People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we're slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney's position as the Times' science columnist gives him more authority than Will's as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he's also eager to buy into the hype whenever there's a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It's hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney's columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He's a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there's "some risk" that global warming will be a danger.) But he's given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he's done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney's world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who's been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own "authority in the political debate" and tarnish their opponents.

And Tierney implies that scientists sign on with the global-warming orthodoxy because that's where the money is. (One blog post is provocatively titled, "Global Warming Payola?".) And the idea that we're cooking the planet is sold to the public by taking advantage of natural disasters and tragic images of sad polar bears:

Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention - and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Recently, Tierney has also been pounding on the common conservative meme that the same scientists who now warn about global warming were warning, in the 1970s, that we faced a new human-made ice age. Since they were so wrong back then, and have changed their tune so drastically, the implication is, why should we believe them now? (The meme is massively overplayed, but even if it were true, so what? Smart people adjust their views when they receive new information. And when the data becomes overwhelming, only idiots and tools stay agnostic.)

You should definitely read Andrew Leonard's takedown (at Salon.com) of one of Tierney's columns, in which he basically claims that the more energy we use, the faster we'll solve any environmental problems — because we'll all get richer, and rich people demand clean air. (Shorter version: CO2 is odorless and colorless, so relying on wealthy people's distaste for smog won't do much good.)

I'm not just picking on Tierney because he's the science columnist at one of our biggest newspapers — I'm fascinated with him because while he paints global-warming concerns as pure hype, he's also one of the biggest boosters of the hype around the Singularity, as simplified by Ray Kurzweil and others. Reading Tierney's writing makes me wonder if the two things (skepticism on pressing, real problems, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for fictional, easy solutions) go hand in hand.

In fact, Tierney has explicitly pushed the idea of a technological Singularity, happening by 2030, as the alternative to neo-Malthusian warnings that overpopulation will result in starvation and environmental disasters. In one blog post, "Malthus Vs. The Singularity," Tierney cites a paper by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum saying that the Singularity could speed up our economic growth so much, our economy would double within a month. (Or even a week.) Says Tierney, this provides an alternative to that downer Malthusian view:

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I'd bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil's graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Here's a smaller version of the Ray Kurzweil graph he's talking about:

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, was a frequent touchstone in Tierney's column and blog posts in the summer of 2008, although not so much since then. And the idea that you can extrapolate from existing trends in computing power into the next century is a cornerstone of Kurzweil's prediction that machines smarter than humans are coming in the next few decades. (Actually, the graph maps "calculations per second per $1,000," which seems a tad arbitrary — and how do you measure how many human brains $1,000 will buy you?)

Tierney eagerly seizes on Kurzweil's predictions that rapidly accelerating technological advances will solve all of our problems — he's devoted a column and at least one blog post to Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns, which says that progress has been speeding up since the beginning of life on Earth. (There are more charts, which show the timeline between multi-cellular organisms and the development of mammals, versus between the Industrial Revolution and the development of the personal computer. Guess which took longer?) According to Kurzweil, the time between Paradigm Shifts has been halving with each decade, and soon our paradigms will be shifting constantly.

Among other things, that means we'll have unlimited clean energy soon, life expectancy will start shooting up every year "faster than you're aging," and all of our problems will be solved. In another blog post, Tierney addresses his commenters who doubt Kurzweil's Law. (Don't they realize it's a Law?):

In response to my Findings column about [Kurzweil] and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it's naive to assume exponential progress can go on - that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history, but before explaining why I like Mr. Kurzweil's theory more than theirs, let me grant them a couple of points. First, there is no guarantee that exponential increases in computer power will continue, or that the exponential growth in computer science will be matched in other fields. One of the most common mistakes of technoprophets is to assume that the the technology du jour will shape the future. When radio was invented, futurists envisioned locomotives powered by radio waves; when atomic power was discovered, there were predictions of nuclear-powered car in every garage.

Also, futurists tend to underestimate the social and political obstacles to progress, so they're often too optimistic about how soon people's lives will be transformed. Just because new tools exist doesn't mean they'll be used widely. Donald Norman, a technology expert profiled in my Findings column in December, says the chief problems to overcome in introducing new technologies involve people, not machines.

That said, after watching the impact of computers on so many fields, I share Mr. Kurzweil's belief that these tools are especially transformative and that change is just going to accelerate. Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits - with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors - they jumped to a new technology, and they're already working on successors to today's chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it's naive to ignore the trend of the past century - or the past 10,000 years.

The Cassandras have been warning of limits and resource depletion and population crashes for thousands of years, but as Julian Simon explained, we've kept exceeding limits and finding new resources and extending our life expectancy. The new problems lead to new solutions that leave us better off in the long run. Today's Cassandras are focused on climate change, which could bring real problems, but to think these problems are insurmountable seems to me as short-sighted as the prophecies of the 1960s ("overpopulation" leading to worldwide famines) and 1970s (the exhaustion of energy supplies).

If anything, climate change seems much more manageable than previous "crises" because the chief consequences are so far in the future. We have decades to figure out ways to deal with it: to find carbon-free sources of energy, to develop techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering the climate, or simply to adapt. These are all formidable challenges, but our tools for dealing with them are going to be improving exponentially, as Mr. Kurzweil argues.

So once again, you see the connection — even as Tierney says that we have decades to figure out what to do about climate change, he's also tremendously excited about a Singularity in which all our troubles will melt away and magic robots will carry us into the cyber-heaven on their shoulders. Rather than viewing the Singularity as a huge disruption, one which we can't possibly understand in advance, as many science fiction writers have done, Tierney buys into the hype that the Singularity will give us unlimited rice pudding.

You'll notice the mention of "geoengineering" in that last paragraph — it's another one of Tierney's favorite pie-in-the-sky themes. If it really does turn out that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing some problems, there's a potential fix that doesn't involve making any sacrifices:

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Possible ideas include lofting aerosol particles into the ionosphere to reflect shortwave radiation back into space, spraying seawater mist into low-lying clouds, to brighten them and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have pooh-poohed the idea of geoengineering because — wait for it! — they don't want to lose the prestige and money they've gotten from warning about carbon emissions. But there are real reasons to think that geo-engineering without reduction in carbon emissions would be worse than doing nothing — and that's if it even succeeds. Futurist Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking The Earth, writes in the Wall Street Journal recently:

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a "techno-fix." It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who's to blame if Country A's geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let's be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload...

[Geoengineering] would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can't let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we'd simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road.

Cascio explains further here:

I'm an optimistic person — but my optimism comes from a faith that we, as human beings, will figure out a way to change what we're doing before it's too late. I don't believe there are magical "get out of eco-hell free" cards lying around, or that the Singularity is going to solve all of our problems. The Singularity has given us some fantastic science-fiction novels by people like Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — but it's not going to come true, any more than the novels 1984 or 2001 were accurate descriptions of those years in real life. But even if computers did become smarter than humans in 100 years' time — for some values of "smarter" — I'm not sure that would save us from the results of our own fecklessness. For one thing, who's to say those super-smart computers would care whether the Earth was habitable for humans?

You can certainly look at our history, as a species, and see an unbroken line of progress. But you can also see many eras where we've driven ourselves into a technological hole (the Dark Ages come to mind) or engineered ourselves into mass starvation (China's Great Leap Forward was a purely human-made catastrophe.) There's certainly no guarantee that we get to have an unbroken upward progression going on for ever and ever.

We'll get a beautiful future — but only if we work for it. The idea that a wonderful, shining future will be handed to us, or that the awful dilemmas we're facing as a species will just go away, feels worse than foolish. It feels like sabotaging the future, for the sake of a bit more comfort and a false sense of security today.

If Tierney only used his bully pulpit at the Times to raise doubts about global warming, he'd just be one of many obstacles to saving our planet. But the fact that he's simultaneously guzzling the Kool Aid on things like Ray Kurzweil's Panglossian Law of Perfect Awesomeness and the mad-science easy fix for global warming makes him something much worse. His cheery outlook is actually helping to ruin our future.

The key thing to remember when thinking about the economic AI takeover is that it is not something we should be trying to prevent. Why shouldn't we, the human race as a whole, build machines to do the hard work we need done, and spend our time enjoying the resulting wealth? Why shouldn't we spend our efforts deciding what needs to be done, and let the machines do it

Sounds very Asimovian.

via Foresight Institute

Density Design created this infographic for the new issue of Wired Italia based on predictions made by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. You can view the full-sized chart on Flickr, but the individual pieces are laid out below.

We Will Be Here — The Map of the Future [Behance via Nerdcore]

Photographer Mathieu Young took these intimate pictures of a small pot farm at harvest time. We see the whole process, from the harvest in hidden greenhouses to the trimming, sorting, drying, and packaging for shipment. I keep imagining that they are growing lettuce and fruit to share with a small, underground collective of organic farmers who don't want to pay a licensing fee to farm. Or maybe I've just been reading too much Margaret Atwood.

See the whole amazing sequence of photos in this gallery by Mathieu Young [via Dose Nation]

I believe with p = 0.6 that the world is in for a "great disruption." It has come to MSM first but it will not end there. In the longer run I am optimistic about the results of this change — computers will free up lots of human labor — but in the meantime it will have drastic implications for income redistribution, across both individuals and across economic sectors. For a core metaphor, the internet displacing paid journalism and classified ads is a good place to start. The value of newspapers has been sucked into Google.

Later, we'll be much better at measuring which research Ph.d's are contributing value and which ones are not, or at least we'll think we are. Since academic achievements follow a Power Law, that will mean a huge ouch for many would-be academicians. The new professor will need to be skilled in assembling collages of information, raising money, and communicating to broader public audiences. Either that or his research should be very obviously of the top order. The distribution of income across professors will become radically less equal as indeed the trend has been for well over a decade now.

So enjoy your laughs at the shrinking newspapers, Professors — you're next! [Marginal Revolution via The Economist]

Roth has declared the novel all but doomed, saying that within 25 years, its audience will have dwindled to a "cultic" minority, going the way of Latin poetry and similar archaic art forms. The issue, he says, is that books simply can't compete with television and other screen-based entertainment.

He said it was "the print that's the problem, it's the book, the object itself". "To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities," he said.

Of course, others don't have such dire predictions for the fate of written literature. Just a few weeks ago, we spoke to writer Cory Doctorow about the future of the novel, and his view was that the web actually increases interest in and access to print novels.

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult within 25 years [Guardian via Bookninja]

Over at Hilobrow, Joshua Glenn writes:

What does this mean for men, you ask? John Broome, author of "It's a Woman's World," a science fiction story that appeared in the DC comic book Mystery in Space (#8), asked the same thing way back in July 1952. As the panels shown here demonstrate, Broome predicted that women would one day cruelly discriminate against men - force them to work in the home, while women ran businesses and fought wars.

But luckily, the men fight for their rights and come out back on top.

More awesomeness via Hilobrow

Written in 20 year increments, The Next 100 Years by George Friedman looks out over our coming century, with an eye towards geopolitics and international power. In the next twenty years, Friedman predicts that the global war on terror, which he terms the US-Jihadist war, will be winding down, a smaller conflict that will have little consequence after all is said and done.

Instead, numerous problems will crop up in the former Soviet bloc as Russia works to regain its former power by reclaiming older territories through economic growth and outright bullying. To an extent, this has already been hapepning, especially if you look at the short-lived war last year in Georgia, as well as the outcry in Poland more recently as the United States decided to pull its missiles out of the country in favor of settling Russian concerns and more mobile missile platforms. However, Friedman views this growth as short-lived, and predicts that Russia, while growing over the next decade or so, will run out of stream due to a decreasing population and declining economy.

Friedman blames declining birth rates for the declining fortunes of a number of nations — and this is a sort of side-effect of an industrial nation. Pre-industrial countries required higher birthrates in order to counter-balance a higher infant mortality rate. With people entering the workforce at a later age, with increases in medicine and the lowered need of numerous contributors in a household, Friedman argues that there's little need for larger families.

Thus, a major point of conflict in the next century, especially in the next fifty years as populations begin to drop, won't be over immigrants illegally entering countries, it will be over which countries can lure in the most new workers to help prop up their own economies and lagging workforces.

While the major powers around the world such as the United States and Russia will have economic slowdowns during this stretch, smaller nations will use this opportunity to rise on their own. Friedman notes that the larger nations won't be down and out for the count, and will thus be powers to be reckoned with - conflict will arise between the United States, which, in his view, will remain the most powerful nation on the planet, and these new players. Friedman singles out three countries, in particular, that will become the next major powers during the 21st century: Turkey, Japan and Poland, with other nations, such as Mexico, becoming far more powerful in their respective regions.

Why these three? All of them currently have advantages that will help them in the coming decades. Japan's economy is slowly growing again. Friedman believes that China will fragment under its rapid economic growth and growing internal troubles, which will further allow Japan to become a leader in the region. Friedman looks to past examples of Japan managing to take over Southeast Asia, at various points in the region's history, as further evidence of this.

As for Turkey, this country sandwiched between Europe and the Middle East will become more and more important strategically, and will become a more vital ally to the United States as Russia first expands and then collapses. In th midst of the Middle East's chaos, Turkey will be able to resist Russia and grow its own economy — and Turkey has traditionally been the leader in that part of the world for much of its history, when it was known as the Ottoman Empire.

Finally, Poland is singled out because it is essentially between two hard places - Germany and Russia. Fearing both, it will seek to expand its influence as Russia consolidates its power back towards its center. Because of its location, Poland has been overrun numerous times by both countries, and would likewise receive US support as Russia grows, because it represents a strategic location. It's entirely possible that those missile systems will be installed after all.

At this point in time, Friedman turns to an inevitable development for many countries - space travel, and how that relates to a country's strategic needs. The United States, he argues, is able to maintain a dominant position over the rest of the planet, because of its armed forces and economic power. A major tool in the U.S. arsenal is the ability to monitor and view every inch of the planet, mainly through the development over the last half century in satellite and surveillance technology. Other nations will inevitably (if they haven't already) develop their own space programs for this very purpose, and look into ways of disrupting the ability of the United States to do the same. At the same time, the US will seek to construct better methods of doing this, including larger crewed systems that could very well be operated by crews that number in the hundreds. At some point in the 2020s-2040s, numerous countries will be utilizing the Moon for scientific and defensive purposes, both overtly and covertly.

This shift in global power, Friedman predicts, will make conflict inevitable, between the United States and these three rising powers, who will loosely band together into a coallition. In order to disrupt the United State's orbital systems, Japan, (on Thanksgiving day, around 2050) will attempt to destroy one of these orbiting platforms from lunar initiated strikes, to maximize the shock value and surprise, in a move reminiscent of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, propelling the countries into war. The United States, faced with destruction of a key military asset, will go to war, as it has done with Pearl Harbor, the Maine and the World Trade Center. The US will retaliate with reserve forces that will eliminate enemy satellites, while soldiers on US lunar bases will attack their Japanese counterparts. By around this time, the US will also have the ablility to field armored infantrymen, straight out of the numerous SF novels and films that have come before.

Essentially, the world will be at war, with Turkey and Poland (Turkey fighting for control over Europe), and Japan fighting to maintain a hold over Asia, with the United States emmeshed in both sides of the conflict. This warfare will be characterized by air forces, robotic forces and enhanced soldiers, and will rely in electrical power grids and other resources as soldiers fight across new battlefields in Europe and Asia. Space will be a vital element, as it allows for communications and the ability to watch a battlefield from a better birds eye view. Friedman theorizes that there will likely be breakthroughs in technology that will allow for microwave and solar energy to be directly utilizied on the battlefield, which might further change how warfare is fought in the future.

Friedman believes this war will last for around two years, through to 2052, when the coalition powers (Turkey and Japan) would be pushed so far as to begin to threaten nuclear retaliation. By this point, the United States will be seeking to push their enemies to sue for peace, rather than destroy them with nuclear weapons. The end result will be a shifting of powers in both the Middle East and Asia, with new nations created in a peace conference. The United States will have better control over space, and will have an expanded economy as a result of the war. America and its allies will prosper in the aftermath of the war. With war as a catalyst to essentially force the evolution of military capabilities and technology, Friedman believes that a war such as this will help to encourage space technology, which in turn will help inform civilian technology. Along with it, he notes, there will be a resurgence in American culture that begin to spread out over the globe, much as what happened during the 1950s-1970s.

By the 2080s, the United States will remain an economic and cultural powerhouse. However, Friedman believes that Mexico will be have been growing while all of this has been happening, and that it will become a dominant rival power in North America. In particular, this sort of rise will be problematic for the United States, because of a large ethnic group that will strongly identify with Mexico, one that has easy access to their homeland.

Rises in robotic technology will displace work forces from unskilled to skilled worked, and thus, unemployment will rise, which will cause problems domestically. Friedman cites a number of reasons, such as oil production and possible shifts in industry from legalized drug trades as a possible method for Mexico to increase its GDP. As Mexico rises, so too will tensions, domestically and internationally, rise between the US and its southern neighbor. Conflict will break out in the Southwest United States as a result of this, although it will be fairly low-key, and last for the rest of the century.

Now, obviously, there are issues with this future, as might be expected with any sort of look to the coming years. While Friedman notes that to look at the future, one must expect a sort of larger view that can gradually bring in vastly different environments from the present, some of his claims seem very outlandish, especially around the specifics. Additionally, he seems to disregard things such as the current 'US-Jihadist' war, which will likely last much longer - the issues in the middle east are long-standing, and neither side seems ready to give up or change to end the conflict.

Secondly, there seems to be a heavy reliance on the actions of the past that will inform the future. While Europe is a fantastic example of history repeating itself when it comes to warfare - German, Russian aggression, etc - the rest of the world generally doesn't seem to function in much the same way. The English, despite their long history as a maritime power, lost that status with the rise of the United States during the two World Wars, while European powers have not demonstrated any real interest in reclaiming influence in Africa, South America or Asia. Looking at the past is not a reliable method of looking at the future. While there are certainly examples (and some that are justly there) of this, it isn't the general rule of thumb that Friedman comes to rely on.

The main strength of this book is one of examination of the world as it is right now, and how that will inform the next two decades, and how those years will possibly inform the next. The years closest to the present are much easier to look at with a higher degree of certainty than decades from now. Friedman imparts some very good advice by pulling the perspective of the years out to a much larger view - as someone who studied geology and history in college, I can attest that looking at history in decades, centuries, millennia and eons will bring about much different perspectives on world affairs than what one might gain by only reading the newspaper or listening to the radio for current events.

The future that Friedman presents does seem very far fetched, but at the same time, somewhat plausible. Will Japan attack the United States in 2050 on Thanksgiving Day? Unlikely, but the important lesson here is the chain of events, brought together by a chain of geopolitical actions, will happen, either with that result, or with very different outcomes. The future will likely bring new conflict, war and problems — and along with them, large-scale shifts in how the world works.

In a way, Friedman presents a far different future than most of the older science fiction predictions, and more in line with some of the newer ones. (Charles Stross and Paolo Bacigalupi come to mind for modern-day examples of this.) What is certain, however, is that the actions of today will inform that of tomorrow. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to begin reading up on some of the more unlikely countries around the world. I'll be learning all there is to know about Croatia - it could be handy in my lifetime.

io9: Tell us about how you got into futurism.

Karl Schroeder: Around 2005 the Canadian army tapped me to do a dramatization for a series of foresight workshops they'd done. They had stacks of papers and needed it boiled down to something simple enough for a 4-star general to understand. We decided to do it as a story. That's how I created "Crisis in Zefra." The African city-state of Zefra was their invention and they let me do whatever I wanted with it. The army published it and you can download it. [PDF]

And this is not the first time that the Canadian military has hired a writer to create a fictionalized future. The first time was over 100 years ago, so it's an old tradition, and it's an effective way to communicate extremely complex sets of ideas.

That story was set 20 years in the future. What did you learn from writing it?

Looked at in isolation, each new technology or advance seemed to imply one outcome, but when you combine them in a story you quickly find that they influence each other in unpredictable ways. For nearly every new laser beam or autonomous armor suit or wahtever they came up with, I found that the most effective defense was the smart phone, particularly in its capacity to be used to create smart mobs.

The smart mob tended to trump any of the cool technologies that were deployed in my imaginary story.

So what do you study in a futurism graduate program?

We study product design as well as process design, with an eye toward how innovation happens in business and science. As graduates, we could go into business or government, and look at ways to cope with change.

How does being a futurist compare to being a science fiction writer?

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer I'm never required to be right.

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.

Let's talk about your science fiction. In your Virga novels, you combine classic characters and adventures with these incredible, high-tech settings. Why do you like to combine what is arguably old-fashioned with the new?

When Cory Doctorow and I wrote The Complete Idiot's Guide to Science Fiction, one of the suggestions I made was that you can get away with varying the setting, or the technologies, or the characters, or the plotline in SF - but you cannot get away with varying or changing all of them. I call that the principle of constants and variables. You can play with some features of the world as variables - set it in the future or the past - or can do a "what if" about technologies. But for a reader to have any anchor to understand the story and empathize with the characters, you have to have constants, things that are not changed.

With the Virga books, I carefully chose a set of variables and constants. The constants were easily-identifiable classic adventure characters in a steampunk type society. With the characters and the cultures to anchor you, you're free to explore Virga, which is otherwise disorienting.

The politics in Virga are also really interesting . . .

Various political themes emerge from my books as I write them. Primarily what I wanted to do with the Virga books was show the sheer fertility of science fiction. I decided not to use ideas from different eras, but classic stories as templates. Sun of Suns was something I consciously thought of as Master and Commander in space. Queen of Candescewas the Count of Monte Cristo. Pirate Sun was The Odyssey. With Sunless Countries, what I had in mind was Bridget Jones.

I brought in old science too. Virga is designed as Newtonian science fiction. There is no science in the series that was discovered past 1940. I wanted to show there is still so much to be discovered and invented in SF even if we limited ourselves to what we knew 100 years ago.

Sometimes artists talk about how they don't want to be psychoanalyzed because it will ruin the inspiration for their work. Do you worry that studying futurism might do something similar to your science fiction?

There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF. What I have noticed in the last 5-6 years the foresight work I've done has provided ideas for near-future SF. I want to dive wholeheartedly into near-future SF, something set 5 to 50 years in the future, that is rigorously based on foresight.

One of the things I did in my novel Lady of Mazes was propose a new model of what it means to be human. That's exactly what I want to follow through on when I start writing near-future SF. I strongly feel that if you're going to write about the effects of cognitive science on us as individuals and as a society, you have to be prepared to take a leap into radically new vision of what it means to be a person. That's what I'll be exploring. I'm going to do it in the context of a computer programmer from the slums of India, and a midwest housewife who burns down her house and runs away - these are people who are instantly understandable.

What are you currently working on?

The fifth and likely final novel in the Virga series, titled Ashes of Candesce. I'm also writing a number of short stories set in Virga. After that I'm planning to do some near-future writing.

Image from the cover of Pirate Sun, art by Stephen Martiniere.

Actually, reading Locus Magazine's write-up, it sounds like MacNeill predicted handheld devices connected to a mainframe, which was more in line with what we actually had in 1980. MacNeill told Locus:

I came up with the one about 'home computer terminals with interactive access to other home, business and academic terminals, and including hand-held terminals' mostly because I had been using the PLATO terminals in Uris Hall at Cornell and wished very, very much that I could have one of my own (and especially one that I could carry around with me).

Ed Ferman, who was editor of F&SF in 1980, says it's disappointing to see how optimistic many of the 30-year-old predictions for 2010 were, and how far short we've fallen. (Although there are still a couple months left — everybody innovate really really hard!) [Locus Magazine]

This year's Arse features performances and presentations from a ton of amazing folks, including R.U. Sirius, Jonathon Keats, Ani Niow, Jason Scott, Rose White, Violet Blue, and even yours truly (I'm going to be part of the opening ceremonies on Thursday, showing some gay porn mashups from Japan; and then I'm speaking on Saturday about the future of love). There will be a party at the Center for Sex and Culture, as well as a hands-on technical workshop on Sunday at San Francisco's kickass hacker space Noisebridge.

You can peruse the whole schedule on the Arse Elektronika site, but here's a quick overview:

October 1 (6 PM-midnight): Film festival, opening ceremony and Prixxx Arse Elektronika Gala @ Roxie Theater
October 2 (8 PM-midnight): Art, pixels, interactive performance @ Center for Sex and Culture
October 3 (11:30 AM-9 PM): Talks and discourse @ PariSoMa
October 3 (after 10 PM): Party and performance night @ Femina Potens Gallery
October 4 (12 noon-10 PM): DIY workshops @ Noisebridge

Here's how the organizers introduce this year's theme:

Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called "Culture" in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the "Culture" are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.
Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century. Don't you think, replicants?

I love a conference about sexual futurism that begins with a long discussion of Iain M. Banks. And so will you!

Find out more at the Arse Elektronika site, and buy tickets here. (Tickets are for the events Thursday and Friday night, as well as Saturday lectures. Saturday night performances and Sunday workshops are free and open to the public.)

One of the most haunting images from recent science fiction is the garbage city where trash-compacting robot Wall-E has lived for hundreds of years. Abandoned by the humans who polluted it, the Earth has become a planet of skyscrapers made of compact blocks of garbage created by Wall-E and his cohort. But now even Wall-E's fellow robots have become garbage, their bodies good for nothing but scavenging spare parts.

The garbage cities of Wall-E represent a classic fear expressed in both fiction and public discussion about human civilization. Put simply, we fear that the good parts of our cities - the culture and science and progress - will be unable to outrun the waste, crime, and greed spawned by urban decay.

But the city is also utopian, representing the very best that human civilization has to offer. Cities tease us with the possibility of living in a place where clean energy and scientific progress have released humans from the realm of necessity. No longer forced to squabble over scarce resources to survive, the humans in these cities are free to explore ideas, creating new technologies and art.

The density of human life in cities breeds what Fritz Lieber dubbed "megalopolisomancy," or city magic. With so many lives interconnected by time and space in one small area, you're bound to start seeing ghosts. There's something dark and mystical about urban life, where possibility shades into probability without much warning. Spasms of weath generate surreal structures and events; vast communities of artists build imaginary worlds in the middle of the street. If mirrored buildings can disappear into clouds, and shop windows promise perfect bodies draped in gold, why can't vampires lurk in alleys and mutants live in storm drains?

All week long, io9 will take you into the breathtaking, bizarre, and mysterious world of the city. We'll cover everything from great science fictional cities, to cities of the future that already exist today. In art and in stories, we'll explore urban fantasy, urban reality, and urban science. Cities are humanity at its highest concentration. As they stand or fall, so does humanity.

Images, from top to bottom, via:
Viktor Antonov
Wall-E
Tomorrow's Thoughts Today
Audic at Deviant Art

I sat down with Lassen a few weeks ago in a Montreal coffee shop during Worldcon to talk about the future of publishing.

io9: Do you think e-books are the future of science fiction publishing?

JL: The distribution mechanism for books has been broken for a long time. Books on the midlist have gone from selling 200 thousand copies 20 thousand because the distribution network doesn't get them in front of people's eyes. There is no distribution outside bookstores.

So I think ebooks are the natural successor to disposable mass market paperbacks. Mass market paperbacks are just not cost effective today. It used to be that you'd go to a grocery store and there would be an aisle of mass market paperbacks. That aisle is now cheap DVDs. Publishers just don't have access to the mass market.

What e-books share with the mass market paperback is cheapness - and their sense of intangiblity is similar to mass market paperback. What I mean is that you don't make an attachment to it as a physical object. Some people do horde mass market paperbacks, but most see them as ephemeral.

I think the mass market is going to flip on a generational basis. Everybody I talk to says "I love paper and the feel of it." I get that, but it's a generational thing. My brother consumes all his media on his computer screen on his mobile. That's where he consumes his media. He doesn't watch movies or TV either - he downloads stuff. Makes sense that he'd consume books the same way.

So how do we solve the distribution problem with e-books?

You need to grow the market for fiction by getting e-books in front of people who don't normally see books. When a kid buys Bioshock 2 on Amazon, then Amazon puts in link to Tor's new Bioshock book by John Shirley. You could see this happening in the context of movies or other pop culture stuff, too. You say find me a zombie movie, and Amazon comes back with a recommendation for some, plus here's some zombie fiction too. There are so many opportunities with the internet because you're not limited by category. You get people consuming videos or comics or movies to find novels that they would find interesting too. Which they don't find now because they're in bookstores, also known as "that store I don't go into."

Bookstores are confusing to people – they don't get the idea of authors, because movies are filed by title. Bookstores are intimidating. Amazon is great because they can buy books they know they want. You want to replicate that browsing experience in other environments, get people to stumble on the book they didn't know they wanted. There's a kid out there who didn't know there was a Bioshock novel by John Shirley and now he does.

That's where I see that recommendation engine being valuable – if it's only books leading to recommendations of other books that's reinventing the wheel. To be revolutionary, you need these books to reach a wider audience – the people who go to Amazon to buy a videogame and find a book.

Does that mean books will be just tie-ins to other franchises like videogames?

Not at all. Look at it this way. At the turn of the century [British horror writer] William Hope Hodgson made bank on magazine publishing. But he made no money on books. Back then, magazine editors were like the gatekeepers of pop culture. Now, novels are what get noticed by current gate keepers of pop culture, which are movie studios. They are buying up books right and left. It's the same as last century: books are what you use to get the attention of the gatekeepers. Books are still a profitable niche market.

How did Night Shade get started?

My business partner Jason Williams started it in 1997. We were always from the get-go wanting to be a trade publisher. We didn't want to do the Subterranean Press thing with special editions. We didn't want to be collected - we wanted to be read. We are book collectors ourselves but there's an understanding that as excited as people might be by your fetish object bound in goatskin and signed in blood, those get put on a shelf and never read. Only about 20 people read it.

We got a wholesale contract due to good reviews early. [Distributors] Baker and Taylor came to us and gave us a good contract. Then we got Ingram. At that point we were one sale away from every bookstore in the country. It's been a seemingly endless trek. And then Iain M. Banks divorced his publisher Simon and Schuster, and in 2006 [with his novel The Algebraist] he said, "Yeah we're going to go with these weirdos in San Francisco."

With the Banks book, we chatted with our buyer at Borders, and he said look, why don't you work with a distributor we use all the time. So he told Diamond to give us a distribution contract. They delivered – we got the Banks novel into the chains in a big way. After that, the buyers at the chains knew who Night Shade was. And now we're doing 36 books a year. Last year we got into mass market paperbacks in a big way. We think we can be a one-stop shop: trade, mass market, and hardback. Start in one format and go into another. Plus, different kinds of books require different things. Putting urban fantasy in trade paperback hobbles it – those readers buy in mass market paperbacks. Most of them don't even look at it unless it's in trade paperback. Being able to do that was a big step.

What about the e-book formats we talked about earlier?

I doubt that electronic-only will be viable for the kind of trade publishing I want to do in the next 10 years. Paper and electronic will be the standard. My view is e-books will replace mass market. So one book might be one, then become another. Authors are unwilling to give up print rights in perpetuity. I structure contracts like this: If the book is in print, if I have X number of copies in inventory, then I still have rights. So if it goes out of print, we also lose e-rights. But if something is selling massively electronically, then we'd keep it in print too.

The publishing industry is so slow, but still it went in a 5 year period from "What is an e-book?" to "We won't buy a book unless we have ebook rights." That says the money streams aren't mature right now, but publishers are seeing these rights as being very important.

How do you think people will read e-books? Kindles?

I don't think dedicated e-book readers [like the Kindle] will work. The Kindle takes all the wrong lessons from the iPod. When people want to apply lessons of digital music to e-books they aren't very smart. People desperately demanded e-music. Nobody is demanding e-books. People aren't jumping up and down to spend 400 bucks on a device to hold books. Sure there's always a niche market, but that's not enough. The Sony e-book reader? Talk about a fucking dead end. That's just not a mass market device.

Here's my wet dream e-book partner: Nintendo DSi online store. Package me up some titles and put 'em for sale on the Nintendo Store. The audience is already consuming scifi and they don't go into bookstores. Put my books for sale there and I'll be happy as a pig in shit. That's my example of going out and getting my books in front of people who wouldn't normally see them.

And that's on a generic device – not an e-book reader. These kids are already buying these devices. That's where I see future of e-books going.

Check out the latest titles from Night Shade Books.

All the phones you see below are fakes - mostly fake iPhones and Nokias, for sale in China. Chipchase writes that there are three basic types of fake phone:

1. Any old phone with a Nokia/Motorola/Apple logo or two printed on the side. In India these are referred to as ‘China Mobile' (no relation to this China Mobile) - phones that may or may not last out the month. These sometimes fool first time consumers in markets with low mobile phone penetration. Top photo on this page shows a fake 'Nokia'.
2. Where the industrial design is copied, the device includes Nokia/Motorola/Apple logo but the device itself tends to be poorly manufactured. Some of the designs are based on products already on the market, but all the industrial designer needs is a leaked photo or official press release from another country to be able to manufacture the hardware - sometimes offering it for sale in a local market before the official device is launched.
3. Recently the quality of fakes/copies have reached the point where many consumers will assume they are holding the real thing in their hands - phones that look, feel and behave like the real thing – right down to start up sequences, graphical assets, user interface modalities for the the top-level user interface elements - the so-called Super Fakes.

Chipchase explains that type #2 also includes fakes that are released before the official models they knock off. He even rates the design of the popular superfake Nokia 5800:

Exceptional attention to detail: industrial design; line art; battery design and placement; right down to the detailing on the inside back cover; boot up sequence; top level information architecture; use of graphical assets and fully working Media Bar button. Room for improvement? Integration with online services; graphic designer needs to go on a typography course.

What does it mean that so many people are buying mobiles based on pirated designs? Companies will turn more and more to services (shopping, location awareness, e-mail, etc.) that can't be faked to up the value of their (real) products. Also, Chipchase suspects - as do I - that as companies like Apple move into China, they will push for applications that phone home to Apple servers and verify their authenticity with some kind of code or indentifier. The result? Real phones will track your every move. Fake phones will have less functionality, but will make you less trackable in the end.

via Jan Chipchase's Future Perfect

Friedman is an intelligence officer with Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence agency, as well as author of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. In a recent essay for New Statesman, Friedman offers a sample of his geopolitical forecasts for the next hundred years.

Friedman's predictions focus on the interactions between nations over the next several decades, including which countries are likely to emerge as the next great powers. He sees the US continuing to grow as a superpower, only to be unbalanced by another emerging power — perhaps Turkey, Japan, or some combination thereof. One possible venue for conflict: space, where he predicts the US will have many of its military assets. But it will be a very different kind of war from those fought on the ground:

The enemy will be trying to deny the US what it already has, space power, without being able to replace it. The US will win in a war where the stakes will be the world, but the cost will be much less than the bloody slaughters of Europe's world wars. Space does not contain millions of soldiers in trenches. War becomes more humane.

Another possible threat to America's dominance, Friedman claims, could be Mexico, which stands to emerge as a growing power as the drug profiteers currently destabilizing the country give way to their more legitimate heirs. That, combined with an growing population of Americans living just north of the border who immigrated from Mexico, could put Mexico in a position to reclaim territory it lost to the US over 150 years ago and arise as one of the world's key players:

One can imagine scenarios in which the US fragments, in which Mexico becomes an equal power, or in which the US retains primacy for centuries, or an outside power makes a play. North America is the prize.

The next 100 years [New Statesman]

io9: With the rise of digital books, is the printed book going to disappear?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: I think print books will continue on into future. In my own life, I've seen myself ramping up the amount of text I consume digitally. For me, it's the weight and inconvenience issue - I want anything that will spare me having to carry around reams of paper. I'm not one of those people who says, "I could never read off a screen." I read an entire novel on a Palm Pilot in the 1990s. That's when I started reading e-books. It was great.

The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text. My authors deliver manuscripts to me electronically – I encourage that. I will be happy if I never have to carry around 500 sheets of 8x11 paper ever again. That's me, and I process text for a living.

Nicholson Baker had an article in the New Yorker where he ruminated about the Kindle. He quoted somebody saying it was "like reading a wet newspaper." I don't have a Kindle but I'm on my third nonfiction book on the iPhone. I read work stuff with the Office app, and take notes with SimpleNotes app.

io9: Where do e-books fit into Tor's plans for publishing going forward?

PNH: E-books are tiny single digit in book market. But they are increasingly logarithmically - they went from something like a 10th of percent of sales to perhaps 1.5 percent in a few months. For a long time, e-books were this thing we had endless meetings about and which yielded laughably tiny sales, which led me to believe that e-books were like the old joke about Brazil, that it's the country of the future and always will be.

io9: But do you think you'll start moving into publishing electronically more aggressively?

PNH: We've been acquiring e-text rights as part of the default contract since the mid-90s. In mid-90s we needed to be sensible and we revised the contract to include electronic text. Now we have that as a clause. We won't buy a book without e-book rights.

So we have these rights, and we do make a lot of our books available on the Kindle, but there are a lot of logistics involved. Basically we're on the case, but at the moment there are a lot of factors that go into deciding what's available for Sony or Kindle and Barnes and Noble.

Tor.com was a place where people complained about lack of availability of e-books for a while. Before we launched the site we had this free e-book giveaway and people thought Tor.com would be all about e-books. But it really wasn't. E-books are phase B and C.

All the way from [Tor parent company Holtzbrinck in] Stutgart down to us, the conglomerate runs on the assumption that there will be changes in the next two decades and we don't know what they are. We're not locking ourselves into a platform. We don't want to let one player become choke point; we don't want to be a hapless manufacturer in the thrall of Walmart or something.

io9: Does it make a difference to you if an author has an online reputation? Does that go into your decisions to acquire books?

PNH: Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.

io9: Thinking science fictionally, what do you see happening to SF publishing over the next few decades? Will we still have novels? How will we read them?

PNH: In 1991 or 92, I registered tor.com, and it was originally a gopher server. So I don't know what the technologies will be - I didn't know what 2009 would be like in 1989. I could have vaguely predicted io9, but not 4Chan or internet memes.

One thing I'm sure of is that we're going to be in linear immersive narratives that produce the reading trance. We won't be moving towards a "choose your own adventure" thing. People will do those things, but those are different art forms. There's something about immersive text that you can read in order - it's persisted through many technological changes. This fiction stuff works pretty well. It's been around a long time.

I do think immersive fictional texts will continue but it's obvious already that there's competition for people's time. Our competition at Tor Books is BoingBoing or Salon. There's more text online in a week than you could ever process in your life. It puts people into a hyperconsumptive, hungry-for-text state.

io9: Do you think serialization is one way we might go with online novels?

PNH: We're trying online serialization with [new Cory Doctorow novel] Makers. Serialization was an artifact of 19th century technological limitations. Now it's a gimmick. I say why? Why can't I FTP it?

io9: Will new online formats change the format of the novel?

PNH: I have a severe Google Reader habit. I think people will use blog forms and twitter to contrive fiction. Here's an interesting thing online: The explosion of fanfic. I don't read much, but back in fandom 1.0 - zines - there were people writing Star Trek stories, but it was below the salt socially. There was a strong aversion to publishing amateur fiction because people felt that if it were any good it would get published professionally. If you were seeing an amateur SF story, it was partly an admission that it was crap and couldn't get published.

But with fanfic, there's no ceiling on how great it can be because it's unlicensed and can't get published. It's often written far better than the stuff it's based on.

I wish [fanfic could go legit]. For most of human history, remixing narratives in circulation has been how culture worked. I believe in compensating artists, but yesterday [on a panel at WorldCon] the "moral rights" thing came up, and I think that's horseshit. I think artists should be treated well and so should waitresses and plumbers. Artists shouldn't have "treat them extra nice" rules. People experience art socially. People say "Watch this! Read this!" We experience art and we want to talk about it. I know that there are writers horrified by fanfic. Jo Walton hates fanfic. But in general I think with TV and the mass media world, somebody is going to figure out a way to encourage [fanfic] in a way that makes them a pile of money.

Art by Jon Foster from forthcoming Tor book Boneshaker.

At first glance, HAR appears to be something like an outdoor rave or music festival, with its brightly-colored flags, tents, and ice cream stands. Except the entire outdooor area, packed with hundreds of campsites, is threaded with ethernet wires that terminate in blue port-a-potties. These toilets have been repurposed as computer network hubs dubbed Datenklo, German for data toilets. Switches furred with wire sit in neat stacks on top of toilet seats, and a wireless access point in the roof broadcasts a local wifi network too. As one of the network administrators explained to me, toilets are the perfect spot for outdoor data hubs – they are weatherproof, mobile, and can easily be locked to keep out drunken party-goers. Cables from the Datenklo lead to a hut called the NOC or network operations center, and are threaded through a window into a series of servers cooled with a portable air conditioner.

It's one of the more nicely-designed computer networks I've ever used, and it was set up in less than a week in the remote vacation village, called Vierhouten, where HAR was held. The group even laid a kilometer of donated fiber optic cable to bring high speed internet to the HAR campers' network. If you wanted to set up a server, there was also a pretty swank colocation facility located in a tiny hut, labeled ETH0 in duct tape.

Elsewhere, a group set up a DECT wireless phone network and sold phones with phone numbers usable only in camp. Another group built a free GSM mobile phone network, and handed out free phone numbers to anybody who promised to test the network, which ran on experimental software and hardware. For anybody who thinks of their cell phone as a device entirely controlled by Sprint or T-Mobile, connecting to the HAR GSM network is like visiting the future. A utopian future where mobile phones are run by community networks that offer free services – and whose operators live in a tent up the road labeled "GSM" just in case you need to ask a question. Imagine being able to control every aspect of your phone, including the very network where you make telephone calls. It seems bizarrely revolutionary.

During all four days of camp, from August 13 through 16, a full roster of speakers gave talks on everything from how to build your own home synchrotron particle accelerator (pictured in the gallery below), to the ways a wily criminal could forge SSL identity verification certificates to make her website appear to belong to a bank or other site online. There were also classes on lock picking, mobile phone hacking, soldering, and beer making. Groups like the anti-censorship organization Wikileaks presented information on how to foster free speech online, while several anonymous people discussed the pros and cons of pirating.

When you wanted to take a break, you could get a free tosti kaas (a toasted bread and cheese sandwich) from the people running the new .tk top level domain. You'd get a free .tk domain name too, to match your tosti kaas.

The nightlife at HAR is just as creative and technologically-mediated as the daytime experiments. The German hackers from Chaos Computer Club (CCC) brought a searchlight and a disco ball, which filled the enormous campground with flecks of spinning light. Glowing tents were full of music and computer equipment. And on Saturday night there was a silent nightclub, where everybody got headphones and could tune into one of three different DJ sets, dancing to the beats of their choice. Passing by the silent club, you could see hundreds of dancers bathed in colored light, their feet beating a rhythm to something inaudible. Once in a while, a group of them would burst into a snatch of song, responding to a directive from their earbuds.

Hung over the next day, people could wander through a lounge decorated with a giant unicorn, and into the HARcade, full of free pinball machines and videogames. One of the coolest was a racecar game where the cars would go only if you made "rrrrummmm" noises into a microphone. The louder the noise, the faster the car.

I had been hearing about these hacker camps for about eight years ago, back when the event had been called HAL, for "Hacking at Large." They grew out of a loose coalition of technical hobbyist groups and activist organizations, including the decades-old German hacker group CCC. Over the past few years, the "hacker space" movement has been growing, and dozens of hacker groups have started clubhouses of their own in the United States and across Europe.

What is the point of a hacker camp like HAR, or a hacker space like CCC in Berlin, or Noisebridge in San Francisco? It is, in the words of an early hacker space pioneer named Jens Ohlig, to create an alternative educational institution, a place where people can learn about technology and science outside the confines of work or school. It's where people build things because they want to, not because they need to make money. And it's a place, Ohlig said, where geeks can "come out" among like-minded people and "live as if you are in the future."

Want to find out more about hacker spaces in your area? There is a list on the hackerspaces wiki.

Free tostis and .tk domains!


Datenklo

Welcome to the network operations center.


Inside the NOC.
A remote-controlled game - log into this page, and control the fans to blow the duck around the maze.
Camp like a pirate!
The colocation facility where you can park your server.

Inside the ETH0 colo.

Open phone hardware.


Soldering class!


Software hacking.
CCC party tent.

Hacked-together UFO.



Game where cars are controlled by you making a loud RRRRRMMMM noise into a mic.

Over the past two days I've been exploring Amsterdam, a city known for its unconventional transportation network. People get around scooters, motorized bicycles, cars, and even on canal boats, using canals mostly built during the city's great expansion in the 17th century. But most of all, they ride bicycles.

In fact Amsterdam is truly a bicycle city, with every road containing bike lines – and even some with traffic lights aimed only at bicycle riders. Amsterdam has become a bike city for a couple of reasons: First, it's almost entirely flat; and second, many of the brick-paved roads and bridges are so narrow that they seem uniquely suited to bike and scooter traffic (though cars still zoom down most of them too).

Amsterdam bike riders do not fetishize their rides. Bikes are cheap, heavy, and practical, with wide, comfortable seats. Chains are surrounded by metal guards so that you can ride in pants or skirts, and you'll often see people riding one-handed, cigarettes or umbrellas held in their free hands. There are no fixies here, and no ultra-expensive made-to-orders. People hack their bikes together, adding saddlebags to the back or baby chairs and carts to the front. Every intersection rings with the sounds of bells, the bicycle equivalent of honking. And every wall, pole, and bikerack is a crazy jumble of handlebars, wheels, and seats.

Perhaps the most amazing bicycle structure in the city is the free bike parking lot outside the central train station, on the harbor in the old city. This is a touristy area, but most of the bikes belong to local commuters. From a distance, the three-story structure looks almost furry because so many small pieces of metal are sticking out all over it. Though built to hold about 1700 bikes, the place regularly packs in 7000-8000 bikes, according to a bike lot attendant I spoke to.

Outside the bike lot, a white truck with an open bed lies in wait. It belongs to a group that enforces bike parking laws, cutting chains and confiscating bikes parked in illegal spots (chained to signs, for example) and putting warning stickers on bikes that have been parked for more than a few days in the parking lot. Impounded bikes are taken to an area at the edge of the city, and are released to their owners for 10 euros.

For many of us, a bicycle parking lot like this is an unprecedented sight. We're used to multi-layer car parking lots which cost a tremendous amount per day. But a free parking lot packed with bikes? For people who dream of a bicycle-dominated future, this is like a glimpse of the future, or an alternate world.

Krugman came to Worldcon for two events: a conversation with his favorite living science-fiction author, Charles Stross (which we sadly missed because we were on an airplane) and a one-person talk about science fiction and economics. At the latter, he started out by saying Isaac Asimov's Foundation series inspired his decision to become an economist, since you couldn't actually study to become a psychohistorian. (He's said this many times before, and in fact, said it again in this past weekend's New York Times Book Review.)

But the most surprising part of Krugman's talk was his assertion that the world is actually changing less quickly than in the past. "The pace of change has actually, generation by generation, been slowing down," he claimed. "The world of today is not as different from the world of 1959 as the world of 1959 was from 1909."

So let's say that you travel 30 years into the future and find yourself in a shopping mall. You'll be astounded at the "great gizmos" that are for sale there, but you'll still be able to recognize it as a shopping mall, said Krugman. On the other hand, lots of trends are likely to come to a head over the next few decades, including climate change and peak oil, and they could result in a drastically different world.

Krugman just cleaned out his library and found he had four copies of tons of books published over the last couple decades, since he gets two advance review copies and two copies of the finished book. And he found himself tossing out duplicate copies of tons of futurist books that were depressingly off the mark about predicting the main concern of the 1990s or 2000s. (e.g. war with Japan.) So he's leery of trying to predict the future.

And of course, science fiction was ridiculously over-optimistic about the world of 2009, with talk of space colonization and undersea cities, and yet missed some huge changes which really have happened. "I remember reading something which had all these people flying around between planets, and using slide rules to calculate their next course," said Krugman.