I’ve long been a fan of Bruce Sterling’s 1998 story Maneki Nekoi
Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman’s eye. Word of Tsuyosh’s skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.
At ten A.M., the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.
“Pickles!” his wife enthused. “People are so nice to you when you’re pregnant.”
“Any idea who sent us that?”
“Just someone on the network.”
“Great.”
So I was intrigued to learn about FriendlyFavor.
People seeking a babysitter, job referral or help moving a couch, to name just a few examples, can all use FriendlyFavor for free to ask for help online-sending their request only to the contacts they trust-as can people with favours to offer, such as extra tickets or leftover moving supplies. The platform was designed to eliminate the hassle, wasted time and confusion that can accompany traditional favour requests, providing instead a one-stop site for managing everything from the initial request to the thank-you once a favour has been granted.
Sure, it’s not yet mediated by an AI, but it is certain a predecessor to Sterling’s vision.
And see What Science Fiction Writers Have Learned About Predicting The Future of Technology (via Pasta and Vinegar)
Back in January, the Wall Street Journal ran a technology-oriented look at what our lives will be like in 10 years, around shopping, gaming, movies and TV, making and keeping friends, searching online, getting news info, and protecting privacy.
It’s filled with many speeds-and-feeds-driven predictions like
Moviegoers also can expect digital projection of their movies in super-high resolution, exceeding anything they could get at home, either online or through high-definition DVDs.
Somewhat better are the feature-driven predictions like
When you buy an airline ticket, you’ll have the option to send a text message to people in your network to let them know you’re taking a trip — in case any old friends will be in the area and want to meet up. Or you might let friends know you just bought a movie ticket, in case someone has a review to share or wants to join you.
And as GPS hardware becomes more widespread, that information will follow wherever you go — literally. You’ll be able to keep track of the physical whereabouts of your friends, so if you’re stuck on a layover in Dallas, your phone might tell you that you have a friend stuck in the same airport.
Mostly the piece just makes my skull throb (and not in a good way) with a barrage of mostly disconnected incremental changes in the amount of noise, communication, advertising, technology we’ll have to manage. That’s largely a function of the experience of reading through this laundry list of changes, not so much the specific predictions themselves. But I didn’t react the way I used to as a kid, waiting for the enticing possibilities of the future, which of course turned out to be way cooler than anything most people thought. This may simply be an artifact of aging (I’m likely more cynical than I was at 14), or may be an artifact of where we are at in terms of epochs of technological revolutions.
What do you think?
Children of Men is an intense and incredible movie, but also a tough one. There are very few typical futuristic elements in a movie set 20 years hence, basically since things have gone to shit in a big way. But here’s a couple:
A virtual keypad used by a wealthy young man who may have been autistic. He was not able to interact with other people and he was required to take pills. That’s all we know about him.
The buses are old and run-down, but they feature digital billboards with full-motion advertising.
The film played with time in an interesting way. Very little obvious sense of the future, fashions resembled today’s, London simply looked more like Mumbai (or Mexico, as the directed had suggested) than what we might think of today. And familiar songs (i.e., King Crimson) swing between the soundtrack and Muzak-like background that the characters hear in posh settings. And so the Battersea Power Station (where art is being preserved) is a location…with a pig floating in the background.
Yes, the pig from the Floyd album cover for Animals.
detail
Update: a reel of displays, interfaces, fake ads, and other visual artifacts is here [via DesignObserver]
After both Nicolas Nova and Rudy Rucker recommended Accelerando to me, I bought it and just started today. This passage caught my eye.
Manfred [the protagonist] is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them…There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.
Not too far off from the truth for many of us!
Bruce Sterling said something similar in his talk on Design Futurism
Futurist activity of “scanning” – newspapers Internet, television, conferences, other futurists, landmark events, reports, weak signals. Always asking “What are the things out there that might affect clientele (which could be anything!)?”
Note: Nicolas Nova blogged the same quote several days before I did. Copycat or coincidence?
Yeah, dude. Keep eating sugar cereal like this and you’re going to have a serious diabetes problem. You already look like you’re suffering from ADD. You (or your guardian) might want to have a doctor check that out.
I’m attending an interesting event next week. It’s a two-day summit on the topic of (as far as I can tell) what we want from our cities in the future. There’s an implied (to me) technological bias, but not any assumption that technology is good.
This is not a topic I feel very expert in, not even very well informed, or strongly opinionated about. Given the discussion-based slant the organizers are taking, this could be a risk, but I’m hoping that diving into the issues will unearth some perspectives on, well, living life in the spaces we live in, that I haven’t previously written or talked about.
Tipping the scales for me, therefore, to attend, are the facts that the event is free and local and especially that organizers/presenters include Eric Paulos and Matt Jones, two big-thinking design/culture/technology folks whom I admire.
This summit is part of a larger event going on in San Jose (electronic art, and presumably some other themes; I can’t really parse the details or remember the name of the conference without regular use of the web) – I won’t be part of that.
If you are attending the interactive city summit, let me know!
You can’t look forward without looking backwards. LukeW writes about Web2.0 – a buzzword that some will be sick of already while others have certainly never heard before. Luke’s soundbites are likely only to confuse those outside the geekstream, but I’ll say that to me it refers to (and maybe this is obvious) the next era or (ulp) paradigm shift in dot-com companies. I suspect this meme is connected to the story about Silicon Valley being “back” (in terms of VC money, IPOs, new companies, jobs, and just general dot-com-type excitement).
An important and timely companion to thinking ahead is to look at where we’ve been. Kevin Kelly, writing in Wired, looks back at 10 years of the Internet in We Are The Web. Elsewhere in that issue is an excellent timeline that ironically doesn’t seem to be available online.
Camelon, touted as CLOTHING OF THE FUTURE – IN THE PRESENT is a multi-purpose garment that comes from the Renaissance Faire/SCA community. An interesting piece of clothing design, through pulling some drawstrings etc. you can convert into four different dresses, two skirts, pants, shirts, shorts, capes, a poncho, a tunic, a handbag, a hauling bag, sleeping bag, or a pillow. Aesthetically, I thought the future stopped looking like the past around the time of 2112
, but perhaps that’s just me.
Also, be sure to check out the Cameleon aka Bill’s Pants video on this page.
Thanks, Connie!