the long spimey meathooks game

The future's getting weird and scary. My futurist friend Matt Jones said to me the other day that, in one sense, the future is a race between the Bright Spime Future and what other smart friend Dr Joshua Ellis has termed the Grim Meathook Future.

[...]

The K-Hole is the remains of a massive system failure. That's the Grim Meathook Future: infrastructures that cannot cope.

[...]

Oh ... Spime Future? [...] or, as it is also sometimes known, The Internet Of Things. The idea is close to that of the noosphere, an invisible world of information flows. A Spime is an object (or blobject, or blogject) that exists as, around and within a constantly-updated, totally-recorded flow of information. In Sterling's words, "A Spime is an object that ate and internalized the previous industrial order."

[...]

There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. (I'm cheating: the end result of pure spime theory is electronic omniscience, which is not a useless concept.) Between

-- Warren Ellis in Issue 3 of the Ministry.

(pure aside: I'm excited that Mr Ellis is going to tackle social commentary again post transmetropolitan)

Read it. Its a good article, because it taps into a lot of things I've been thinking about recently. Y'know, like an entirely Augumented Reality version of instant messaging. Imagine being able being able to know exactly where your friends are (possibly pointed out with superimposed arrows and distance counters) and being able to send messages (text, voice, video, somophore* - the language protocols is almost irrelevant). Scary from a privacy perspective, but the technology will be possible in 10-15 years. Its just about leveraging multiple existing social and technological paradigms into a new 'platform'. I'm not sure what I should call that phenomena yet. It needs a term because its going to happen increasingly often. The iPod is the greatest triumph of leveraging multiple pre-existing 'things' (technological and social) into a new emergent paradigm that is more than the sum of its parts. Steve Jobs realised the power of the Package when he launched the iPod - his predictions were arrogant at the time but have been proven true. In a way, his entire philosophy has been about building the Package to produce emergence... (which I guess isn't true emergence as the end game has been designed to an extent... but whatever... not many people can play the Long Game and win.)

[insert segueway here]

Which brings me to a quick critique of the assertions made above by Ellis' futurist friend. Namely, I don't think that the Spimey Future and the Grim Meathook future are contradictory possibilities. Rather, I think they're symbiotic symptoms. The Spime Future is largely being driven by the burgeoning transnational private sphere - a sphere which its spimeiness actually reinforces. Its the triumph of the technoliberal wet dream: a utopia of island-individuals (indiviulands?) freed by information being free. The meat hook is the Shadow of this Utopia. Its the collapse of geographically, often highly physical, infrastructures. The very things whose corporeality makes them incapable of being swallowed by the Spimes. as a product of the exodus from territorial bodies politic to transnational communal webs. Its the form that State Failure will take within the West (and others).

The reality, of course, will be somewhere in between. A world where your train will still be late, but at least you'll know where it is in maglorious superimposed 3D with GPS-enabled precious.

Yum.

* One of the great practical jokes I've been wanting to pull is sending someone an MMS in somophore. Sadly hasn't happened yet. Least of which is my lack of bothering to set up MMS on my phone. I'd rather make a music video in somophore (FUCK, now that is an idea...)