I haven’t posted much here in a while and, honestly, I don’t know if I have an audience anymore. You gotta feed the beast or it’ll just go gorge elsewhere at the unlimited trough of spankulation that is the Internet. It’s easier to tweet, and now there’s Ello which hasn’t yet found its center of gravity or true genus locii to root down a thriving community. But it’s refreshing to post more than 140 char without the expectation of serious long-form journeys. And I don’t use Facebook so Ello at least offers some potential to have an intellectual cohort that won’t rat-hole into that heady blend of extremism and uncritical non-thinking that seems to be coded directly into the DNA of Disgracebook. So consider this post my sort of Fakebook personal rant…

But then, I’m not sure I have a lot to say these days. Partly, I do so much of this sort of thing at work where the audience is internal. The content is fairly narrow but still insightful. Not the broad random walks through techno-behaviorology that I’m inclined to pursue here. Partly, on another axis, the Twitters and the constant streams of the technoverse and geopolity have got me a bit swirly, like the inertia of information is too great to adequately slow down and process into some sort of theory. The fascination with the stream is at the expense of any fascination with the particulars of life, like it’s all moving too fast and I’m being entrained to be little more than a relay node in the network. Click, retweet, copy-past, post. A servant to the memes, like apes collared to silicon just to grind out more 1’s and 0’s.

So much of the stream seams meaningless – fleeting glimpses, spikes of outrage, stories about things and events that will be wiped from the collective memory within a week. And maybe that’s the point, to bring all the mundane details to light, to share the bits with each other, to fully become the eyes of the world, in witness of it all. But then, if I really think about it, it’s appalling how many resources, how much energy, how much labor born on the backs of the impoverished, how much of this all goes to keeping the platters spinning and the switches switching and the rare earth’s rare-earthing, across global data centers sucking down megawatts to make sure we archive every random bleating of the global mind. To a post-psychedelic techno-futurist like myself, it’s a bit confusing to feel at odds with the marvel of it all.

I can’t remember the source but this phrase about digital transformation really stuck with me: that it’s emulsifying entire industries. Which underlines that there’s very real import to the network spankulation, that we have some obligation to roll the dung ball of modernity around and around beneath the Sun, to check it for deformations that might drive truly dangerous emulsifications. We can snicker at the death of old industries but what about the demise of comfort or wellness or nutrition or the oft-anticipated end of the state… Are we really ready for this degree of transformation? So I’m left with a crutch of faith that the stream is, on balance, a positive tool to keep us all engaged with the Great Work of unfolding the possible with some integrity, without destroying more than we create. That the relentless bleating of sheep is what keeps the shepherds attentive and considerate, and that the global mind helps us better evolve the animal within towards something more tenable than base self-preservation, something much holier than religion, something much more wise than science.

It’s a lot to put on a stream, I know, but maybe having a degree of faith is what keeps us swimming, lest we give in to the rushing depths and fall like stones, inert and silent.

It was a dull gray afternoon when he began to see the algorithm. He was listlessly surfing his go-to etailer, looking for a book he’d seemingly forgotten. After some reckoning the title returned – Nature and the 30 precepts of Aescelopes. Then, with a swipe and a click he added the book to his digital shopping cart. The page refreshed and returned a recommendation.

“People who bought Nature and the 30 Precepts of Aescelopes also purchased Aescelopes’ 30 Precepts of Nature.”

Hmm. Makes sense. He’d been fascinated with the esoteric Greek rationalist, known for his early work identifying the simple patterns underlying natural phenomena. So with another swipe and a click, that one too jumped into the checkout bin.

A couple days later the package arrived, brown and dusty with the weight of travel, the box dented and slightly abused. Upon tearing it open he removed the two ponderous tomes, gave each a quick flip, and then added them with a thud to what was now becoming a bit of an edifice of books on the subject. Scanning the towering strata he noted the titles:

Nature and the 30 Precepts of Aescelopes
Aescelopes’ 30 Precepts of Nature
30 Precepts of Nature, by Aescelopes
The Natural World and the Precepts of Aescelopes
Aescelopes and the Greek Precepts of Nature
30 Greek Precepts of Aescelopes
Aescelopes’ 30 Greek Precepts

And finally, Aescelopes and the Greek Fascination with the Natural World.

He shifted in his chair with a familiar creaking, letting has hands fall to the gray fabric of the arms. Gazing at the librarian stack he felt a tickle somewhere in the back of his mind, like a fleeting shadow vaguely intent on revealing itself, but not yet – maybe later, after lunch. With considerable excitement he had purchased each of the texts in the now-teetering stack, adding more clues to the mystery of this forgotten Greek, hoping to link those simpler insights with the confusing modern world – a place he’d always struggled to comprehend.

But now the books seemed stale and redundant. Each new chapter previously approached with great alacrity now seemed obvious as he gazed back down the hall of his readings, this brood of wandering octuplets encamped upon his gray tabletop. Each was, in it’s own right, different – the words, the sentences, the chapter headings – but from this new perspective he realized they were all saying pretty much exactly the same thing.

Rising abruptly from the chair, a dull frustration stirring behind his eyes, tensing his musculature and pushing up the hairs on his arm just slightly, he walked to the kitchen. A drink perhaps. Yes. He tugged the gray cabinet nob, pulling open the gray enameled doors to reveal row after row of gray ceramic cups. Mindlessly, he grabbed the nearest, set it down on the gray marble counter-top and reached for the bottle of Bourbon. In the depths of him something was stirring – unseen fishes momentarily scared off by a deeper flux in the fundaments. His hands shook slightly as the golden bourbon poured from the bottle. A distant memory flashed by, something bright, waving to his heart before leaving again – leaving him alone on a vast dull plain. He stretched his recollection, almost painfully, to try and catch the glimmering light. A laugh, the scent of grass, a soft brush against his skin… Now just dull gray fishes swimming in circles somewhere below.

His fingers fumbled and the bourbon crashed into the cup, shattering both into a kaleidoscope of glass and gray shards and honeyed liquor. A sudden searing pain shot from his hand as blood began its crimson advance down his wrist, penetrating the woven fabric of his shirt sleeve.

He abandoned the kitchen catastrophe and dashed into the bathroom, plunging his aching hand under the cold faucet, cursing himself as the blood ran in dilute swirls down the drain. He grabbed clumsily at a hand towel, pressing it into his palm to stem the flow. Eyes closed, breath rising and falling. And gray fish turning slowly in a deep sea.

He opened his eyes with a sudden start. The towels were also gray. When did he order those? The bathmat was gray, except for a few red stains of blood. Did he buy this to match the towels? The wallpaper was gray paisley on a lighter-gray background. It must have been like that when he moved in. He returned to his bloody sleeve, the stains. Wrapping his hand in gray bandage, he checked the shirt. The same gray linen as the towels. Why? He ran to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer, full of gray socks. He wrenched the other drawers out, striking the gray cement floor with a wooden crash, spilling the silent clothes to broadcast his wardrobe of static to a dead audience. He stood broken for a moment that stretched out in every direction and, at the same time, none. He couldn’t remember what his apartment had looked like before but he knew, from somewhere distant, that it wasn’t like this. It couldn’t have been. He would never have moved into such a monotony of dullness, such a bland gray canvas. Would he? No. It was a submission, an abdication to some common denominator forcing itself upon him.

And yet, he couldn’t remember it any differently. In spite of, or perhaps because of its uniformity, it was on some level comforting. Predictable and safe. Non-threatening. Had he been ordering and arranging this all along? He could still see enough to know it had been a process of becoming, rather than a fixed state that was always there. Something he had, in a way, been corralled into, or conditioned to believe.

He stared out the window. It was a dull gray afternoon and he could see the algorithm. He couldn’t remember it any differently.

Back to the kitchen, the only life a splattered trail of blood red and a sprawling puddle of brown bourbon. A laugh, the scent of grass, a brush of flesh. A fleeting shadow below the surface, circling. He confronted the Edifice of Aescelopes and pulled one of the tomes from the pile, careful not to topple the wavering tower. In a fit of bibliomancy, straining at forgotten gods with a sudden fervent of religion, he opened the text randomly and began to read:

As Aescelopes notes in his Precepts, the mechanisms of nature are afforded the greatest efficiency and scale by merit of their frugality. The observable diversity and complexity of nature arises from a very simple set of rules that are fed recursively into themselves. But rather than yielding conformity, the mechanisms allow for the interdiction of the chaotic element in order to better explore the space of possibility. In this manner, nature wields simplicity to explore complexity.

However, in some cases, Aescelopes surmised, the chaotic element becomes excluded, leaving only simple rules looping without end, reinforcing the common denominator into a metastatic condition.

A procedural narrowing in allegiance to social cliques, convenience, and an easy purchase, designed to reinforce similarities, to lead us to more of the things we liked. They had spread across the network, watching from the edges and making adjustments to correct some invisible ledger. Their cool competency was painted across his monotone flat. On this dull gray afternoon he could see the algorithm as more than just a convenience, or even a tool to corral consumers into the spectacle. It was competing with the very rules of nature, fire-walling the chaos to contain the safety of order, painting the world gray because that’s what they did on the last clock cycle, that’s what the consumer wanted, that’s what makes the supply chain more efficient. From down here with the gray fishes, circling and circling, the light above the surface had grown dim.

He stared out the window into the dull gray afternoon. He could see the algorithm.

The gray bandage wrapping his hand was now stained with a darker gray. The blood and bourbon had dried into a fine ash. He couldn’t remember it any differently. His thoughts began to smooth out into the mercurial nothing of a Winter gloaming. The buildings across from his were so faded they barely composed against the sky. Gray people in gray houses eating gray food, staring blankly with opaque eyes at the dull gray afternoon. He couldn’t remember it any differently. A laugh, a scent, blood and shattered glass like ash on a gray floor. He stood for a moment that stretched out in every direction. An eternal gray now.

Gray people in gray houses swimming forever with gray fishes.

He stared out the window.

He couldn’t remember it any differently.

Some fine satirical futuring here…

A Rational Fear – Brisbane Nuclear Olympics from Duncan Elms on Vimeo.

Two important (IMHO) reads from the past week…

Evgeny Morozov, who tends to really grate on me with his overly-generalized, ad hominen attacks, reminds us of his brilliance in spite of himself in this Guardian article: The rise of data and the death of politics

Such [algorithmic] systems, however, are toothless against the real culprits of tax evasion – the super-rich families who profit from various offshoring schemes or simply write outrageous tax exemptions into the law. Algorithmic regulation is perfect for enforcing the austerity agenda while leaving those responsible for the fiscal crisis off the hook. To understand whether such systems are working as expected, we need to modify [Tim] O’Reilly’s question: for whom are they working? If it’s just the tax-evading plutocrats, the global financial institutions interested in balanced national budgets and the companies developing income-tracking software, then it’s hardly a democratic success.

Nils Gilman has honed his study of the ongoing deconstruction of the state by the engines of plutocracy and deviant globalization into a masterful treatise, The Twin Insurgency

During the 1990s, it became a fashionable form of irony to declare that, in the new post-Marxist era, the state (the dirigiste state, at least) was destined to wither away. In truth, something more subtle was going on: the double collapse of social modernist state’s capacity and legitimacy was giving birth not to the post-historical utopia of a universal consensus in favor of liberal democratic capitalism, but rather to a two-headed monster in the form of plutocratic secession and deviant globalization. Instead of projects of collective emancipation, what both plutocratic and criminal insurgents desire is for the social modernist state to remain intact except insofar as it impinges on them. Neither criminal nor plutocratic insurgents are revolutionaries in the classic modernist sense of political actors who seek to take over the state.

…What both insurgencies represent is the replacement of the liberal ideal of uniform authority and rights within national spaces by a kaleidoscopic array of de facto and even de jure microsovereignties. Rather than a single national space in which power is exercised and all residents enjoy rights in a consistent and homogeneous way, the cartography of the dual insurgency consists of diverse enclaves of heterogeneous political authority and of non-standardized social-service provisioning arrangements.

Returning to Morozov, again with the casual simplification and lazy stereotyping but, nevertheless, an important kernel:

As Silicon Valley keeps corrupting our language with its endless glorification of disruption and efficiency – concepts at odds with the vocabulary of democracy – our ability to question the “how” of politics is weakened.

The “what” is cybernetic, the “how” is human. Interests below and above the game will always circumvent the algorithmic measurement, control, and containment that the rest of us are corralled into.

Gilman concludes:

The ultimate losers in all of this, of course, are the middle classes—the people who “play by the rules” by going to school and getting traditional middle-class jobs whose chief virtue is stability. These sorts of people, who lack the ruthlessness to act as criminal insurgents or the resources to act as plutocratic insurgents, can only watch as institutions built over the course of the 20th century to ensure a high quality of life for a broad majority of citizens are progressively eroded.

In a sense, both speak to a progressive fragmentation of the social and economic order as the system becomes too complex and unwieldy to effectively manage. Morozov would likely see this as a failure of will, an abdication of agency. Gilman might regard it as both a cause and effect of the dismantling of statehood. Only algorithms can tangle such huge volumes of information spooling off the maelstrom. And only humans can ensure that our institutions survive and prosper enough to keep the common good at the center.

Watson is basically a text search algorithm connected to a database just like Google search. It doesn’t understand what it’s reading. In fact, “read” is the wrong word. It’s not reading anything because it’s not comprehending anything. Watson is finding text without having a clue as to what the text means. In that sense, there’s no intelligence there. It’s clever, it’s impressive, but it’s absolutely vacuous.

– A recent comment from Douglas Hofstadter regarding the current state of AI.

We don’t yet understand how brains work, so we can’t build one.

– Jaron Lanier

Of course, it may be that our anthropomorphic maps for sentience and intelligence will prevent us from spotting a different kind of networked machine intelligence…

[My top-level notes from the events.gigaom.com/structure-2014/”>Gigaom Structure conference…]

The big picture – affordable and easy
The Structure conference focused on the evolving territory of cloud infrastructure, highlighting some fundamental shifts in the industry. First, the enterprise has been challenged to overcome the cost, deployment, and management overhead of adoption. However, many emerging businesses are serving this need by making it easier to deploy and run these services. Now pretty much all enterprises understand the value of moving into either a private on-premise or public multi-tenant cloud (and there was much discussion about when to co-lo and when to go public). Adoption is further enabled by the price war between Amazon, Microsoft, and soon Google that has driven public cloud services to become more affordable.

… agile & elastic
The second big shift is in making networks more flexible, elastic, and agile. Services are now more easily deployed across abstraction layers like virtual machines, or modularized into containers. Both VMware and Docker had a strong presence at Structure and most talks had some refrain about the relative merits of one versus the other. Network hardware is softening or virtualizing altogether into SDN and NFV solutions. It’s much easier and cheaper to update software than it is to update hardware. In parallel, more machine intelligence is displacing both hardware and human IT resources, enabling efforts in self-optimizing networks (SON). All of this makes for networks that are sensing and responding to constantly changing conditions.

…composable pools of compute
Third, compute power has become a distributed commodity that is dis-aggregated, addressable, and composable from anywhere on the network. Hypervisors and containers become the means for addressing compute pools, with services stretched across these hardware-agnostic abstraction layers. Notably, there was much talk about how the Internet of Things will force a reconfiguration of networks as billions of devices come on line, some of which require very low latency for their control loops. Pushing compute out to the edges where it’s needed for industrial IoT will spare the core from being overburdened by compute requests.

The Big Picture is starting to show a world awash in pools of computation and heterogeneous networks that are becoming more intelligent and adaptive.

In my day job I help companies navigate the roiling seas of change kicked up by digital transformation. My team at Orange Silicon Valley has just released a large report looking at billion-dollar valuations in tech, the strategic opportunities in pursuing adjacencies as an adaptive posture, and a forecast of tech sectors and macro trends unfolding in the next 6 years or so. I was the lead researcher and writer on this one – I’m especially fond of the sector overviews and macro forecast.

Here’s the press release from my parent company, Orange.

A new report from Orange Silicon Valley called Unicorns, Startups, and Giants: The New Billion Dollar Dynamics of the Digital Landscape shows that tech ‘Unicorns’ are becoming more than just billion-dollar start-up superstars or fodder for talk of bubbles. They are the new engines of disruption reshaping the competitive landscape.

And here’s the report – a map for business to navigate rapid change and align with the fundamentals: Unicorns, Startups, and Giants: The new billion dollar dynamics of the digital landscape

I think it was the disco panda, charging into a clutch of alien invaders, while riding an enormous shaggy cow. That