mathpunk.net

I spent the morning processing IFTF forecasts, leading to the mindmap at the bottom (still a work in progress). My goal was to pick out the forecasts most relevant to my goals of superstructing education and learning. I’m afraid I lack the time and energy to explain the details of each of the forecasts; please let me know of any links to good write-ups so I can make this post more understandable to a wider audience.

THE BASIC ORDERING IDEAS
In the green circles are my favorite “flashpoint” forecasts: those forecasts IFTF identifies as useful launching pads for superstructing. The blue circle is the concept of a Superstruct ecology. These are combinations of superstructures which indicate trends developed by the 7000+ players of Superstruct, and grouped together by IFTF. (Aside: during play I desperately wanted to identify these ecologies, but could not develop the real-time data tools that could have spotted them.) I have noted the three I was the most involved with, and a handful of my favorite component superstructures.

RED IS FOR DOING
The Networked Citizens signal is the increasing online presence & expertise of people (i.e., the “My mom is on Facebook!” signal). The red arrow leading up and right toward The Open Fab Initiative by way of Superstructing Reality (“making”) is my belief that increasingly networked citizens will create the textbook of the future. Multimedia explanations of diverse topics in all the learning styles you could want; physical objects tagged with their scientific and historic principles; mobile-phone-based biology and physics labs for virtual dissection of real-world objects; you get the picture. I’m calling this ill-defined idea The Infinite Textbook (twitter hashtag: #infinitext), and my hope is to help citizen scientists (including my favorite scientists, babies & children) get precisely the knowledge they need in the format they need, even when they don’t explicitly know they need it. You’ll hear more on this as I turn it into a dissertation and working superstructure.

The arrow leading down and right from Networked Citizens toward Community Works by way of Post-Newtonian Governance (“connecting”) leads into the EDU, a unit of f2f learning currency (superstructure in progress) and to twitter hashtag #datamancy, which is my codeword for 1) the hard math & computing problems of working with more and larger datasets, and 2) the softer problem of representing very large datasets in a compelling, dynamic, and visual and/or narrative way.

The EDU is my contribution to an open money society, and if it’s a superstructure with legs you’ll hear more later. Datamancy… I dunno what it is yet. It’s part journalism, part citizen science, part Government 2.0. Still collecting pieces for that one.

Quantum Governance is on the map because I think it relates to the problem of academic credentialing. I haven’t quite sussed out how. A trustnet model of evaluation?

NEXT STEPS
More signals, more connections. Basic multimedia skillz. The mathematics of very large datasets. And, of course, the search for research funding. If you know anyone handing out grants to energetic weirdos…

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.