As I have a children's book posted on my web and my blog links to Biznik I feel that I should offer this disclaimer... The posts about Web 3.0 is meant for the older readers with a wry sense of humor, just so you know...
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Sex. That's what it's all about. This was what I was told, back around 2000, during in the initial days of my graphic design career, which I found myself quickly rising in the ranks of due to my knowledge of the web and my belief it could be more than just weird porn and "Party of Five" fan-sites. A year out of college and I was tossed the position of art director for an up-and-coming firm in the farmlands on the edge of Chicago, in a wood-paneled musty room packed with an unreasonable staff indifferent to the effects of second-hand smoke. It was there my job depended on an overweight burnt out salesman that frequently compared his life to Schindler's List and metaphorically referred to his job as an elephant which constantly shit on his head. He claimed in the end there was no real marketing strategies or branding. No, it all came down to a human being's need to have sex. And believe me, this was the last person I wanted to lecture me about human sexuality. The man had about as much sex appeal as a sock puppet. I never liked that guy, and I know he hated me for my lack to turn around design projects in less than five minutes.
However, it did illustrate a point that for many of us that endured the son-of-a-Bush years realized, even well-intended individuals can be in positions of power and dead wrong about a great many things, completely aware they are doing harm. (I do not want to single out George Bush. Let's face it, there have been piles of individuals responsible for the recent calamities stemming from misguided American policies.) And the repercussions of bad leadership is not a new concept, think of the millions of people that have perished in wars due to ignorance, arrogance, and in some cases the need to get laid. (Ask Helen of Troy.)
But let's pull back the reins here, this isn't a mean-spirited blog you're about to read. Really. We're going to scrape off the elephant poop from the bottom of our shoes and look to the future, because despite what the news leads you to believe, we're on the verge of a bright new world, and the impact the internet will eventually have on the human race. Of course it would help if we knew where the human race was going, and for that we look to the skies and the search for little green men.
Somewhere around 1950, the world-renowned physicist Enrico Fermi speculated on why we haven't heard from aliens, zipping around in shiny spaceships and spitting out television signals from their lame alien talk shows. After years of speculation and brainstorming, the answers to Fermi's "where the hell are they" paradox come down to a couple of solutions: First, life is difficult to start and to evolve to an intelligent and technologically advanced stage and perhaps we're either the only one in the galaxy or simply too far away from one another to make contact. Then there's the more pessimistic view, where advanced civilizations quickly destroy themselves. Another theory revolves around the idea that the aliens have arrived and are far too advanced for us to recognize them. But in my mind, the most disturbing one goes along the lines of civilizations destroying themselves; in which a society implodes into creatures of luxury, plugged into virtual utopian worlds free of fear and pain. Maybe they'll still have sex.
What makes Fermi's speculations so intriguing is the simple fact that they illustrated the possible futures of our own civilizations. Where is this going you ask? I thought this was about the future of the internet? Hang on for a moment, and let's hyper-link to the world of quantitative finance.
Despite what you may think, the quants are not a group of little green men. There are a group that works with green in terms of currency. They crunch numbers like bowls of Cherrios. Mathematical whizzes that found their calling in the world of business. There is even a high-profile magazine in the quant-world known as "Wilmott." Don't have a subscription? That's because Wilmott subscriptions cost the it's-too-ridiculous-of-an-amount-to-even-be-considered a-joke... of over $500 a year. (Quants do live up to their name, they sure know how to rake in the dough.) After about a year or so of observing the quant world from afar and reading tons of Wilmott's free postings on their website, I've come to make a qualified (or quantified) generalization about them. Like most businessmen, they love free markets. it doesn't matter if the goods or services are of good quality, moral standing, or better society as a whole. One article even boasted that if the public wants fifteen Police Academy movies, there should be no qualms to simply provide mindless entertainment to the masses. Restriction free supply and demand, that's the only rule. That's the golden rule.
On the other end of this notion are Harvard professors like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, whom feel that theoretically there is no such thing as free choice. They even wrote a book about it. In their view, everyone that presents a choice is a "choice architect" and unintentionally or intentionally favors one selection over the other in the presentation of a choice. Since human beings tend to make bad choices, it is critical those presenting the options act as "parental libertarians" and make the best decisions for society the easiest or most accessible for others to choose, as it is our responsibility to make the world a better place for the generations to come after us.
Both sides have serious flaws, but after the economic stress endured throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the case for keeping markets completely free of regulation has soften considerably, even with the likes of longtime fed chairman and economic genius Alan Greenspan. (Remember, before the collapse he warned us the housing market was in fact "frothy" which has now made me extremely wary of the major catastrophe awaiting to pounce from my morning espresso). Both the quants and the parental libertarians do agree on a couple of facts, most notably the idea that people tend to choose the easiest path because life is hard and we prefer to be lazy and besides, isn't the definition of scholar Greek for leisure? Hence, by definition the more leisure the better off we would be. Unfortunately if the quants are completely correct and it is our God given right to choose whatever our hearts desire, and we tend to always choose the quickest and easiest path, then we are all destined to become those previously predicted creatures of extreme luxury, plugged into that virtual utopian world.
I don't buy it. It would mean our civilization is simply a destructive fluke of nature that we eventually need to neutralize, and in time return to more streamlined life-forms that do not philosophize, create abstractions, watch Battlestar Galactica, and ponder our existence. It means the critics are right, and the hundreds millions of dollars spent on the atom-smasher at Fermilab (named after our alien seeking pal Enrico) in Batavia, Illinois is truly a fool's errand not worthy of pursuit. Religion, God, everything you know other than eating, sleeping, and reproducing is a distortion that turns mankind into a destructive earth killing virus in which the only solution is to make everyone retarded enough to stop being problematic to one another. True story, Stephen Hawking began to speculate on this during an AOL discussion about the future. In the video, once Stephen began to rank that the only way people would survive would be to genetically modify future generations to be less aggressive, the video awkwardly faded out. Yeah, even Steven thinks it's going to be about giving the public "dumb-down pills" to keep us at bay. This could have been our destiny, the massive dumbing down of humanity, has it not been for one invention that although still in its infancy, democratized information and has provided a generation with new possibilities and opportunities not seen since farming, industrialization, hairspray and sliced bread.
Yep, the internet.
It may seem redundant to write about the future of the internet. But wait, we are still just beginning to understand its impact on our lives. We are already seeing a dramatic shift in how we see the world, how we navigate through it with GPS devices, how we access knowledge, make better decisions, and relate to one another, even find our soul-mates. Once we integrate fiber optics into our networks, we will be able to introduce a new visual platform in which the internet will operate. As an artist and a visual communicator, I am completed intrigued by where this new technology is headed. And as a businessman, I want to know the answers to Negroponte's dilemma as discussed in his 1995 book "Being Digital." Simply put, how are we going to make money from those little ones and zeros?
It is my hope that this blog will be able to provide those answers, starting with the basics. First, let's look into the ways in which human beings process and retain information. Then we will explore the psychological aspects of personality and character development. After we figure ourselves out, we'll look into the effects of mass media and modern art over perceptions in the last century. We'll finally arrive at the present day, grab this big messy pile of information we know about the web, throw it around, beat it up, knead it, and see if we can make a pizza out of it, or something that makes a little more sense. And overall, this discussion is about the internet, about the victory of the pursuit of knowledge over the desire to be a couch potato. In fact, if the round-about hyper-linked way we came to this point bothers you, then we seriously have to chat. In the future, we will be able to make connections to a seemingly random variety of topics that will bring about new ways of defining our world and being to solve the problems we have with it. Hyper-linking is so Web 2.0. By the time Web 4.0 rolls around we'll have the ability to conduct hyper-meaning. More on that later.
The future isn't just going to be just about sex. Think hyper-sex with instant access to 100 positions on your iPhone complete with demonstrations and sexy music to accompany them with. Of course how will we sift through these oodles of choices? Parental libertarianism isn't going to be just a theory, it will be a structure in which companies will make tons of money filtering the gobs of information we'll be dealing with. The user will become their own choice architect. The future is about knowledge. And if knowledge is power then the internet has just tapped into the atomic equivalent of that power. Human beings will always be subject to their animal instincts, we'll need to eat, sleep, love and so forth. And these are all great things that define us. But for now, with this new information vomiting tool we've created, let's assume that our de-evolution to the ways of the monkey have been postponed for a long, long time.
Besides, I bet if you were to ask the good people at Fermilab if the highly complex and relentless search for the Higgs Boson (aka God Particle) was really just another way to express their primal need for nookie, they'd probably toss you into the atom-smasher.
Next up, we'll talk a lot about you, the world on a theory of strings, fate vs. destiny, sports-themed parking lots, and why things get better with age. Basically a lot like an episode of "Lost." Oh yeah, we'll chat about the internet, too.
