♥ ¢¢ ♥ ♥

Full text of “Drone Army descends on New Orleans” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

Drone Army descends on New Orleans

Contact with drones lost during drug wars, swarm slowly migrating north.

photo credit: l@mie

MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade.

Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday.

Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units.

This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release.

“Although the full extent of the so-called Lost Army’s presence isn’t known, we have to assume that at least a portion is established in the area and people should be careful when travelling outside, hunting recreationally, or otherwise behaving in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner,” Arceneaux said.

Since the Michoacán incident, the Louisiana Department of Civil Defence has been upgrading surveillance stations along a north-south line through the state and at several key navigational choke-points to monitor for signs of the drones. Critics charge that the process has taken too long and that warnings are coming too late.

“This is just part of a larger failure on the part of the powers-that-be to properly fund national sanctity,” said Corporal J. F. Ruck, Minutemen spokesman, “They’re telling us to just sit back and let the drones fly on by, more of the extensive record of do-nothing politics by the government. We don’t even know where they are.”

More security news
Louisiana Ambassador calls for funding assistance to deal with drone menace
Chinese government denies reports of Afghan uprising
“Pitbull” defence breeds approved for public purchase in Chicago

Built and deployed to police the Columbian jungle during the height of anti-drug paranoia, contact with the nearly completely autonomous collective was lost 9 years ago. The incident and subsequent massacre of a small unit of Panamanian security forces led to the immediate banning of high-autonomy drone units. The ban has ironically made the errant drones nearly impossible to contain.

“The problem is that our guys just aren’t as fast as these things,” said General Hussein, speaking from the Pentagon, “They do one thing really well and that is high speed 720 degree combat. You can’t expect a human operator to match that capability.”

After two disastrous attempts to retrieve or destroy the drones in South America, a containment policy was declared. However, jurisdictional issues have plagued the joint task force and as much as 50% of the army carrying up to 70% of the remaining ordinance remains unaccounted for. Despite efforts, they have been steadily migrating northward.

According to Lockheed Martin analysts, the drones appear to be in a patrol mode. Since the massacre at the alleged cartel fields in Michoacán, few violent incidents have been reported.

The drones carry a mixture of bio-explosive and conventional ordinance. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with drones disarm and seek cover immediately. People with weapons, home-based laboratories or certain kinds of farms are advised to take special caution. More information is available on the DoCD website.

Don’t miss these top stories on the network:
Opinion: Is it rude to sequence on the first date?
Hurricane Zeke makes landfall in Maine
Plan your vacation: 10 must-see “sunken city” diving tours

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Listen, Jerry can you get Louisa on the line? I’ve got an idea here you kids don’t want to miss. This’ll be a use of your VC dollars that’s way better than that ridiculous gene therapy tech that Kurzweil sold you on.

Here’s the deal: It seems like all of the buzz for augmented reality is around layering images in real time over the world or a video feed of the world. That seems cool, but it’s all very new and pre-alpha and I feel like there has to be more to the AR stuff than just jittery lines and awkward French maids. In fact, I think that there is the tech for an app, RIGHT NOW that could provide a polished user experience using current-gen consumer devices. I’d like to pitch that product to you today. Now.

photo credit: babel`µx

Here’s the background: On day 10 of Dustin Curtis’ 30 Day Flight he sits next to a retired Disney audio Imagineer. Calls him Mr Q. They have a conversation. In 1968 this Q guy designed the ambient audio system for Disney World. It was the first theme park that had music playing on the pathways between the rides. Over time it’s gotten more and more sophisticated.

Listen to this:

He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

That’s Dustin Curtis explaining How Mr Q Manufactured Emotion

It’s a cool solution but it’s very 20th Century. Very infrastructural. It’s location dependent and expensive to reproduce. It asks everyone to hear the same thing. It doesn’t scale to the whole world.

Enter smart phones.

Jer, you know smart phones. Smart phones are your own private amusement park. They have headphone jacks, they let us load apps, they let us play sounds, they are location aware. We don’t need to install speakers throughout the city, people carry the speakers in their pockets. They’re listening to playlists and podcasts and these really ancient “we-don’t-know-from-new-tech-so-we’re-just-filming-plays” primitive stuff. Pre-modern stuff. Audio walking tours? Please, that’s Walkman stuff. Press play when you reach this sign post, whatever. We can reproduce Mr Q’s tech and we don’t need to lay a single inch of cable, don’t need to bolt in a single sub-woofer. We just need to paint in the sounds.

Pick an launch market. Somewhere filled to the gills with creative types who have iPhones, Palms Pre, and Android handsets. New York? Toronto? London? San Francisco? Call up some big names or some up and comings soundscape artists. Is Brian Eno available? What about DJ Someone-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of? Someone the kids are in to.

There’s two parts to this thing. The client sits on the phone, downloads a soundtrack – custom for the city – pulls from the location API, and mixes sounds according to the instructions. There’s cleverness sure, some audio gee-whizery secret sauce, all very patentable and proprietary that seamlessly pulls it together. As you make your way from uptown to downtown, the tone shifts gradually, like in Mr Q’s park but moreso. Mr Q is strictly last century, he’s amateur hour hacker hobbyist. It’s laying copper when we could be putting up cell towers in Africa. Disney doesn’t know from happiest place on earth.

On the server – wait’ll to see what we’ve got going there – it’s all very user-friendly, very drag-n-drop. We show you a map of the city and your uploaded audio files. You can paint-in areas, just like Photoshop, in fact we’re using one of those 2.0 cloud-based painting apps as a base tool. Colour your regions and associate sounds accordingly. We crowdsourced the names of neighbourhoods from Flickr to give you suggested outlines, if you just wanna throw something together, but the real artist can paint down to the nearest half-meter.

Oh yeah, of course it’s all socially networked. We’ve got Facebook integration and a Twitter feed and you can rate soundtracks and see what your friends are listening to and we’ll make a recommendation engine or just leverage someone else’s.

Financial model? We’ve got a financial model like you wouldn’t believe. Licensing opportunities for bands, official city soundtracks for the burgs that care about that kind of thing, pay-per listen, downloadable in-app micro transactions, the whole thing. Disney needs to talk to US. Why are they wasting time on a single soundtrack for the happiest place on earth? Why aren’t they selling Little Mermaid downloads for the girls and Pirates of the Caribbean for the boys? You know what I’m getting at: everyone’s happiest place custom-selected for the needs of the individual.

And that’s all 1.0 stuff. Pre-launch Beta. Let me tell you about what’s in the pipeline.

For one thing, imagine interactive soundtracks. We’ll throw up some time-of-day code in the 1.2 release, that’s easy stuff. Then we start pulling down weather data and incorporating that into the premium soundtracks. Maybe event-based too. Festival in progress? Why not throw in a caribbean undertone?

In the long run, as user adoption upticks, we see a sub-genre of tracks that react to what other users are up to. Who is nearby? Is a crowd forming? The app knows and revises the soundscape accordingly. We’re also looking at a game element – can you follow audio clues and visit all the right locations? Secret soundtracks, unlockable content, all the stuff that makes people crazy with desire.

That’s not it, there’s 3.0 plans too, stuff that’ll change your relationship with sound; military applications, fitness regimens all kinds of things. But before I get to that, you’re gonna need to sign the NDA.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Ingredients

1. 15 Lombard Street is a meticulously researched manual for breaking into a London bank. Read about it on BLDGBLOG.
2. Augmented Reality. Hip and sexy new tech. Lots of active development and gee-whizzery. The whole industry is still essentially pre-alpha.
3. The construction method in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. Tagged tools, materials, and smart gloves tell unskilled workers what to do. The building more or less assembles itself.
4. WikiHow and Instructables.
5. The Anarchist Cookbook.

photo credit: Curious Expeditions

Recipe

What’s missing from AR is good, cheap, goggles. No one wants to go around with a flashlight on a lanyard Everyone knows this. The solution is under active development. It’s a matter of time before goggles let us overlay images on the world in real time, leaving our hands free to, you know, work.

The promise of AR (aside from sexy maids everywhere you look) is highly contextual just-in-time information. Could be automated, could be an operator looking over your shoulder telling you what to do.

“OK, pull the lever I just highlighted in red, then the one that I highlighted green.”

The idea of puppet-master is so centralized. So 19th-Century Crime. The real future is in the automated stuff. What happens when someone makes a Heist Layar? What happens when the getaway portion of the Heist Layar is build on top of someone else’s Traffic Avoider routines?

Distributed, crowd-sourced manuals for a break-in and escape. Researched by shadowy groups with Cayman Island bank accounts, released to the street. Hey mister meth-addict who just pulled off the greatest heist of the century, despite having no plan whatsoever: Need somewhere to launder your money? The manual has some ideas about what accounts you could use (for a fee).

It’s all very user-friendly. You pop on the goggles, plug in the earphones and go to work. There is a bright pathway lighting your way along with a little countdown telling you how long you have to get to the next node. The manual assures you that the patrol times have been precisely plotted. It ducks you into and out of shadows with alarming precision. Red areas outline the vision cones of every known security camera. You can see the gaps and thread your way between them effortlessly. You are wearing the clothes that the manual had you put on and a working counterfeit ID tag (the gear guided you through making that too). There are countermeasures in place, of course, but you’re running a 0-day version, updated overnight with data from an inside source.

You accomplices don’t even need to be witting. Inject the right instructions into other people’s rigs, have them hold open doors or block traffic to ease the getaway. You can recruit accomplices on Craigslist. Spread a crime across a wide enough range of people and the notion of accessory begins to look strangely outmoded.

“What? I’m just a courier. I got handed a package and I handed it off at the appropriate time. Of course my papers are all in order.”

“Surveillance of the bank? What are you talking about?! I was hired by a company to ensure that their security guards were all making their rounds at the appointed time and to note any deviations.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about officer, I just answered an ad and did what the rig told me. I thought it was a cleaning job.”

Now, take this tech and give it to suicide bombers.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Excerpts from “Ashphalt Veins – The Freeway States” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

photo credit: mallix

It was no great surprise when the highways seceded.

A decade of inadequate funding, a Federal system collapsed in all but name, and a growing trend towards autonomy by the megacities left a vacuum in transportation policy that demanded to be filled. Public funding gave way to tolls which gave way to privatization which gave way to a network of roadways with little loyalty to the faded Union and a vested interest in maintaining the exclusive safety of their limited territories.

…

The seeds of the secession were sewn in, of all places, Afghanistan. Amongst the unconquerable mountains was waged an eternal game of cat and mouse. Pitting patrols against insurgents and drones against IEDs, the military demonstrated that even if you couldn’t control the territory, you could keep the roads clear. Much as with flack-jackets and APCs, it was a matter of time before drone hardware trickled down into law enforcement and private security.

…

In the past, borders had been fixed to natural geographic or political points. If they weren’t cut along a mountain range or a coastline, they were drawn along the arbitrary geometric divisions of longitude and latitude. These conveniences for cartographers and generals were 20th century relics.

Automated smart-defences changed the rules. Borders of arbitrary complexity became possible, as demonstrated by the almost fractal Jerusalem Solution. The new question became whether a territory was worth defending. For the Freeway States, the calculation shifted to tolls, traffic levels, and ROI per mile.

…

There were missteps on the road to independence. The I87’s disastrous “We need to secede to succeed” campaign springs immediately to mind.

…

But try as they might to ease the process, borders always cause friction, reducing traffic and further starving road-side communities of income and tourism. A trend evident in the increasing destitution of the “drive-thru states”.

…

To attempt to draw a political map of the reconstituted North America is to confront these contradictions head-on. What counts as a nation? How to capture the overlapping spheres of responsibility? What about the areas all but abandoned to wilderness? Does membership confer citizen-hood?

…

Here, in what used to be Arizona, the new owners of I40 are experimenting with a new security model. In a stretch of route that has been notoriously difficult to keep profitably clear, tolls vary inversely with the recency of patrols.

The idea is simple: Display the time of the latest sweep prominently and offer a discount as the safety rating goes stale.

“It’s a way to give drivers the choice,” explains Chaz Ferrari, head of security and spokesman for the route’s President, “If they are in a hurry, or feel that they can protect themselves, they can take a cheap trip. We let the market decide.”

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

In Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, there is a passage where he considers the apparent failure of architecture as a device for making us better people.

photo credit: Mr.Tea

Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live in them.

…

Medieval devotional paintings may try to remind us of sadness and sin, they may seek to train us away from arrogance and worldly pursuits and render us properly humble before the mysteries and hardships of life, but they will hang in a living room without active protest while butlers circulate the fingerfood and butchers plot their next move.

Alain de Botton – The Significance of Architecture (from The Architecture of Happiness)

If buildings haven’t been able to protest in the past, it’s because we haven’t built them for it. They didn’t have the eyes and ears to notice, nor the power to do something about it. That’s beginning to change.

Witness the new power-use visualization devices, perfect accessories to your environmental devotional, and a means to give mute buildings a voice and opinion about your ecological footprint. This is going mainstream. There is stimulus money. Google is getting involved. Machines to raise your consciousness, machines to make you feel shame.

The Internet of Things expands. More devices are equipped with sensors and they can talk to each other about you. They notice that you spend too much time in front of the television. They wonder why you haven’t been on the exercise bike in days. They gauge the volume of your voice, the pheromones in the air, the sharpness of your movements, and know that you’ve been fighting a lot.

What to do with all of this information? Upload it to Daytum. Analyze it in iGoogle. Tweet about it.

Scenarios

A businessman programs in his New Years resolution. As he falls short of his best intentions, the house begins diverting power from the television, cutting it off completely for days at a time. Only miles on the exercise bike will restore the flow of entertainment.

A study links the colouring and lighting of rooms to the moods of the people therein. The methodology is weak and the conclusions disputed. It’s enough to sell books and spike sales in colour-shift walls. Thousands of complex algorithms are marketed, promising to cross reference sensor data with the latest pseudo-science. Fire-engine red for energy, passion, and late night deadlines. Sea blue to calm arguments and children. Alternating goldenrod and pearl for concentration and intelligence. A software patched is released in order to address reported strobing events which could occur under certain conditions “in a small number of cases”.

After the death of a child on a stretcher in a hallway, a special committee is convened. Battles erupt about patient confidentiality and data security. The Opposition makes headway in the poles by demanding the release of full waiting-room positional data. All new hospitals will have timers projected on to the walls above waiting visitors, counting up.

A small religious community commissions a planned community of morality houses. They are secretive and little is known about their practices. When reports do emerge, there are sensational headlines for weeks.

After the fourth shooting – the result of a toxic mix of firearms, frayed nerves, smart homes, and late night electronic intrusions – the Attorney General announces a crackdown on haunters, while urging new standards of encryption and security. “No one should be afraid in their own home.”</em>

The appeals process in the first gunman’s case drags on.

GE’s Houses That Talk

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Excerpts from “Floatopia: The Rise and Decline of a Libertarian Experiment” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

photo credit: @rild

By some accounts, the Freedom Ship should never have launched. Plagued by enormous engineering challenges, delays in construction, allegations of corporate fraud, and fully three complete ousters of the executive team and board of directors, the sprawling utopian project seemed doomed from the start. But in a world of massive concentrations of wealth alongside sweeping climate change, it was perhaps inevitable that the vogue for private artificial islands would give way to something that would rise with the waves.

First conceived in the heady days of the Internet Bubble 1.0, decades would pass before the laying of a single section of carbon fiber hull began. When it finally did, controversy raged about alleged labour abuses, and ultimately the Ship’s status as a tax haven.

…

“The zombie ghost of collonialism” wrote one commentator.

But in the end, sufficient international outrage did not surface and the Ship launched, albeit with only 2/3 of the expected 100,000 residents and crew aboard. In this 3 part series, David Dockand offers an exclusive in-depth look at the Freedom Ship, 5 years into her ongoing maiden voyage.

…

Arriving at the Freedom Ship by air is a profoundly underwhelming event. After hours on a small plane or helicopter over azure waves, you see the ship, a sort of matte white rectangle. You land on the deck, and go through an airport that looks like any old airport with a Nautical theme. Constrained by physical necessity and the banal tastes of the ultra rich, the Freedom Ship is ultimately a disappointing wonder of the world. Looking at other centres of hedonistic excess, Las Vegas in the West or Dubai in the East, one can at least say that they were interesting to look at. But the Freedom Ship – in its creaky uniformity – ultimately looks like what it is, an enormous strip mall on a barge.

…

They are running out of money on the Freedom Ship. No one wants to talk about this, but everywhere you go, the signs are evident. Heavily reliant on tourist dollars, the often remote destination is difficult to reach and expensive to visit. As the world economy endures another downturn, visits have dropped sharply. The same forces that are emptying the malls of America are gutting enterprise on the ship.

…

Crime is a huge issue. Built on libertarian principles, the notion of how a society on the ship might remain stable seems to have been given little thought during construction and the early days. It’s as if the founders figured that all their political philosophies would be true and that society would work itself out.

…

After the shocking murder of Kitti Genere and her entourage, a police force was created, but because of the ongoing no-taxation policy, the force is perpetually underfunded and seems at best reluctant to police.

On the Freedom Ship, victims face many of the same issue that they face on cruises. Protected by private security forces with obligations to the ship itself, and the corresponding reliance on tourism for income, incidents are hushed up when they are reported at all. Victims find that the freedom from local jurisdictions cuts both ways. In an environment where it’s frequently unclear WHOSE laws should be enforced, often it seems no laws are enforced at all.

…

Perhaps the biggest blind spot in the creation of the ship was the rise of highly-organized, networked piracy. The Freedom Ship is a slow and easy target. It is also large enough that an attack can be occurring on one end without passengers noticing on the other. It is not uncommon for a crew of pirates to conduct a lightning raid on one of the 6 casinos, disappearing back into the ocean before a defence can be mustered.

…

One such attack occurred while I was on-board. We did not learn of it until hours after it was over, when we found that our table reservations had been lost in the chaos.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: Iguana Jo

Published as an article in 1982, the Broken Windows theory is the the idea that the little things are what make the difference between an orderly and a crime-ridden city. If you are diligent about cleaning up graffiti and vandalism, then people will be less inclined to cause trouble. Leave damage un-repaired and you send the message that no one cares. And then…

We suggest that “untended” behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

NYC Police Commissioner William J. Bratton was an adherent and applied the idea in his efforts to combat the crime wave that was sweeping New York in the 1990s. Malcolm Gladwell approvingly covered that story, making it one of the pillars of his argument in The Tipping Point. Despite people like Steven Levitt arguing that correlation is not causation, the theory still holds a lot of sway.

So much for the background.

It’s 2009 and the housing market is in free-fall. American resolve, strengthened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, redirected and solidified by the HOPEful rhetoric of Obama’s new administration is facing its first test. This is not an external challenge, a threat from the outside carried by insidious invaders. This is an internal failing.

Newsmagazines and pundits are proclaiming the End of Capitalism, or at least the need for Serious Reform. Everyone’s trying to figure out who to blame. Insolvent homeowners or the banks who lent to them. Over-regulation or under-regulation. Democrats or Republicans.

Underlying the whole thing is this nagging thread of doubt. What if American can-do can’t? What if the whole thing has been a bubble? What if the sun has finally set on the American Empire?

There are any number of people who’d like to see the United States fail. Al Qeada and their shadowy financiers, of course. Any of the forgotten domestic terrorists. White supremacists, survivalists, cults, and any number of far-right and far-left organizations. Not to mention the Chinese, Russians or countless James Bond-esque ultra-rich villains.

Somewhere in an office or a cave or a secret volcano base, someone is reading The Tipping Point next to the latest housing figures and a light goes on.

Maps are drawn up, sleeper cells are activated, secret Swiss and Cayman accounts are accessed, and the buying begins. It’s child’s play, really. A matter of ensuring the right density of abandoned housing.

In a lot of cases, the problem takes care of itself. Investment housing that no one actually wanted in the first place, places where no one wants to live. Half-finished bedroom communities and subdivisions. Detroit and the rest of the rust-belt. These areas will devour themselves. Just to be sure, agents buy a few properties for fractions of a penny on the dollar.

Other areas require some finesse. They are generally liveable, often quite nice. Here, it’s a matter of finding the homes belonging to people whose wages don’t match their mortgage payments and who are realizing that their debt outstrips their houses’ value.

It’s very easy to recruit agents to this cause. You don’t need suicidal maniacs, you just need people vaguely in favour of your aims who are willing to pick up the mail from time to time.

Once property is bought, it’s simply a matter of keeping up with property tax payments, knocking out a few windows, and leaving the building to die.

The American system is utterly unable to cope with this attack. The whole rhetoric of the need for things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is built on the assumption that homeowners will take care of their land. Even now, measures are being pushed through to protect homeowners who can’t actually afford their homes.

It’s totally legal. People are buying and selling property through normal channels. There is no investigation because there can be no suspicion. It looks like all the rumours of the end of American prosperity are true. Newscasters inadvertently act as force multipliers, broadcasting reports about America’s Decaying Neighbourhoods. Until it’s not news anymore. Until it’s just the way things are.

Some neighbourhoods do resist. Busybody homeowner associations form a kind of local immune system. They fight the tide, calling meetings, filing by-law complaints and fighting to keep their neighbourhoods safe, clean, and free of strangers. It’s exhausting work, and though some neighbourhoods succeed in staving off the damage, most families (worn down by those rowdy children) simply try to move elsewhere. There is nowhere to go.

It’s an engineered crime wave. As security forces helplessly patrol the docks and airports for dirty bombs and terrorist attacks that will never come, America rots from within.

A glimmer of hope: what if Broken Windows is wrong and the whole attack fails? Then the neighbourhood recovers, prices go up and a weapon becomes an investment. Our shadowy attackers sell the houses back at a tidy profit.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: lrargerich

((An incomplete idea))

Begin with the idea of seeds as dense packets of shippable information. Seeds contain (self)assembly instructions. Just add water.

Think about memes vs. genes. Memes allow an evolution that is faster than the rate of gene evolution. There is the rapid transmission, sure. But there is also the internal workings, self-reflection and modification of memes. A meme can undergo a great deal of evolution within a single entity before it gets spit back out into the world.

What would it look like if plants had access to memes? What if plants had rapid learning? They’d still need to be plants, so no moving and talking like people. Otherwise, we’ve just recreated Treebeard.

Think about machines. In some crude sense, RepRaps are plants. They build other RepRaps but they themselves don’t change or learn. The learning is instantiated in the next generation of machine that the RepRap builds. Generations can be radically (instead of gradually) different – an advantage afforded by all of the information processing that happens between generations of RepRaps.

Give plants memes and let them instantiate their learning in the (plant)conscious design of the next generation of seeds. Give them access to the ability to modify their behaviour almost as quickly as humans modify ours. Let them adapt rapidly to our rapid cultural shifts. Why should Monsanto have all the fun?

Scenarios

A weed appears in the Middle East with seed pods that are as satisfying to smash as a florescent tube. When smashed near the right kind of soil, chemical triggers set off a fiery light show. Youthful Tehran is overrun with the stuff.

In Paris, a species of flower predicts next season’s colours and changes its children accordingly. A bizarre symbiosis occurs as fashion designers derive inspiration from plant and plant derives inspiration from the runway. All the big houses guard their greenhouses jealously. Chanel’s radical “Agent Orange” spring line causes a scandal.

On the rootops of Detroit, a species we call shiftspice changes flavours from generation to generation. Chefs prize them, trading and collecting them the way that we trade vintages of wine. “Is that a Brightmoor late 2012?” Collector-prospector-burglars creep along the eaves with highly portable harvesting gear. Their discoveries are sold to restaurants all around the world.

In Tokyo, a kind of balcony fruit that seemed incredibly successful is learning about fads and backlash. While in Abbotswood, truce is declared as gardeners learn that updating your landscaping to the latest fashion can be something of an impossibility if the current plants don’t want to be removed.

Rumours circulate of a grass in L.A. with hallucinogenic properties and pollen spores that are activated by fire. If you hotbox with male and female angiosperm in the same bowl, the trip is said to be twice as intense.

Authorities in São Paulo engage in a futile attempt to crack down on the practice of “body pollenating” at festivals, after revellers discover a flowering vine that, in the right conditions and quantities, produces an indescribable contact-high.

From a plant’s-eye view

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.