mathpunk.net

In my continued efforts to champion the creative job application as modern American literary form, here is a bit of my response to “Tell us why the idea of social innovation/enterprise has you all excited now!”

I will freely admit that I’ve done my share of sneering at social innovation entrepreneurs. They can be chipper and self-congratulatory, and they waste valuable characters using your given name in their alarmingly earnest DMs. However, we are moving out of the cheap talk phase of social networks. Within about 7 hours of the Haitian earthquake, I read on Twitter of a number allowing you to text $10 to the Red Cross. As I did so, I realized I was doing it, partly because it was right, but mostly because it was easy. I would use the same device to send the donation as I had used to read it, so there was no context switching; there was no need to fact-check because the information was from someone I’ve learned to trust. Our tools are getting better at convincing us to do the right thing, and making it easier to do it.

Watch for Evoke. It’s going to be the real deal. In the meantime, send 10 bucks to the Red Cross by texting “haiti” to 90999.

I love watching babies. They are tiny scientists, experimenting in a complex world with a new user interface (hands, eyes, language).

The ‘citizen science’ signal showing up (from the TYF ‘09 results; their research RSS feed here) suggests we should take that concept more seriously. I have two possible opportunities for superstructing young scientists*, and I’d love feedback on some possible directions.

Firstly: This afternoon, I will be tutoring a very clever kid in math. We’ll be doing some basic homework/worksheet stuff, but I’m planning on asking him if he would like to partner with me in a research capacity; i.e., I’m going to ask him for a job. My idea is that we might be able to learn from each other about superstructing, and maybe work together on something for Digital Open.

Secondly: In about a week, I’m going to be giving a talk at a local, non-accredited religious school. I have pretty free reign over what I’m going to talk about, and so I thought that it might be interesting to talk around the concept of ‘knowing’: how do we know things, how do we confirm or challenge our beliefs, etc. I’ll have an hour with the kids, and I’d like to come up with some sort of exercises that will allow us to learn from each other. (And I’d love to hook them up with Digital Open as well!)

This is pretty handwavey, isn’t it? Hence the call for help finding readings or really good questions that I can process into something fun and cohesive and useful over the next several days. Oh, the joys of improvising everything…

* – ‘young’ means ‘middle-school/high-school’ at this time, though I am definitely going to return to the concept of Baby Scientists in the future. (Did you know babies can learn sign as young as four months!?)**

** – technical note: I have no idea how to intelligently footnote a blog post in Wordpress!

You know that TV ad? Maybe 10, 15 years ago? There’s this firefighter, and the camera’s up close on his plastic visor with flames flickering off it? And he’s kind of hunched over, right—he’s got something wrapped up in his arms, and it’s in slo-mo, and he’s breathing heavily through the oxygen mask. Now he breaks out of the building! And when he opens his arms, there’s a baby wrapped up in the blanket? But, all of a sudden you realize that the firefighter is Obama! And you get all choked up, and you feel this joy in the center of your chest, like, I don’t know, maybe you should help, or give a cookie to someone, or whatever? And you just get this instant sense of like, Wow, that’s what the vagus nerve does, and you had no idea what a vagus nerve was before but now you’re like, “Cool, I know what the vagus nerve does! I didn’t know that before!”? And you don’t even giggle when you say ‘vagus nerve,’ because instead when you say it you just follow it with “yes, yes” and nod your head (although you will probably consider giggling later, a little).

That feeling was what I got from Superstruct.

I’m still processing the experience, which ended yesterday with the Institute for the Future’s Ten-Year Forecast. I’m relieved that it’s over, frankly. I’ve spent the last six months trying to come to terms with Superstruct’s combination of:

1. visionary powers of “systemic thinking and collaborative action”;
2. the potential for highly entertaining experiments resulting in Massive Multiplayers Mocking You Failing Spectacularly In Public Just Like Mr. Fagerstrom Always Said You Would;
3. the Spider-Man level sense of responsibility to, well, quit fucking around. (Aside: I would like to take a moment to advocate that “The Economic Downturn” be rechristened as “The Great Quit Fucking Aroundathon.” Thank you.)

Now, the data analysis that I wished we players could have done has been completed by the IFTF. The Superthreats and Collaborative Superpowers, have become Ecologies and Superstruct Strategies. (These really are useful concepts, even though as my extroversion willpower ran out on Tuesday, I struggled against saying ’supercrowdusergenerationsourcing’ to people just to test my deadpan.)

The serious players were, in our own ways, going through hours of weird metagame theorizing and rapid protovation. We were testing as many simultaneous modes of strategic inquiry as possible, all while suspending disbelief and read/writing the game world in a realtime feedback loop equivalent. It was like sticking your face in a toroidal firehose stream. Now that there are tested strategies (admittedly, tested by lunatics) and a comprehensible set of major future signals, superstructing reality looks downright easy.