Simon O'Regan

LEVELS & LAYERS. Why write, why learn.

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

LEVELS & LAYERS. WHY WRITE, WHY LEARN.

I’m rattled. Rattled without reason. With no strong reason for writing.

I enjoy writing. Sometimes. I detest it others. I like having written. To have crafted a something. I like the release.

It feels mildly good to write something that helps another understand a topic. Some part of the world, some patterning. To organise it. To clarify, simplify, put it in context.

But that has always felt a little light. Not reason enough. Kind of like why it’s good to do the groceries.

Well, we have to eat.

I get gently depressed thinking about the effort needed to write something bland.

The reading, the distilling, the ruminating. An edit or two.

The long slog, bleary. Whittle-craft crystallised in digital meh.

This stone-in-the-shoe distress isn’t an isolated anxiety.

It’s heaped. Lathered idly on the uncertainty of not knowing where I should best spend my time. Where I should direct my tiny energies and indulgences.

I have a few more weeks or months to find some level of sustainability to these fallow explorations. To arrive at something fruitful. Some action. A practice that will pay the bills.

I’d settle for clarity of purpose. Direction. A believable dream.

Or simply pure-enjoyable.

Writing is neither of those things.

And yet it’s not not those things either.

There is a type of distilled writing that I’m drawn to. Poetry. The generative form.

A sentence that cannot be rewritten. A contained blazing portal-feast of imagery and ideas in an un-reconfigurable sparsity of words.

I am no poet.

There is a business writing equivalent. Bear with me.

Facsimile, a cheap knock-off of the real thing. Knock-offs aren’t nothing. Not nearly. We are mirror-folk, meme-people.

I’m speaking of a fractal writing document. A Product 1-pager. Summarising a concept. In its purest form, a single sentence. You’ll need to capture and condense. Buttress firm with a well-chosen metric. Or two opposed, leaning. Inwards.

It must be clinical. Firm. Final.

The eigenvector of the idea. The eigen-concept.

I tend away from this type of writing in public. I do some in private. I usually don’t refine it sufficiently to publish.

And then, I wonder is it worth publishing.

My poetry lacks art and discipline. My business writing lacks research and rigour.

There is a third string to this harp. Explain it to me as a five-year-old. Simple sentences. Form the simplest building blocks of ideas. Dum-dum language. It is beautiful and powerful both. Because it immediately shines the blinding beam of a lighthouse on the gaping gaps of your understanding.

There’s no-where to hide.

And so, it takes time to craft. To withstand the harsh-neon exposure of small sentences made for reading.

Each string of the harp enthrals me a little. But don’t sit me down in deepest wonder either.

And I worry if I have anything at all worth saying.

Anything at all worth the effort.

A man is not supposed to know his Fatal Flaw. Or if he does, it doesn’t matter much. He falls for it anyway.

I suspect my own is Epistemic Greed. I want to know everything. And believe I can and will.

I say this knowing comfortably that even if it were possible, I lack the intellect and memory. And more importantly, I lack the practice.

But I dabble.

And hold out false hope that I’m moving on that path.

Accumulating tabs, and Twitter bookmarks. Notes, highlights, sketches.

And books in piles of leaning towers I’ll likely never read. And sure I’ll never learn.

But I do it anyway.

It is a compulsion. And one I’m happy enough to indulge.

My father once consoled me by telling me I wanted to be God’s Brother. I laughed a laugh of delighted recognition.

And that made me love the fatal flaw a little more.

Though the flaw is overwhelming. And tiring me out.

And standing in the way of doing something much, much smaller. Of much, much greater consequence.

Of any consequence really.

Progress & Possibilities Sequence

Wed, 08 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This Sequence is a series of short thoughts on Progress and Possibilities.

The future is not predetermined. It is not inevitable. While it is impossible to predict, there is room to change what future we arrive at. Exploring what could happen is a useful first step on that journey. The future can be be influenced by individual choices.

Small actions can make a difference. The future is influenceable; and it is influenceable by seemingly small contributions. Individual choices matter.

By imagining ‘what could be’ the best possible futures, makes those futures much more likely to be made real.

There is no particular order in which the Sequence must be read. The short-thoughts below tend towards Futures work, but will increasingly include more quantitative, historical aspects of Progress Studies as posts are added.

The Deployment Age

Wed, 08 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The Deployment Age

What’s the Deployment Age? The concept comes from Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez. For the past 240 years, technological development and its financing has emerged in long, and broadly predictable cycles. These cycles have notable similarities, and are characterised by:

a critical element of production suddenly becomes very cheap (e.g. oil)
a new infrastructure being built (e.g. roads and highways)
a period of wrenching innovation followed by a bubble (e.g. build-up to Wall Street Crash )
a post-bubble recession (e.g. 1930s)
a re-assertion of institutional authority (e.g. IMF, World Bank, GATT)
a period of consolidation and wide distribution of the gains in productivity from the new technology (e.g. 1950s Golden Age of Capitalism)

Here are the four cycles and the first half of the fifth.

By this theory, we exist in the Age of Information and Telecommunications. If the theory is correct, we are on the cusp of the Deployment phase - a time when the speculative, frenzy of technology development recedes to make way for a golden age where technology has become familiar, easy to implement and deployed at scale.

I’m intrigued by the idea that history rhymes and we may be entering a new era of technology development. I plan to write about AI and conceptual tools and methods from Design & UX, Product Management, Futures, and Innovation Management. The Deployment Age seems like an interesting lens through which to view these topics.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is often praised by Marc Andreesen and the other VC big-boys. It’s heavy enough going; start with the best summary by Jerry Neumann. Alex Danco outlines a view on how debt financing is the next logical step for startups in the Deployment Age, here.

This was originally published in 2019 in The Deployment Age newsletter on Substack.

Design Fiction Sequence

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Design fictions are imagined tangible prototypes from the future. These can be narratives, news items, physical objects.

They are stories about possible worlds that are told through designed artefacts.

Design fiction is like an archeology for the future. They capture potentially huge or inspiring shifts in technology and society in ordinary mundane things.

They’re fun to make, and fun to imagine. They’re less dry and less impersonal than trend-work and strategy-making. Design fiction prototypesallow the abstract to become real. In doing so, it allows for a deeper examination of that possible future. Is this a preferable future? What should we do between now and then to ensure that future does or does not happen?

Design Fiction: Biophilia Futures ran as a newsletter in 2023; each issue offering a glimpse into a possible future. These fictions focus on futures that bend towards Biophilia - the human tendency to be drawn towards life and life-like processes.

UX of AI Sequence

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This Sequence is a series of short thoughts on the UX of AI. That is, the experience a user has while interacting with a product that uses artificial intelligence.

UX of AI is increasingly important as most of today’s internet products have at least some AI built in (and more and more hardware products are using AI) and the experience of interacting with AI products can be fundamentally different than with traditional software products.

Designing AI products with UX top of mind can lead to a fundamentally better experience for the user, and is more likely to lead to good product outcomes for the PdM or designer.

For the non-PdM and UX reader, there may be some benefit to understanding the design considerations behind AI products. You will be increasingly interacting with AI, explicitly or implicitly.

There is no particular order in which the Sequence must be read. Below is the logical order from own perspective. Additional posts will be added over time.

Speculations on the Future of UX of AI

Org

Tiny Bet #2: Prehistoric Artefacts

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When I first set out on Sabbatical, I knew that ‘making’ would be a part of it. Specifically, after years balancing concept-work and management, I felt the need to get more tangible with idea-play.

Tiny Bets are a series of minuscule gambles on creativity.

Framed as such, to get me making and to lessen procrastination and doubt.

Each tiny bet, a diminutive act of creation that adds to the world of things. Filling some miniature gap in the tapestry of needs or possibilities.

The initial plan was a tiny bet a week. That proved overly ambitious.

Nevertheless, one tiny bet expanded to fill quite a bit of space. Namely, the presentation of pre-historic artefacts in a way that made them appealing to the eye.

I’ve experimented a lot. Sourcing, acquiring, and mounting prehistoric artefacts to display at home.

A way to shorten the cognitive gap between the real-tools of our ancestors and modern life. An act of visible meditation.

Making the displays inspired Design Fiction: Alone with the Ancients.

Here are a few on display at home:

A Neanderthal scraper, the oldest tool I’ve found, and from our hominid cousins. Dating ~300,000 years ago.

The piece was sourced from the south of France, and bought from a French collection.

A Celtic torc. Copper, dating ~300 BC from Anatolia.

And here is one of a pair of wall mountings, I made for sale on Etsy - Neolithic Arrowhead Collection.

The arrowheads were sourced from a Belgian collection, originally acquired in West Africa. Made from Silex, Agate in very good condition with no restorations or recent repairs and dating 5,000-3,000 B.C.

What’s beautiful here, is that these arrowheads and those like them, were one of the few technologies that fuelled our ancestors for thousands of years.

To be acquainted with these tools is to reach out and touch the tapestry of time.

DESIGN FICTION: A Brief History of Sailing

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAILING

The Solent, 2035

Since animal-hide sails were first flown on animal-hide boats, we’ve wanted to go faster. Faster in absolute terms, but faster too than other boats. We can never know for certain when that first race was. But my guess is that it was within days of sails being added to two boats.

Who had the faster boat, or faster crew. It was an exercise in prowess, strength, stamina. It also had obvious benefits beyond bragging rights. Getting to a new land first, brought with it the choice of spoils. Or back home to safety meant rest, recovery, family. Perhaps a better question might be, why wouldn’t you race. It’s a boost when the spirits are lagging and the mind is flapping in the wind. We are pulled to it.

The first written record of a sailing race came a lot later. From Greenwich to Gravesend and back. 1661 between the pleasure-craft Katherine and Anne.

Organised sailing races evolved from there. Growing out of a club scene, initially in Cork Harbour in 1720. Here, the pleasure class engaged in races, usually straightforward - from one place to another. Handicap system eased in by 1820 as bigger boats were typically faster, and better sails or more hydrodynamic hulls meant sailing skill was less the issue than investment in boats.

100 years of further evolution. In-shore, Off-shore, Oceanic. From one place to another, with some markers along the way.

The sailing we know and love today is of course nothing like that. We race each other, but we race towards a moveable, chaotic, unpredictable mark. And so it not only tests speed, and planning, but most importantly, adaptability.

And the luck involved, is no longer the luck of the winds and the tides. But the luck of the chase.

We can date the first Chase-sailing race to 2028. Off the Cornish coast, two university yachts, Little Agamemnon and Moonduster were out observing the Atlantic Bluefin tuna shoals that had reemerged with ocean conservation and rewilding. Knowing the real-time location of those shoals (some of the Bluefin has been fitted with sensors), the crew of the boats challenged each other to a race. The first one to the Tuna didn’t have to buy the first round of beer that evening in Falmouth.

Fair enough. Off they went. It quickly became clear that the race wasn’t a straightforward one. The Bluefin moved, not always predictably. Moonduster in the lead. A sudden change in the tuna. Little Agamemnon in the lead through no obvious plan of their own. Until planning became predicting where the school would move to next. And that was a skill, not just luck-work.

The race was said to be so enjoyable it became a habit, a source of bragging rights within the Plymouth university fleet. In May of that year, they set up the first formal Bluefin Race, with 7 boats entering and the rules quite clear. The first boat to get to within 250 meters of the shoal or the boat who was closest on the 2 hour mark would be the winners. No time handicaps.

It was cleaner. The skill of the chase levelled the playing field. Of course, major mismatches occurred where the fish would travel distances greater than the boats themselves could reasonably cover. And so quickly, the race planning tended to locate fish species and specific schools of fish that would be amenable to the boat class themselves.

Mackerel in the harbour in August for dinghies. Dolphin pods in the high seas for the foiling monohulls.

Today of course we have variations on this. We have randomly programmed drone-fish that can match the pace of the fleet. Though purists dislike the form, for professional competition it is of course necessary to standardise somewhere. Then again, despite the best cryptography, there’s always the suspicion that the drone can be tampered with and pre-programmed to favour one boat or another. Famously, the Russian team in the Sagres Cup in 2034 were known to have hacked the drone-fish to claim a victory that threw the sport into disrepute for a time.

That disrepute plunged the sport into suspicion for a time. Gambling drove huge sums into Chase-Sailing, and with it ever-bigger incentives for tampering. Suspicion was weaponised. The JP Morgan team was accused of tampering in The Solent Chase, though no proof or anything close to it was ever produced. The results stood. But the trust in those results was a more fragile one.

Activists have said that the sailing disturbs the fish. Brings anxiety. Interferes with their movement patterns. That may of course be true. Even yachts powered by the wind create sound. Vibrations that are alien to fish they chase. But is it worse than whales or dolphin or shark hunting those very same fish? We don’t know. The latest research suggests it’s fine. And the disturbance, provided it’s sporadic, is enough to add variation into the movement patterns of the fish. Itself, a good thing.

Some have called for balance. And how to make Chase-Sailing ecosystem-positive not just neutral. That has had mixed results. Entrance fees going to conservation appears to work well. For a time, the Sagres Cup experimented with providing feed to the fish. That proved counter-productive. An unnecessary intervention.

Perhaps the greatest good that Chase-Sailing has brought us has been a widespread informal policing of these shoals. Stealth poaching and illegal fishing is less likely with so much scrutiny on the whereabouts of these shoals. And indeed the tagging of so many shoals means that sailing clubs around the country know where tens of thousands of shoals are at any particular time. The shoals are tracked and information is freely shared.

If a shoal disappears, questions are asked and investigations undertaken.

We know of at least two major cases of prosecution with life-sentences handed to captain, crew and owners of the Yuedianyu 45992 and Yuemaobinyu 65443 who illegally fished Yellowfin tuna off the Chagos Archipelago.

The other great good the booming sailing industry has brought is attention to the emerging conservation-tourism of the marine protection areas. The Dogger Bank, the Chagos Archipelago and St. Helena.

The sailing circuit now follows the fish.

And though racing and conservation is the main aim.

There is usually good eating at the end of it. Moderate, sustainable. And as natural as we’re likely to get.

DESIGN FICTION: Great Hall of Possibilities

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: Great Hall of Possibilities

Copenhagen, 2036

The cavernous hall stretches out before you beyond the limits of the eye. Miles, upon miles of towering oak shelves, looming overhead and into the heavens.

On these formidable shelves, laddered into the dark reaches of the above, sits each and every invention conceivable. Billions upon billions of artefacts and documents spanning wall to distant wall, floor to star-strewn ceiling.

This incredible cathedral is the Great Hall of Possibilities. The collection of all possible inventions.

Walking through the hall, the inventions are not distributed randomly. Instead, they are placed with a very particular organisation. A defined, albeit organic structure. In one area sit all possible variations of axe - from rudimentary stone age axes of hunter-gatherers to today’s carbon steel blades. To axes yet to be discovered - axes woven from nano-materials Axes grown from diamond.

Beside this area is a huge collection of chainsaws, laser-cutters and other evolutions and off-shoots of the axe.

And so it is for every other possible invention.

Now, three things are noteworthy about the Great Hall.

Most items near other items are almost identical with only very minor modifications. Our carbon steel axe could have slight variations in size or shape or composition.

A lot of items are fairly poor. Weird variations that don’t do much. Variations that are suboptimal for the problem they intend to solve. The good stuff is rare.

Most of the items have never existed. They have yet to be invented. Or never will.

Close to artefacts that you may be familiar with, most items have never been brought out of the Great Hall and into the world. We had no reason to search all possibilities within those niches.

On top of this, whole swathes of the Great Hall have never even been explored. Nobody has ever walked past those shelves - or even near them. The overwhelming majority of items have yet to be invented.

Invention is a search of the Great Hall.

This search began deep in our hominin past. Exploration accelerated with the birth of civilisation, again during the first Industrial Revolution, and once more in the Internet Age.

Each invention shedding light on the shelves around it. Drawing our attention to what is possible to create. The more we explore the room, the more possibilities open before us.

Spend enough time wandering between the shelves of the Great Hall and you may begin to see where the most interesting possibilities sit.

Do these virtual shelves really contain the inventions themselves? Or are they simply illusions. A cheap conjurers trick. Like the impression of gaming background-matter. Life-like, but simulated with simple rules-engines.

That depends. Yes and no. But mostly yes.

The room itself is real. It contains monstrous shelves and stretches forward as far as the eye can see. This is partially an optical illusion, owing to its donut-shaped design and ingenious use of mirrors.

The shelves themselves are in-reality empty. They are populated with the help of augmented reality masks handed out upon arrival at the Hall. These masks, are part of the outfit which visitors are required to wear. Monk-like robes and hooded cowl. The AR masks cover the entirety of the visible face. To onlookers, the faces appear as mirrors. To the wearer, digital imagery is projected forwards onto their field of vision. The robes are generally red. Senior researchers wear black. The most senior sages and leaders are permitted to wear white.

The use of garment is partially an experiential element to the cathedral. To help the user immerse themselves fully. To disconnect from the distractions outside the Great Hall. Partially too it’s a counter-tactic to espionage.

The inventions themselves are perusable. Any invention may be examined, with their details later sent the individual. But the Hall Guardians are sworn to protect the integrity of the archive itself. The superset of all inventions.

The Hall was founded on two principles. First, to make real the Thought Experiment of the Great Hall of Possibilities. In doing so, accelerate beneficial invention and discovery. Second, to accelerate the search for a unified theory of structured problem-solving.

As such, it is open to any researcher who pays the nominal fee. Those researchers are aided in how best to approach their search of the Great Hall. Mostly, that means learning to find the vicinity of their search. And learning how best to navigate permutations and contexts once they’ve found their niche.

However, the institution is not keen to share the totality of the archive, or the insights therein - fearing a monopolisation of invention.

Equally, they fear the discovery and harmful application of forbidden knowledge by amateurs or bad actors. These forbidden inventions, often, but not exclusively are weapons and harmful pathogens.

The Hall is deliberate in its design-decision to simulate all invention but to incorporate benevolent-use alignment principles within the underlying display algorithm. All inventions are explored, it is not the role of the Hall to moderate, curate and curtail discovery. However, security clearance is required to access certain vicinities.

The scope and scale of the simulation is mind-bending.

As of writing, the existing archive contained 457 billion inventions, and growing at 11 billion per day. Permutation-exploration is carried out by proprietary gen-search algorithms. However, those algorithms are fed by user requests and visitor movement. Those areas that are investigated by visitors will receive further attention from the invention-search algorithm. In doing so, human use and curiosity is harnessed.

A visitor never steps into the same library twice.

I asked Rasmus Bjornsson, a curator and algorithm-designer, whether the inventions I was seeing were ‘real’?

“Yes, very much so. Right now, I can look at a mirror display of what you are seeing on these shelves. But I get to see some additional meta-data. On this shelf before us, we can see 180 inventions. 30% of these had already been simulated in the catalogue. The remaining 70% were generated as you approached, or are currently being simulated. So if you look up at that area there, the details of those inventions have not been simulated until you move closer and gesture to investigate them. We may see a delay of a couple of seconds if we choose one that is particularly tricky to simulate and assess.”

What about forbidden knowledge?

“We don’t give out information about that beyond our general policies. That is a defensive and conservation strategy and we do it to ensure that the Great Hall is not co-opted by Bad Actors.”

But, these possibilities are being generated as we speak, how do we assess whether some of them are harmful?

“What I can say is this. Firstly, some entire areas are considered Forbidden. These are the usual ones. Advanced weaponry, pathogens, adversarial illness design, methods of transmission of viruses. All the bad stuff we know about. Then we have some additional filtering rules we apply to what is generated on-the-fly. You will see that these are fairly lenient. That many of the inventions you see could easily be re-purposed for harm. That bio-symbiotic filtration system for example, could be utilised to deliver pathogens. We don’t screen for those types of misuse.”

And how much is filtered?

“I can’t say. Will not.”

But right here? How much is filtered?

“Right here in this vicinity, there are 1,400 near-variations that are deemed overtly malicious and deliberately life-threatening or contain some aspect of relentless-destruction.”

And what of the non-filtered inventions. What percentage of those are potentially harmful?

“I would estimate in this vicinity - perhaps 15%. Maybe a little more if combined with some core mal-tech or malevolent AI. You can see why we screen so thoroughly for access to the Great Hall. We don’t want even benign technologies falling into the hands of Bad Actors, or even commercialised by entities who may use them to undermine Knowledge and FreeSearch.

But again. There are limits.

If we are too strict, the archive becomes a gimmick. And a bottleneck to discovery. And that is against our Charter.”

The Hall and the surrounding Research Cathedral is permanent base to 78,000 researchers, inventors and designers. Narya, Dreamspike and Determinist have all opted to base their research lab HQs in the adjoining district. The Great Hall is the Mecca of the Structured Patterning of Problem-solving movement. By extension it is the heart of frontier knowledge work in design, invention, algorithm design, speculative design and meta-design.

It’s adherents and worshippers are a varied bunch. The priest-class are researchers who focus on the discovery of underlying design principles and structure of knowledge and invention. These are the cultural descendants of the founder Thomas Gilchrist and his school of Meta-Invention. This group is a mixed bunch ranging from the highly theoretical, the mathematical, and design eccentrics all the way to the evangelical and neo-religious.

Traditional and Symbolic Designers and their conceptual and speculative off-shoots make up another 20-30% of permanent researchers.

Then there’s a long-tail mix of lone inventors, wanderers and the insatiably curious. The Hall has attracted also, those Completists and Collectors who crave to understand a more full ‘variation of things’. The Hall has needed to introduce pre-screening for some of the more harmful offshoots of this group owing to a number of mental-health incidents centred on fixation and obsession with the infinities of variation. in the earliest days of the Hall, there were cases of visitors refusing to leave after searching for days. There is talk of a new entry in the American Symptom of Disorders for visitors who become addicted and unable to leave. Those strict time-limits are now enforced by a security caste, wearing distinctive primal-green robes.

Outside I got talking to one researcher who specialises in Alternative Historical Design. He uses the Hall to explore the turns that humanity never took. Inventions that were adjacent to those in our history and within grasp given the knowledge and materials of the day. He consults with movie studios, palaeontologists, archeologists, historians and of course anthropologists. From his work, he says it is possible to pinpoint if a new archeological find is consistent with the directional drift of a civilisation or a new direction in design and perhaps peopling.

It’s also painful he says. So many opportunities where inventions and discoveries were “Right there! Staring us in the eye, and we just blundered past them. The lives that could have been saved. The future we could have now, if we had only taken those branches that the Tree of Invention had offered to us so much earlier.”

That notion of addiction, of overwhelm, of religious fervour simmers here. This is not a place of dispassionate research. Of academic detachment.

The possibility of what could be, what could have been, what will come next. It’s infectious. My visit here was sparked by pure inquisitiveness and a notion that my own research could be helped by what I felt was a useful Tool for Thinking.

I’ve spent a fortnight here now.

And frankly, I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon.

This is the Grail of Discovery. The Everything Palace. The possibilities here are endless.

To return to Oxford, is to return to the Dark Ages.

We have entered the Age of Infinity. And I wish to sit at its source.

DESIGN FICTION: Diary of a Basking Shark

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: DIARY OF A BASKING SHARK

Baltimore, Ireland 2055

The following is an extract from the early diaries of Maya Clarke.

Much later in life, Maya went on to win the Nobel Prize for Biodiversity Science for her work on Artificial Intelligence communication systems and how they can interface with live bacteria.

My mother said that the way to a man’s heart is through his belly. The same it seems can be said of Basking Sharks. They are greedy eaters of the tiniest things. They feast on fresh air it seems and love us for it. And I love them in turn.

It sounds corny, old fashioned. Too serious. But I do love them.

I didn’t think I would.

Why would I? Who loves sharks? Boy children, maybe. And baddies. And basking sharks seem so goofy beside the savage grins of the Great White. Remember that picture-meme of the Great White surfacing with the caption ‘rare picture of shark after stepping on legos’. That’s gas. Remember to Seek and Send that to the Clan.

Anyway, nattering. Today was glorious. It was everything they said it would be. It was a true Communion.

I’m glad I went for the proper robes. The grey shawl with the herringbone GrowTech weave. It added to it. It made it more itself. More authentic, I suppose. Truer to the scene. I think it must be that micro-proprioception thing that Arnaud was on about. That we pick up tiny cues from our body and the clothes we wear. It’s why prisoners used to get fat in loose clothes. Why we act more confident in a suit. And why we feel more woven into the fabric of our seascape in the Robes. More timeless. More in touch with the ancient seas.

The boat choice, too, was worth the coin. That wooden aesthetic added to it. Helped to situate us in an older time, even if beneath the surface the hull was a tri-fibre-glass and carbon-floss mixture. I kind of wish I didn’t know that; I kind of wish i hadn’t asked the skipper. Ignorance is bliss. It would have felt more ancient, more spiritually timeless to think we were using the same boats the ancients used. But that’s nonsense Maya - I don’t want a Disneyspace version of this. I don’t want to pretend. I’d rather know the truth. There’s enough in this ritual to be grateful for.

The mantras were worth learning off by heart. Hard to admit; they seemed stupid. But I get it now. To deliberately recite the feeding words, meant more. Meant something that wasn’t just the words. I guess it was mindful. It felt like the sharks understood, when I stepped to the edge, when I walked onto the platform, waist deep on the artificial reef and emptied the baskets of plankton. I’ll say them again here, “Lig dúinn beatha tú. Deartháir, deirfiúr, máthair, athair. Lig dúinn tú a bheathú ionas go bhféadfá daoine eile a bheathú freisin. Ith le do thoil, le do thoil ithe linn”. Let us feed you. Brother, sister, mother, father. Let us feed you so that you might feed others too. Please eat, Please eat with us.

I could have sworn the sharks waited for me to finish. And if I wasn’t such a committed Hyper-Rat I would say that they understood. That they looked right at me when I said “Please eat”. But they hardly could have. Can they even hear outside of water? I don’t know - will check it later. Or maybe I’ll just let it linger. The romance of it is warmer than the cold explainability of understanding. Better not let the HyperRats hear me say that one. There’s a difference between lying to ourselves and just not bothering to put things under the knife of explainability.

Scáth Mór (Great Shadow) allowed himself to be touched by me. The ritual master said that was rare. Very rare. Rare to touch any basking shark, rarer still to touch Scáth Mór. He was a leader of sorts. And old. Wary of us humans and the damage we have done. He must remember the 2010s and 2020s - they can grow that old. Humans weren’t to be trusted then. The fishermen and the pleasurecraft. We used not feed them then. We used not Commune.

Why me? Pure coincidence? Something else. The ritualmaster said I should meditate upon it. I have and I will again. It seemed Fateful. A sign.

Anyway, all in all it was a perfect day. Actually … The only wrinkle was the girl on the other boat and her screaming when the sharks approached. What did she expect the silly bitch? That nearly scared away our sharks, they must have heard her … so maybe Scáth Mór did hear me when I said “Please eat”.

Let’s choose to believe.

Anyway, I’ve had nothing like it before, and I may not see a day like this again. It was … holy? Raw? Real? Compassionate, caring … I don’t know how to describe it. But I take the Movement seriously now, if I didn’t before. It’s not just the right thing to do. It’s not just the Hyper-Rational thing. It’s much more than that. I can feel it.

I’ve taken the Pledge and I intend to see it through.

DESIGN FICTION: Masked Themselves from History

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: MASKED THEMSELVES FROM HISTORY

San Diego, 2054

Fame is u-shaped. The poor are anonymous. The richest too.

But the baseline level of anonymity changed definitively in the first three decades of the 21st century.

What was once table-stakes - no-one outside your local community knew of you unless you achieved great or terrible things - became rare, then rarer still, until it was barely possible at all.

Not everyone was on the streams of course. But everyone was on ambient video, stitched from CCTV, and the always on streams of others.

And digital currency leaves its own trace. The only way to escape was to go off-grid, but even then the drones and forest beacons would pick you up. And finding you, and you without a detailed profile, invited further investigation. The drones were sent to scope you out. So hiding, or opting out, opted you in more.

So, table-stakes.

The surveillance economy was not only important for keeping tabs on crime, and as a convenience (tax collection) but as the most valuable thing of all, data to train the algos. But even that idea soon became dated. Vulgar even.

Ironically, or perhaps predictably, society came up with good cultural reasons to justify its vices. And recast them as virtues. It is important to know who you are and what you’re like because you are part of the tapestry of history. You are a child of humanity and we owe our descendants and the universe itself the gift of ourselves, our experiences and our unique combinations of genetics, nurture and life-paths a glimpse of what it is to be us. To deprive them of that is a vice. Extreme selfishness. Anti-social behaviour.

So opting out was taboo.

Still, you might Walden-pond it or Unabomber it a bit. And get away with it. There are deserts out there still, and deeper woods than there have ever been the modern era. So you could, sometimes, be anonymous if you resigned yourself to separate completely from humanity. Renounce involvement in human affairs. Throw out achievement and focus on the simple things.

But what of those freaks who craved privacy but achievement too. Those who wished to make their mark, but not be known. Those who would remould the world but wished not to be looked at; wished to remain unexamined. Except in their achievements.

Those Socrats as they became to be known - wished to follow their namesake and icon, Socrates, and definitely mask themselves from history.

They would be know of. But nobody would know them.

Their motives differed. Many feared being the victims of fraud, of being incorporated as deepfakes. Others feared a future where conscious simulations of themselves would be recreated from their digital prints once the technology was suitably advanced. Others still, perhaps the majority, felt that identity was a sacred thing and should not be shared.

How did they do this? By masking. They hid their identities in layers. They presented a version of themselves to the world, but never their true selves. Nor indeed anything close to it. They deflected. They altered their opinions, their behaviours, and even sometimes, their biometrics. Their faces, their gaits, their prints.

They put out so many different prints of themselves, that evolved, faked back, doubled down then doubled back, that it was never at all possible to know who they were. Re-looking at them through the Backcasters it was as if you were looking at not one person but three, or five, or ten, or a hundred. These people were knowable only as distortions or shadows. Reflections or refractions of an identity. They shed so much conflicting data that you could make anyone of them.

And their devices and algorithms helped them do it. In fact, did it for them automatically.

Your gait is known too well. You broadcast that biometric print every time you take a few steps. No amount of conscious conditioning can make you mask your gait for long; you slide back into it unconsciously. Instead, your shoes reconfigured to make you limp or sent imperceptible electrical shocks to make you hop a little, or favour one side, then the other. To slow you down, then speed you up, all within a single stride.

Your face is known, so the Socrats used technology to relax or tighten facial muscles, dynamically. Often, they took to surgery, temporary or permanent, to alter their appearance more dramatically. If they had the coin, they underwent dynamic surgery. The programmable face one. Where they a layer of reconfigurable under-muscle was implanted directly below the skin. Then the facial structure would be changed over time programmatically.

A quirk of the capitalist system of government that predominated when big data first emerged, meant that spending habits were one of the most accurate and predictive behavioural signals for identification. You are what you buy. A basket of eleven items is enough to pick you from the crowd of 9 billion.

The Socrats subscribed to counter-algorithms that interfered with those models. Mixing up what you bought for optimal pattern interference.

It’s common sense, that text and speech is shedding information on our moods or vocabulary. Well that of course can be scrambled too. The Socrats, communicated with the help of AI advisors employed to tell them what to say and when to say it. Just enough to confound inference-makers. They spoke through voice modulators, imitating mood-markers and barely perceptible vocal ticks; just enough to throw on-lookers or archivists off their digital scent. A times, the AI advisors sent dummy messages off into the digital ether. Burying true signal in a deluge of noise.

In short, they made themselves multitudes. So the masses might never gaze upon their true selves.

And yet they still could remain part of society. Doing their important work. Without ever been definitively known.

They had masked themselves from history.

DESIGN FICTION: Nature Buddy

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: NATURE BUDDY

Ireland, 2036

It’s hard to make friends as an adult.

Even in Ireland, where they’d talk to the wall and the wall would talk back. Once you hit your mid-twenties, new friends are hard to come by. It’s harder still to make friends with someone who shares a very different worldview.

But that’s exactly what the Irish government forced upon its construction industry in 2030. The Construction in Accordance with Biodiversity Directive set out that all construction companies employing more than 5 people would need to now employ an Environmental Advisor, full or part-time to advise on and report centrally on the environmental and biodiversity measures taken during construction. These biodiversity consultants or ‘nature buddies’ were mandatory from 2033 and saw strong enforcement immediately.

It started because the builders couldn’t be trusted. They’d fucked the rest of us over one too many times. Crumbly concrete, backhanders, planning scandals, bulldozing protected hedgerows. It was felt in Government Buildings, in the urban electorate, and loudest in the glass corridors of Brussels that something needed to be done quickly. The Biodiversity Crisis had heated up, and accelerating more than even the most pessimistic forecasts had warned.

Of course, not all builders were out to destroy the environment. There were good ones too. The ones who felt that we’d inherited an island that was a beacon of natural beauty. Beauty worth preserving. But how could we trust them to compete in an industry of fine margins where too many were willing to cut corners.

So supervision it was.

Conveniently, it provided a slate of jobs for the growing class of college-educated environmentalists who found a work-market largely indifferent to their concerns and qualifications. Nobody mentioned that. Instead, the Directive embedded environmentalism in small business. And grounded it firmly in local communities.

Of course, it did both. But it wasn’t exactly an immediate success.

What makes a good Nature Buddy? Well, for a start, a thick skin. The first cohort of Biodiversity Consultants found themselves the focal point of relentless piss-taking and workplace bullying. The building contractors may very well have ordered it. And probably did in certain cases. But a more innocent explanation was the colliding of two very different worlds. The soft academic with their idealism, abstraction and nature-love. And well, everyone else in the construction industry.

By no means a match made in heaven. But a match made necessary by the rapid degradation of biodiversity on the Emerald Isle. A decay that was increasingly visible from year to year. Something had to be done. And this was one of those somethings.

Anyway, it was a bumpy start. Those bumps made national news. A viral trend of eco-smearing kicked off following a TikTok of a Biodiversity Consultant in Monasterevin locked in a portaloo, and pushed over. The excrement-covered eco was fuming, prompting a fairly unimaginative nickname to spread nationwide. Eco-shits.

The Biodiversity Consultants picked fights of their own. 280 building projects were shut down, or received environmental fines of more than E50,000 in 2033 alone as a result of these nature-buddies. 195 cases of workplace harassment and bullying went before the Courts.

So the culture war had two sides. It was a war of attrition.

It was a tumultuous three years, but by the beginning of 2036, both sides had begun to realise that nobody was benefiting from the tit-for-tat.

And so, things began to normalise. The culture of workplace bullying began to lose its vicious edge. Of course there was piss-taking; no outlawing here of that national past-time. But the worst of it was gone, mostly. The original cohort of Biodiversity Consultants had become more pragmatic. They had a better understanding of the realities of the building world and were more able to adapt to its rhythms and constraints.

What helped greatly was a common enemy. The installation of ‘Nature Auditors’ on each local council was a nightmare for the construction industry. Their usual avenues of complaint to the local politicians, counsellors and TDs (members of parliament) were cut off, as the ‘nature czars’ were installed by an EU directive. The directive grew from the fact that Ireland had failed to hit any of its Nature and biodiversity targets in the previous 7 years. Ireland was the remedial student and would need special supervision.

And so the Biodiversity Consultants were the means by which the Builders could navigate this new eco-legal reality they faced. And navigate they did. By 2036, the Biodiversity-Alignment Score of the average building works carried out in Ireland surpassed all other EU nations bar Denmark. And the relationships on the ground are a bit more friendly. And a little less covered in shit.

An interview with Paul Coughlan, a building contractor in East Cork: “I suppose it’s a good thing in the end. You wouldn’t have heard me saying that last year, or the year before. It was a joke. But look, eventually, we’ve worked it out. We’ve three advisors between the eight sites we’re working on at the minute. So we have James, Kate and Siona working with us. And we get on mighty. They’re part of the furniture at this stage like. We’d be lost without them. We’d get nothing built. They’d all be held up in planning. Nightmare stuff. But sure look it, it took a bit of time, but we’re getting there. And the houses are looking better for it in fairness. And with this biodiversity crisis, sure we have to do something.”

The view from the Biodiversity Advisor’s side is similar. Tomasz, based in Enniskerry, “To be perfectly honest, I came into the job a bit green in all senses of the word. I didn’t have a proper idea how the industry worked. What the day to day looked like. I was thinking only of conservation and sticking to the Biodiversity Directive. But over time, I’ve seen that it’s well and good taking a directive but implementing that in the real world, is a totally different thing. We’re learning. And I think we’re improving. Some of the proposals that were made in the Forum on Biodiversity just don’t work. And others, work much better than anticipated. Being on the ground we can see what’s working and do more of that. And of course, help to ensure we’re meeting the housing needs of the local community.

We all need to live somewhere. And most young people are sick of renting. So we want to buy a house but we don’t want to destroy the environment either. It’s nice to think that what we’re doing here is helping to make houses that are less detrimental to nature.”

And what about the Nature Auditors?

Both Paul and Tomasz declined to comment. The less said, the better.

DESIGN FICTION: How the City Plants Grow

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: HOW THE CITY PLANTS GROW

Freiburg, 2037

Infrastructure is a boring word. A word consigned to engineers, economists and public policy wonks. And bio-architects.

But that infrastructure beneath our feet keeps the lights on, the data streaming. It brings us clean water and takes waste-water away.

And in Freiburg, beneath this sleepy city is a hidden subterranean network of plants.

It connects each and every plant and tree in our city in a way that allows the soil to regenerate, re-capture carbon and allow those very same plants to communicate with one another.

Carsten Havertz is best known for his work designing the first great city plant substrate in Freiburg in the late ’20s. Groundbreaking; the design and implementation saw the uprooting of 2M tonnes of concrete and tarmac, to be replaced with topsoil and organic compost. Urban Planning 101 today, when the Freiburg Municipal Planning Council set out to redefine how city flora are connected the plan was met with something altogether less than enthusiasm.

Why would you even bother?

The questions cut like daggers from Left and Right alike. Even environmentalists saw this as expensive quackery. Green-naivety.

E2.5 billion spent re-earthing Freiburg could be much better spent elsewhere - rewilding, protecting existing rainforest, research, tree-planting. Literally any other environmental investment would have a better ROI in terms of carbon capture, biodiversity, conservation. Why spend money on the expensive land in commercial centres to replace with relatively tiny amounts of plant matter. Madness. The project came under criticism in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Bild and Die Tageszeitung. Green Entrepreneur, billionaire and German socialite Jo Mueller called for a public enquiry. A mismanagement and misappropriation of tax payers money and a diversion away from urgent action needed on the twin fronts of Biodiversity Crisis and Climate Crisis.

Henning Blum, council member at the time, described the period as “One of the most challenging of my life. It was not easy. It took its toll on all of us. On our families - who were called out on social media and metastreams. There were even death-threats. In the end, those turned out to be AI-gentic. But of course, we didn’t know that at the time. We thought we’d wake up one night and be taken away by BioStomp or something.” Blum is visibly shaken recounting the incident, even today. It’s clear the memories have left a deep wound.

But his expression changes suddenly when he speaks of the city today.

Smile-blazing: “But look at Freiburg today. It is a miracle. A cathedral of living matter. It is the unthinkable made real by perseverance. And of course, by the maestro himself, Herr Doktor Havertz.”

What was he like? “Oh, he was … [pauses, lost in thought] … he was otherworldly. He knew things, he saw things we could barely see. He could feel the possibility. It was flowing in him and when he let you see his vision, it was like looking into a crystal ball that reached out filling you with brilliant hope. To listen to him when he was in one of his moods was like listening to music. The most magical music. Not the music we hear today, but the type of music you read about in books. Spellbinding … “ Another pause. I let time pass, it’s clear that Blum is somewhere else. I am about to interrupt, when he reanimates, hand on chin.

“You know, there was a story my mother told me when I was child about a Piper. He came to the village and played a flute and led all the children away with him. I never really understood it at the time to be honest. I was always asking questions. Why would these children just get up and follow some man playing music? It was silly. But I’ve thought about that story a lot since I first met Carsten Havertz.”

He was the piper, leading you all astray?

“No [emphatic … pause]. He was the Piper, certainly. But he wasn’t leading us astray. He was leading us into the future. And we wanted to go with him. We were giddy to go with him. There was simply no question we would follow. I guess, I never really understood that about the fairytale. Why did the children go? Were they under a spell? Well maybe they were but it was a spell that they wanted to feel.”

So he had charisma? An infectious Reality Distortion Field? “Yes, I think. Maybe more than that.” Another pause. This time a pained expression on Blum’s face. He’s conflicted, having an argument internally. Again he resumes, sighs. He’s made up his mind, and a calmness comes over his face. “You know I’ve not really spoken about this publicly before. When I was young - university time - I fell in with a crowd. I cared about sustainability, and that led me to some communes and … anyway that’s not important. At that time, in that scene, whatever, … neo-psychedelics were a thing. I’m sure you remember the Summer of Insight and all that. Well, I was one of those people for a little while. And then I drifted into harder substances, Nhat and Opies. I was addicted to Opies for quite some time. It was not … anyway, it was a long time ago. But the thing that you hear these days with Opies addicts … and no no … I can say it, that is what I was. We shouldn’t shy away from these words. Anyway I was an addict but what you never hear about Opies these days is how incredibly good it felt. Of course it did. That’s why I took it! [Laughs].”

“It was unbearably good. Unbreathably good. It wasn’t a superficial high you see. It was as if every cell in your body was vibrating gently with Life. Meaning was clear. It was a hug from god himself. And the certainty of the hope you felt … there’s nothing even remotely like it. Nothing.”[pause]

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except maybe listening to Carsten Havertz. And his beautiful vision of a City that Lived.”

The City that Lived was groundbreaking in so many ways. Bio-architects consider it not only a masterpiece because it was so unlike anything that had come before it. But a masterpiece in its own right. The layout, planning, the detail of the Freiberg substrata remains to this day the benchmark, the north star for substrata design. That isn’t just an aesthetic preference or architectural accolade. That Masterpiece status is visible in downstream quantitative ways. Measures of plant health in Freiburg are higher than in other cities of similar size and climate. The jump in well-being index was the largest seen by any city that invested in substratum (with the possible exception of Irkutsk in the Siberian Republic and the quality of that data is contested).

What’s less well known about the City that Lived were the other benefits that emerged from it. Freiburg had the lowest age-adjusted per capita heat deaths in Scorching 34. It had the lowest per capita number of excessive deaths due to Avian Flu ’35. According to researchers at Robert Koch Institut, that was largely because of the proximity of the population there to such a variety of birdlife that shared open streams and settled in the gardenfarms. It didn’t provide immunity as such, but seems to have provided partial immunity to a minority of the population; enough to stop the virus from tearing through the city like it did so many of its neighbours on the Eurasian continent.

The plant pathways of Freiburg are amazing to behold. Canals of earth that house the network of root system and soil movement that allows the city to regenerate, to sit in the ecosystem rather than apart from it. The Glass Avenue is a major tourist attraction today and worth the visit. Here the soil is divided by corridors of glass that allow you to walk within the soil network and see this tangle of roots and the slow movement of water, worms and the very occasional mole. Amazingly, the soil health of downtown Freiburg is higher than that of the average American farm.

More surprisingly still, the average citizen of Freiburg reports a higher level of affinity with nature than activists in Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF.

This was always the plan.

Havertz in his essay Manufacturing Biophilia finished with a sentence that Blum knows by heart. “Love is not an abstract thing. Love of Nature neither. If we want to learn to love our Living Planet, we must first live in it.”

That love of Nature is undeniable in Freiburg. It is everywhere to see. In the wild, richness of the main thoroughfare right through to the leafy forest of the industrial estates and the winding greenery of the ringbahn and autobahn.

Love of Nature then is not an abstract thing. That love is real. And that love is measurable in money. That E2.5 billion spent on the Living City. A waste it was said.

E2.5 billion is the sum of private donations of Freiburg’s residents to Environmental NGOs, clans and accelerators in 2036. Each year, the City of Life pays for itself as it strengthens its residents commitment to Biophilia.

To complete this piece, my research led me to seek out a senior figure in BioStomp who had allegedly threatened the Council. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, owing to their being wanted for acts of terrorism and bio-terrorism, I wanted to know if they still viewed Freiburg as the ‘act of betrayal’ they dubbed it all those years ago. “Ahhh. No, no. Freiburg was … we may have gotten that one wrong. You know it was war. We needed urgency. Of course, this looked like an absolute disaster. With the floods, the fires, tens of millions displaced in Europe alone. Tigers, gone, red squirrels, badger, rhinos, gone, gone, gone. And this bunch of bureaucrats wanted to dig up their city and plant a few more trees. It was madness. [smiles]

But sometimes madness is necessary.”

BIOPHILIA SUMMARY: Rewilding the Sea

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

REWILDING THE SEA, Charles Clover

Easy bedtime reading. A nice narrative overview of the status quo and some rewilding rays of hope. Now seeking a Vaclav Smil-type follow-on.

TLDR

The sea and its wildlife is in extreme decline.

Ocean ecosystems regenerate if left alone.

To regenerate, we need large areas where fishing is not permitted. Phase out bottom-trawling and dredging, reduce quotas and enforce them, get rid of subsidies.

There used to be way more fish. For every hour fishing today, even with best equipment, fisherman land 6% of what they did 130 years ago [1890].

Some types of fishing are worse than others. Bottom-trawling and dredging are the worst for biodiversity loss and carbon release.

Some marine species are more important than others in helping the ecosystem regenerate and thrive. These should be nurtured and protected. Atlantic cod, Oysters and Kelp, amongst others.

Great examples of regeneration are Chagos Islands, Acsension Island and Lyme Bay .

The most important things I can do in Ireland:

Avoid Cod, scallops and Bluefin Tuna.
Lobby against bottom-trawling and kelp forest destruction.
Support creation and policing of large marine reserves.

Managing the Oceans.

The oceans are the last place where modern society depends largely on hunter gatherers. Fishermen depend for their living on catching wild animals.

There can be no ‘individual re-wilding efforts’ as there is on land.

The seas are hard to police.

The most harmful fishing practices are subsidised. They do not make economic sense, let alone environmental sense. The big players: China, EU, US, Japan, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea all subsidise fishing.

A barbell strategy for sustainable fishing:

It is ecologically and economically beneficial to only have artisanal fishing methods within 3, 6, 12, 40 miles of the coast. This should be our aim.
Phase out trawling, bottom-fishing, dredging. No hyper-targeted fishing. Stricter quotas.

Fishing has a big part to play in climate change. Trawling is as carbon-contributing as aviation (2021 Sala et al.).

Mesopelagic fish help with carbon capture. There is a risk that we will increasingly start fishing them.

Kelp can take 20x carbon than a landforest. Let’s protect and re-wild Kelp Forests.

Sources

Rewilding the Seas, Charles Clover

DESIGN FICTION: Birth Flower

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: BIRTH FLOWER

Madrid, 2034

2033 was the year of the See-Me-Not. A beautiful stifling year on the plains of Toledo when the See-Me-Not was seen and seen fully.

Gyrocaryum oppositifolium Valdés had been endangered in the 2020s. Dramatically so. Despite conservationists best efforts to preserve and protect its genetic diversity, the See-Me-Not very rapidly lived up to its name.

The death of a 27 million years-old flower is a tragedy. A tragedy made more tragic still by its isolated position on the tree of life. Sitting, alone as the single species in the Gyrocarum genus, the morphologic peculiarity of its fruits is a beacon to its uniqueness.

The See-Me-Not was a plant worth protecting.

Remarkably, this protection may be an unusual case of conservation that was too successful. How did it happen? Given its ‘worth-protecting’ status, it was assigned to proportionately more citizens. A little over 0.05% of Spaniards were assigned See-Me-Not as Birthflower. But a rather powerful cohort it turned out to be.

Perhaps the drama of the See-Me-Not was due to the Birthflower Ceremony. The government plan had been to register BirthFlowers for each new birth in Iberia to foster an affinity between the population and their natural environment. A beautiful concept. And one that was met with unexpected enthusiasm in a country not especially renowned for its love of nature.

The wrinkle with the See-Me-Not was that many adults wanted BirthFlowers also. They loved the idea and wished they themselves could forge a more intimate relationship with the herbiculture of their local landscape. So the Ministry for Nurturing the Relationship with Nature updated the database; assigning Birthflowers retrospectively for the adult population.

Like anything, not everyone takes their duties seriously. And some, take them very seriously indeed. And seriousness becomes more serious still when competition is involved.

And so the story of the See-Me-Not is the story of Juan Marcos Alba and Alberto Alvarez. Two Castilian billionaires; two men randomly assigned the inconspicuous Birthflower of Gyrocaryum oppositifolium Valdes.

The See-Me-Not won the lottery with one billionaire patron. It won it twice with two. But the one-upmanship that blossomed between the retail magnates was something else entirely.

Alba started it when he announced the creation of a vast farming and replanting initiative outside Leon in early August 2029. In a single act of environmental benevolence he wished to turn around the fate of the forgotten cousin of the Forget-me-Not. The See-Me-Not would be forever associated with Alba. It’s 27 million year fate entangled with this singular man. An inspiring story of Homo Sapiens nurturing the natural world.

But inspiration breeds jealousy too and Alberto Alvarez could not live with the idea that his BirthFlower would be synonymous with his contemporary and rival. He lobbied privately to have his Birthflower changed. This was not possible the bureaucracy said; it would undermine the program and lead to complaints and petitions by those would wished for the more beautiful extravagant and elegant flora. This would introduce clear bias into the natural world, disrupting nature once again.

Birthflower assignment must be random, and it must be irreversible. Even for Billionaires.

Especially for Billionaires.

So Alvarez was stuck with the See-Me-Not and the shadow of Alba above it.

In March 2030, at a vast vineyard turned ‘plant nursery’, he held a press conference of his own. He had funded a new organisation of See-Me-Not conservation. They would repopulate hinterlands of Madrid and Sevilla in magnificent numbers. The See-Me-Not would blanket not only natural areas, but roadsides, parks and commercial property. This would be boosted by donations from his clothing empire (Destino, Flor Tenue and Pluma).

Donations flooded in.

Not least because the See-Me-Not motif was intertwined with that seasons fashions. The brand redesign of Flor Tenue even had the See-Me-Not as its icon and appeared entangled with the logo.

The See-Me-Not was in the limelight.

The story continued as any story of one-upmanship does. By 2033, the See-Me-Not was everywhere. Its resurgence was noted far beyond the Iberian peninsula too. Botanical Data Scientists in Greece, Algeria and Azerbaijan noted upticks of over 1000% in See-Me-Not in the wild. It’s not clear if that was natural pollination or copycat efforts. Likely it was the latter. 2033 was the Year of the See-Me-Not.

Soon, the See-Me-Not will need to be contained, reduced, pruned. It is stifling its competitor species. The Narcissus minor asturiensis, Hypericum pulchrum and Campanula patula - all driven to the edge of extinction by the benevolent vanity of two great men.

But that is a story for another day.

AI SUMMARY: Prompting is hard, AIs can help

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Eliciting Human Preferences with Language Models. Li et al. 2023

Prompting is hard. An AI can help you prompt it better.

This paper creates a method (GATE) where the AI and user have a bit of back-and-forth to co-create the prompt.

Accuracy. GATE outperforms or equals both example-giving and prompts as input to ChatGPT-4 for two tasks: content recommendation and email verification. For moral reasoning an AI-led yes/no back-and-forth outperformed the open-ended one.

Usability. Using GATE is equally or less mentally demanding than user-written prompts.

CONTEXT

AI’s do stuff.

We need to tell them to do stuff.

What they do, and how well they do it depends on how we ask.

Typically we ask in two ways: give it a bunch of examples and ask it to extrapolate, or ask an open-ended instruction (prompt).

Example-giving is tough where there are many edge-cases.

Prompts demand a user know what to ask upfront and know what the AI expects.

Humans recognition memory is ~30% better than Recall memory. It makes sense to allow the AI to help us use Recognition memory.

Simon’s speculative YES And:

Lots of opportunity to refine for specific domains. Not only maximising performance but minimizing time to eliciting the prompt.
Open question as to whether this leads to user preference shift over time. We can expect that prompting will lead to users drifting towards prompts that are more machine-predictable. It did this in most other domains. Will there be any differences in drift between GATE and user prompting?

Source:

This is a human-summary of a single pass of the paper. By a very fallible human.

The intent here is to give a principal component of the core concept presented.

I emphasise general usefulness, not technical novelty, or even technical usefulness.

Use at your own risk.

DESIGN FICTION: Dead Pokemon

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: DEAD POKEMON

Tokyo, 2029

Life imitates art.

Mass protests outside the high-rise of The Pokemon Company in Roppongi Hills and the offices of their joint-owners, Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures Inc., have brought Tokyo to a standstill. The Japanese games conglomerates behind the hit Pokemon franchise from the 2000s have seen share prices tumble on market opening, only to be brought lower still when a DDoS attack ground the massive multiplayer role playing game offline. Hi No Mu (Nothingness of the Day) the Japanese hacker group, responsible for last years leaking of Chinese bribing of the Imperial family, claimed responsibility with a simple ransom request.

De-extinct Charmander.

The beloved fantasy character, a baby dragon, was declared by The Pokemon Company as endangered and later extinct in the latest online game and all Pokemon properties (movies, tv series, games and merchandise). The move, a targeted effort of social engineering, was an attempt to open the eyes and hearts of young people today to the extinction crisis. The Pokemon Company CEO, Hikari Ishii, revealed that she felt a deep responsibility to use the influence of the beloved media empire to spur young fans into taking action on the very real extinction crisis facing the real world today.

Spur them into action it did.

Drone footage of the protests estimate the crowds at 2.5M people, or approximately 12.5% of Tokyo’s population. Protestors travelled from all over Japan, with anger and indeed mass grief visible in television and social media coverage of the event.

A sister protest in Bellevue, Washington saw 200,000 people amass on Bellevue Way, an ordinarily quiet Tech district in a city that has recently been notable for its subdued and nerdy quietness and right of center politics. A more conservative balance to neighbouring Seattle across the water.

Bemused commentators and disgusted editors spoke out against GenZ and Gen Alpha and their apparent devotion to fictional cartoon characters while the real, complex beauty of the natural world is being erased before our very eyes. It is clear, that the youth of today don’t in fact lack the energy and protest passion of their grandparents in ’68 or their parents in the Iraq War.

Instead, they lack a credible link with reality.

Tens of vertebrate species eliminated from the great book of life each decade, to the deafening chorus of silent indifference.

One scrawny cartoon character, and it’s Chaos. War. Protest.

The crisis escalated further in India, where the Japanese embassy was attacked by a group of youths demanding that they bring Charmander back.

In an age when the biodiversity crisis raged on, the people played fiddle while the world burned. But they will not stand by while their beloved fictions are torn apart, even for the most noble of reasons.

In an act of incredible defiance, an unfazed Hikari Ishii, addressed the protestors on Xstream. She had a simple message for the outraged youth.

“There is hope for Charmander to rejoin us if those beautiful creatures that inspired him are saved.

Charmander will return when the most endangered 20 species in Japan are conserved.

If you wish to protest, protest those ensuring the biodiversity holocaust on our noble islands.

Turn your fire on the enemies of our planet.

And we will raise Charmander from the ashes.”

– – –

Epilogue

The protests and mass movement that followed are estimated to have stabilised 23 of the 40 most endangered species in Japan, as of 2043. Charmander has risen from the dead.

DESIGN FICTION: Forest Fraud

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: FOREST FRAUD

Guinea Bissau, 2047

How can a forest disappear?

Well, it could be cut down, and we have no shortage of that in our illustrious history. But forest-clearing leaves a trace; forests don’t just vanish. Forests are either burned or they’re cut; both leave obvious evidence at the time. Those forest fingerprints persist for decades afterwards. Burning wood turns to ash that becomes massaged into the soil and river systems over time. Today, the wildfires that wracked the Australian east coast in the 2020s are still there to read in the soil. Similarly, when large forests are cut or cleared, they inevitably leave behind pockets of flora in the soil. Tree seeds are hardy and cunning. Buried, they lie dormant, waiting for their inevitable climb up into the light. A forest can be cleared but some of it stays buried beneath the ground. Thankfully. Waiting for its moment to resurface; waiting for humanity to let its guard down. Just look at the rewilding efforts of Gorongosa, Caledonia, Harapan or the abandoned hinterland of Chernobyl.

Forests can be killed, but they cannot disappear.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened in Jabicunda a tropical rainforest west of Guinea Bissau border with Guinea. Long touted by BioKeep as a local biodiversity Library of Alexandria, the forest no longer is. And with it, that library of life has vanished too. GaiaMetrics, the de facto data hub for biodiversity data, estimates that Jabicunda contained 50,000 unique species of plants and animals and a further 367,000 unique fungi, bacteria and protozoa. We instantly lost 1.6% of global biodiversity. Just like that.

But the tale gets weirder still. If you travel to Jabicunda what you find is a series of rural villages, some farmland and small pockets of rainforest. In other words an area with no forest, an area with no clearing, an area with no new build on it. So the forest never existed. Mystery solved.

Speaking to some locals, they don’t know what you talk about when you mention the Jabicunda forest. Some think you’re crazy, or naive. There’s no forest here, never was.

So an admin error, or mistranslation - these things have been known to happen. Especially with rare, local dialects disconnected from the metropolitan administrative centres. Or outright fraud designed to bring needed funding to what is otherwise an impoverished rural corner of Africa. Also not unheard of. An elaborate lie to feed the families. With so much wealth flooding into conservation and biodiversity research and so little work elsewhere, a bit of fraud sounds not just plausible but inevitable.

Except other locals say exactly the opposite.

The forest was here, one time and its legacy is tattooed into the local culture. Literally. There are tattoos here of Lesser White-spotted Flufftail, Crested Blue-bellied Roller and Latastia ornata lizard. Birds and animals that only ever existed in this part of the world.

Animals, without the forest, are extinct. Yet the body art is striking and obviously based on reality. They are not mythological creatures or fanciful drawings. They are anatomically accurate - as much as a tattoo could be. And they are widespread; approximately one in three people in Jabicunda town on the edges of the ‘disappeared forest’ have these tattoos or ones like them.

And its not just skin-art. The place names of this corner of Cacine in the Tombali region hark back to the forest days.

Many people have names that include - bu, ma and ri - Biafada words that have their origins in the forest. So perhaps the forest was here, once upon a time, say in the early 20th century and the culture is sufficiently self-sustaining with its language and practice that the memory lives on. And perhaps the elders recall the forest, or its remnants, or remember their parents speaking of it. Fair enough.

But it’s not simple as that. There are photographs of the forest and of a sub-species of the Latastia Ornata lizard that do not exist elsewhere. And some of these have been genetically sequenced. Or so it seems. The investigative team have examined these in detail and are adamant that a human could not create these genetic profiles as pure fiction. They are convinced this couldn’t be the work of AI either. That claim has been corroborated by InterAI - neither the images, the videos nor the sequences bear any of the hallmark errors and pockmarks of AI generation; nor the watermarks put there by the algorithms.

Except the locals don’t agree.

Mawri Fada tells a very different story. The forest was here until last year, and one day we all woke up and it was gone. Spirited away. The ravings of a madman or a chancer.

Except he’s not alone in thinking this, and telling us. Even children, with no obvious incentive to lie say the very same thing. Not only that, they refer to areas and daily practices that describe the forest. Be careful over there - there’s a Wawri, a poisonous frog. Leptopelis pumilio . Without the forest, extinct.

How and why could this happen? The shaman says it’s punishment. Punishment for angering the spirits of the forest. For taking them for granted and believing we could live without them. Punishment for letting the Kalo Ri fade away. This, a mystery within the mystery. The Kalo Ri was an animal revered in the culture of the region. Even when the forest was said to exist, it was endangered and declining.

When we put this theory to those who had said the forest was never here, a deathly silence descends.

“We must not talk of that. We too don’t want to disappear.”

DESIGN FICTION: Product Sage or Who Oversees the AI Ethicists

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: PRODUCT SAGE or WHO OVERSEES THE AI ETHICISTS

Northern California, 2037

Wracked by rapid growth and the federal attention that brings with it, the executive team at InterAI needed to escape somewhere quiet and regroup. They wanted space to think, somewhere out of the public’s furious gaze. Somewhere, to work the knotted governance structures that had sprouted up in the organisation and were slowly stifling their progress and competitiveness. Structures and practices that were, ironically, inviting more scrutiny and federal oversight. This is exactly the opposite effect that CEO Dan Rohr foresaw when he committed an industry-leading investment of $200M in an AI Ethics team. He cared about the direction AI use could take in the wrong hands. And he cared about how bad publicity on the consumer-side and on the regulatory-side could stifle his vision. $200M sent a message: InterAI takes safety seriously. They were putting their money where their mouths were. And it was simply good business.

And yet, Senate Hearing after Hearing, OpEd after OpEd, pulled the company deeper and deeper into the morass.

He’d painted himself into a corner. He couldn’t disband the team - that would cause uproar. It would be an admission of guilt. Of covering up.

So the executive team were heading on retreat, to a B&B set in a quiet Zen monastery in Northern California. Away from the gaze of the hysterical public and the zealotry of the tech scene. That retreat would prove to be a watershed moment for AI and was the genesis of the Order of Quiet Oversight. The story goes something like this: Dan was sitting in the shade of a Zen rock garden, eye-blurred with the haggard look of recently-departed frazzle. He was lost, and staring at the fine-raked sand. Annie Li, at that time a Buddhist nun living in the monastery, was passing. She smiled and observed that something must be deeply troubling him.

They got to talking and with some gentle back and forth, as conversations with Buddhists nuns tend to do. They arrived at two questions that stopped Dan in his tracks.

Were these ethicists good people?
Were they wise?

In his own words, Dan, “stuttered, and stumbled and stopped. I don’t know, I mean aren’t we all good people in our own ways? And what exactly is wisdom”. Annie was quiet. Unfazed, and unsurprised by the half-truths and hiding. She gentled prodded again. Were they good people? Were they wise people?

Dan had to admit that no, they were not especially good people. They were mostly fine, like the rest of us, a mix of good and bad - sometimes the balance leant one way, sometimes the other.

They were not wise.

Again Annie. “If these people aren’t particularly good people, and they are not wise, why are they tasked with overseeing the ethical direction of this incredibly powerful organisation? This seems unwise and perhaps dangerous”.

In interviews since, Dan describes it as an epiphany. Like a bolt of lightning his eyes had been opened. What he needed was not an AI Ethics team, a cadre of Ivy-League woke and hungry, status-scouring law postgrads. He needed a Sage. An oracle who could be asked to weigh up the impact of any major product direction. Dan, entranced by Annie’s otherness, her serenity and loving detachment was convinced that she should be that oracle.

Dan was wise in his own way; but more so, he was astute. His enemies would say cunning. Right now, InterAI were being punished for trying to be good. He wanted a level playing field and to do that, he’d need to pull his competitors deep into the Ethics game. So Annie would be the oracle but she would be independent - and all AI companies should submit their plans to her.

The Zen angle appealed to Dan. It lacked the hang-ups and righteousness of his Christian upbringing. And at its core - it was all about change. His vision was to re-engineer the human world. To bring super-intelligence into being and with it to change humanity utterly. To unleash wave after wave of discovery to convene with this super-intelligence to solve hunger, illness, climate change, the biodiversity crisis, to help us to leave Earth, and live-out the sci-fi dreams of his adolescence.

“Well what do you think about the way that AI is changing society?” Dan had asked. “Everything changes”. “Change is the very nature of Reality”. Dan had heard enough. He was convinced, that this ethicist could be trusted to remain impartial.

This, was the birth of the Order of Quiet Oversight. Annie would lead it, with a small group of nuns, monks and miscellaneous wise people.

Independent, unattached to company politics. Like the federal regulation had intended to be. Before it was corrupted by the hysteria and anti-AI fervour.

That was the late summer of 2032. Of course, looking back it seems hardly conceivably that Dan Rohr and Annie Li could have been anything but hardened enemies. Dan, later arrested and convicted of attempting to have Annie and her team murdered.

When asked if Dan was evil, Annie replied with characteristic sagacity. “Oh no, he’s not evil. Certainly not. Without Dan, we wouldn’t have solved Alzheimers, or SIDS, or any of those other terrible illnesses his AIs so magnificently put to an end. And we wouldn’t have the Order of Quiet Oversight either. I think Dan has done immeasurable good in this world.”

But he tried to have you killed, surely that’s an act of evil.

“Well yes, that was evil. And illegal. But worse, it unwise”.

DESIGN FICTION: EVP, Panthera

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: EVP, PANTHERA

Mumbai, 2035

Biophilitas is looking for an Executive Vice President, Big Cats to join our team in Mumbai.

Biophilitas helps NGOs, zoos and wildlife organisations implement strategies to ensure the preservation and flourishing of all of earths plants and animals. Biophilitas is a semi-private arm of the UN with accountability and ownership in specific jurisdictions (more below).

Biophilitas’ sister organisation GaiaMetrics is the world-leading platform for species health-tracking allowing organisations to manage, track, and achieve their unique conservation goals — all through a single, powerful solution. GaiaMetrics consumer platform is the fastest growing Biophilia-for-enterprise app worldwide.

With offices in Mumbai, Manaus, Dakota, Edmonton, Vladivostok, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Xinxiang and Shimla, we are a team that puts biodiversity and the experience of biodiversity action at the heart of our workstyle. We strive for the best solutions and ensure that pan-species Design Thinking is central to everything we do.

Our offices are open, collaborative environments where our team and individual accomplishments are celebrated, encouraged and deeply embedded and symbiotic with the ecosystems we help to flourish.

Doing the vital work of preserving biodiversity should be fun, flow-worthy and full of life-rewarding experiences.

We are looking for a EVP, Panthera to join our team to focus on building and executing conservation and flourishing strategies that will safe-guard Big Cats populations globally to 1.5 million.

What will I be doing?

As EVP, Panthera you will be responsible and accountable for the conservation and flourishing of each member of the Big Cats family globally.
Currently there are 450,000 Big Cats globally and are classified as in-peril with 5 sub-species at or near extinction. You will own Biophilitas’ target of moving this to 900,000 by 2040.
Lead a team of Species Managers to achieve their conservation results. Fostering a sense of ownership, accountability and conscious interdependence to achieve challenging goals whilst maintaining a positive and supportive work environment.
Prioritise long-term species strategies ahead of short-term conservation gains and publicity.
You will be responsible for the genus, species and sub-species flourishing vision and strategy and ensuring that it aligns with the long term organisational goals of Biophilitas.
Drive complex, ambiguous conservation, ecosystem regeneration and species re-introduction.
Track & report on species flourishing and intervention effectiveness.
Hire and develop talent in the team through recruiting activities, evangelisation and coaching team members to growth.
Manage the relationship with UN, governments and international NGOs working on Big Cats and associated species and ecosystems.

What skills do I need?

Proven managerial experience in species management. Demonstrated ability to achieve results through others.
Ability to build effective cross-functional, cross-domain and international relationship and influence others without direct authority.
Demonstrated ability to drive results through delivery of complex, ambiguous new ecosystem development, in a fast-paced VUCA environment.
Ability to effectively manage a portfolio of responsibilities, build roadmaps, make difficult trade-offs the balance the needs of different species, organisations, governments and societies.
Mastery of communication skills - written, video, AI-interaction and verbal.
Strong background in data and intervention management - ideally with proven success in multi-agent RCTs.
Strong storytelling skills and ability to create compelling messaging that speaks to stakeholder pain-points, incentives and fears.

Don’t worry if you do not tick every box. We’re always happy to review applications from exceptional individuals and take all experience into consideration. We do our best to provide fast feedback within 24 hours.

DESIGN FICTION: Throw-Away Bottle

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: THROW-AWAY BOTTLE

Edinburgh, 2045

When Isuelt Morgan finished the interview she took a sip of water from her bottle. Then she casually threw it into the sea.

The camera was still rolling. Because cameras don’t not roll. They are always on.

So she must have known that she would be seen. She was caught red-handed. This torchbearer of environmentalism. This preacher of plastic doom hadn’t just acted out a hypocrisy. She had flaunted it. And done so in a most disgusting fashion.

It was an act that broadcast contempt for the ocean. Why not throw it away in the boat? Why not just leave it lying around? Why actively discard it? Seeking out the sea as a litter bin.

The Streams stitched it together with other acts of violent disregard for nature.

One caught the heartstrings and disgust-core of the digital horde. A scene from an old television series from the 2010s, Mad Men. The series had captured the imaginations of the literati of the era in particular who wanted to feel what it was like to be amongst those powerful ad men of the 1960s. What was it like to live in a time of great, hopeful change and to be the ones at its forefront? A time when America was youthful and booming. A time when the hyper-verbal were on top, and the number-crunchers and autists were confined to the back office. It painted a rosy veneer of that American dream and paired it with a painting showing the dark capitalist underbelly that went along for the ride. One scene was particularly galling.

The Drapers are out for a lovely, 1960s, picturesque Sunday picnic. Everything about the scene is a billboard for a hopeful America. And then, it’s time to leave.

The family get up, take up their blanket, picnic basket and children. And discard a pile of rubbish in the grass. Unfathomable, un-reasonable. An act of awfulness to those of us living in a newer, wiser Overton Window. The scene appalled the audience in 2008. It seems laughable to us today. Too unrealistic to treat with contempt.

Now Iseult Morgan fit perfectly into that scene. There was no difference. Except perhaps that unlike the Drapers, Iseult was supposed to know better. She was, afterall, fond of lecturing us about the our many eco-destroying behaviours.

Things moved quickly.

Within 20 mins of going viral, there was uproar and outrage. A little after that major questions were being asked by funding agencies, sponsors and venture capitalists.

Iseult couldn’t be contacted, as she was on a retreat. Imbibing ayahuasca as part of a mother-earth ritual deep in the Costa Rican rainforest.

So they revoked her funding in absentia. And smeared her holy image until there was nothing left to salvage.

Iseult emerged from her psychoactive retreat in a state of post-clarity bliss. She was not prepared for the raging firestorm of public fury. But she was well-placed to take it well. Clear-eyed; hungover but calmly so.

A camera shoved in her blissful face left her quietly stunned. But not distressed. Perhaps she didn’t’ yet grasp the gravity of the affair.

“Why do you feel that it’s right for you lecture the world on environmentalism and then treat the ocean as your own personal waste-basket? Are you not ashamed of yourself?”

A blink.

“Surely you, Iseult, should know better than to litter?”

Silence.

“What were you doing throwing that bottle in the ocean? Where you trying to spark outrage?”

And realisation dawns. Ripples of recognition illuminate her face.

“Ah. I see.”

“Well, do you have nothing to say? Why would you do this? When so many follow you and depend on your leadership?”

A pause. A smile. Some modesty, a little embarrassment.

That bottle was an Active Compost bottle. It’s designed to degrade naturally.

“Sounds like an excuse. But even biodegradable plastics take time to degrade, they pollute the seas and ecosystems in those times. And they are an eyesore.”

I agree. Active Compost is not a biodegradable plastic. It is a mould-hardened dormant algae. When left in salt water, the bottle decomposes and the akinetes germinate into new active cells. It’s not a bioplastic; it’s food. Its purpose is to be thrown away.

“What?”

It is better for the environment to throw this in the ocean, than to recycle it, reuse it, landfill it, incinerate. It’s food first, a bottle second.

“But the energy needed to manufacture or transport, surely it would be better to simply grow algae and leave it to the ocean itself?”

It would but the blue-green algae is a waste product from biofuel. And blue-green algae is in short supply in the High North Atlantic. And to inject huge, concentrated amounts into the ocean would be counterproductive.

These bottles are designed to be gently distributed on demand. Little islands of Cyanobacteria allow little clusters of zooplankton to gather and grow. In turn, they feed the marine food web.

When the explanation was verified there were a lot of embarrassed faces. But the damage had been done to Iseult Morgan and to NutraSpiral Foods and to PlasticWar. Some of that funding was not coming back.

But the publicity the AquaBloom Flask received may have been worth it.

Of course, today, that’s why we throw our rubbish away. Unlike the inefficient energy-wasters of the past.

Our waste feeds the Earth.

Their waste killed it.

DESIGN FICTION: Climate Artefacts

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: CLIMATE ARTEFACTS

The following is a transcript of a stream-auction. The auction consists of immersive, interactive stream. The stream typically viewed in Spatial, can be viewed in 2D video on older devices. The transcript below is a summary of the audio and floating text accompanying the stream-auction.

CLIMATE ACTION COLLECTION AUCTION (CONTEMPORARY 2031-2051)

The lot is curated by Frederic Thierry and comprises a set of physical and virtual artefacts from the Climate Action Campaign 2031-2051. The lot focuses on items used in The 5th French Republic and parts of Euskal Herria (Basque Country)

Firefighter Helmet, Dordogne

Beautiful F1 firefighter helmet, red from Biscarrosse in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Helmet is typical of those used by professional and international firefighters during the Great Wildfires of Nouvelle-Aquitaine 2030s which saw the pine forests effectively eliminated in Landes de Gascogne. Item is considered exceptionally rare owing to the Lacanau fire in 2038 which destroyed four primary storehouses of firefighting equipment and so this item is of the last generation of MSA Gallet F3 firefighting helmets used in France.

Year of manufacture: 2010
Condition: Fair
Material: Composite
Location: Biscarrosse, Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Beautiful 19 mm tooth of Iberian lynx.

Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) tooth, non-fossilised. The Iberian lynx was formally declared extinct in 2038. The wildcat was endemic to southwestern Europe and had been the holder of the title of ‘world’s most endangered cat species’ for 30 years. Formal extinction followed a long, dogged conservation effort. The lynx was a shy, solitary animal that lived in forest areas and thick jungle, hunting primarily rabbits.

Length fossil approx.: 19 mm
Condition: Good
Locality: Guadalmellato, Cordoba, Spain

Teeth in this condition are rare.

Item was part of a private collection prior to 1970. Certificate of Authentication and Crypto-Provenance attached to this item.

Catalogue of Firefighting methods.

An intact pamphlet demonstrating guerrilla and makeshift firefighting methods to residents and volunteers caught in the Great Wildfires of Nouvelle-Aquitaine 2038. These pamphlets were issued in the spring and summer months from 2028 onwards but became increasingly rare after 2032 owing to large numbers of residents leaving the area. The techniques used and illustrated in the pamphlet shift dramatically in this period. The twin languages of French and Arabic were common on all safety publications in this period.

This pamphlet is notable for inclusion only of French; believed to be part of a small print run for the residents of Biscarrose-sur-Plage, Mimizan and Arcachon.

Year of manufacture: 2032
Condition: Excellent
Locality: Arcachon, Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Series of Portraits of Volunteer Firefighters by Marlene Dubois

Beautiful series of portrait photography of volunteer firefighters in the Great Wildfires of Novelle-Aquitaine. The series were taken between March and July of 2033. Marlene Dubois’ portrait photographs are reminiscent of the war photography of Vietnam and focus exclusively on unsung heroes and heroines in the environment of their work.

Year: 2033
Condition: As New
Locality: Novelle-Aquitaine

DESIGN FICTION: Transfer Season

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: TRANSFER SEASON

Kent, 2032

Hello everybody and welcome to Transfer night. It’s that time of the year again, and of course we have an amazing show for you.

Big news! Big, big news for our listeners in Kent. Good things are on the way.

Let’s remind ourselves. We’ve been through this many years, most of us. But it only comes around once a year, and we have new members on the stream. So let’s run through very quickly how the process works. We have a Source who has animals they are willing to send to be reintroduced to another part of the world. Usually it’s national or regional wildlife foundations, conservation organisations, or local biodiversity councils. But of course it could be private breeders and zoos also. These Sources are looking to get paid for providing the animals which will be reintroduced - mostly its cash, but from time to time we do see swaps. Then you have the Relocation Partner - the local Biodiversity Council that wishes to reintroduce the animals to some area under their jurisdiction. Again, these are wild animals we’re speaking about. We’re not interested in animals moving between conservation or breeding centres. Unless of course it’s a temporary step in a Reintroduction.

Now the transfer details.

There are four levels to transfers. ‘Applied and accepted’ when a Reintroduction location puts forward their case and funding proposition to the Source and is accepted as a suitable Reintroduction Partner for a planned transfer. ‘Animal identified and agreed’ is given when the specific animals are assigned to the new location. ‘Deal done - the receiving location is ready to accept the animal’, pretty much what it says on the tin. The specific animal or animals are agreed to move and the Reintroduction partner is ready to accept them. And the one we all wait for, ‘Here we go’. The animals are on their way.

Ok tonight we’re focusing on three areas of the Atlantic with big news breaking in the past few hours: Kent, Mid Ulster, and Finistere. And it’s a cracker. Two major headlines reported in The Telegraph and The Gaian. Kent to see the re-introduction of Carpathian wolves in 2032! Now let’s take a quick breather. We’ve been here before. We’ve been here last year - we thought we were getting three breeding pairs. And lost out on all of them! Is this more of the same again? I’m not sure I can do another summer window of this. You all know I’m based in Kent, so this one hurt. The disappointment last year was unbearable.

So let’s remind ourselves what happened. Kent Ecosystem Managers and Biodiversity Council have been in the market for wolves for more than three years now. They’ve made it well known that they’re interested in Carpathian wolves. We had ‘Applied and Accepted’ this time last year. And then in the final moments, Kent narrowly missed out to Shetlands for a breeding pair.

This year, the reports look positive. Well, let’s hear where they’re coming from. They’re coming from Romania. This isn’t the tabloids here in Britain making up stories to give us hope. No, the Romanian press is reporting that they’ve seen the wolves flourish in recent years in the East of the country. Transylvania, Moldavia and Muntenia. Locals in Muntenia in particular are seeing too many wolves for the first time in living history. According to the reports, this is harming the ecosystem and harming their programme of reintroducing Elk. So they’re eager to moving on a larger cohort of wolves than before. Instead of moving on 10 breeding pairs this year as they typically would do. This season they will look to relocated 25 pairs.

And this brings Kent back into the picture.

Now with such a major move imminent, surely Kent must be high on the list, having missed out so closely last year.

Well …. not quite.

In the wake of the Carpathians falling through last year, Kent were compensated with two high-profile signings. The Dalmatian Pelican and two pairs of Lanner falcons. The Lanner falcons had bird-watchers extremely excited. The rare bird of prey is one of the only pairs in the UK that have successfully bred.

So Kent’s budget and their position on the national priority list is significantly lower than it was last year.

A further wrinkle is the opposition to last years planned wolf reintroduction. The opposition we all know has been there in the farming community, and the Sustainable Ag Allotments.

But it picked up in Greater London and into the Kent Downs following the viral deepfake of a young child being mauled by a wolf, supposedly in Romania. Despite being debunked and aggressively withdrawn by the streaming platforms, the meme had legs and morphed into different formats too quickly to catch. The word was out and the protests and threats to hunt the wolves were a deciding factor in dropping Kent as a Reintroduction Partner.

That’s still hanging over us, so I don’t want us to get too excited this year.

The good news? Transfer expert and journalist Gabi Rose-Davis - we had her on the show yesterday - has said that it’s looking good for Kent this time round.

We will face competition, Bakhmut, Copenhagen, Belfast hinterland, Cote d’Armor - all in for the wolves this year. But Kent are supposedly favourites to rank in the places. They’ve approached the Brasov Biodiversity council, and offered a number of incentives including rights to the first mating pair from the Lanner Falcons and a sizeable cohort of the ever-growing elk population.

Again, it’s likely to be a few interesting days and nights as we wait to see how the window unfolds.

There is of course always the risk of last minute bids coming in. We saw that last year with the spending and reallocation driven by the Gates Foundation. They were criticised by Fair Play rules. However, the investments they made have been working well in Strathclyde and Normandy.

Exciting times. Stay tuned for updates and we’ll be back with news from mid-Ulster after this message from our sponsors.

DESIGN FICTION: Plant Directory

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: PLANT DIRECTORY

Boulder, 2078

The internet-of-plants was a silly idea.

Each generation since the Industrial Revolution has sought to understand the world through the dominant technology of the day. We are metaphor-making animals after all.

We are animals who use our environment to reason. So to think of the vast networks of root systems under-pinning the old-growth forests as an internet of sorts was predictable enough. Still though, to shoehorn the majesty of the biosphere into such a cheap metaphor was a bit much. Obscene really.

Obscenity is an art in itself. And what is art but the ability to make humans think. To make humans reflect. To make humans consider more than the canvas itself. And so the internet-of-plants, an obvious metaphor got our human minds thinking. And sparked the greatest change to the biosphere since the Mesozoic. The single biggest intervention of the Anthropocene.

It started with Suzanne Simard’s research into forest pheromones and entangled root systems that allow interspecies communication between trees. This was sacred stuff. But it got the engineers minds racing. What are the trees saying?

Can we listen? Can we eavesdrop?

We could, and we did.

The trees were warning each other of disease and environmental changes. We learned to listen to these rhizome whispers. For a while. And used the chatter to warn us of changes in the weather. And occasionally to give advanced warning of pollution and toxin-spread.

Can we talk back?

Well, that proved a little more difficult. But the beautiful relentlessness of technological progress meant: yes, we could talk to trees. Human-Forest Interfaces began in earnest by dropping wafer-thin wires into the soil to send and receive biochemical signals. It worked and we learned tree logic. And to ask the trees questions, of a kind.

To speak with an Ancient Oak was an old practice. Humans were doing this for tens of thousands of years in the Paleolithic right into the Middle Ages in Celtic lands.

To converse with the oak in its own language, and to provably hear its response was something else altogether. It was a threshold moment for the Gaian spiritualists. It spawned a crowd of druidic cults. The Celtic druids thought it was against Nature. The neo-Druids built a new religion firmly around tree-talk.

Some neo-Druids were more fervent than others and sought to drive Human-Forest Interfaces to their absolute limit. They wished to remove the layer of logic that was used to ask the forests questions and speak with the forest directly.

Fiona Finn, a young neo-Druid from Portland, Oregon was the first to have a neural implant inserted that would allow her this ability. To send and receive biochemical signals with the forest. In effect, simply by thinking, she could communicate directly with the woodland itself.

The Lady of the Forest drew a global and awed following. From neo-Druids and normies alike. Soon, however, she showed the markings of true madness. She wept uncontrollably and wandered out to die amongst the Redwoods.

The neo-Druids tell the story that Fiona, Lady of the Forest, heard the cries of the trees and that drove her to despair. She could not bear the pain of the forest in the face of catastrophic climate change.

In a post-mortem carried out by a team of postdoctoral students and gaia-engineers at Berkeley, it was discovered that something far less romantic was at play. The Lady of the Forests neural interface allowed her to communicate with too many individual trees at once. Her mind was filled with a cacophony of voices that she could not escape. That explained the madness.

But the madness was not for nothing.

Amazingly, that same team at Berkeley found that they could isolate individual trees. They could unpick individual voices from the cacophony. They could tell who was doing the talking and so with enough sensors, we could ID every tree on the planet. Identify each tree by its biochemical fingerprint.

In doing so, we could easily keep a record of the health and communication of each tree in existence. This really was an internet-of-trees.

From there, the story didn’t stop. It accelerated.

The rise of the Tree-talkers and the sad case of the Lady of the Forest was not enough to deter the team of gaia-engineers. They had a vision, a desperate one. To use this web of biochemical submersibles globally to persuade (read: manipulate) the tree-network to increase its carbon capture.

Incredibly, this worked.

But manipulation is rarely a simple thing.

By signalling extreme opportunity to increase their carbon capture, the trees were tricked into going all out on reproduction. In effect, they the trees had been asked to reproduce and grow at ten times their usual rate.

A sudden spike in fertility rates would quadruple the spread and growth of our declining forests. The Engineers were helping Trees to help themselves.

And so they did.

For a little while at least.

DESIGN FICTION: The Memes are Never Justified by the Ends

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: THE MEMES ARE NEVER JUSTIFIED BY THE ENDS.

Lagos, 2045

The memes are never justified by the ends.

In a landmark case, the African Congress of Nations handed down the biggest single penalty against environmental activists and organisations. The ruling, covering jurisdictions in all African countries and extended to the METAP states was groundbreaking in that it will immediately seek reparations for activities that were acknowledged as being ‘uniformly good for the victims’.

The Justice Afrikaaner stream listed Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Greta Action, Gates Foundation, UN Committee for Climate Change, Harvard Center for Sustainability, and Stanford Biodiversity School as “guilty of overt, deliberate and duplicitous manipulation of African populations and administrators through sophisticated sustained campaigns of meme-engineering”. The report went on to detail the forensic investigation that demonstrated with certainty that these organisations engaged in campaigns dating from as early as 2028 in which popular communication channels were weaponised to stoke fear and action in Africa in the face of a worsening climate and biodiversity crisis.

The meme-engineering began on social media (an unsophisticated early version of modern Casting), moved quickly to the spatial computing and then to Casting, Dreamspace and MoodPlace. The tactics, laid out in detail in the year-long proceedings in Lagos, demonstrated how the meme-engineering began as AI-generated videos. These videos adapted to trending memes and interlaced them with urgent calls-to-action for African citizens. Meme-models were then retrained, modified and reposted in minutes to learn what would maximise engagement with users.

The Tribunal heard that while the practice was morally wrong, it was still a legal grey area in 2028. However, even these early campaigns clearly contravened the Meme-Manipulation Act of 2030 and therefore punishments handed down could date only from 2030 onwards. This exempted any participants or rights-holders in the BioClasp campaign in 2029 and has cleared any involvement by FIFA President Zinedine Zidane and football icon and billionaire Christiano Ronaldo.

There were audible gasps and outrage when verified, bio-verified footage of conversations between the late Bill Gates, Greta Thurnberg and Sadie Eke showed the group plotting to “create widespread urgency and dedication to the defense of nature”. In one clip, Gates is seen saying “at the end of the day, these people and their children and their children’s children will thank us for this. If we don’t do it, there will be nothing in Africa but dead sand”. The use of ‘Dead Sand’ is still considered highly emotive language in parts of West and North Nigeria. Lawyers for the Gates Foundation claim that the remarks were not intended to refer to the chemical disaster of the same name, although the phrasing was both unfortunate and unwise.

That Gates and company were correct in their prophesy proved irrelevant.

Where the campaigns ran, environmental action was overwhelmingly effective in protection, restoration and re-wilding. In areas where the campaigns did not run - such as in the Distributed Republics of the Dodoth and Turkana which had banned all Spatial Computing platforms in 2027 and in Zambia which had recently erupted in civil war - climate destruction accelerated. Both areas were environmentally devastated prompting ACN to step in with force in 2038.

The Tribunal heard that the defendants were clearly correct in their judgement that meme-engineering would lead to improved environmental, societal and indeed economic outcomes for citizens and businesses in Africa.

The effectiveness at which they ran their campaigns was praised as being technically and sociologically cutting-edge and of artistic sophistication. There was speculation and praise by v-poet Femi Ng that the Campaigns very likely birthed the BioCraft v-poetry movement, and by experiential artist Gabi Nketia that the Campaigns themselves were the seed that blossomed into African Environmental Supremacy. Africa today is the global leader in Biodiversity Care and Gaia Enrichment precisely because of these Campaigns, the artist claimed. “One led to the other, this is obvious.”

The African Supreme Court of Moral Judgement is known to oscillate between abstract philosophising and raw practical realpolitik. As part of the Tribunal, it was convened for a two-week period where Philosophers, Neo-Sages and Theo-saints were invited to debate the philosophical merits of the case.

On the one hand, meme-engineering was outlawed and morally unjustifiable. On the other, the benefits to all involved, including future generations were undeniable.

The moral good realised by the Campaigns was estimated at 59 trillion QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) by the panel of Simulation Consequentialists and CONAI their AI simulation engine. For context, this is the equivalent of avoiding 1,239 World War IIs.

Nevertheless, the African Supreme Court of Moral Judgement argued forcefully that the means are not justified by the ends. In short, consequentialist estimates of ‘moral good realised’ were only estimates. These ‘goods’ were not real and so the Campaigners were gambling with the minds, moods and free-will of the African populace.

The Court concluded that moral rules must be upheld, and to set precedent here of manipulation for good could and would be abused in future.

The arrest warrants for Greta Thurnberg, Sadie Eke and 7,876 other employees, beneficiaries and intermediaries was issued subject to Appeal. Should any of these individuals set foot in ACN or METAP countries they will be arrested. Extradition laws will be enforced in China and OCEANIA+.

Negotiations are on-going with EU and ASEAN countries who are expected to grant asylum to the Campaigners. Perhaps unsurprising, given that 329 of those convicted now hold public positions in the EU Commission, EU Agencies or EU ActionGroups.

DESIGN FICTION: Saints of the Regeneration

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Vatican, 2044

Pope Theresa has introduced a new pathway to Catholic sainthood. In doing so, she recognises those who dedicate their lives for the protection and preservation of the Biodiversity of Life.

The new category, introduced in an official letter from the pope on Tuesday, is “one of the most significant changes in centuries to the Roman Catholic Church’s saint-making procedures,” the South China Morning Post reports.

Before the change, there were four categories that provided a path to sainthood: being killed for the faith (martyrdom), living a life heroically of Christian virtues, having a strong reputation for religious devotion and sacrificing ones life for others.

The process of becoming a saint begins after an individual’s death. According to the Vatican’s official stream, the new category has four main criteria:

The individual must freely and voluntarily dedicate their life to Biodiversity.
The person must show Christian virtues, before and after dedicating their life to the cause of Biodiversity.
They must have a “reputation for holiness” at least after their death.
They must have performed a feat or outcome in service of Biodiversity that was thought impossible or extremely improbable at the outset of their work.

Archbishop Marie Cannavaro, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes, said that this is intended “to promote heroic Christian testimony in the face of the destruction of the Library of Life. It is recognition of the Church for the mystery of life in all its wonder and glorious detail.”

The pope’s letter announcing the new category is called “Scio omnia volatilia caeli,” which is taken from this passage in Psalms:

“May the glory of the Lord abide for ever, and may the Lord rejoice in his works …

For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine.“

The first saint to be canonized through this new pathway is Saint Diogo Ribeiro of the Amazon.

St. Diogo was raised in the southeastern basin of the Amazon amongst the Amahuaca people that managed the forests and rivers of their homeland. He has been referred to as a “child of nature” who went often as a boy into the rainforest to make crosses out of sticks and to speak with God. At age 15, Diogo converted to Catholicism.

Diogo is the first indigenous Amazonian to be recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church and had been informally considered the patron saint of biodiversity.

Over the course of several decades, Diogo has planted and tended native trees and plant-life in the river basin of his birth which had been left entirely deforested and near-lifeless due to logging and ranching around the turn of the century. In his work, he faced extreme hardship, imprisonment and suffered violence at the hands of local government. His mission to “return the Amazon to God’s vision” faced severe setbacks, including the intentional burning of the rewilded rainforest in 2026, the murder of his son in 2028 and the loss of sight in both of eyes in the same incident in which his son was killed. Despite these and many more challenges to the work of restoring the Amazon, Diogo continued his work until his death in 2037.

The Restoration project that he began alone is continued to this day by his daughters and grandchildren and is responsible for the preservation of over 26 species of bird, 187 species of insect and 912 species of plant that have not been recorded elsewhere on this planet.

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DESIGN FICTION: Ju’wasi School

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: JU’WASI SCHOOL

The following is the transcription of a personalised persuad archived from the metastream of a wealthy, bohemian mother based in Berkeley, California in October 2032.

The persuad promoted one of several schools offering year-long immersion with hunter-gatherer tribes as a means of assimilating indigenous Palaeolithic knowledge. Technical Ecological Knowledge and ways-of-being in the global population was increasingly viewed as invaluable in the education of a humane elite. The intention was to send children, sometimes with a parent, to live amongst a tribe so that they may maximise rate and depth of experiential learning.

The immersion programmes were the precursor to the Rewild Sapiens movement that later would see permanent residence of neo-hunter-gatherer families in American national parks.

The persuad’s metadata notes the following stamp from the American Guardian of Generative Advertising. This was the third variation that the mother had viewed in the campaign. The emotive, and romantic language used was within the limits of ‘acceptable performance promise’. The wording and imagery was generated from a model that was 65% based on previously consumed content and so deemed within ‘acceptable limits of personalised persuad generation’.

– – –

[Cuts to first-person chase of an Eland across broken scrub]

You sit on the shoulders of millions of years of evolution.

Our modern lives are alien, cramped, caged. As humans we were meant for the wilds. We were meant to walk, to hunt. We grew to search forest and savannah for sustenance. We were meant to talk by firelight. We were meant to know our environment intimately.

Most of us know this to some extent.

We feel it when we sit for endless hours on front of our terminals, walk half-blinded by our VisionPros and Augcasts, slave away at repetitive and pointless busywork in the pursuit of abstract CØIN. Our ancestors did not know these irritants. They lived in worlds dripping with meaning - hostile and abundant in equal measure. Unforgiving worlds that challenged them to survive. And survive they did. Their lived experience was fundamentally different than ours. Fundamentally richer.

[Cuts to fire-talk, night roars of lion pride]

This is a world we have forgotten. This is a world we are slowly beginning to remember. As we quietly piece together the dream, recall what it was like to live in Nature, as Nature.

In ten years of psychological research we have discovered that individuals who immerse themselves with hunter-gatherer peoples go on to lead more satisfying, richer lives. Their experience, skills and connection to their deep past stays with them.

Most strikingly still, the younger the participant in our hunter-gatherer immersions the more positive are the lasting effects.

[Cuts to day-scene. Tool-building, group-talk]

Children’s’ worldviews and sense-making is heightened and most sensitive between the ages of 6 and 8. By placing children in hunter gatherer communities, they accelerate their acquisition of Technical Ecological Knowledge. Incredibly, they begin to learn and adapt new ways of survival, art-making and meaning-making in those worlds.

Hunter-gatherer societies are innately conservative. Innovation is a dangerous thing when survival is on the line. They rely on methods and tools that have survived the test of time; time in this case being tens of thousands of years.

Our modern children living in indigenous tribes, combine the best of traditional ways of being and modern day creativity, curiosity and idea-forging.

Alumni of TEK Path state that they come away with heightened understanding of the natural and modern worlds, a sense of change-making possibility, and agency. They score substantially higher for resourcefulness, resilience, grit and flow-finding than their peers.

These alumni are meaning-seeking, happy individuals who, without exception, have had major positive impact on their subsequent Pathways in adulthood.

Give your child the gift of deep human knowledge. Equip them with the survival skills and ways-of-being that held our ancestors together for hundreds of thousands of years.

[Interactive text overlaid on stream]

Overview

Your child will live for 12 months amongst a hunter-gatherer group living The Old Way, entirely off the land and in connection with nature.

As a student of TEK Path your child will be assigned a family. They will be cared for and treated as a member of the tribe. Your child will grow and be nurtured by their new families, and taught the Old Way in theory and in practice. Detailed immersive diaries of day-to-day life can be found on our metaspace and in the Immersive Documentary: Teaching New Ones Old Tricks.

Learn, practice, and rely on primitive and traditional living skills.
Travel as a hunter gatherer band, living off the land.
Learn competence and confidence in their ability to live in the wilderness with nothing more than simple tools they have made themselves.

[Auto-flow to new interactive text overlaid on stream]

Philosophy

Every man, woman and child should know deeply the feeling of complete dependence on the bounties of nature. Every man, woman and child should know hunger and hardship and how to survive them. Every man, woman and child should know the meaning of total self-dependence. They should have the confidence that self-dependence gifts them, and feel that throughout their being.

Every man, woman and child should have the opportunity to understand their ancestors at an experiential level, to connect with them via the acts that define our species.

Few of us ever depend upon our own skills and resources for our needs. We depend, instead, upon the manufactured items of our civilisation and live in fear of losing them. Most of us are less creative than we could be. Most of us are less resilient than we could be. Most of us are less connected to the living world than we could be.

A person who has lived off the land without the help of a single pre-manufactured item has gained a security-of-being unmatched by contemporary living.

Pre-requisites

TEK Path strongly suggests that students bring a high level of comfort in the wilderness and degree of competency with primitive survival skills. These skills can be obtained on the longer Field courses at TEK Path, or elsewhere.
TEK Path requires that all Hunter-Gatherer course applicants undergo a complete physical examination and receive their physician’s approval in writing prior to final acceptance on the course.
Students must be 5 years of age or older.

[Auto-flow to new interactive text overlaid on stream. Faces re-generated to preserve privacy]

Testimonials

“My daughter attended TEK Path when she was 7. It was the single most impactful act of her education and has made her into the kind, wise, young leader she is today. I wish I myself had taken the course when I was a child.“

“The freedom I found walking back into our past - and later bringing that freedom back into society is indescribable. I look back at the year I spent with the Ju’wasi as the year that made me who I am, all that I could be.“

“Not a day has gone by that I haven’t applied the skills learned at TEK Path. I am who am because of my time at TEK Path. I returned as an adult for another 18 months and have just enrolled our 6 year old son in his immersion for this coming September.“

DESIGN FICTION: Alone with the Ancients

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: ALONE WITH THE ANCIENTS

Cambridge, 2036

The history boom just got boomier.

Of all the trends of the 2030s, perhaps the least expected is the sudden rise in interest of History. The rise itself surprising, the depth of interest and the activities associated with it are more surprising still.

Of course, people have always had an interest in their past and the twentieth century showed quite clearly that there was a healthy appetite for monetising that interest. In 2020, an airport bestseller on World War II, a trip to Rome or an evening documentary on the Vietnam War were commonplace. But your armchair historian generally didn’t read the sources, they didn’t engage in excavations. When they visited museums they were presented with ‘the greatest hits’, not the esoteric.

University of Cambridge is the latest in a string of institutions and museums to open up the historical back-catalog. The long-tail of original sources; the dry-stuff. And make that back-catalog available not only to the PhDs but to the public. And easily.

In 5 clicks on the university app, I managed to book a 30 minute reading time with Orosius: Historiae adversus paganos, an 11th century Saxon text. All for the princely sum of £25.

Arriving at the library, I simply walked up to the security gates and passed through (presumably facial recognition) and then was directed to a dark, storied reading room with a place marked out for me. The book had been transported in its case (more on this later) and was opened on Book III as I had requested.

When I sat down, the app talked me through the text - first giving context, then reading the page in Latin and finally a translation into English. A tap of a button and a precision robotic arm turned the page and the reading continued.

This is the stuff of dreams for me, a journalist, who regrettably did not study history in university. But it has always been an underlying, dormant passion of mine. To witness and experience this ancient text, on my own, in a quiet, sacred atmosphere was beyond what I could have imagined. It was spiritual. Words do not capture the experience; cannot do justice to this communion with our past.

Back in the Reading Room, when the session was over, the glass case was transported away, as if by magic, on a series of unobtrusive, ancient looking (but I’m reassured, very new) tracks. To be replaced with a series of official government communications from 1917 for the next pre-booked reader.

The Experience is a dramatic departure for the armchair historian. Put simply, it has democratised the study and relationship that the amateur historian has with their past.

Speaking with Dr. Martha Wilkes who leads the service, I later learned that prior to my session, fewer than 19 individuals had ever read Orosius: Historiae adversus paganos in person; each a scholar at the university. I was fascinated with this and wondered why so few? “History and historical artefacts are governed by a Power Law. Everyone tends to be interested in the same few subjects, the same artefacts. Most artefacts, like most books published, are very rarely read. And because of that, these countless, priceless documents and artefacts are (or were) stored for safe keeping.” But that seems to be changing. Martha shared the app data for the three months to date, and the curve is flattened. The long-tail is fatter - more people are interested in the back-catalog.

The technology helps. One reason more people could not view old texts was that it required a librarian to search for, fetch and then guard the artefact while a reader looked on. “We can’t let just anyone turn the pages, because soon enough, the pages would disintegrate, worn as they are by the travails of time.” The elaborate track-system and robotic arms was the game-changer; referred to by staff as Gringotts after the bank in the original Harry Potter Movies from the turn of the century.

Before leaving, I asked Martha who uses the service and why. “Mostly it’s amateur historians. Students too. It’s changed how historians view and do history. We’re already seeing an explosion in publications as a result of more people having access to these artefacts. The floodgates have opened and with it our knowledge of the past is blooming. We’re seeing a lot of the gaps in our knowledge filled in - small details and bits of detective work that were unnoticed or not covered before. That’s something wonderful”.

What about non-historians? “Well, there’s some interest from the general public - mostly from areas that are close to popular interest - specific dinosaur bones, arrows, swords - that kind of thing. One interesting feature is that the archive is now searchable. Previously you would have simply visited a museum and wandered through the exhibition, with things popping out to you as you went. Now you ask the questions. You define what you’re interested in seeing. You want to see the axe that beheaded Anne Boleyn? We can point you to that. How about the clothing of someone living 6000 years ago in the south of England, and contrast that with the clothing of someone from 600BC? We can show you these things, on demand.”

It makes history more immersive, more conversational, more queryable. More reactive to the curiosities of an individual. There’s less wading through what’s not currently interesting to you as a person. Of course, we had a lot of that with images and the metaverse ten years ago. But the physical aspect makes a real difference. “The physical aspect is what makes this so exciting. It is what makes it really.”

In fact, of the 3,456 sessions that have been booked to date, 412 of them have been for Focused Artefact Mindfulness. A practice of sitting in the presence of an object from our past and meditating on it. That’s not an entirely perfect description. Brian Foxe, a well known mindfulness influencer and onetime historian specialising in ancient Egypt, describes it as “being fully mindful in the presence of talismans from our shared, deep past. Breathing in the air and atmosphere of all those lives that went before us, that tie us to this present moment.” Surprised at the numbers of people practicing this, I wanted to understand why. Brian Foxe described it as a deep-seated human urge to connect with our ancestors, with the tapestry of life and living that went before us. To connect us to that. And you know, it feels good. You should try it.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but I did do a bit of research of my own. The literature is equivocal in showing a significant, resilient rise in measures of well-being, life-satisfaction and spiritual connectedness for those who practice Focused Artefact Mindfulness. Those results appear to persist for at least 3 months after a session. More, if the session is done with an artefact from a topic that is ‘of personal significance’.

Some have replaced their Sunday religious service with trips to the Reading Room; group rooms are also possible.

Food for thought. And one for the next visit.

This is part of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.

DESIGN FICTION: Colour of the Year 2034

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

ANNOUNCING THE PANTONE COLOUR OF THE YEAR 2034

PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW A New Pantone Color Whose Vitalising Spectral Weave of deep greenery and rich earth browns is symbolic of the complex hope of growth.

EARTHGLOW is a dance of deep life-giving greens and rich browns of the clay beneath us. It is a swaying spectrum of the tapestry of life. EARTHGLOW evokes the deepest past of our shared ancestors as they walked the forests and plains of the Paleolithic. EARTHGLOW is the colour-space from which we emerged. It is the first days of nature’s green revival to the final days of autumn’s golden fall. The richness of EARTHGLOW connects us to a time when we walked with nature and asked her to nourish us. It is a deep breath into where we’ve come from.

EARTHGLOW is the colours of our forgotten past. Our lineage as children of nature. It is a meditation on the long and winding paths our ancestors have taken to reach the shores of the present day. It is an acknowledgement and thank you to the world around us and the world since damaged. It is a call of hope to regeneration. It is a rallying cry of rewilding and redefining a human future that places us once more in communion with the breathing earth.

A shade of conscious quiet celebration, EARTHGLOW is also emblematic of vitality and the gentle relentlessness of growth.

PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW is a new departure on how we name and index colour. It is not a single hue but a spectrum of gradual, complex varieties woven together in the dance of growth.

Nor is it stationary, fixed. Instead, PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW is dynamic. Like life on this planet, it is changeable and always changing. Each of the colours in this new Bio series (B) are defined not by a single fixed colour but by the range of possibilities bounded by the growth process of a specific living organism. PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW was chosen to lead the series as its spectrum captures the natural greenery and clay hues that decorate our planet. It demonstrates a rich mix of greens and browns that vary widely and subtly with changes in climate , soil chemistry and season.

ABOUT PANTONE COLOUR OF THE YEAR

The Pantone Color of the Year selection process requires mindful consideration and trendsource understanding. To arrive at the selection each year, Pantone’s colour oracles at the Pantone Color Institute™ comb the world looking for new colour influences and muses. These can include the natural world, the dreamlabs of material ecology, the cyber-ghettos of the metaverse, emerging art, flickering-fashion, all areas of design, as well as new lifestyles, virtuestyles and ideascapes. Influences may also stem from new technologies, materials, textures, and the rich palette of cosmic photography. For 34 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in industries, including metaverse, fashion, material ecology and industrial design, as well as additive product design and generative AI seedspace.

This is part of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.

DESIGN FICTION: Citizen Oak

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: CITIZEN OAK

Milwaukee, 2031

Mason Brint is unrepentant.

His handlebar moustache curls in contempt as he spits out the words in dry Mid-Western. “What I did was a god-given right, and you assclown tree-huggers are insane if you think it isn’t”.

Mason Brint is unbending.

He will not backdown. He will not admit his guilt. And so he sits behind the plexiglass screen in blazing orange overalls. Thick fingers grip black phone. Thick eyebrows overhanging fuming black eyes.

Mason Brint is a murderer.

Convicted. He committed the crime; said so himself. But he doesn’t believe murder is a crime. Not unless the victim is a person. And this victim, this citizen of the United States of America was not a person. His victim was 326 years old, though spritely enough. His victim was Old Addler, a 326 year-old Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa). One of the oldest old growth trees in the Mid-West. A living being with the same rights as you or I. A national treasure. ‘Damn good timber’.

“If I’m a murderer then I come from a long line of murderers. Proud killers too. Brints, or the O’Malleys, or Smiths, all the way back to the Civil War, we’ve been tree killers and handsomely rewarded for it. And we’re suddenly murderers. Give me a f***kin’ break, man. This is some insane Nazi s**t.”

Strong words, made stronger still by the fact that Mason Brint will join Old Addler in the afterlife at 2pm on Friday 9th May this year. He’s sentenced to death by chemical injection. A fate he could have avoided by admitting guilt and voicing remorse for his actions. He could still. But he will not.

Brint’s words have struck a chord with working class America; he’s the latest in long line of eco-martyrs to grace our screens. His dry, no-nonsense language; his Mid-Western drawl, his man’s man appeal have made him a rallying point for the tens of millions of working class conservatives who think the environmental movement has gone too far. No tree is worth a man’s life.

But we’ve seen this all before. We saw it with Harley Rowe-Smith, with Josh Federling, with Frank Mackay. All serving life sentences for tree-felling.

Brint will be the first to face the axe for his crimes against a citizen tree.

Addendum: Two months after this piece, Mason Brint’s execution was acquitted and the US constitution amended to forbid the death penalty in cases of humans against nature.

Addendum II: 7 years after this piece, Greg Volks an extremist anti-environmentalist and anarchist was charged with the destruction of the Solana Nature Reserve having purposefully started a forest fire that destroyed 4000 hectares of old growth forest. He received a sentence of 8 years in federal prison. Two days after his release he was murdered.

This is part of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.

DESIGN FICTION: Karma Off-setting

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

DESIGN FICTION: KARMA OFF-SETTING

Munich, 2031

Deutsche Insurance has re-issued its famous and somewhat controversial insurance product, Pay It Forward, for this coming year. The product which has been described by its opponents as Karma Bribing and Gambling with God, is more in-demand than ever.

Let’s look at what the brochure says:

“Back by incredible demand, our empathetic and compassionate customers want to live lives that respect and protect our environment and its many beautiful ecosystems. Today, there is simply no way for a caring, conscientious citizen to be certain of the consequences of their actions.

Our customers care. They want the reassurance that their lifestyles do not harm the environment, exacerbate climate change and or threaten biodiversity. But no individual can be expected to research the consequences of each and every daily decision

We do this research for you.

Through a simple interview, we evaluate your lifestyle and take effective steps to balance any potential harm you may inadvertently do through purchases and habits so that you can sleep soundly in the knowledge that you are not damaging our beloved Gaia.

Pay it Forward.”

The genesis of the product was an unexpected one, spurred on by the dramatic drop in the birth-rate of Germany’s most affluent areas. Popular opinion was that rich GenZ weren’t having children because they don’t want to spend their time and money on anyone other than themselves. They were the selfish generation; spoiled. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Consumer research conducted by Massenpuls on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Future Generations (BMZG) showed that over 70% of GenZ were not starting families for fear of the impact that those children would have on the planet. The consensus amongst wealthy Germans in their 30s was that any new person would be a net-negative on the world and they would not subject their children to that knowledge.

Neue Erbsünde (direct translation, new original sin), that viral trend from the mid-2020s, was deep-seated. Commentators and demographers had assumed that this was nothing more than a brief fad. A childish ideology created by the hysteria of collapsed ecosystems and weather pattern change. Meme’s and movements can override the natural drive to procreate.

But meme’s can be defeated.

Tellingly, 97% of GenZ surveyed said that if they could guarantee that their children would have a neutral or positive impact on climate and biodiversity, they would consider starting a family. This has been a resounding truth. Pay It Forward has been bought over 260,000 times in the past five years. German wealthy neighbourhoods have witnessed a population increase of almost exactly that.

In other words, every baby born into a middle-income or above German post-code has been subscribed to Pay It Forward.

It has been so successful that the German federal government has begun to subsidise it in a bid to boost births further.

And that is where the trouble really started. The environmental anarchist collective Naturkrieg have branded the insurance firm Eco-Nazis and buyers of the product collaborators. In late March, Naturkrief staged a series of protests in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. They also claimed a series of partially successful DDoS attacks on major federal government websites. More successfully, they launched a massive (now-viral) campaign highlighting some abhorrent behaviour by recipients of Pay it Forward. These videos show boho Germans jet-setting, burning wood stoves, clearing forested land while laughing. The videos, interspersed with horrific montages of climate damage and animal death in less well-off areas of the globe, left a deep impression on popular opinion.

The message was picked up by Opposition Christian Green Party which has made noises that not only would they ban the product, but they would severely prosecute individuals who used the product and subsequently engaged in environment-damaging actions.

Clearly, this cohort of abusers is a minority. And the discourse is further muddied by the fact that at least some of these videos are proven deepfakes. Despite this, Pay it Forward was paused on July 15th, citing an ‘adverse and charged public discourse’.

Public opinion seems to have shifted dramatically in the past 6 months, following the murder of 18 young parents and 24 children in an attack on a pre-school in Prenzlauerberg, Berlin. The terrorist attack claimed by Black Summer was the latest and most bloody of a series of attacks on parents and children. The Deutsche Insurance website has a main banner stating “We stand in solidarity with parents who want to bring children into this world so they might do good. We cannot allow child-killers to dictate our shared future.”

Interspersed with issues as contentious as the environment and biodiversity, inequality of those who can afford to off-set their lifestyle and the very contemporary resurgence in morality and religious, the focus on original sin and by extension its twin, eternal damnation, is it really a wonder that Pay It Forward has proven such an issue of Life and Death?

This is the first of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.

Favourite Problems

Thu, 25 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In 907 there was so much information in the world that you could never hope to imbibe it all. It was too much. Simply undigestible.

Thankfully, all that information was not available to eat. It resided in other people’s minds. Minds who were mostly far away. It resided in books. Books which were rare and far away. An information glutton did not risk reading themselves into the oblivion of the shallows.

A short 600 years later, the info-glutton could move to a city, or chance upon a now slightly less rare book and gorge to their hearts content. Still too much to eat in the world, but still mostly manageable for what’s close at hand.

Cue the 19th century and you’re fucked. Cheap books and many minds and you surrounded by information. Information tempting you to scatter your mental faculties across too many mental hooks.

Cue the 20th century, and you’re fully fucked. Cheap books out the wazoo. Radio, television and masses of minds moving the mills of industrial science. Enter Feynman, and his method to restrict his diet to only those questions he deemed his ‘favourite problems’. Open-ended curiosities that he found himself returning to again and again. A beautiful lens through which to view the world of information; one which focuses it elegantly on the questions most important and intriguing to you. One which right-sizes the info-glutton’s mouth to their belly.

Cue the 21st century and you’re so fucked it isn’t worth dwelling upon. Feynman’s method is a sinking life-raft; but it is a life-raft and you’re in no position to discard flotsam on this freezing Atlantic evening.

I’ve practice this method in fits and starts since 2020. Here’s a look at my own 12 favourite problems, as of June 2022. This is mostly the residue of problems I was most intrigued with in 2020 and 2021 and the years leading up to Coivd.

When I joined TikTok it took an offshoot in other short-term directions.

They’ve evolved somewhat since I left TikTok. I’ll update that shortly, unpick it a little, and try to understand what the evolution has been. And what caused that evolution. And perhaps chance a guess at where it might be leading.

Feathermap

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Feathermap is a tiny experiment in how I might use visual design to make idea exploration more enticing.

I want to explore whether there is a site structure that would better fold into my own thinking, research and curiosity-seeking.

Is there a format of this website that would encourage flow for me and be more curiosity-generating to readers?

In Feathermap, I use an SVG exported from Figma as an interactive map as inspired by Tom Critchlow.

Feathermap

Material Ecology

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Design in the 2020s is modular and static. It is not bad. Neither does it mimic the best features of Nature’s invention.

In physical design and architecture form matters most. The material from which form flows is less important, less noteworthy, less remarkable. So too with the environment from which the design emerges and into which it is placed.

Much of this is engrained and invisible to how designers design and how users perceive those designs.

This state of affairs has been building since the Renaissance; modernism and mass production made it more so. Summarised:

The form of an object is the first thing we perceive. It is how we characterise things.
Objects are independent of their environment. They don’t react to it, they don’t change.
Objects are made from parts that are fixed in advance. There is no interplay between the systems level and the material level. Concrete is concrete no matter the temperature. Cotton, once woven, is cotton - whether you sweat into it, or use it as a warm blanket.

Material ecology is a movement that upends these principles. It directly subverts these ‘givens’.

Materials as a fundamental aspect of design.
Materials that are not static but interact with their environments.
Materials that can organise themselves. Materials that are different under different conditions.

In other words, if a material can move, shift and change, the form is less important. As the form is not fixed. Designs move, shift and evolve based upon what’s going on around it. Material doesn’t have an upfront schema. Instead it processes itself into a form based on the events and conditions it finds itself in.

The best designs exist in nature. In this ancient canvas of living epoch-old experiments, we have much to learn and much to adapt.

And plenty to borrow and build upon.

Sources & Inspiration

Material Ecology, Neri Oxman.

Age of Augmented Invention

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I expect we’ll shortly see the emergence of Quantitative Discovery studies.

The Philosopher’s Stone of the inventive world is a machine that can independently invent useful technologies for us.

I suspect that we are still quite a ways from this, despite the early promise of GPT-X, AlphaFold and friends. A credible concrete step towards this philosopher’s stone would to begin not with new inventions from AI, but rather with attempts to nudge AIs into independently re-discovering existing knowledge.

This would catapult us toward new, exceedingly actionable knowledge on how invention and innovation really happens. And how we may best approach it.

The parallel here is how simulation has helped us to better understand animal behaviour, disease, and the brain.

I expect it is still too early for humans to take the backseat to inventive AIs.

Instead, we are entering an Age of Augmented Invention.

Freeman Dyson on AGI

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I do not believe that machines that think exist, or that they are likely to exist in the foreseeable future.

If I am wrong, as I often am, any thoughts I might have about the question are irrelevant.

If I am right, then the whole question is irrelevant.

Beautifully said. In hindsight, my thoughts exactly.

Sources

https://www.edge.org/responses/q2015

David Deutsch On Discovery

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

“Discovering chemistry, like discovering anything, would then depend on whether your problems led you there.”

Problem selection is not only important for its expected outcomes; but for the serendipity that hides behind it.

Behind some problems lie great discoveries.

Discoveries that will go unnoticed until those problems are themselves sufficiently explored.

In Praise of Futurism

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The best way to predict the future is to build it.

But which future to build?

With manifold futures we have manifold options. Many of these lead down dark paths which are harmful to the Biosphere. Many unintentionally harmful; dark paths are rarely signposted.

Biosphere-affirming technology is possible but not inevitable.

By imagining ‘what could be’ the best possible futures, makes those futures much more likely to be made real.

If only because we may try.

Decarbonisation in one Number

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We must end our dependence on carbon by 2050. This, to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-Industrial levels.

In 2020 fossil fuels supplied 83% of the world’s primary energy.

To get to zero from 83% in thirty years requires cutting 2.75% of global fossil carbon a year, every year.

We’ve not done that in a single year, let alone cumulatively. Since 2000, we’ve had an annual reduction of 0.2% from 87% fossil fuel contribution.

This means transitioning to Green sources at 14X faster than we managed in the past 20 years.

Not an optimistic outlook. Not without gargantuan global cooperation unseen in our 6,000 years of civilisation.

But if it’s to be done - and surely it must - there lies untold opportunities here for invention, innovation and deployment.

Sources & Inspiration

Invention & Innovation - Vaclav Smil
Our World in Data

Where do we put the camera in the Permaweird?

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Narrative demands a point-of-view.

What’s so disorienting in this Permaweird is not simply the lack of coherent narrative. But the abundance of viewpoints.

No narrative can accommodate all points-of-view.

No regression can fit all data points.

No camera can be everywhere at once.

We try to drink the ocean and become sea-sick.

Van Gogh On Fear in Art

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Vincent van Gogh, writing about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas.

The canvas is far more afraid of the painter.

The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.

Sources & Inspiration

Letter To Theo Van Gogh, Letter #464

Piraha Spirit Story

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A story from the Piraha people of the Amazon, an excerpt from Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes.

A mythlike account of an encounter with a jaguar.

Mostly understood as an encounter with a spirit jaguar.

Xipoógi heard a brother call.

He spoke, Xitahá’s parent. What did the parent yell?

Xipoógi spoke. Go see

He spoke, Xipoógi. It is a jaguar.

He spoke, Xipoógi. Throw your bow.

The jaguar already grabbed Xitihoixoí.

She spoke. Boai, you go too.

You go see.

The jaguar roared.

She spoke. the jaguar went far.

It has already grabbed him.

Perhaps it ate the partner dog. He took the dog with him.

The woman spoke. Let’s go; the jaguar may get away.

He may have seen the dog partner. The dog partner left. The dog went into the jungle.

He spoke. Bring your machete. Sharpen the arrows.

The woman was afraid.

He had become tired.

It hit him in the face then.

It bit him.

It scratched his arm.

It scratched his shoulder.

He said, the arrows are all gone.

Lullabies and Content Recommendation

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t lose sleep over content recommendation.

But somebody should.

We’re a solid 20 years into content recommendation going mainstream in digital products. Yet despite better under-the-hood performance, how we interact with recommendations is stuck.

If you ask a random person on the street what are the implications of liking a post on Tik Tok, or repeatedly listening to a song on Spotify they probably don’t get that it impacts what content they will see in future.

Younger users get it; tech savvy users get it. But the average global citizen doesn’t yet. Users certainly don’t understand the dimensions along which those content recommendations work.

And yet, interview users and most of them would like more control over their recommendations.

Tech savvy users have workarounds. They also have hesitations.

They have algorithm hesitancy - a reluctance to interact with digital products because the don’t want to mess with how algorithm curates for them.

So we have couples who won’t share Netlix profiles, or users who are effectively punished for using their accounts in non-typical ways.

A good example is Spotify Discover weekly. Here’s a company that shot to popularity on the back of really great music recommendations.

And yet, I had to abandon my Discover Weekly in 2020 when my son was born and it became dominated by white noise and baby lullabies.

Socrates’ Daemon

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Socrates heard voices. And listened to them.

At his trial Socrates spoke about this internal spirit, his daemon. This voice spoke to him at important junctures. Telling him what to avoid.

“a voice of God is made manifest to me indicating my duty”

Socrates’ daemon warned against fleeing or fighting his accusers. That this trial had purpose. His fate was to marry the Truth until death indeed did them part.

“I shall prefer death to begging meanly for longer life and thus gaining a life far less worthy in exchange for death.”

And Socrates believed we each have a daemon and should recognise them.

“I assert, that all men use, and this is their belief.

The only difference between them and me is that whereas they call the sources of their forewarning … ‘chance meetings’, ’prophets,’ I call mine a ‘divine’ thing;1 and I think that in using such a term I am speaking with more truth and deeper religious feeling”.

My PhD problem in 10 lines

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes things go wrong with the brain. Sometimes large sections of the brain fire together. These are seizures: epilepsy in adults, neonatal seizures in newborns.

When the brain does unusual things, we want to know.

In the immediate term, this allows us to medicate to stop brain damage. In the longer term, this allows us to plan interventions and adapt care for the patient.

To know that seizures are happening, we can use EEG. This measures voltages on the scalp; the sum total of the electrical activity of the brain below each electrode is picked up.

EEG is imperfect and crude. Mostly, it only picks up big changes in brain behaviour; and these need to be trawled through by highly trained neurophysiologists.

Because they’re highly trained, they’re expensive. We usually can’t get neurophysiologist to monitor patients 24/7.

Instead we train computers to do their job.

This is machine learning. We feed the computer examples of seizures and non-seizures, and the computer learns the difference.

Then we run it on live brain signals. When it sees signals that look like seizures it alerts the nurses.

But computers get things wrong. Especially, they get things wrong when other signals interfere with brain signals. Every time a patient moves, blinks, or tenses their jaw the machine gets confused.

The focus of my PhD then was to figure out ways to detect and remove these interferences, so we can monitor seizures more accurately.

Digital Litter

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We leave little footprints.

Each tiny digital creation tucked away forgotten in server farms.

The robots crawl in to check on you occasionally. Add you to their list.

The pile of digital litter grows. The algorithms picking through the pile, in search of relevancy. And occasional serendipity.

We leave broken clay pots in the digital earth. For future archaeologists to piece together. With their own algorithms.

Even the unread article makes the pile bigger.

Making each search that little bit harder.

Why I Uninstalled TikTok

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I woke up tired and that tiredness followed me to my desk.

Nevertheless, I was working. Words were flowing. Imperfectly, but steadily. A series of tiny frictions, but each tension overcome with a pause and a prompt to ‘just keep writing’.

Then, a whisper in my ear: turn your eye to TikTok. Just for a moment. There might be inspiration there.

Rabbit holes rising up to meet me. Man Utd, early Irish archaeology, baby names.

Back to writing then, but stuttering.

Another TikTok interlude. Once you pop, you just can’t stop.

It’s got to go.

I need my dopamine hit hard, and hard to get.

Against the Commodification of Community

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve come to accept that we will be commoditised. That our own actions are other peoples’ incomes.

This was a clever corporate thing until recently. Now we’re monetising each other.

And that’s a bad thing.

Digital creator culture is flourishing. And with it, a gold rush. The playbooks point to creating an email list and creating communities. Then milking both.

This is a bad thing.

We are at a point where internet culture needs space to breathe new life into its corners. Where people can come together in ways that they no longer are doing in person. These communities, these as-yet-to-be-invented communities are valuable and important. The act of commoditising them is crude and counter-productive.

Interrogating a little my own thoughts here. Is it how blatant it is? Is it that there is no clear value-add; instead it’s just an entry fee to filter? Is it that my perception of value delivered is lower than the asking price? Perhaps it’s the transactional nature? In ways it’s all of these things. And more.

It strikes me as a real step backwards in internet culture.

It feels like individuals mimicking the worst aspects of social media platforms. It feels like a step backward in time to the era of men’s clubs and its manufactured scarcity.

It sounds like a low-pitched whimper of wanted exclusivity.

But even the X club has substantial running costs, and those costs are shared by the members. They typically have expensive properties in wealthy environs. They have staff and subsidised costs for food and drink.

Online communities don’t have these. So why are they so expensive.

Why not instead, organise around the principle of helping each other. Sure, there may be a fee. But let that fee go towards strengthening the community, and that alone. Find interesting ways to spend it on the group. Invite speakers, get access to tools, put it toward shared assets.

Or more inspiring still, re-invent the old Irish meitheal culture. A community of helping each other out. Today we will build your thing - tomorrow mine - the day after somebody else’s. Some days we’ll just pitch in to strangers who need a hand. Or to a cause that craves it.

Rather than this scanty schematic.

Get people together. Then charge them for the privilege.

Our would-be creator communities are too valuable to commoditise.

David Deutsch on Knowledge

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

David Deutsch has a core perspective that I find extremely inspiring.

In his book The Beginning Of Infinity, he points out that there are only two real obstacles to any problem: physics and knowledge. Your goal needs to be possible according to the laws of physics. If it isn’t, then no amount of knowledge will make it possible. You cannot get to Mars in your Toyota Yaris, no matter how much you know about space travel.

If it’s physically possible, then the fundamental obstacle is always knowledge.

Flooding the Zone of the Ancients

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Developers and fantasy authors share a penchant for the ancients. In naming things, mostly.

An unintended consequence of this - obscuring the original sources.

An innocent flooding the zone with @mentions and blogposts, making the original material near-unfindable.

Burrying historical whispers beneath the algorithm.

The original Daemons were spirits of the Greek world; one of whom was the spirit inside. Famously, Socrates listened intently to the guidance of his Daemon. Who inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid.

Surely a thread worth exploring. So thought the 18th century Romantics, as they too flooded the zone in their own way. Again famously, Goethe’s daemon was a spirit that dwelled within him, compelling him to fulfil his destiny.

Without the algorithm as guide, the term evolved in meaning but not in discoverability.

Then into the 20th century and the creation of software daemons running in the background and later Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials with fantasy spirit-friends guiding the characters.

Onwards to 2018, George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood and Daemon Targaryen rising to prominence in the TV adaptation, House of the Dragon. This Targaryen, the only daemon on TikTok, the principal one on Google.

Burying original references deep in the literature.

Socrates’ spirit snuffed out.

500 Whys: Writing your Purpose Statement

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Purpose matters.

A purpose can give coherent meaning to a career. It can help with the difficult decisions required to craft a career worth creating.

Articulating what we believe in, what our objective is, makes us more aware of what we should be doing. It makes us accountable to ourselves. It stops us from following job offers that are tempting in the short run but leave us far from happy and far from where we want to be. Purpose helps us navigate, motivate and filter out the noise.

It opens our eyes to opportunities we’ve been neglecting.

Purpose reminds us of the possible.

The hardest part in crafting a purpose statement is beginning.

Conjuring a definitive single sentence that encapsulates what it is that you are working for is daunting. It seems furiously final, and far-fetched.

My belief, firmly held, is that to craft a purpose statement, one should immerse yourself in examples. Play with them. Try them on for size. Tweak and remaster and experiment.

The blanker the page, the more likely we are to procrastinate. The more intimidated we become.

Crafting a purpose statement from the cuttings of other statements is more effective than beginning with a blank page.

And yet, finding examples of purpose statements is much harder than it should be.

There are occasional blog posts that list 10 or 20, a handful of books detailing corporate mission and vision statements of Forbes Top 50.

Esteemed authors and coaches like Simon Sinek, Bill Burnett and Daniel Pink each have excellent books on the methods of understanding and unearthing one’s purpose.

But there’s nothing that emphasising a broad, far-ranging, diverse set of example purpose statements.

And so 500 Whys: Writing your Purpose Statement is a short book that focuses on exactly that.

It is a book of 500 single sentences. 500 purpose statements.

Examples that will help you immediately find a statement that’s 80% right. A statement that resonates mostly but not perfectly. That will give you something to remaster. Something with which to experiment.

This book is about examples and examples alone. 500 of them. It assumes that you already recognise the benefit of defining a purpose for yourself; the clarifying value of viewing life and career decisions through a defined purpose.

These “Whys” been loosely categorised as Technology, Education & Empowering Others, Peace & Safety, Human Responsibility, Knowledge & Reason, Human Flourishing, Community Building, Justice, Culture & Creation, Economic Growth & Progress, Little Pleasures, and System Changes & Moonshots.

Some examples, drawn from the book:

Use technology to further our understanding of the universe.

Ensure that the Legislature keeps pace with technological advances.

Democratise access to fashion.

Help people to grow their focus and reclaim their attention in the Age of Distraction.

Build products that delight users.

Help individuals to understand themselves better via their preferences.

Build homes that people want to grow old in.

I help people work on the right problem.

I solidify promising prototypes.

I test ideas in the wild.

I create tools that support people making difficult moral judgements.

I work to ensure that human rights are global.

I give young scientists the tools to do novel research.

I help young people identify questions worth asking.

I shine a mirror on society’s bad habits.

Help people craft their life narrative.

Use language in ways that make people think.

Use language in ways that help to open minds.

I make meals that put smiles on peoples faces.

Build tools that make business fun.

I invite you to test these beliefs. And test them quickly.

This book is designed for exactly this.

And begin experimenting with that purpose, immediately.

Speculative Futures and Barriers to Entry

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

An idea is worth nothing. An idea can change the world.

Speculative futures is a discipline of idea exploration. Speculative future scenarios allow us to explore the unknown unknowns. The act of design here is not to try to fix a problem.

Instead to model a possible future state of the problem and the human behaviours that result from that system change.

But even idea exploration is not an exercise in thought alone. It requires tangible design skills to conceptualise those ideas in the digital or physical world.

The cost (material, time, skilll aquisition) of creating artifacts depicted in images and video is a barrier to the design of speculative futures in quantity and speed.

While speculative design is ‘conceptual’ design know-how is still required. And so, is a barrier to entry.

Generative AI tools like Midjourney rapidly decreases the time and cost taken to create these speculative design pieces.

By implication, the barrier to entry for conceptual and speculative futures has just dropped. We are moving closer to the pure form of concept or idea. With the ‘design and doing’ automated.

When things become easier to do, more of it gets done.

What would a world of more speculative design look like?

Is it a world where fears or hopes become amplified. Making futures vision states and nightmare scenarios more real. And therefore more likely to be acted upon?

Or perhaps over time we will see a neutralising effect. The possible, the weird, becomes commonplace and less evocative. Pushing us towards ‘real’ and immersive multi-sensory experiences to evoke a response.

Planting speculative futures firmly in the physical.

500 Whys: Writing your Purpose Statement

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT