I’ve just had a chance to read and juxtapose two recently done articles: Remnants of the Biosphere (from BLDGBLOG) and Whatever Happened to Second Life? (from PC Pro).

The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.

I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.

Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.

This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?

I just read a very thought-provoking article by author Michael Chabon (pdf form here) on the idea of the future. Chabon was (2 years ago, in this case) writing about the Clock of the Long Now – a project of the Long Now Foundation: a group hoping to promote better long-term thinking in many areas. What Chabon writes is very interesting to me, for all sorts of reasons. I suppose it helps that I already enjoy his books, but his insights on this issue are very good, as well as being connected to some of our earlier posting about “alternative futures”. One thing that I automatically agreed with is that our imaginations lead us into our pursuits and inventions. Chabon makes the intriguing point, though, that “the future” – as it has come to be pursued – is really rather archaic (if you can call the 1950s that).

There is an oddness in realizing that, having done everything the “future” of the past wanted to accomplish (minus infinite food supplies and personal rocket packs), we are yet confronted by the same difficulties – and yet more deeply, perhaps we have lived out our past’s version of the future and now don’t know what to do next. There is no more future of the past to live out. So as we see the power of the imaginations of those from envisioned the future before, it should inspire us to re-envision for ourselves that future.

But part of the problem now is that “the future” previously envisioned hasn’t amounted to the utopia imagined – it’s just gotten filled with all of the gadgets and systematization we “always wanted”. The Clock that the Long Now Foundation is making reminds Chabon (and many others who think about this project) to take time to imagine life 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. The incredible thing is, this can sometimes produce only a blank slate – forcing us to realize just how little vision we actually have, and how much “the future” of 60-year-old sci-fi is really a function of the past and present, rather than something we’re actively and creatively thinking about.

I’ve started to pay more attention to things Kevin Kelly is writing, especially on the “non-neutrality” of technology. His Technium is going to be a very important piece as we consider the issue of alternative futures and the imaginative visions driving those possible directions (in fact, the Technium project seems to be Kelly’s direct response to Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near). The post that I’ve just been reading today is “Triumph of the Default” (June 22, 2009). Kelly is commenting on the hidden influence on users’ experience of technology as it comes from its makers loaded with biases and presumed ideals. I quote the posting at length here:

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases.  We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.

I think it becomes obvious that our “defaults” as producers and artists – while not controlling the use or interpretation of our work – definitely carry implications to audiences. We want people to take it a certain way, even if that certain way is “to keep an open mind and not assume it only has one meaning.” This is one of many ways in which the presentation space – physical, acoustic, visual, etc. – profoundly influences audience experiences. Think of the difference between taking in a movie passively on a small laptop screen while simultaneously facebooking/twittering/youtubing  around and actually taking the trek downtown to that little theater that plays the independent films on a huge screen with warm projected light beaming through always high-resolution analog film (thanks to Read Schuchardt from his thoughts on this topic). Each format “wants” something different from you – and your behavior as a viewer trends toward that demand, even or especially through inaction (as Kelly points out, on a more general basis). This relates directly to whether we will use technology as it is handed to us, or make something else out of it – whether we will shape the tool, or be shaped by it.

For more from Kevin Kelly, watch his TED talk from several years back on the evolution of technology: