I came across this book while searching the database of my local library for books written by Douglas Rushkoff, an American media theorist linked a few decades ago to the early cyberpunk and open source movements. As it turned out, this book is not actually written by him. He only wrote a short introduction. But the book is published by CyberSalon, a think-tank that focuses on the effect of the digital revolution on society, business, and culture. 22 Ideas About the Future brings together a collection of speculative fiction and non-fiction about our near-future centering on the impact of digital culture on health, community, retail, and money.
From the preface, written by Eva Pascoe:
Hopefully, this book demonstrates that "ethical data" is an oxymoron. It is akin to saying that ethical weapons are possible. There is no difference in using tech power to wield advantage with traditional guns, modern night-vision-equipped drones, or AI that triggers you to make choices you would not select on your own. ==At the end of every data capture and every data-scraping bot there is a loser and a winner. The winner is always the data scraper, rarely the data giver.
(p. 11)
The first part collects short stories on how our digital culture could change health in the near future. From the afterword of this part, written by Angus Fraser:
A relevant issue, without a doubt, in a world where we wear fitness trackers everywhere. The problem I see, of course, is that, under capitalism, everything is a commodity. None of this happens because corporations or the executives who run them are evil. It happens by design. Those are the rules of the game.The tools that exist to date, with few exceptions, detect a condition or situation. The next stage, as exemplified by blood sugar monitors now on the market, is suggestion. With this type of device, a remedial course of action is suggested when it detects a particular set of circumstances. The final decision to act is left up to the person interpreting the data. The final stage in this progression would be to intercede directly with treatment. In the case of a blood sugar monitor, this would mean a system that maintains the correct blood sugar level based on the person's observed state, an entirely real-time, closed loop system to maintain health.
I believe the adoption of such technology should remain local, by which I mean that the closed loop system should be under the control of the user. That data that is gathered and used should remain inside the closed loop unless the user "actively" decides to share it. A blood sugar monitor's efficiency might be improved if measurement and treatment data were shared to improve the treatment's AI model. However, the user who provides the information should be able to expect that the data's usage is strictly limited. The data they provide is not a commodity that can be further sold and traded.
(p. 39)
The second part collects stories about the retail business in the near future. Overall, the conclusion appears to be that, convenient as online commerce might be, we still need physical stores to build community and feel human.
Part three of the book shares stories about "the fabric of community", i.e. how a digital culture might impact our sense of community. Disconnect, by Wendy M. Grossman, portrays a world where local government is far more flexible, including a bit of a libertarian tint:
I'm sorry, but I've never been a big fan of libertarianism, in particular the American type. I find it extremist and demagogic. More to the point, perhaps, I find it selfish and self-centered. Under the guise of promoting "flexibility" and "freedom", the end result, in my opinion, is a serious reduction of freedom and wellbeing for the majority, even though it does allow a minority to live better. In Gathering Power, Stephen Oram tells us about a near future where some people choose to wear implants that connect them to other people quite deeply, allowing them to feel each other and, thus, building an extended community of sorts.See/ Total ignorance. The Communities Rights Atc, passed in 2027, strengthens communities —it's what the government said at the time, that communities proved their importance during the pandemic— and it allows us to be self-determining by bonding together in Independent Registered Associations (IRAs).
The Act creates three community types: geographical, local interest, and virtual. Geographical IRAs —geoIRAs— can opt out of council services and negotiate their own contracts for waste, recyclicng, and street cleaning, negotiate collectively for electricity, water, and gas, exploit "naming rights", and exercise the "right to inclusion." That one's really important, so new members share the IRA's values.
Our small cul-de-sac twenty homes quickly voted to become a geoIRA. We then contracted with the company that owns our freeholds for what used to be council services, and the freeholder subcontracted to the council anything it couldn't make profitable. Home care, for example.
Waste pickup is more efficient, and ending the council's "townscape" classification lets the north-side houses install awnings in front so their houses are cooler in summer. The council is still a problem, though. It's prosecuting us over the awnings.
(p. 78)
Each one of the implants scattered across her body represented a friend, a member of her cluster. A cluster initially drawn together around a shared obsession with the obscure art movement, Vorticism. She knew who was who from the implant's location and vaguely knew how they were feeling from the pattern of its vibrations. There was a beautiful harmony of frustration and comfort in being constantly aware that they were out there living their lives.
The implant that connected to Jake was still worrying her. He was the only one of her cluster who lived close by and the only one she had flesh-met and he was struggling with something, but she couldn't summon the energy to find out what was wrong. It was selfish, she kewn that. It was also about protecting herself from being swamped by whatever he had going on.
(p. 88)
In The Valens Program, Jesse Rowell writes about a future where fake reality is all over the place. This should be a wake-up call for us all, particularly now that we are experiencing this AI bubble that threatens to drown any reasonable discussion of the topic in marketing hype.
Referred to internally as the Lotus Server, a reference to the lotus-eaters in Greek mythology, the company created deepfake deviants with family histories and years of social media postings, photos, and videos for communities to examine and vilify. The ghosts that the Lotus Server wove into the fabric of society became so effective as to become hyperreal: People claimed to have known the deepfakes at some point in their lives, gone to school, or worked with them, and above all, hated them.
(p. 98)
The last part of the book, part four, is dedicated to digital money. In The Accountant, by Sophie Sparham, we read things like the following when the main character finds a coin on the street:
I shivered thinking back to the leather purse I used to carry in my left pocket, a time before the days of digital monitoring. A time when you could walk into a bar without having to turn your balance into alcohol credits, where your gym membership didn't count towards your health score, when bank statements weren't checked like passports. A time when I had a job. One that was above-board. There were few of us left now. Most had retrained or been sucked into Monetor, the financial monitoring conglomerate. I put the coin into my pocket and squoze it tight, stepping back onto the street. The wind picked up and I hitcked my scarf around my neck, crossing the road. My pager beeped. I pulled it from my pocket. This was the only way me and Akeel were able to keep in contact without them tracking us.
(p. 112)
In The Summoned, by Eva Pascoe, we learn a bit more about the deeply unequal system set up in a world where digital currency is all there is. She chooses the label "Tall Men" to name the financiers who work in "Tall Street". Obviously, it's a parody of Wall Street:
As in the case of my profound skepticism towards libertarianism mentioned above, here I also hold a very skeptic view of the supposedly liberating nature of the cryptocurrencies. Underneath all their paeans to freedom and anti-sistemic discourse, I see nothing but a thinly veiled ambition to disrupt the financial markets and unseat the current clique of powerful rich financiers to... simply take over their seats and replace them on the throne.With time, they became the sole handlers of new funding and banking. Their wealth grew as they concentrated their Alpha currency and became owners of all real estate. Then, the SUmmoned extracted fees from the people for access to anything from housing to transport, even digital worlds like the game platform Alphaverse. Tall Street Journal, where Tall Men's wives worked, praised their wins, reinforcing the idea of Tall Men's "magic" financial powers. It was a perfect setup that worked for centuries as the rich grew richer.
(p. 116)
The afterword to this fourth part of the book, written by David G. W. Birch, includes an interesting reflection at the end:
By the way, before you starts tweeting about the Gold Standard , or cryptocurrency or faster-than-light payments, note that right now the Taliban are paying Iran using not dollars, not bitcoin, but water. They have opened the Kamal Khan dam to release water for the Iranians to pay them back for sponsoring terrorist groups in Helmand. A Water Standard looks more likely in the fifty-degree future of the world than a gold standard or bitcoin. Truth is always stranger than fiction.
(p. 140)
Overall, while the book contains sketches of a few good ideas, none of them are minimally developed. This is almost by design, since each and every one of the stories only extends for a few pages. Also, truly, none of the ideas felt particularly shocking or exciting to me, to be honest. I'd say the book is not bad. But not good either. Mediocre is more like it.
Entertainment: 5/10
Content: 4/10