Tag Archives: A.I.

Chocolate Instagram, digital consumption & the sweetening of social memory.

07 Monday Sep 2015

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Could chocolate provide a simple low cost off set strategy to the impact of repeated use of technology, devices and the internet both on our individual long term and our collective social memory?

Could an old school tablet of a particular chocolate offset the dulling of our deeper human conscious software bought on by hi tech devices and surfing the net?

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows pointed to the neurological impacts of constant and intense internet usage on us – with evidence that suggests that how our brain works – the way we think and in deeper terms how we retain and internalise our experiences both immediate, short and long term – is directly affected by how we experience life through the lens of our digital age.

We use technology to accelerate and expand both the speed, reach and the expanse of our lives.

But we rarely stop to consider the impact of using technologies to do so. Any negative consequence of doing so would simply ‘get in the way’ of the immediate gratification and the life enhancing abilities of fully submerging ourselves in a stream of tech derived stimuli.

Its just cool kit right? That helps us be our fabulous expansive selves.

But as we are coming to realise, technology and all it brings has far deeper resonance on our humanity. It always has, regardless of type, culture, epoch and era. Let us not forget that, at one point, alphabets and writing were an exterior technology. But their impact on how we retain, process and express our most profound human selves has been immeasurable.

Carr cites Walter J Ong in that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness”.

Modern digital and social technologies, in rewiring how we think, are changing our capacity for retention of information – especially the kind that feeds our deeper long-term memory – in ways that may seriously affect how we remember – both individually and collectively.

Contrary to the previously held belief that “it played little part in complex cognitive processes such as thinking and problem solving”, long-term memory is more than just a warehouse for ‘stuff’, according to Australian educational psychologist, John Sweller – “long term memory is actually the seat of understanding. It stores not just facts but complex concepts or “schemas”. These schemas are the very things which give depth and richness to our thinking.

So how our working memory – the short term immediate variety – works and its ability to transfer information to our long term memory has a massive impact on and is central and fundamental to the ‘health and dynamism’ of consciousness.

So where does the Chocolate Instagram connection come into this?

Last year I had the pleasure of being party to a number of research groups across France, Germany and Russia run by the inestimable Justin Kent.

The research in question focused on deciphering the true ‘emotional’ heart and hook of an iconic Swiss chocolate brand. The theory was that the chocolate seemed to be rooted in a deeper sense of emotional well being and connectivity of a particularly tender variety. (I know, go with me on this one: its surprising what a group of supposedly sane adults can come up with in a room when they’re exercising their intellect and protecting their school fee paying salary and smart holidays.)

That the taste and experience of the chocolate might build an instant bridge between the Now and the deeper long term individual and collective social memory bank was to be fair not that ridiculous an assertion.

In two of the countries researched, millions of people had grown up with the chocolate, so its role in golden-fringed and highly personal memories of childhood and of naive simpler times was to be expected

But interestingly the research also revealed that this was a reoccurring theme across both the countries where the people had grown up with it and in those where it was a new arrival (albeit using very small highly qualitative samples – and with only one ‘new’ country in the mix).

Something in the chocolate’s sweet emollient nature – its texture and melting properties – and the way it made you play with the square of chocolate in your mouth (a quite childlike think to do)seemed to create a brief momentary sense of wellbeing that seemed to be rooted in taking people to a naïve and simpler place in their head, regardless of whether they had ‘grown up with it’ or not.

To be clear this was not a retro, nostalgia moment that lifted them up and out of the moment into a reverie removed from the here and now. It seemed to bridge the space between their ‘Now’ – their working memory – and their ‘Then’ – their long term memory.

Much like the Kodachromatic filter on Instagram that immediately makes any picture just taken look like a memory; plucked from some old family photo album (for those of you who can remember them), the chocolate was making instant snapshots in the family album of the Now, saturating and staining the living moment in a deeper simpler kodachromatic emotional mood.

This inspired me to badge this momentary product effect as Chocolate Instagram.

But in linking something as simple and old school as chocolate to something as advanced and rooted in the burgeoning digital age as a social app, a thought popped into my head.

That Chocolate releases chemicals like anandamide and theobromine to stimulate neurotransmitters that affect our mood and effect how we think is a well proven ‘given’. It has a singularly positive effect on our disposition (unless you are on 3 bars a day and diabetic of course). Could the positive act of consuming chocolate off-set the potentially stunting, shallowing effect of our consumption of relentless digital stimuli on the well being of our brain and ultimately our consciousness?

Chocolate is certainly one of those rare compound experiences that seem to elicit both highly individual and deeply set emotional responses while also triggering immediate and ‘shared’ moments of equal emotional vivacity between people who have otherwise no connection to each other: much the same as the social apps and networks we fill our lives with.

If chocoholics are to be believed it certainly fulfils Ong’s task of being a technology that transforms interior consciousness.

Therefore it was interesting to me to ponder the possibility that the simple act of eating a piece of chocolate might be opening a synaptic connection between wells of feeling (sentimental data) in our deeper consciousness (our long term and social memory banks) and the immediate working memory of the Now, measured in seconds and moments.

Beyond the pleasurable feeling in the moment of playing a sweet melty square of chocolate around in your mouth, could chocolate create a parallel yet opposite effect? Heightening the receptors that shape how we consume the moment and subsequently how we process it? Perhaps we could build a complementary ‘conscious cloud’ computing system for our emotions predicated solely on the eating of chocolate?

That the low-fi technology of chocolate might have a similar yet potentially opposite effect on our conscious existence to the one provided by an super hi-end App used in the recording of that existence felt intriguing and in some ways complete – circular.

It certainly felt worthy of further exploration: especially by a chocolate business looking to off-set its avaricious peddling of more of its fat sugar compound pleasure with a higher purpose of sorts.

Even the simplest test might be revealing. What if we were to wire the brains of two sets or samples of people – and then have both sets undertake social networking and web surfing in isolation – the only difference being that one set undertook these tasks with the supplement of chocolate and the others without.

We could test them ‘in play‘ – eating as they undertook the tasks. We could also perform a secondary and tertiary set of tests – with consumption of chocolate happening prior to undertaking the tasks and finally one where the chocolate was consumed after the fact.

What would the brain scans reveal I wonder? No effect? Some effect? Would the activity be complimentary, conflicted; or would one either elevate or negate the other?

Who knows: but it would be fun to find out.

In the meantime, I suggest we break out the Whole Nut: oh, and a bag of Maltesers please. (And a Wonka Triple Chocolate Whipple) and consume heartily. And then perhaps tweet the empty wrapper picture to an waiting audience!

You know you want to.

Minions, miniturization, anthropomorphia & a smarter lighter life

31 Monday Aug 2015

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BLUE STEEL

I’m not quite sure when the time of old school Miniature passed.

But the last micro nail in its super miniature coffin arrived with the face of blue steel

Derek Zoolander’s phone marked the absolute end of old school miniaturization as cool. The moment he takes out the teeny tiny phone and flips the tiny weeny lid we know the old world of miniaturised anything is so last year – certainly in the electronics department.

It was different once. Miniature electronic devices were once the height of slick modern technological chic. Advances in technologies powered by space programmes and the cold war rendered cameras, screens, phones, mics, recorders and files and documents invisible (who could forget Microfiche).

When tethered to Bond-like fantasies of kit from Q undertaken by Men From Uncle and underwritten by the futurist accessories of Joe 90’s briefcase, miniature everything was overwhelmingly stitched into the military industrial complex and the spy networks of the 50s 60s and 70s – and subsequently into the wish list of every dreaming boy.

But the world turns.

Now, nano technologies of ever greater invisibility have kicked visibly Miniature technological anything into touch. That we can now view the world through both sub-atomic God Particular and super-expansive Hubble Spectacular lenses has taken our concepts of inner and outer space to whole new dimensions. And the espionage aspect of miniaturization seems a little old hat.

Suddenly, in that particular bright and cruel light, products like Derek’s super mini cell phone seem almost ‘quaint’ – folksy. He may as well have whittled it on the porch.

MINIATURE IS DEAD. LONG LIVE MINIATURE.

So is miniature dead? Is micro done? Are we all so super nano chip technology friendly that the old school miniature anything doesn’t cut it any more?

Well I say a big fat No and the reason lies in a recent airport shop excursion with my 8 year old daughter

The drudgery of a late easyjet flight home was illuminated in brilliant splendour by my daughter’s beaming face. The thing that almost made her pop was this: a massive tic-tac box full to the brim with diddly little tic tac boxes – baby tic tacs as she called them.

That a receptacle for mints of any size can elicit from her the same ahhhhh usually reserved for when we are google searching ‘the cutest spider in the world’ (a particular favourite); And Bob the Minion (the one with the teddy bear) is remarkable.

The big tic tac box filled with mini tic tac boxes is to be fair a stroke of anthropomorphic genius.

It’s as if, in a moment of fading brand share and slipping distribution the grand Tic Tac fromage has shouted down the corridors – get me Disney on the line.

And in a flash they have come up with the idea of a painfully, immutably cute merchandisable tic tac mini series. Smiley face. Smiley face. I heart you.

 (I can already see the diffusion and content brand play – a new set of collectibles with cultural cache in an animated short – Tic Tac High School featuring a punked cover of the Ramones Rock N Roll High School –  shifted to a more euro punk pop ‘tic-i-tac…tic-i- tac High school’ – a place filled with tic tac tweenagers – the loner rock-n-roll tic tac mini; a goofy one; a punky girl one, a geek science girl one and one from a [please choose from one of 6 positive discrimination ethic sub groups].

The ability to anthropomorphize is not the sole domain of the Disney Corporation. We all do it. That’s why they do it. Because we like it. We’re suckers for it. Mini dinky versions of things we know and love are astonishingly attractive.

LARGER THAN LIFE SIZE

We still love love love mini versions of stuff. Why?

Is this just the old myth and folklore traditions of the little people: the elf, the pixie and the leprechaun writ new? (There is more than a touch of folklore, Grimm’s fairytales and the Singing Ringing Tree at work in Dr. Evil’s Mini Me.)

Or do we simply find the ‘scale of life’ we lead or feel pressured to lead over-whelming – and yearn for a simpler more childlike time – a time these things remind us of?

Do we have some deep-seated yearning for a more manageable dolls-house version of the life we have? One where all of the outrageous consumption is suddenly reset – shrunk – made more manageable and therefore meaningful by reducing all that heavy burdensome stuff that we cant bear to admit is suffocating us? Suddenly, the idea that we might have the opportunity of creating a new Honey I Shrunk the Household Bills/Work Stress/Performance Anxiety/Social Dislocation/Environmental Degradation life seems very attractive at 3a.m when we’re wrestling brain worms and goes bump in the night anxieties about making ends meet.

There is certainly anecdotal evidence enough to say that miniaturized versions of everyday things seem to appeal to a quiet and vaguely inexplicable corner of our psyche.

We seem to often apply a Minion-like personality to anything we see as having been miniaturized. They are immediately made playful, mischievous, naive, clumsy, goofy flawed and wonderful. And we can do it with anything.

Watch people’s faces when a Kellogg’s variety pack is popped onto the table. We love them! These small, diddy, boxed versions of our full-sized favourites and the small piles of cereal that pop out of their waxed paper interior, the perfectly weighed statistical baseline RDA to which all those calorific and vitamin figures apply.

The compelling seductive nature of mini dinky things is at work everywhere, not just in the larder or snack cupboard.

I challenge anyone to pretend they did not LOVE mini Fish & Chips finger food the first time they came across them at some party of Do. And the Mini Sunday Roast. BOOM. Mini genius.

We’ve even got a soft spot for alcoholic miniatures. A perfect dolls-house measure for more meaningful consumption. An alcoholic Tinkerbell-treat best served in a very, very small petal shaped glass.

We have even built a mini socio cultural fabric in and around them. The poet, John Cooper Clarke, was inspired to anthropomorphise miniatures and the mini bars they come in:

You know you’re in the wrong hotel when a fight breaks out in the mini bar

WINDSWEPT & INTERESTING

Some might say that the International or Traveller’s miniature fixed the idea of little things into the psyche of the curious and the eternally childlike human being. Since the dawn of the explorer and intrepid traveller, things have been made travel-friendly by re-modelling, re-engineering and reducing items to make them more portable. Miniature versions of your everyday stuff – all specifically ‘shrunk’ to fit the traveler’s demands.

Scattered in and around hold-all of the worldly traveller we now find miniature pack sizes of shampoo, body crème, toothpaste, toothbrushes – and an array of miniature things pilfered from distant hotels or the rarified cabin class in-flight offerings – small silver utensils – mini salt and pepper pots – all of it evidence of people who ‘travel lightly through the world’ – hopping from plane to hotel room to slope to beach to boat.

Long before the existence of miniature or compressed proucts driven by smarter more sustainable strategies for a reduction in primary and secondary packaging; and the subsequent innovations in dispersal technologies they spawned, there was already a world of dinky mini travel sized everything out there – and to the increasing number of children and child like adults who find themselves on planes trains and automobiles to far flung places, they present a wonderland of child-like, child sized things.

(Though it has to be said there is a dark side to travel miniatures – some people use these items as a form of social jewellery, scattering them around their homes and hold-alls. In that way these are being used as the product equivalent of speaking very loudly in public places about skiing holidays – but that’s for anther time)

21ST CENTURY TAPAS

The clamouring affection many seem to hold for these miniature things is powerful indeed but perhaps it obscures an even deeper and more powerful and more particular culture at work: one which we might turn to good effect.

I believe that these are in fact a much-overlooked form of cultural tapas – a small dainty platter of elegant 21st century consumables.

In the same way that tapas takes what is a fairly robust and sometimes coarse set of food ingredients and diminishes them into small fine and elegant mouthfuls, perhaps all of these miniatures are our way of taking the coarse vulgar edges off the galloping excess of our consumption?

This for me creates an opportunity to have a bigger conversation in a fun and very non hectoring way.

If the first thing their very size and miniature-ness triggers in people is this Minion Effect, then perhaps we could celebrate a more life size, planet sized mode of consumption by elevating the Minion Effect to a national day of consumption consciousness.

A LITTLE BIG DAY

Perhaps we should have a Miniature day. A day where we celebrate the larger than life lives we lead but in miniature. A day where we take a Minion approach to life – a day filled with dinky things – small brilliant – perfect.

A day full of miniature everything:

Wake up

Shower – 2 minutes maximum – using miniature shampoo and conditioner

Miniature breakfasts – variety pack – mini croissant – very small tea cups –

Go to work with miniature lunch pack – or snacking utility belt – cool pockets of time staged miniature snacking

Equally – we should compel some enlightened food retailers to miniaturise their servings and prices for one day – e.g. Subway to serve a Baby Foot Long Sub – measured to the length of an infants foot.

Then – a Miniature chocolate cereal crisp like afternoon snack

Close the working day with minature drinks at the mini bar

and then a miniature dinner – in plane meal trays of portion controlled servings – using very small cutlery (in a fit of fashionista homage to Liz Hurley’s much maligned and probably hugely apocryphal weight watching ritual of eating with children’s cutlery)

Finished off with a fractual mini House Of Cards short watched on a mini wind up device.

Could be fun.

Everything shrunk to a play-size.

Pop a quick Cadburys Hero and make a shrink wrapped 50 character tweet.

Playfamily sized Family buckets from KFC – sponsored by playmobil.or Fisher Price.

Downton Abbey Special played out by Sylvanian Families.

A one page miniature copy of VOGUE.

And a short News At Ten all rendered in LEGO

So hands up who wants to take a run at applying the Minion Effect – and thinks charming people into reducing what they consume instead of boring them into submission through a love in with miniature stuff might be worth a go?!

I’m in.

#voom, voices & the murmurations of the twitterati

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

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There’s something rather magical about the fluid shape shifting phenomena of social media.

And it has reached far beyond the slangy codified data dynamics and scale numbers thrown around Old Street hot desks of doing.

Dependent on the context and the lens through which you view them, there is something truly phenomenal in the surges swoops and sweeps of the numbers and the geophysics of how where and when they occur

Having just launched the Virgin #voom/Pitch to Rich campaign (not personally of course but as one of a very large team) I have started to view social phenomena through this lens and things are looking quite beautiful. And revelatory.

The staggering social reach and the dynamics of flocking in the social media networks around the campaign and some of the numbers being achieved (45.2 Million social media reach in 6 days-ish) has for me stretched far beyond the need for collective nouns.

(How the #voom/pitchtorich campaign reached this scale of impact is a much larger thing to consider. But the finger points to the spirit, mood, exceptional impact and revelatory nature of the Branson films Bruce Goodison of Sundog Pictures created from the various pieces of paper and email chains – supported by some leading media thinking and doing across a substantial number of interrelated and interdependent media channels, partners and audiences)

The wave of furious activity #voom/pitchtorich has inspired in the social networks bears a closer look. The irony is that the further back you stand the closer you can observe the ‘nature’ – the physical virtual dynamics – of its social phenomena.

Originating in a clumsy joke of mine about twitter and birds flocking – I slowly came to the quieter joke of murmurations of twitterati. I am always astonished and in awe of murmurations of starlings. There is an ‘otherness’ to them – as if they are in thrall to a different dimension of existence – to the magnetic turbulences and older forces at work in the world that remain otherwise unseen.

It is also incredible to think that we as humans get to observe them in ways they will never know from the white heat heart of their furious purpose.

Perhaps the same is true of ourselves in relation to our virtual otherness and the collective behaviours and actions in which our virtual selves participate.

I have always sensed that the shape shifting mass of a murmuration carries its own ‘voice’ within it; a relentlessly changing imprint of cadences, inflections; sharp punctuations and sublime emphasis – an ornithological oratory written across the sky.

It then occurred to me that if we mapped our social murmurations – by numbers and actions across time and space we could perhaps visualise our own greater voice carried within them.

For example if there was a social campaign that could be plotted not only by number of participants (flock) but by intensity (altitude) geolocation (topography) and time (horizon) – perhaps we could create animated murmurations of social phenomena.

If we could do that we could then perhaps study the patterns and nature of them in much the same way that we study sound waves and voice recognition patterns.

And perhaps with the wider ambition of attribution, we could begin to recognize traits and characteristics in each pattern that helps us to define the real voice at work and its source and integrity.

Just a thought that I would love to explore a little more.

Punks, Wonks & Breakout strategies for sustainability innovation.

21 Friday Nov 2014

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Innovation. We love it!

Especially in the trending world of sustainability.

And rightly so: the potential impact and influence of sustainability innovation in the shaping of a more positive human existence is immutable and immeasurable.

Innovation’s role in reinventing and reimagining the way the domestic, private and public sectors use, reuse and replenish the limited resources we have at our disposal is critical to our survival as a race.

So anything that inspires us to escalate our ability to innovate, whether that might be of the incremental, process or radical kind, deserves all the help it can get.

We cannot really afford for sustainability innovation to stall or fail – but it does so, all too often.

Failure is of course an occupational hazard in the innovation department: an almost welcome metric.

If you’re not failing you are most probably not trying hard enough to create meaningful breakthroughs in unchartered territory.

But often the reason for innovation faltering is not quite so grand. An all too human: stakeholder conflict; lack of communication or collaboration: or simply personal agendas and self interested gerrymandering.

So the question recently raised was this: how do we make Sustainability innovation more, well, sustainable?

One enormously powerful influence we identified at these axial moments are the behaviours and attitudes of the different actors and agents in the room.

The first step was to try and create a really simple framework and a lens through which to view those actors and agents: and in such a way as to be able to inspire and help them marshal the innovation through.

The people involved seemed to fall into two broad camps of behaviour and attitude.

It was this simple observation that formed the basis of a recent plenary and workshop on Sustainability Innovation that Thomas Kolster of Goodvertising and I hosted at Sustainable Brands in London

Entitled A Game of Two Halves; the plenary and workshop endeavoured to use the two attitudinal behavior types we observed to set up a simple playful framework in which we might help re-inspire and reenergize the process of sustainability innovation: most pointedly in regards to human behaviour and modes of thinking.

The inspiration for these two types and they game of two halves they ended up playing was drawn from anecdotal evidence, conversation and a little light stakeholder research.

The world of Sustainability seems to be populated by a kaleidoscopic constituency of vital minds

  • the green activist agitators, ice breakers & policy shakers of the likes of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace
  • the scientists, conservationists and behaviouralists from the myriad NGOs advising and supporting communities across the globe
  • the sustainability policy and regulatory advisors, architects and engineers who operate at the point where the private sector and the public sector collide
  • the particular and labyrinthine coder programmer and systems minds of IT and rock n roll tech geekdom
  • the lateral and populist storytellers and communications professionals who advise both corporates and government on sustainability communication strategies and campaigning
  • the HR professionals who are increasingly being placed at the heart of burgeoining Social programmes being designed to evolve from the inside out and the ground up of large corporates and public sector organisations
  • the corporate actors driving sustainability agendas to improve performance, mitigate risk, attract investent or embrace social responsibility.

Many of these actors and agents are rarely advocates of an over simplified Either/Or picture of the world, and most have traces of both polarities in them.

But it did seem that as things start to go wrong or seize up there is a human tendency to fall into one or other of the camps – and revert to the type closest to ones own nature.

2 halves

Thomas and I chose to identify and explore these Either/Or moments and the attitudes and behaviours that accompany them in a couple of ways

The first was that of Venus & Mars, with Thomas viewing the two types through the lens of couples counselling, viewing the barriers to innovative sustainability thinking and doing as requiring the navigational and brokering skills usually deployed by professionals trying to help Couples climb out of the morass of familiarity and astonishing contempt – someone adept and experienced at showing warring and stagnating couples how to embrace the best of each other.

With this in mind we asked people a simple question; what is the greatest barrier to sustainability innovation?

We collected some answers from the people in the room. We then asked them to define what they felt might be the best solution to those problems. We collected these.

We then had the pleasure of Sarah Greenway from B&Q who spoke eloquently and in heartfelt terms about some of her own challenges and feelings (un-surprisingly one of those people with both aspects ascendant in her).

And then we rolled in a rainbow grenade to see if we could unlock people’s minds further.

Taking the view that in fact as well as the innate issues of intimate self-realisation that Thomas had alluded were some more extant behavioural traits that we might explore and play with to help the innovation on its way.

And I chose to label those traits as Punk & Wonk – another simple playful way of creating a tension and point counter point framework in which to exercise the innovation process to create breakouts and breakthroughs in stagnating thinking.

Punk celebrates the liberation of explosive dynamism and chaotic fluidity: Wonk that of incremental revelation and structured illumination.

I believe that somewhere between their poles: between the anxiety-inducing anarchy of blowing stuff up and the pointillist particularity or relentless rigour lies a resilience strategy for those embarking on a process of sustainability innovation. A potential answer to sustaining Sustainability Innovation.

I used the genius of Bowie and Eno as an example of how even the most complementary and inventive minds need help – need to be compelled to take a different view to break through blocks and walls in their own and others heads.

Bowie, the master of relentless reinvention – the punk dude of many lives personas and faces – and Eno, the musical scientist, and king or algorithmic cadence utilized the inspiration of Oblique Strategies – a set of obtuse cards devised by Eno and Peter Schmidt – to break their own creative deadlocks in the studio.

I asked people to envisage that we might create our own set of Breakout Strategies for Sustainability Innovation in much the same way, using the dualities of either Venus & Mars or Punks & Wonks to aid that inspiration.

We then asked the participants in the room to take one of the solutions we had identified and one of the traits = preferably the one least like themselves – and see if the application of a Punk or a Wonk mindset had helped them see anything differently.

I will leave the rest to David Harding-Brown in his write up of the session – far more complete and objective as an observer than either Thomas or I would be.

What we have left is a charming and playful set of inspirations rooted both in punk and wonk perspectives and some hybrids to help people in the fire storm of sustainability innovation.

Everyone needs to break out of their hole and reignite the minds we need to re-inspire the innovation that just might stop us all going up in a plume of consumption smoke!

Discuss.

See the links below to the event from the SB site including david Harding-Brown’s piece

http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/organizational_change/david_harding-brown/sb14london_innovating_sustainability_-_game

http://www.sustainablebrands.com/digital_learning/event_video/collaboration/innovating_sustainability_game_two_halves

 

 

Banality, Insanity & The Human Condition. The Life Chamber: a short story (virtually)

16 Monday Dec 2013

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Dan stood expressionless at the mouth of the walkway.

Ridiculous. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a decision by himself. Perhaps he never had. But then again, fuck it. The Chamber was there. Why not use it.

To be fair, no-one he knew ever made a decision – a big one anyway – without ‘immersion’ – the slightly baptismal name for a quick session in the Chamber.

And using the Chamber was just so damn easy. A quick questionnaire and background was all that was needed. Provide Your Avatar; your DNA PIN, faith (passive or active) social network; your game personas and your economic and geographic bearing and you were ready to roll. (Dan was already a Gold Tier Traveller.)

The Chamber was a pretty cool piece of kit. Its Possibilities software programme offered a number of primary, secondary and tertiary consequences so large they had to write a second programme to help them reduce the time it took to calculate across the consequence matrices of the first. Nice.

Why was it so popular? Well, no brainer really – in more ways than one.

It allowed you, from the Right Here Right Now, to see how life might play out – it projected your future by playing out in a multitude of actions and consequences, with every action rooted in your previous behaviours and tendencies, digitally correlated to your past and both what you may have done and did do with it and in it. The Chamber played those future possibilities out from the next second to a millennia hence- based on the chain of events you would ignite by any decision you acted upon.

And boy did it open your mind.

When you first went in, all was pretty dark – just a low lit walk way to a central glass platform that seemed to hover in the middle of the air. You had no idea of the construction wrapped around you at this point.

Once you were on the platform, your sight-line was directed by a small amber pin-prick light in the distance. Once you’d locked on that – pow – quick iris scan and you were off – and off was the right word.

After the first few tests they had quickly developed a more gentle fade up timeframe. It seemed the sudden appearance of a thousand cosmoses of opportunity and consequence were so shocking to the human guinea pigs experiencing them that one had a heart attack, two soiled themselves and the fourth reached a rather inappropriate state of arousal (psychopath apparently!)

Anyway, when it rise up in front of you, the effect was so exhilarating it was hard not to just hurl yourself off the platform as, surely, life could never be filled with more wonderment than that which was spread out before you now. The Chamber was a sociopath’s dream.

Look up and you could see your potential for exceptional success rising high above and around you, in front and behind of you – a bright dome of possibility; the fully illustrated illuminated text of the best of you – rendered in one seamless trajectory from the day of your conception to the day you expired. (there was a second Chamber for Posthumous Possibilities and Consequence) Equally all you need do was look down around and about your feet and you had set out before you exactly how bad the failure could get.

Looking forwards was OK but you could kinda figure that out by yourself – the picture of what could be if you carried on as you were.

The really, really brilliant thing happened when you looked left and right – and to what degree and angle you did so.

If you looked to your right, the Chamber would reveal to you what Could Be: and by looking to the left all that Should Be. Slightly nuts – and the theory of it did in fact pitch Dan into a dreadful two month period of insomnia riddled with the brain worms of How on Earth…!?.

Part if its massive impact and WOW factor was in the way the visual technology seamlessly played out what were in effect quintillions of cause and effect strands that all overlapped and informed each other but in such a way as you could actually consume what you were looking at in any way that made any sense whatsoever. Cleverly, they synched everything to the iris lock directional software that drew the part you were looking at into perfect focus while allowing the squillions of slightly shaded variations of the same consequence in its immediate proximity fall out of focus.

It was utterly overwhelming the first few times he used it. He just wasn’t wired that way. Dan’s brother was the gamer, not him. To be able to look around and see how actions he was yet to take might play out in so many ways was frankly insane.

The obvious ones in a straight line stretching out in front of you were easy enough. They were almost pedestrian.

It was the Maybe!? and What if? on the left and right, above and in front of you that really blew your mind.

The Could Be hemisphere offered up visualisations or opportunities – potential decisions based on myriad trajectories from where he was in life right now, drawing in his past actions and outcomes; and calculating the consequences they could deliver going forwards (allowing for all the other 15 billion people stuffed on the planet and their own set of infinite possibilities and his colliding at any given point). Genius.

The Should Be hemisphere was, on the other hand a whole different deal. Whether they admitted it or not, it was basically judging you – a moral, ethical and humanistic filter that was more to do with what you deserved as a human being – a value judgement on you and how you lived your life – and the right of entitlement to nice things happening to you those would deliver.

There were still a lot of naysayers out there about the Chamber and its toxic and addictive nature. Whatever. It made total sense to Dan. There was a sublime logic about the Chamber.

What did they think was going to happen when all that data digital mobile virtual stuff finally met in the middle anyways? Brain Implants Avatars Full immersion virtual experiences, future genome and DNA mapping, data petri-dishes…and all that…STUFF – what did they think was going to turn up?

The number of gamer software programmers out there had been left to their own unaudited devices for decades: developing intuitive algorithms that could meter out infinitesimal shades of cause and effect in real time – organic consequences from any number of human actions and reactions, across multiple players and combinations in any circumstance. When they revealed how far they’d got – effectively developing a parallel universe that our Avatars could live in on their own sweet evolving terms, the proverbial and virtual really hit the notional and legal fan. Once the furore had died down (and that took a while) the Senate agreed that all of the programmes and supporting data would be secured by one host – them funnily enough.

And it wasn’t just the brain bit of the gamer stuff. The platform graphics had learned to keep up. Why wouldn’t they? They were smart evolving programmes too. When they synched that lot with the digital mapping of the planet – elevator madness.  The upgrade impact in virtual experience was initially immeasurable. (They had to subsequently upgrade the neuro-science monitors to read the new wave cadences.) Let’s just say that the ability to capture and render every shade of material environment in 4D alone, had become so sophisticated that some of the scientists managing the programme ended up literally not knowing what planet they were on– and has to be sent on a ReLocation Centre to wean them out of the virtual world they lived in back into the real one.

So:

That eventually, some smart arse would think it was a great idea to take all the uber-advanced human plastics generation technology, genome and DNA mapping, intelligence banks, A.I., gamification programmes and consumer data banks as well as every organic and plastic materiality index and put them in one place was no big surprise. That the said smart arse would also think to converge them into one huge intuitive evolving thinking machine with out first having figured out to what use to put it was a When? and Who?, not an If? or a Why? conundrum!

But two things popped up to save the day on the Why anyway.

A) the Vivisection & Animal testing pressure groups won in the Global High Court. So when the geeks said ‘hey let’s create some virtual humans to experiment on!’ it was high fives and whoop de whoops all round, followed by a sudden urgent and surprisingly coincidental need to develop virtual humans with enough random characteristics in them and undefined cause and effect strands to render them plausible as test moneys .

B) Poor Time-poor first worlders had become so concerned about the degradation of their optimal decision making abilities, compromised by the new speed of life and its attendant devices, that they lobbied successfully for an institution to be established in the public good to enable them to stay, well, optimal.

But because everyone was so tense about the whole ethics thing, every platform, strand and data organism designer was compelled to build an ethical monitoring system and a kill switch into their technology and supporting programming to ensure no mutating toxic or belligerent strands were allowed to develop, rise and prevail. A sort of systemic Do Good Do The Right Thing value programme.

Dan had always thought this was kinda funny – that the scientists that had chased the old God out of the old universe had in fact become the architects of a new him/her/it in their new one.

The really scary bit though had come from the really basic data stuff that had slowly been building up in the vaults of the big consumer companies. Their ability to know and capture in malleable data bundles the banalities and nondescript details of the human condition – when a razor was binned, the speed at which someone crossed a given space, the number of times they recharged the batteries for their sex toys, the fallibility of the individual (wrong turns, punctuality, household breakages), their attitude to risk (heathy purchase of Savlon and Junior Sun Screen?) –  had become so sophisticated that the Big Bank (the human data centre) could actually cut the data in such a way as to predict when a certain post-coded 34 year old Latino guy called Miguel was most likely to forget to pick up something his wife ordered dependent on from which direction he approached the mall.

So, anyway, take all that stuff, and fuse it together some killer polyhedrous curved screen innovation and bingo. The Chamber.

The passive fibrillating sensation bought Dan back to the now. Dan flicked his ThumbMic. It was Cheryl.

CHERYL: You sound weird. What’s up? [ PAUSE ] Don’t tell me? Dan you’re not in that place AGAIN? You’re in The Chamber aren’t you?

DAN: Yup.

CHERYL: For chrissakes! Dan. Its just a birthday present. For a 4 year old?! Surely you can figure that out all by yourself. Jeezus!

CLICK. The line went dead.

Dan pondered a moment before walking down the low lit walkway. It hadn’t been going terribly well with Cheryl recently.  But what to do…what to do?!! Dan dropped a quick note on to his palm screen to book anther Chamber session for next week.

Needs Must and all that.