The Institute for Ethics and Emerging technologies linked through to an interesting bit of research that looked at “Preferences for Psychological Enhancements”, and reluctance by test subjects to allow enhancements. Specifically, they point out that “Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling … the fundamental self increased people’s interest in a fundamental enhancement, and eliminated the preference for non-fundamental over fundamental enhancements.”

With that in mind, I came across an article in Wired discussing Darpa’s latest forays into human enhancement, and I couldn’t but help notice the wording of Tony Tether, head of Darpa, the US’s Advanced Research Projects Agency: “[The Defense Sciences Office] isn�??t trying to create posthuman troops, Tether says. �??You know the old Army saying, �??Be all that you can be�??? Well, that�??s really what we�??re doing.�?� In training, soldiers �??become extraordinary in strength and endurance. But it�??s not any better than their body can be. And what we try to do is come up with techniques that allow them to maintain that level.�?�

The Wired article also showed that, in order to avoid scrutiny and accusations “of funding a Frankenstein army”, the names of various programs “were changed to dull their mad-scientist edge”. For example, “Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance”.

So there really is a lot in a name. Hey, it’s all in the branding.

I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.

But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.

What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.

The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.

What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.

As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.

I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.

I’ve written before about Bruce Sterling’s speech at Space in London. Finally, MAzine has put up a link to download the full speech. Worth listening to!

The Foresight institute’s Nanodot blog has posted a link to a really interesting discussion from the National Press Club’s meeting about nanotechnology (NanoWorld: Toward a Policy for the Human Future, see here for a press release). Andrew Kimbrell, director of the International Centre for Technology Assessment, gave a speech (from about an hour into the conference) where Nanodot’s blog characterised him as someone who “opposes nanotech”. Just finished listening to his talk (in fact, everyone’s speeches), and I cannot help but feel this characterization to be a terrible misrepresentation of what he was arguing. He did not “oppose nanotech” in so much as he seemed to oppose the non-transparent, corporate and military controlled, profit driven, unregulated, and patented way this technology is being developed, instead wanting to link nanotech development with values, keeping patents within the commons, pushing for transparency etc. I cannot help but agree with much of what he said, probably because he echoed a lot of my own concerns. Here’s a summary of what he spoke about (my apologies if some things aren’t transcribed properly).

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Looks like using computer games to help hack social networks is becoming all the rage these days. Wired is reporting that an Iranian game “designed by schoolchildren belonging to the Union of Islamic Student Societies” is to be released next year:

Rugged veteran Iranian special forces hero “Commander Bahman” will soon be tackling one of his toughest missions, rescuing one of his country’s top atomic scientists captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. […] The Fars news agency said that in the game’s narrative Iranian atomic scientist “Doctor Kousha” goes on a pilgrimage to the Shi’ite Muslim holy city of Kerbala in Iraq where he is seized by U.S. troops.

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Great doc just screened on BBC called Is business the real Big Brother?

“As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we’ve been doing.”
- Dr Kirstie Ball, Open University

You can download it here. (I just started reading Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Excellent, expect a review soon, but definitely read this book).

There’s no love lost between the US and Venezuela. The country’s leader, Hugo Chavez, was overthrown by a US-backed military coup which quickly backfired when a populist uprising returned him back into power. Chavez recently kicked out the US-based New Tribes Mission accusing them of being involved in “true imperialist infiltration, the CIA, they take away sensitive, strategic information” and “exploiting the Indians”. The US, for their part, have repeatedly warned against Chavez, with Condolezza Rice accusing him of a “Latin brand of populism that has taken countries down the drain”.

But today comes an interesting story from ZDNet, who says that US gaming company Pandemic Studios’ upcoming game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is being denounced by Venezuelan lawmakers as “a U.S. government-inspired propaganda campaign against Chavez that could even help lay the psychological groundwork for an actual invasion”:

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Wired is reporting that a video game that exists within the online game Second Life is causing a stir - apparantly because it’s mimicking the real world where parents no doubt moan the fact that their kids are online all the time playing games like Second Life.

“People started to complain that Tringo was harming the culture,” says Wagner James Au, the writer who has reported on Second Life as an “embedded” journalist for the last three years. “They felt it was ruining the social nature of the game. People were just showing up to play. They weren’t socializing or buying stuff any more.”

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game.

Of course, this said as much about the nature of Second Life as about Tringo. Second Lifers do not regard their world as a game: It’s a social environment, a chat room on steroids — a platform for an alternate life.

Just goes to show, even alternate realities can’t escape from reality.

New Scientist has an article on ‘Mashup Sites’, sites “created by merging data from two or more websites”. It was this interesting observation that caught my eye:

A hacker could feed false data to a crime location mashup, for example, perhaps to help raise property prices in a particular area by making it appear crime-free. A prankster could create bogus traffic jams on a mashup map, diverting traffic in such a way that queues are actually made worse.

This is simply using the content of the digital electric medium to manipulate people in a way similar to how governments and corporations can manipulate entire societies to go to war or to consume. However, the age old terms of propaganda and advertising are inadequate to explain today’s realities of manipulation and the ability of the “masters of the universe” to create other realities because today’s medium combines not only the old ones of TV, radio, and books into one, but also the actual active, participating minds of its users. I’ll explain this a bit more (I hope) but I’ll refer to this type of technique as “social hacking”. A good example of what I’m referring to (with a business twist) would the popular TV series Lost, which is completely viral new media using The Lost Experience, an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that utilizes fake books and websites to create an immersive world in conjunction with the TV show. It’s no longer just a show, it’s another reality.

As the digital-electric medium as a whole morphs to whatever tomorrow brings, the power to manipulate social groups, cities or countries can belong to sole individuals, which is one reason why governments have such paranoia regarding hackers accessing restricted or sensitive information (or having criminal intent, depending on your outlook or their intent). But tomorrows buzzword will probably be “sockers” and the threat they pose to the civilized world because they will use the content of the medium to manipulate groups of people or societies. A forerunner to what I’m talking about is probably The Yes Men, hacking the business world to expose the WTO for what they are. How is what they do actually possible? Because today’s electronic medium represents the autoamputation of our mind, and tomorrow’s Internet of Things will be the autoamputation of reality. In other words, our minds and reality are becoming the content of the medium itself, and this has profound implications for us.

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I attended a talk last night by sci-fi author and “futurist” Bruce Sterling at the Space Studios near Bethnal Green in London. (I say “futurist” because, as Bruce pointed out during the evening, futurist isn’t really accurate anymore, being an old term from the 60’s where you could actually do futurist studies). Here’s a brief summary of the topics he spoke about, and some of my own thoughts.

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