How will you be tracked, monitored, and surveyed in thirteen years? One man gives his predictions on the marketing zine-site DMNews. While these predictions are meant more for “direct marketing” purposes, it wouldn’t take much to turn them into spy tools for Big Brother.
Washington-based privacy and information policy consultant Robert Gellman looks into his crystal ball and gives these predictions on future surveillance and possible consequences:
Auto tracking. Every car will be required to have a transponder, and automated highway readers will record all trips. The transponders will allow agencies to monitor driving habits and to issue electronic tickets for violations. The system will collect fees for using congested roads, replace parking meters and prevent undesirable people from driving in certain areas. For example, pedophiles will not be permitted to drive near schools. Driving with a malfunctioning transponder will be illegal. A black market will emerge in cars registered to “clean” or dead individuals.
Sounds like an evil E-ZPass, doesn’t it? Think I’ll take the bus… or get some “accessories” for my car like a black market transponder, machine guns, smoke screens, anti-aircraft missiles…
Very personalized PCs. Every computer will have a static IP address. No one will be able to operate a computer without registering through a token, fingerprint or other identification device. All e-mail will be stored permanently, and records of other network activity, including searching and transactions, will also be retained. Stolen computers will be a hot black market item for criminals who will use them to avoid accountability for online actions.
Static IP addresses for PCs should make it easy for someone to trace where you are… unless you use an onion router or Tor, preferably one that isn’t easily defeated by traffic or timing analysis, or compromised by “security analysts.” Biometric login devices will be a safe way to access your system, until someone chops off a finger or digs one of your eyes out to defeat it. Don’t worry too much about the retention of e-mails and activities; Companies may not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for more storage until terabyte drives become affordable. As for the black market computers, go with something relatively low-end, cheap, and disposable. You don’t want to spend too much on a system that you may only get to use once.
Mandatory MySpace. Every individual will be required to maintain a personal Web page with basic contact information accessible by the government and the public. People with out-of-date pages will be fined. An individual will be allowed to post minimal information for public use, but the government will demand more. Everyone will be required by law to have an active e-mail address. Official government notices will be sent by e-mail rather than by post.
Do we really want everyone on the net? It’s like driving; Some people should NEVER be allowed on the roads, real or virtual. They’ll just get in the fast lane and travel 25 when the limit is 65 and hold everyone up. Besides, can you see an Amish or Luddite webpage?
Also, people may not want to give much information out where perverts and telemarketers troll for people to harass. Then again, there’s nothing that says the information has to be 100% correct.
Society caught on tape. Surveillance cameras will be even more universal than they are today. You will not be able to walk down a street, enter a store, park in a garage, ride the subway, sit at your desk at work, open your front door or do anything else outside your home without being recorded.
Like that isn’t going on already. The big shock is quite a bit of surveillance is being done not by the government, but by the citizens themselves! That boy across the street with his RC car… it has a camera built into it, and his mother is watching him, and you, through her cell phone.
Penniless marketplace. Currency will disappear and all money will be electronic. Every transaction will be permanently tracked. Private money systems will develop using tokens, gold and other forms of intrinsic value. Paying in private money will work for some things, but prices for non-tracked activities will be double to cover the risks involved.
Guess Mr. Gellman hasn’t heard of “debit cards” yet. People who have checking accounts have them, they work almost like credit cards sans the high interest rates, they’re electronic, and transactions are tracked by your bank. Private money systems already exist as Warcraft players can attest to. But the idea of paying with “forms of intrinsic value,” to me that sounds like the Open Source community, where information is power and currency.
Dog tags go digital. Identification chips implanted in the human body will be banned after some people are maimed or killed to obtain their chips. However, governments will promote the wearing of personal transponders so that scanners can identity each person within range. Personal transponders will first be touted as a safety program for children and then as a protection against terrorists. If your transponder does not work, you will be subject to arrest in any public space. Trafficking in transponders will be illegal, but widespread.
Mr. Gellman wrote his article the day before the reports of RFID chips causing cancer in lab rats. Personal transponders? Bad idea, unless you’re someone who works or plays in remote areas where rescuers need to find you fast. And if your transponder suddenly fails or runs out of battery juice, that automatically makes you a terrorist? Plus the possibility of cancer due to the radio waves they use…
Fast food goes under the table. The health and insurance industries will try to control costs by monitoring food purchases. They will begin by offering discounts to individuals who allow monitoring of their eating habits, but monitoring will eventually become mandatory. Separate checks will be universal in restaurants. Restaurants will prosper by putting fish on the menu, but will tell customers that the halibut is actually a hamburger. Eventually, insurers will audit restaurant food purchases to try to keep the reporting system honest. There will be a black market in unregistered junk food.
We’re already seeing a hostile takeover by “healthy foods,” surprisingly done voluntarily by restaurants and food manufacturers who are using “lower trans-fat oils” and making “zero carb, zero calorie, zero fat, zero salt, zero taste” foods. Next step: Everyone eats cardboard. MMMMMmmmmm….. cardboard. :p
Healthy living is a must. Government and private insurers will mandate that individuals agree to health treatments as a cost-saving measure. Computerized health records will be centrally reviewed to monitor compliance. If you don’t get a required treatment, your insurance will cost more or be cancelled, you will lose your job, your tax return will be audited and you will be labeled as unpatriotic. Digital health records will permit precise scoring of individual and family health risks. Each insured person and family will be individually rated and priced, even under employer-provided health insurance policies. An underground system of healthcare will develop for people who don’t want their insurer to know about some medical conditions. People will pay privately for care to avoid higher rates, uninsurability or monitoring.
Don’t forget about “data brokers” who would like nothing better than your private medical records to sell to the pharmacy cartels.
Relax, they’re only predictions. While some things like the penniless marketplace and “health food” replacing fast food are here already, the mandatory MySpace pages and transponders may never see daylight due to consumer boycotts and privacy and health concerns. Those transponders are just EVIL!
This is how they describe themselves and their mission:
The We the People will not be Chipped - No Verichip Inside Movement, is based on the irrefutable fact, that we believe in mankind’s inalienable human rights that are absolute and can not be debased, nor perverted. Human life can not be degraded to a 16 digit RFID chip number embedded under you skin under any circumstance. By uniting on this common ground, we can send a strong message to the IBM funded Verichip that we the people will not be chipped!
If you or your company/organization would like to get involved with the We the People will not be Chipped - No Verichip Inside Movement , we encourage you to get in contact with us. We are looking for contributors , web designers, artists in all fields , printers, multimedia experts, mailing houses, civil libertarians, financial contributors, and freedom fighters to help us take this message to the masses. We will only be treated like inventory when complacency becomes our drug of choice.
As history has a funny habit of repeating itself. Study World War II closely on how IBM backed the Nazi Regime utilizing the Hollerith Machine . The Hollerith Machine was a punch card system that aided in cataloguing the population. This IBM technology gave the fascist, totalitarian state the much needed technology boost to increase it’s rate of human data processing . The goal was simple, extreme nationalism which called for the unification of all German-speaking peoples and eradicating the enemies of the state namely the Jews and other non-compliant races.
Fast forward to the year 2006 , we have IBM funding the parent company of the Verichip namely Applied Digital Solutions [ADSX] . The VeriChip Corporation is both FDA approved and patented with the owner of patent (#6,400,338) granted recently to VeriChip’s manufacturer, Digital Angel Corporation, with worldwide patents pending.
In the re-active world’s state of affairs, we are seeing world governments tightening measures in regard to identity protection, trumpeting our need to be protected from the forces of evil. As we move into the age of paranoia and fear these ideologies, supported by propaganda campaigns, demand total conformity on the part of the people.
While there has been a sort of revolt by states against RFID being used in the Federal “Real ID” cards, this has to be first such NIMBY group against the implants themselves, although this seems to be more focused on VeriChip’s activities and experiments rather than the idea of such implants as a whole. For those who are looking to become DIY cyborgs, this will cause a conflict of interest as step one is getting RFID implants.
A warning about Big Brother, or just a bunch of Luddite kooks? Either way, this looks like the kind of battle that makes good cyberpunk lore.
So I find myself in Seattle for the first time ever, and what do I find but a city literally wallowing in pig art! Who woulda figured that Seattle was the mecca of all things pig??? There are literally dozens of these things, all different. We found this one in a shopping mall near the Monorail - now even pigs have good cyberpunk!
If you ever find yourself in Seattle, definitely check out the Science Fiction Museum. This thing is a joy for Sci-Fi (and cyberpunk) fans. It has all sorts of movie props and costumes. For instance, I was amazed at how awesome Rachael’s black dress from Blade Runner looked up close. They also had the Terminator skull, a full-sized Alien queen from Aliens, the captain’s chair from the original Star Trek, the Death Star model from Star Wars (1977), A full scale, operational Robbie the Robot replica who argues with an actual Robot from the Lost in Space series, etc. It was definitely worth the price of admission.
Mac Tonnies over at Post Human Blues posted a link to a fun little essay/emerging tech news overview from the Free Geekery Blog. The packing is a Top 10 list titled “The Do It Yourself (DIY) Guide to Becoming a (Real) Cyborg.” I would list them here, but really they don’t do justice unless you see the words with them.
Every now and then, two great ingredients come together to create something magical. The latest “peanut butter and jelly” moment comes from two powerhouses in Web 2.0: Google Earth and Second Life. Arguably the second-most popular and influential work cyberpunk, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, has fueled a generation of virtual worlds developers, who have continually strived to achieve the vision laid out in this wonderful story. Now it looks like that possibility is on track to arrive in a reality near you.
Question: What do you get when you combine Google Earth with Second Life? Answer: The Snow Crash Metaverse!
…within 10 to 20 years–roughly the same time it took for the Web to become what it is now–something much bigger than either of these alternatives may emerge: a true Metaverse. In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, a classic of the dystopian “cyberpunk” genre, the Metaverse was a planet-size virtual city that could hold up to 120 million avatars, each representing someone in search of entertainment, trade, or social contact. The Metaverse that’s really on the way, some experts believe, will resemble Stephenson’s vision, but with many alterations. It will look like the real earth, and it will support even more users than the Snow Crash cyberworld, functioning as the agora, laboratory, and gateway for almost every type of information-based pursuit. It will be accessible both in its immersive, virtual-reality form and through peepholes like the screen of your cell phone as you make your way through the real world. And like the Web today, it will become “the standard way in which we think of life online,” to quote from the Metaverse Roadmap, a forecast published this spring by an informal group of entrepreneurs, media producers, academics, and analysts (Cascio among them).
Imagine a scene in San Francisco, where you want to have a meeting with two associates at a local coffee shop, but at the last minute, you decide that three others need to participate. They can log into Second Life, and then show up in the coffee shop virtually. You and your friends have special glasses and sound devices that allow you to see and hear them as if they were literally at the coffee shop. By overlaying detailed maps onto a Second Life sim, and then tying them together with augmented reality sensors scattered about the locale, people will be able to simultaneously live in both virtual and real events, tied to the same geographic location. The possibilities are endless.
In the field, technicians or soldiers may get 2-D slices of the most critical information through wireless handheld devices or heads-up displays; in operations centers, managers or military commanders will dive into full 3-D sensoriums to visualize their domains. “Augmented reality and sensor nets will blend right into virtual worlds,” predicts Linden Lab’s Ondrejka. “That’s when the line between the real world and its virtual representations will start blurring.”
I asked David Gelernter why we’d need the Metaverse or even mirror worlds, with all the added complications of navigating in three dimensions, when the time-tested format of the flat page has brought us so far on the Web. “That’s exactly like asking why we need Web browsers when we already have Gopher, or why we need Fortran when assembly language works perfectly well,” he replied.
The current Web might be capable of presenting all the real-time spatial data expected to flow into the Metaverse, Gelernter elaborates, but it wouldn’t be pretty. And it would keep us locked into a painfully mixed and inaccurate metaphor for our information environment–with “pages” that we “mark up” and collect into “sites” that we “go to” by means of a “locator” (the L in URL)–when a much more natural one is available. “The perception of the Web as geography is meaningless–it’s a random graph,” Gelernter says. “But I know my physical surroundings. I have a general feel for the world. This is what humans are built for, and this is the way they will want to deal with their computers.”
We all know the web itself will once again morph into something completely different. Geospatial positioning is intuitive for structuring our reality, so why not use it to structure cyberspace? And yeah, this certainly brings us on track to move ever closer toward a post-human society. When smart phones are passé and augmented reality devices become the norm, our cultural patterns of interaction will again shift in counter-intuitive ways. When combined with transformations to our bodies we see with prosthetics research, and transformations of machines with robots and AI advances, our society may look very different far sooner than we think.
I often watch movies that I think “might” be cyberpunk in nature that end up not really fitting for one reason or another. One movie I enjoyed that fit this was the Japanese movie, Hinokio (Akiyama, 2005). In Hinokio, a robotics scientist tries to help his very disturbed son by making him a robot double who can go to school for him and interact with other students. His son is able to control all the movements of this robot, and can talk through it, etc. In the real world, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University is working on the same concept in creating his “Geminoid” which was designed by using a model of his body and hair from his head. Many articles discussed this, here’s one:
Ever wished you could be in two places at one time? A Japanese researcher has managed it, through a robot that looks and moves exactly like him…He can see through its eyes, which act like cameras that beam images back to a monitor. Ishiguro, who moves his neck or hands to give the robot human-like twitches, is very attached to his robotic twin…
Ishiguro controls the android’s movements with a remote control and sensors attached to his body. When you poke its face, the robot grimaces like a real human, thanks to the more than 50 sensors and motors that are implanted beneath its lifelike skin. It appears to breathe when compressed air is pumped through its body.
“I don’t find any particular difference between talking through Geminoid and talking as myself,” he said. “And curiously, when the body of Geminoid is touched by somebody, I get very similar feelings of being touched.”
This approach of creating a “communications double” is far more attainable than the creation of a sentient robot. In essence, the problem has been decomposed to focusing on creating realistic human movements via messages sent from a host. While this is still an extremely difficult problem, just looking at the robots created over the last few years, they are making incredible headway.
Geminoid is a modern variant on an old idea, a humanoid robot designed in his creator’s image, down to the tiniest of details. The skin tone, the spectacles, and even the lengthy hairs on its head are the same as Hiroshi Ishiguro’s, a robotics expert at the Osaka University who built his doppelganger as a stand-in for when he is otherwise engaged…
Dr Ishiguro believes robots like Geminoid will in future allow people to be where they cannot be. Speaking through Geminoid, he says, has become natural, an extension of himself.
It’s always interesting to see how these really cool technological advances are predicted to affect the world. While its certainly possible that this technology can be used to cut travel costs, one can envision a myriad of other, perhaps more important applications. If combined with, say, a really powerful VR application, you can imagine invalids traveling to the moon, for instance. Another interesting thought is the idea that combining these robots with a sort of “proto-intelligence” might allow one person to “control” a group of them. The human can pass on broad directions or program parameters, which are then acted on by the robot team.
A short walk down Gaien-Higasi Dori in Roppongi will reveal to you a world of Discount shops, trendy night clubs and sushi bars. But at the Roi Building on the 12th floor there’s two things and two things only that will greet you - Media and Information.
Sporting shower rooms, Internet, free drinks (food was extra), 100+ seating (including dual/quad and ladies only seating) and a vast collection of any kind of media you could think of. One could theoretically live here for ever. The only thing standing in the way of maintaining your cyber-addiction is the fee and the money required to pay for said fee.
When I went in they were offering a day package, 980 Yen would net me a cube and all the coffee I would need for 3 hours. The clerk right off the bat asked “Smoking? Or non?” “Smoking” I replied, Ultra smoking. So I got my receipt and was shown my cube on the map. F-12 Dual seating. I quick made a pit stop at the coffee bar, grabbed a ashtray and I was on my way. I wasn’t sure what I was in the mood for, A library size collection of Manga (Every Akira, But no GITS), Magazines (TIME, Sass) and Porn (Playboy etc, etc.) greeted me as soon as I walked away from the counter. Deciding on the good ole’ fashion tubes of the Internet, me, my ashtray and coffee set off for my cube.
Cubes. Lots of cubes: Tucked away in a corner of the floor in a dark, quiet maze of cubes I found F-12. Kicking off my shoes at the door, I opened it up. Like a mini-living room, it has a TV, DVD player, PC (Running WinXP Home), Headphones and a PS2. Also each cube had a phone so you could order whatever you needed. Each cube had black leather cushioning and had seat formed cushions on top of that for back support. The only thing these cubes were missing were IVs and catheters. I turned on a lamp and began my session.
Internet? PC Gripes and tubes: I surfed some of my usual spots; cyberpunk review and googled some random stuff. My session was pretty fast, pages were would pop up fairly quickly. I wouldn’t expect it not to, seeing some people spend all night here and fast tubes is a must. I must of came in before basic maintenance because the pc was running sluggish when having to load anything (Didn’t really hinder my experience, plus I feel for their IT). My biggest whine is that they don’t offer OS’s other than Windows, and it would be a nice change if places would start to offer Linux and/or Mac, instead of just WinXP. I would gladly pay 100 extra Yen an hour for a little OS change. But like I said it’s personal not necessary.
Dark room: This place is quieter then any library I’ve ever been in. In the background you can hear clicking of keyboards, people shifting in their seats and the occasional clearing of the throat. but otherwise it was dead silent. I had a window cube so I could pop open the curtain and see the street below bustling with life. Not that the silence bothered me but it was a nice reminder that the world was still there. I can see why, staying the night you wouldn’t want to be bothered with the real world or be reminded of one while you were going on a media/coffee binge.The only light source was from lamps and the sunlight creeping in from the curtains.
Overall? As I exited the elevator and was greeted by the raining Roppongi afternoon I met up with my girlfriend. As the cool rain beat down on me, I pulled the hood up on my black hoody and walked across the street to meet up with her, clubs and bars starting to open up exclaiming that happy hour was now indeed in effect. “How did your thing go?” How did it go? What was my experience? On that twelfth floor there was a soft lonely feeling, a nagging at, you might not forget. No matter how lonely and cold it can be, soft LCD glow can carry you home. I smiled, pulled the hoody tighter. And thought of a quote. “Well….There’s no there, there.”
The photos that I took were a little blurry so I apologize.
Similar to the tagline Albert Pyun’s movie, Nemisis (~86.5% is still human~), apparently we’re now saying similar things about sheep. But at least we’re not talking sheep cyborgs here. Instead, as reported in The Mail, we’re witnessing the first human-sheep chimeras.
Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.
Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s fetus.
He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.
The idea for increasing the number of available transplants is an interesting one. It does give yet another dimension to our upcoming post-human future. One wonders what the market dynamics will do with this. Perhaps the hospital systems will use this as a nice money generator - “Well, a full human liver costs an extra 15K, but I have this genetically modified sheep liver for a song!” Truly, at first glance, this sounds like something out of Transmetropolitan. Apparently others have similar thoughts, given their worries:
But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.
Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: “Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV.”
Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: “Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all.”
Hmm, sheep fusion, ey? Gives a whole new slant to the whole sex with farm animals thing!
Last week, cyberpunk legend and current futurist, Bruce Sterling wrote a nice piece in the Washington Post about how the time of the Greens has finally arrived. While this was predicted some years back, it took a while before things kicked in high gear.
In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don’t. They think I’m joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being “counter” and “alternative” — they don’t understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything — the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn’t go on. Glamorous green. I preached that stuff for years. I don’t have to preach it anymore, because it couldn’t be any louder. Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away.
Sounds like the world is finally starting to take notice. But the message isn’t so positive:
The time for action isn’t now. The time for action was 40 years ago. Today we live in a stricken world that bypassed its time for action. We have wreaked science-fiction levels of havoc on the unresisting carcass of Mother Nature. The real trouble is ahead of us.
Ah yes, yet another indication that our cyberpunked future is quickly merging with our present circumstances. One has to wonder what will happen when the impacts of our excesses start to truly affect the global economy. Sterling seems to view the Balkans as a bellweather for our global future:
Serbia may be the world’s single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.
But life isn’t all bad. Sterling ends things on a high note, where he gives us a glimpse of his wonderful ability to juxtapose circumstances:
So what’s the good part? They never gave up around here. On the contrary: There’s a certain vivid liveliness in the way they’re scrambling and clawing their way out of yawning abyss. The food is great, the women dress to kill, and sometimes they even laugh and dance.
For some reason, the last line reminds me of Edger Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. We laugh and dance now, but lets just hope Prince Prospero chose his guests more wisely this time…
In a recent post in the Meatspace forum, Stormtrooper of Death advocates the development of a new Cyberpunk Manifesto, ver 3.0. Stormtrooper of Death has started the process by creating a node in the Cyberpunk Wiki. The previous two version are reproduced here. In 2007, we’ve entered a world in which the power of mass collaboration is changing the mode of production (See Wikinomics for a good read on this subject). As a consequence, this process should also drive the development of a new cyberpunk manifesto. Please join us in writing this.
