The flavor of our simulated futures
It’s May now? As the trees and flowers explode around us, we’re looking deeply into simulation, particularly now when so much of our personal and professional interactions are mediated by technology. Read on for a pointed analysis of the experience economy, creative experiments in social interactions, and artifacts from a past that never existed.
— Alexis & Matt
1: The umami theory of value
Every once in a while, you read an essay that feels seminal, that sums up your previously nebulous thoughts into a framework that makes them crystallize and coalesce. That’s how we felt reading this piece by Emily Segal and Martti Kalliala, which they describe as an “autopsy of the experience economy”. In it, they use the idea of umami — the concept of savoriness or deliciousness that is usually applied to food — and expand it to the cultural sphere. They posit that umami is the locus of the experience economy, an era which is ending abruptly as we speak. The essay unpacks both the desirability and essential emptiness of these experiences, how they constructed meaning but were functionally meaningless; how they reaped financial gain without creating anything of real value. It’s a thoughtful analysis of what has felt both pleasurable and problematic about the culture and “innovation” of the past decade.
“It was miso experiments at the Schindler house; the sting of a targeted facial acid; the endless, senseless brand collabs, like the fungi that can mate with their own DNA. It was Levi’s 501s as a category of experience, not a cut of jean. It was Impossible Burger, obviously… Umami could have been anywhere, but we smacked our lips in the moment. It was liquid in the sense that it flowed from place to place, airy in the sense that it was ungrounded, and earthy in the sense that it might have been in your mouth.”
We believe that umami has been both literally and figuratively the key commodity of the experience economy. Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience…
2: The future of futurism
We’ve been fans of Cennydd Bowles’ writing for a while now (his “Future Ethics” arrived in a big order of books to read during the lockdown) and his talk here, “After Dread”, is a clarifying summary of where we are now as futurists.
Bowles first names what we’re feeling now: not fear, but dread. Dread is fear but with statistics and not probabilities: “What we feel isn’t just concern that bad things might happen: we know they’ll happen, that they’re happening right now. All we can do is hope the statistics end up being less awful than they might be.” He then pulls together the thoughts of several other futurists writing about this moment and summarizes that our world following Covid-19 is likely going to be very different, though what that may look like depends a lot on your opinions of the nation state, capitalism, socialism, and what society owes itself. “It would be a huge mistake to think these preferable futures, however appealing, justifiable, or essential, will automatically come to pass. The moral course is never a given, and should doesn’t always translate to will.”
He ends by returning to the idea of dread, adding that dread is fear minus agency, the ability to affect the outcomes and improve your odds. Futurism has largely been at the service of large corporations planning for multiple scenarios, but now it must adjust to help people mourn the end of the industrial era and find agency in shaping what comes next. We won’t be dreading a future we can help shape.
It took just a fortnight for ‘these uncertain times’ to become a cliché. Sharp discontinuities like this pandemic have a habit of injecting new terminology into public consciousness.
3: Beyond Zoom and FaceTime
In the wake of social distancing, there is new focus on apps that take creative approaches to connecting via video and voice. Taking a step beyond traditional phone calls and video calls, there are a number of apps that are trying to create different kinds of interactions. Some are focused on bringing more spontaneity into the equation, primarily for social purposes. These include apps like Houseparty and Clubhouse, which let you spontaneously jump into video or audio chatrooms, as well as more experimental approaches like High Fidelity, which brings spatialized audio to virtual spaces and could be a contender for hosting a virtual Burning Man. Other apps are trying to innovate around work and productivity, finding alternative approaches to the typical video meeting. These include Loom, which takes an asynchronous approach to video communication, or apps like Around and Pragli, which take an anti-meeting approach by allowing for more spontaneous voice and video conversations between colleagues.
While we’re intrigued by the innovation and play happening in these interactions, we also hold out hope that at some point soon we’ll just be able to be in the same room with each other. It’ll be interesting to watch how these innovations expand and adapt as gatherings and in-person events return.
Clubhouse voice chat leads a wave of spontaneous social apps
Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That’s the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine.
4: This next talk is presented by a raccoon
While many are content to connect via voice and video, others are continuing to explore how we might interact in virtual spaces, from games to VR. Last week saw a DevOps tech conference being held in Animal Crossing as well as the massive Travis Scott virtual concert in Fortnite — two of the latest instances of gaming platforms being used for alternative purposes. And the piece below describes Virtual Market 4, an enormous Japanese expo that spans 36 separate worlds contained within the VRChat ecosystem. It is intended to sell virtual avatars and apparel, and is set up like a giant VR expo center. While this sounds kind of nerdy and niche, it’s expected to see over 1 million visitors over 10 days, making it the largest VR gathering of all time, and the exhibitors include multinational corporations like Audi, Netflix, Panasonic, and Sega. In some ways, VR and immersive gaming experiences still feel far from being everyday experiences, but there are some signals that these experiences are starting to become more viable, leaking into the mainstream from the edges.
The World's Biggest Social Virtual Reality Gathering Is Happening Right Now
The most astonishing aspect is the scope and scale of the event; more than a million visitors are expected to participate over the course of 10 days.
5: The naïve optimism of delivery robots
Unsurprisingly, tech that helps people get their meals and groceries without interacting with people is seeing huge demand right now. This article from Ars Technica takes a look at two competing services, Starship and Kiwibot, who use small sidewalk-class robots to deliver food in certain residential areas.
While we could go on for hours about all the implications here, two in particular seemed most important to highlight. First is the applicability of this tech: it works best in semi-dense, walkable residential areas like suburban communities or college campuses. The vast majority of Americans live in extremes away from this ideal, either in super-dense cities or in sparse rural areas. Each would require a very different approach to these kind of robots, whether that be carrying dozens of deliveries at once, or navigating packed highways between locations.
More importantly, it also hearkens back to a basic misunderstanding of how automation affects individuals’ economic safety. Since the 1950’s automation has been imagined as a tool to increase leisure time, to reduce the amount of work a person must do so that they can do more of what they love. Missing in this is any kind of universal welfare scheme that would allow someone to work less while maintaining a comfortable life. In the U.S., we must work to live, and until that changes, continued automation will apply massive economic pressures to communities who rely on jobs like these to survive.
The pandemic is bringing us closer to our robot takeout future
“We saw that business double overnight,” startup says of UK grocery deliveries.
6: Sing us a song, you're the Piano GAN
The robots are getting very clever. This week news broke that a GAN-based AI system has succeeded in creating songs featuring real singers’ recreated voices, singing lyrics they never actually sung before.
(Reminder: a GAN is a Generative Adversarial Network, where one AI generates artifacts like songs, and another tries to discriminate between real and generated examples. These systems improve each other, so that the generator gets better at making fakes, and the discriminator gets better at picking out fakes.)
The output is very good, but obviously not perfect to a human ear. The audio glitches are similar to the visual ones you see in generated faces, where the ears don’t quite match or the eyes are of different colors. The project also hits on a fundamental question about art and expression, one that applies to visual and audible art alike: what is art but an attempt to express an idea or a feeling, and what value does art have when the intent of the artist has been replaced by the guesswork of an AI?
Deepfake Music Is So Good It Might Be Illegal
And other fascinating A.I. research from this week
One ahistorical thing: Apple products that never were
Dana Sibera has created a delightful collection of non-existent Apple products. They take us on a journey through an alternate timeline of industrial design, with artifacts like this “PowerPortable with Touch Bar” that blend classic Apple computer design with newer features and functionality. For more, take a look at their Twitter feed, which has dozens of these nearly-nostalgia-inducing illustrations.
The “PowerPortable with Touch Bar”, an imaginary Macintosh we wish had been real | Dana Sibera
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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