Yule Heibel's Library tagged futurismo →  View Popular, Search in Google

I agree with Bruce Michael Conforth here:
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The sociologist Robert Jay Lifton has written about the “Protean Man” who is more comfortable with images than with words and with fragmentation than with wholes. This, of course, is nothing more than the fruition of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” It is our mediums that have become the driving forces in our culture and society, not the ideas they transmit. The Internet is reshaping not just the way we communicate but reprogramming our neurological makeup in ways we can’t even yet imagine. We want, indeed NEED, tiny instantaneous fragments of information: sound bytes, word bytes, info bytes, image bites… the instantaneously and ever changing visual imagery ushered in by things like MTV, computer screens, split screens, virtual reality, etc. And the speed by which things appear, go viral, and then are gone almost precludes the possibility of there being a subculture that lasts anywhere nearly as long as ones in the past have.

And do you know what made the Beats, Hippies, and Punks possible more than anything else? There were no distractions. There were three television networks, no cable or satellite. There were only a few radio stations, and they still featured live, local djs. There were no video games, nothing digital, no iPods or mp3 players… there weren’t even cassette players for most of those times. There were no VHS tapes or DVDs or CDs… you wanted to see a movie you had to go to the theater. No Internet of course. No computers of any kind. There were no ATMs or credit cards… no cell phones… there weren’t even xerox machines until the 1970s. The only things we had were each other. The only things we could do was hang out together, talk, have sex, do drugs, and make our own music and art. Yes, there were all the cultural influences I mentioned earlier but the only way to share them all was face to face real human interaction.
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flavorwire hipsters trends futurismo

Great article, must read. Basically, capitalism disrupted. A small excerpt:
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So for the publishers, the next step was clear: Make the book destroy itself.

An ebook sold to a library will thus delete itself out of existence after a year, or after X number of times it had been lent out. This is a big source of controversy between publishers and public libraries, maybe because both of them know they've found the loose thread that can unravel all of society. After all:

A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?

B. Wait a second. It's just a digital file. Why not just buy one copy, and just copy and paste it for every customer who wants to read it?

C. Wait a second. Why do you need the library at all? Why can't a customer just buy a copy from the publisher and "lend" copies to all of his friends?

D. Wait a second. If no printing and binding needs to be done, why do you need the publisher? Just buy it directly from the author.

E. Waaaaait a second. Why buy it? Once the author makes one copy available, why can't everyone just grab it for free?

Stop and think about everything that just vanished there. Skyscrapers full of publishing company employees, warehouses full of books, book stores, libraries, factories full of printing presses, paper mills, all the stuff the author bought with his writing money. Gone.
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david_wong cracked futurismo bs socialtheory

Fantastic analysis and riff on the internet and our present prospects, by Jaron Lanier.
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To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.
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edge jaron_lanier internet futurismo technology interview video socialtheory

Neal Stephenson nails it...
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We’ve been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades. Some progress has been made in those areas, but energy is still all about oil. In my city, Seattle, a 35-year-old plan to run a light rail line across Lake Washington is now being blocked by a citizen initiative. Thwarted or endlessly delayed in its efforts to build things, the city plods ahead with a project to paint bicycle lanes on the pavement of thoroughfares.
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and
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Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
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innovation neal_stephenson progress futurismo world_policy_institute

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Nothing should make a futurist more wary than looking at the history of the profession and seeing how hilarious its mistakes have been.
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Exactly. That's why futurologists (whether of the happy-happy or the often *much* more profitable doom-and-gloom school) give me hives.

singularity_hub video predictions futurismo

Interesting organization:
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The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent nonprofit research group. We work with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. We provide the foresight to create insights that lead to action.

We bring a combination of tools, methodologies, and a deep understanding of emerging trends and discontinuities to our work with companies, foundations, and government agencies. We take an explicitly global approach to strategic planning, linking macro trends to local issues in such areas as:

Work and daily life
Technology and society
Health and health care
Global business trends
Changing consumer society
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institute_for_the_future palo_alto california think_tanks futurismo

One of the best, most thought-provoking articles on education I've read in a long time, by Maria H. Andersen. Brilliant, brilliant insights and suggestions...

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Mass education is adequate, as long as students are highly motivated to learn and get ahead of their peers. In developing countries, a student who is successful in education will be able to climb the ladder of personal economic prosperity faster than those who are not successful. But in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again.
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maria_h_andersen education trends futurismo innovation disruption socialtheory socratic socrait

Sort of spooky, but simultaneously completely logical, the web is getting into predictive...

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This focus on the timeline sets Recorded Future apart from other firms trying to gain insights by mining news and other data, says Ipeirotis. "I'm curious to see when other text analytics firms will jump into the trend."

Recorded Future is about to expand its service to cover Arabic and Chinese sources. Making its indexes bigger is a major priority. "I'd like to be able to get in front of every piece of streaming data on the planet," says Ahlberg.

As the databases covered by Recorded Future, General Sentiment, and others grow, more powerful types of analysis will become possible, says Skiena. "I'm currently working with social scientists on models to predict what the probability is that a person that gets few mentions today suddenly becomes very famous in the future, by looking back at years of past data," he says.
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Be sure to check out the video demo of Recorded Future:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?gl=US&client=mv-google&hl=en&user=RecordedFuture#p/u/1/Un8toBItXdo

mit_techreview recorded_future web futurismo

Would be great to see something like this get built:
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Stalled projects are a blight on any city’s landscape, but several Boston architects are looking to turn those mid-construction eyesores into useful (and cool-lookin’) spaces. With the economy in the gutter, many developers’ plans were squashed, but rather than sit idly, the Boston Globe asked architects to take a look at the sites and envision completely new projects that use the existing structure to improve the city. Höweler + Yoon and Squared Design Lab took a stab at the stalled Filene Development at Downtown Crossing and envisioned “Eco Pods,” a prefab, bio-fuel producing building that can adapt, change and grow over time.

Robotic arms attached to the building would move the pods around to optimize growing conditions. Voids are created when the pods are reconfigured, leaving behind space for public parks or botanical gardens. Bio-fuel created within the pods is used to power the robotic arms and the remainder would be used elsewhere, possibly to assist construction. Once construction is complete, the pods could be taken and reinstalled on another building and be reused. As Höweler + Yoon says about the project “This is anticipatory pre-cycled architecture, capable of generating a new micro-urbanism that is local, agile and carbon net-postive.”
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ecological_urbanism futurismo boston inhabitat architecture biofuels

A February 21/10 interview with the inventor of The Bloom Box, an alternative energy generation system.

bloom_box fuel_cells futurismo eco alternative_energy energy video

It starts as a photo-essay, but this being the Tyee, the comments muscle their way in to center stage, too. (An aside: I'm getting fed up with all the negative commentary that craps all over all newspaper - including Tyee and my local paper, Times-Colonist - articles that allude to anything creative, innovative, or full of change. It brings out all the usual suspects, who waste no time burying a good idea under cyncism and negativity. Ugh.)

thetyee vancouver eco_density architecture green_buildings futurismo

Great article from May 2005, by Stewart Brand, on scientific thinking v romanticist thinking, applied to environmentalism and predictions for the future. Great stuff. It starts like this (and doesn't slow down):
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Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
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mit_techreview stewart_brand environment ecology criticalthinking futurismo

I despise the way JH Kunstler has managed to make what should be well-placed criticism of the system into an ideological cult that's infused with hocus-pocus and now - egad! - "neo-medievalism" and celebrating the failure of "the Enlightenment mental model." There's so much wrong with his approach that the kernels of usefulness (which are there) get lost. If you listened to Kunstler, you'd never know about all the good work that is being done. Furthermore, does he really think that personal mobility devices (i.e., some form of car) are going to disappear? So why trash the Rocky Mountain Institute - or why trash NASA because it's not focused on teaching Americans how to garden? Aside from that, anyone who "predicts" the future ought to be taken with a bucket of salt.

james_kunstler futurismo predictions o'reilly peak_oil

Hmmm, from the header: "electric changes everything :: When we break the cycle of oil dependence, new things become possible. See how the switch to electric transforms the relationship between cars, people and the planet."

Proposed solution? Electric everything?

Portal page.

Interesting - lots to explore...

ecology economics environment electricity futurismo better_place shai_agassi

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

varnelis.net futurismo architecture urban_design portals

An article by Eric Savitz that sums up the panel presentation by Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Tony Perkins on the top 10 tech trends to be aware of. Lots of buzz around mobile phone technology, mobile computing in the manner of what The Economist called "Nomads at last" (see http://tinyurl.com/643een) "who are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it."

Speaking of modeling the new urban connected classes on nomads (and Bedouins), another trend identified by the panel was that water is the next peak oil. See Wired Magazine, Peak Water (http://tinyurl.com/5kzqcv).

Jurvetson talked about how "evolution trumps design," which seemed to me like he is channeling Janine Benyus and Lynn Margulis. Microbes are drivers of evolutionary biomass viability on Planet Gaia; we're part of that game; and we will figure out how to engineer matter at the nano level of microbial life to "hack" evolution's code and make those organisms work for us. Dangerous, but inevitable. (As Margulis and Dorian Sagan point out, however, if Gaia is a living thing and if living things are defined by having the ability to reproduce, then our role on earth may well be to help Gaia reproduce: i.e., create viable biospheres that can be sent away from Earth into space. What better place to fulfil that mandate than to tinker with microbes and evolution?)

trends technology futurismo