Guide to Future-Present Archetypes

hand, it doesn’t matter if people think it’s cool. It’s all about the companies and the contracts involved. The question becomes about the technology: is it consumer-based, or infrastructural-based? An elevator gets installed without much input, but smart elevators do have interfaces. People wait for elevators, and interact with them that way.

  Is it a price point, or the novelty of being able to actually do some of these things that brings it from an infrastructural technology to a consumer-based technology? It’s hard to know where or when things will take off, and bloggers around the world will start writing about it. It’s difficult to predict. People said that cell phones would ruin Apple, but the iPhone has changed the way we think about phones. The sort of speculative blogging that I and other bloggers do, does this actually have a reach and affect on market forces? I don’t have the evidence either way. I think the genre of the review, ironically, has more of an effect that listening to me, Matt Jones, Julian Bleeker, or some sort of design-fiction piece about the cameras of the future. I like these, but I don’t know if they are actors on the world-historical stage. “iPads and the geological formations of the moons of Saturn”--I might write that, but I don’t know that it would change the development of the iPad.

  - Geoff Manaugh

  When looking at the Future-Present as commodity, there is always a tendency to label so-called “market forces” as the primary force upon the development curve, and the key variable in that cultural algorithm. So much of our technological development is spurred by the pursuit of profit, that it is easy to say simply that this is what commodities are “for”. But what Geoff leads me to ask, is what factors exceed simple supply and demand? Speculative fiction hardly creates demand all on its own. But decisions are not purely the result of focus-group calculus, either. What single demand engendered our concept of drones? While certainly there is money to be made from drones, larger societal desires than profit factor into our fascinations and fears about UAVs.

  I'm actually rather more concerned about theory objects that develop into things that aren't "commodified." We've got legions of commodifying guys already. They get up every day doing nothing but trying to make ideas into commercial products. There seem to be some remarkable spaces opening up for products outside the conventional markets. A good thing, too, because those markets are sclerotic with IP and are stifling us.

  - Bruce Sterling

  The speculative fiction creators that may or may not affect the shape of the market have their exo-market allies in the odd use-case scenarios that develop as street-level innovations. Hackers, and others who explore the margins of commodities’ uses are their own formative effect on both Future-Present and its commodified incarnations. Outside of capital exists an entire world of use, shaping how we know and think about objects.

  It’s common in India to communicate by phone rings, without letting the phone connect, so they can convey information without being charged for the call. This is not about the fact that there isn’t technology available to allow people to make phone calls. It’s about finding a way around the monetization structure. This is a marginal case, but it’s a useful way of thinking about hacking the system.

  Richard Nash writes about “monetizing the entire demand curve”. Amanda Palmer-- she has a very developed fan base. If you look at the Kickstarter tiers, it starts at a dollar, and the tiers go up and up. The house parties on Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign were in the $10K range. Everyone should be able to get something they want at the price they can afford, otherwise you’re leaving money on the table. Back in the old days, the best you could do is buy a band’s CD for $20. If you had less money, you were out of luck. If you had more…well, you could fly to another city to see them, but the band itself wouldn’t profit from the extra money you were spending. Now you can have a range of experiences. The thing about the phoning and hanging up.... if you’re a company, you can decide if you want to monetize the price points, but at some point you decide it’s not worth it. Even if the customer is not connecting the calls, they are still paying money to have a phone.

  - Deb Chandra

  The use-cases of technology always overwhelm the ability of the market to monetize it. Commodities, therefore, are never just about just capitalist commodification. And because there is a curve of emergent behavior to factor into the construction of a commodity, it means that the Future-Present, as commodity, is a series of evolving nodes, to which there are fundamentally no limit of variety and number. Who affects drone development most? Those who build them, those who buy them, those who fly them, or those who are watched by them?

  There will always be emergent behaviors like these, especially in networked technology. Twitter is another example: these days, it’s presented to new users as a way get information from organizations, brands and celebrities. When I signed up, I thought it was a lightweight way to stay in touch with people. But now, in my life, it serves a couple of distinct purposes.

  But the single biggest impact of Twitter on my life is why you and I are talking on the phone--it’s a networking connection, to meet the friends of our friends and expand outward in this circle of interesting pieces. Which goes back to the design decision of allowing you to see other people’s @ messages if you are also following that person. Probably, the people who made this design decision didn’t think about how it would make networks transparent. I sometimes describe Twitter as Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Drive, only for my social life – you pass through all parts of the universe (or in this case, social network) at once.

  With networked tech, it is more likely that there will be this sort of emergent behavior. The etiquette about twitter, DM fails, all of these things emerge. Even the simplest technologies have alternate uses, like using a butter knife as a screwdriver. Like the Game of Life, you can predict certain behaviors but it is not entirely deterministic--there are complicated and interesting emergent behaviours.

  - Deb Chandra

  “Evolving network nodes of culturally-inscribed divergent use-value” might be a fairly tidy way to sum up how the Future-Present solidifies into easily understood pieces. But this doesn’t mean that we have them completely under our thumb. Drones serve as an archetype for this aspect of the Future-Present not only because of their conglomerate conceptualization, but because, at the end of the day, we don’t control them. They fly overhead, always recording our actions, whether we like it or not. Many are armed with nothing more deadly than a camera, and still, that is more than enough. We may be able to control them remotely, and occasionally hack them to broaden their use. But like the angels of heaven, invoking their name is an attempt to wield their power, as much as it is an admission that whatever they are, they are always just outside of our sphere.

  Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #5: Schematic Maps

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  When attempting to map out the Future-Present, there is not just one map to consider; there are three. These three categorical types of map—our mental maps, symbolic maps, and broken maps--are each a schematic layer in our effort to perceive the world, and it is in their dissonance that the world actually exists. We must identify not only what these maps are, but what they are when they fail. In the fractures, one sees the spidering web of weaknesses, the many possible scenarios of rupture that select without warning. Reality is unpredictable, bursting from its constraining archetypes. And yet it is uncannily similar to all the breaks we’ve seen before, like a river delta resembling a tree.

  The first category of map resides somewhere in the brain, perhaps in the hippocampus. It is through these networks that our neurology gives us a sense of space that we might try to express, record, and share with others. In studies performed on mice, “place fields” have been identified in their hippocampal neurons. Everytime the mouse passes through a particular known place in its terrain, a burst of action potential fires through the same neurons. We know less about the human brain, but it is clear that our hippocampus is important to forming memories,
and that larger hippocampi correlate with people who have more detailed place knowledge, London cab drivers, for example. Somewhere, lurking inside the chemical differences between the inside and outside of neurons, in the minor voltages and in the ever-changing and evolving cell pattern of our neuroanatomy, is a material record of what we mean when we sense our geography. We cannot read this map— we can only think it. We express this map’s imperfections via our senses. When this map fails, we feel lost.

  The second map is spoken aloud, in the possibility of uttering a symbolic map. Humans are never content at forming schema and just keeping them to themselves. Our schemas are meant to be shared, explained, inscribed, and signified. But the topology of these symbolic maps are as complicated and multifaceted as our neurology. It was Alfred Korzybski who constructed the phrase so relevant to our contemporary times, as the second part of a statement first spoken in 1931:

  A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory...

  B) A map is not the territory.

  One of the primary tenets of Korzybski’s theory of general semantics is that we give too much credence to our