Hieroglyph (42 page)

Except it won't,
Rob thought grimly,
because I won't be here to rubber-stamp any of it
. As everyone rose for lunch he rose too, joints creaking from yesterday's canoe trip. He did the usual glad-handing but pressed inexorably toward the door. Out of the corner of his eye he could see some of the industry reps talking heatedly on their cell phones as they paced in the corners. Shit was happening, apparently.

He collared Terry in the parking lot and said, “Walk with me.”

His son grinned and nodded in the direction of the bay. The water was gray today, reflecting the low tumbling clouds. “That was amazing, eh?” said Terry as they walked.

Rob shook his head and sighed. “I just got a call,” he said. “We know the tanker running aground wasn't an accident.”

Terry stopped walking, a shocked look on his face. “No shit?”

“ ‘No shit' what? ‘No shit' that it was deliberate, or ‘no shit' that we found out?
You
knew all along.”

“Dad, really.” Terry looked hurt.

“Is that why you called me to come house-hunting with you? To get me to Vancouver in time for all this”—he waved at the center with its proud totem poles—“to go down?”

“You really think I'd do that?” Now Terry looked angry.

“Well, you are a Sky.”

Terry glared at him. The moment dragged—and then his son laughed. “So what happens now?” he asked.

“This is serious, Terry. If the evidence trail gets back to you, you could be going to jail for a very long time.”

“Except that it won't, we both know that. Besides . . .” Serious now, Terry gazed out at the ocean. “There's a Dorian for that.”

“Terry, I'm done here. When this hits, I have to walk away. No more negotiations. The government's going to cry blackmail, and your little escapade here is going to fall apart.”

Terry shrugged. “There's a Dorian for that, too. What's SimCanada got to say about it?”

“I . . .” He didn't know. “Dammit, who cares?”

“You're right, it doesn't matter.” Terry crossed his arms, looking pensive. “If you pull out now, the conference will still go forward. Only you won't have any say in the results. You could pull some stunt right now, and split off some of the industry guys, the conservatives and government lapdogs. But even some of them are now convinced about what should be done. And everybody else . . . they'll still go on to make their commitments. You may preserve the Indian Act, but it won't be the reality on the ground after today.”

“We'll see about that.” Rob turned away. He'd only gone a few steps, though, when he stopped again.

“You know why I never came here?” he heard himself say. He hadn't meant to say this—he shouldn't have to defend himself. Terry waited patiently, so Rob grimaced and went on.

“It's not my roots,” he said. “
I
get to decide what my roots are. And these ones, this stuff you're defending so cleverly . . . it's dead. There's no people in the world who can hold themselves together using band councils and elders and traditional dances. You can't go back. The world's moved on and sitting around a campfire
deciding
together just isn't going to cut it anymore. It's that simple.”

Terry sent his dad a wry look. “You know, the first time I visited you on Parliament Hill, I was walking up the steps to the main doors, and all I could think was ‘This place is handmade. Out of
stone
.' ”

He sauntered off in the direction of the water.

Rob stalked across the parking lot, fuming. What the hell was that supposed to have meant? Of course Parliament was built of stone; it was old. Old . . .

He skidded to a stop. “Hey, wait a sec!” But Terry was already out of earshot. Rob sputtered, trying to say, “Yeah, it's old but not old like the band councils, not like that wisdom of the elders shit,” but his son was too far away and besides, Rob could feel the world turning around him, the ancient and the new colliding in the goddamned sensory substitution shirt.

They could have sensory substitution banned; but there was still Wegetit.com. Maybe that could be shut down, but there were already imitators. The mesh networks, autonets, the block chain . . . they blurred into the legal in every direction. And the overlays, Structured Dialogic Design, Nexcity, and the Dorians—now that the genie was out of the bottle, there'd be so many improvements so fast, that soon every citizen on- and offline would have or have access to the kind of political second sight that previously, only rare people like Rob had possessed.

He didn't have his glasses on, but it blazed in his imagination: the Dorian of the only future that was going to work. The face of a new government was rising like a sun above the campfires and lodgepoles, above the halls of stone and oak—a government not dependent on any single technology, not even the Internet, but rather the accumulated crescendo of dozens of little nudges, techniques, and apps, and hundreds of new insights into cognitive and behavioral science.

It was obvious now: he'd only been invited out to Haida Gwaii as a courtesy, the way that he himself had invited elders to meetings so many times. To make them feel better while the real business went on invisibly around them.

He wasn't going to lose this negotiation, and he wasn't going to walk away from it either. He'd never really been a part of it.

Jeffrey was standing in front of the center, eyes darting around and a worried look on his face. When he spotted Rob, he rushed over. “I just heard. What are we going to do, sir?”

Rob let out a huff of breath—half sigh, half laugh. “We do what we always do, Jeff,” he said.

“One way or another, we keep the conversation going. We can't give up now.

“Let's go back inside.”

Its design/Shutterstock, Inc.

STORY NOTES
—
Karl Schroeder

Humanity's biggest problem isn't how to imagine or design solutions for our economic, environmental, and social woes; our problem is that we can't agree to implement them. By 2013, for instance, international agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions was further away than ever, despite years of conferences, meetings, expert panels, and millions of dollars spent on studies. This issue—of how we decide important things in groups—is the “meta-problem” that trumps all other issues. If we solve it, our other crises become manageable. If we don't solve it, it doesn't matter how many fixes we come up with. If we can't get them implemented, we might as well not have wasted our time.

Wicked Problems

Many of our most important problems are ill-defined. There's little agreement surrounding possible solutions to such problems, and there's no way to verify if a proposed fix will work or if one that's been tried has worked. These are called “wicked problems” because you cannot simply engineer a solution to them. Fortunately, methods do exist to manage them—if not to solve these messes, to at least
improve
them. One such approach is called Structured Dialogic Design, which was developed by the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, primarily by cyberneticist Alexander Christakis. SDD builds upon decades of research into small-group interactions to provide a process whereby people with radically different, even hostile agendas can sit down together and agree upon mutually beneficial plans of action. An introduction to the process can be found in the book
The Talking Point,
by Thomas R. Flanagan and Alexander N. Christakis.

Decision Architecture

There will be no “Facebook for politics,” no single solution to the problem of human governance, because politics is a wicked problem. That doesn't mean we can't improve political processes at all levels, perhaps dramatically, by solving many smaller subissues using communications technologies, cognitive bias filtering software, decision-making strategies, and so on. SDD is just one example of how to do this. The story “Degrees of Freedom” showcases a possible set of such improvements, just a tiny subset of the many possibilities. I've included more information about some of these below.

Dorians

Humans are hardwired to detect extremely subtle differences in facial expression. In 1973, Herman Chernoff suggested using this capability to make complex multivariant data more easily visible to analysts. Different parameters of a complex data set are mapped to different features on these “Chernoff faces,” making it easy for viewers to perceive small differences between sets.

Extending this idea, Dorians are pictures of yourself that are more or less happy, healthy, or fit depending on how your current behaviors or habits are trending. Basically, they show you your future self as you might look if you keep doing what you're doing. Dorians are a natural and intuitive interface for “quantified Self” apps such as sports and fitness trackers, though in this story they also interpret the results of more significant life choices.

You can think of the augmented reality app Nexcity mentioned in the story as a form of urban Dorian (see SimCanada, opposite).

Liaisons

Liaisons are a concept I developed for a Canadian military foresight project in 2009. A liaison is a Dorian that personifies a corporation, government, organization, or group. It can serve as your interface to that organization; for instance, when you do online banking you might choose to do so by talking to the bank's liaison. The trick is that the bank doesn't control how the liaison appears and behaves—instead, its personality is an aggregate of the public's experience of the organization—its social media “likes” and “dislikes,” to put it crudely. A company that tries to paper over bad practices, lies to its customers and the press, etc., will have a shifty-looking liaison. One that promotes philanthropic causes will look saintly, and so on.

Padgets

Padgets are a European Union experiment in democratic technology. Padget stands for “policy gadget.” You can find out how they work at the project website, http://www.padgets.eu/.

SimCanada

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows how large sets of diverse models can be ganged together to create robust quantitative simulations of the future. SimCanada and its imitators build on this technology by using climatic, economic, social, and cultural data to present constantly updated future versions of the country. Citizens can explore possible outcomes of economic and political policies, climate change, and wildcard events by running them through the model(s). With a gamified graphical interface, the system will even let you walk through your city or province as it might appear years from now—in effect, as a national or urban Dorian.

Gwaiicoin and the Block Chain

Gwaiicoin is an altcoin: a derivative of Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself, while interesting, is a sideshow to the more important technology underlying it. This technology is a cryptographic system known as the block chain. It can be used for far more than “just” creating a revolutionary new form of money. The block chain can support decentralized, fraud-proof implementations of nearly any kind of registry. Everything from voting systems, citizenship and ownership contracts, constitutions, corporate structures, and decision-making processes can all be done in the block chain. Faced with the question of “Who has ultimate authority?” on nearly any matter, the answer no longer needs to be some committee, statute, ministry, board, or person. The answer can be “the stakeholders, directly, using the block chain.”

Project Cybersyn

Cyberneticist Stafford Beer partnered with the Chilean government of Salvador Allende from 1971 to 1973 to build a new form of government based on cybernetic principles. Project Cybersyn was a new model of socialism, a “third way” that was different from both capitalism and Soviet or Maoist communism. Cybersyn was based on advanced communications and feedback systems. The system was destroyed, and Allende killed, in the September 11, 1973, coup backed by the CIA and led by Augusto Pinochet.

FORUM DISCUSSION
—The Future of Agriculture

Should we ban agriculture on Earth? Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling, and chemical engineering Ph.D. student Zach Berkson investigate at hieroglyph.asu.edu/degrees-of-freedom.

THE MATHEMATICS OF GAMIFICATION
—Foursquare Data Scientist

Explore the mathematics of gamification with Foursquare data scientist Michael Li at hieroglyph.asu.edu/degrees-of-freedom.

RESPONSE TO “DEGREES OF FREEDOM”
—
David Guston

David Guston, the founding director of Arizona State University's Center for Nanotechnology in Society, responds to “Degrees of Freedom” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/degrees-of-freedom.

TWO SCENARIOS FOR THE FUTURE OF SOLAR ENERGY

Annalee Newitz