Crowd Models Become Pervasive Across Society

Crowd-based models are becoming so pervasive that almost no major segment of modern life is left untouched by them. The concept of digital crowd models refers to the coordination of large numbers of individuals (the crowd) through an open call on the Internet in the conduct of some sort of activity.

Not only are crowd models an efficient at-scale alternative to former methods that the Internet now affords, but at another level, crowd models are also a node of progress for humanity, both individually and en masse. An inherent property of crowd models is greater autonomy, decision-making, and action-taking by the individual. This means greater individual agency whilst simultaneously enabling group collaboration projects at previously unimaginable scales, for example, possibly ultimately coordinating and employing the cognitive power of millions of human agents.  

Crowd Models by Sector

• In economics, there are crowdsourced labor marketplaces where simple tasks and professional services requests can be posted and fulfilled, crowdfunding websites for financing projects, and group purchasing mechanisms. 
• In politics, crowd models mean the use of big data and social media to organize opinion and action, conduct direct marketing, and affect change. 
• In the social venue, blogs, social networks, and online dating sites are examples of crowd models. 
• In entertainment, there are massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. In education, vast eLearning networks are populating the landscape. 
• In health, there are health social networks, digital health collaboration and experimentation communities, crowdscience competitions, and new movements such as the quantified self. 
• In the legal venue, digital public goods have arisen through crowd contributions such as the Wikipedia, online health databanks, and other data commons resources.

FutureSex

Would you still feel like yourself if you modified your body or tried on a different body? Would you have the same sexual appetites and desires? Would it feel the same to be with your partner sexually if you were in a different body? If he/she were in a different body? If you were both in different bodies?

Selecting different bodies would separate the physical and mental aspects of sex. Pheromonal and other elemental physical chemistry might be surprisingly different in different bodies (as Richard Morgan explores in Altered Carbon). There is probably a wide dispersion in people's preferred mix of physical and mental sexual characteristics.

Consider for example senescent seniors trying on teenage bodies for a sexual romp. Should it be illegal to have sex with a body aged below the age of consent if it is inhabited by an adult?

The range of sexual issues that are challenging to discuss in relationships now could explode. Current issues regarding virtual world sex are just a warm-up, for example, is it cheating to have virtual sex with an avatar inhabited by someone other than your partner?

My partner wants to be someone else
How should I feel if my lover wants to experience being in a different body? What if I don't want to have sex with the person he/she wants to try being?

My partner wants me to be someone else
How should I feel if my lover wants me to be in a different body? Is self-agency diminished in inhabiting a body picked by my partner or is it just a more extreme form of doing what I know my partner enjoys? Would I or should I feel rejection pangs if my lover wants me to wear the Angelina Jolie body or would it be fun? Then of course the respite to the novelty could be the really wild - lets just wear ourselves tonight...

Its all about me...my partner is a sexual substrate
Would sex disappear as a special interaction amongst partners in favor of a way to explore individual desires? How could I be desiring my partner if I want him/her to wear someone else's body? Do I still desire my partner or is he/she just a sexual substrate if I can have sex with him/her as Brad Pitt one night, as Angelina Jolie the next, etc.? Does it matter if we are both wearing each others fantasy bodies? How could turning current fantasies into reality be achieved in a healthy way that doesn't hurt feelings but rather opens up new doors to fun and exploration?

We generally don't expect our partners to mind if we engage in other means of entertainment and relaxation with others, could an evolved understanding of sex be as casual? As possibilities increase, the possessiveness of sex probably diminishes.

Does it depend on whose body?
Is it different if it is another real person's body (the Brad Pitt) vs. a fictional body (the anonymous Pleasure Bob model)? In an advanced society, there should be no difference in the connotation of a partner's desire for the Brad Pitt body, the anonymous pleasure model, the Next Door Neighbor or the Guy from Work that you met at Happy Hour.

What would the world be like if we could all have sex with our neighbors, co-workers, celebrities and politicians via a filter worn by our partners? Ironically this could strengthen monogamous or polyamorous bonds and allow relationships to revolve around non-sexual aspects.

Multi-flavor
It could be that the Brad Pitt model is actually not that well-endowed, and would need to be modified mid-stream, or switched to the Johnny Depp or the Marilyn Monroe model, or become a rotating kaleidoscope of morphing physicality.

How should I feel if my lover wants two copies of me simultaneously? This is actually a new concept of having sex with yourself. Would I want a threesome or foursome with multiple copies of my lover? How would I expect my lover to feel if I wanted to experience a multiple-some with copies of him/her?

Presumably sexual options will eventually extend at minimum to wearing a neuro-experience filter mapping real or imagined partner behavior to personalized sensors and magnitudes, experiencing your partner wearing someone else or having sex with humanoid robots.

If different bodies can be tried on, sex is but one area for discovery, ethics and imagination.

Early Signals of Acceleration as 2007 Begins

Historically, technology typically solved discrete problems in open territory such as how to get database systems to talk to accounting systems or how to simulate the Earth’s climate in a computer model.

Now there is a deeper shift occurring which promotes change in the form of unsought improvements to the wide-ranging structure and institutions of society, to all of life. The thinking that has been creatively applying technology to problems is starting to question all aspects of how we experience life and redefine long-standing traditional social, economic and political models and problems at all levels including physicality/stuff (stuff-ness), information and concept. There is a tremendous opportunity for participation in this process. The toppling of societal models is underway in three key areas…


ECONOMICS - INDIVIDUAL AGENTS REPLACE 200 Y.O. INSTITUTIONS
The most fundamental changes to status quo are currently visible in the economics sphere.

1. Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law professor extensively studied at Harvard’s Berkman School, points out that for 150 years, information and culture has been produced at the capital-intensive industrial scale and nearly all society is currently organized around this. Now, however, there are radical changes re-jiggering the creation of information goods and culture to increasingly occur in distributed open source models of participation by individuals. The subtext is the impending demise of traditional institutional models.

2. Markets 2.0 is driving capital allocation decisions to the individual in unprecedented ways deflecting power from existing capital markets with institutionally-disintermediated P2P affinity-directed investment, philanthropic, purchasing and human productive capital.

3. We are becoming a multi-currency society with reputation and ideas supplementing, replacing and ultimately surpassing monetary currency as the medium in which value is reflected.


POLITICS – BEGGING FOR CHANGES
Politics has not changed much yet. The time is ripe for many ideas such as these two and hopefully the 2008 US Presidential elections will be the catalyst:

1. Google Earth-like zoom perspectives of aggregated searchable political information integrating 1) real-time congressional voting records, 2) parties to whom budget allocations/public contracts are awarded, 3) lobbyist/PAC activities and 4) OpenSecrets, NewsMeat, etc. campaign contributions.

2. A daily barometer on MySpace, AARP, SeniorWorld, SecondLife and other social network giant homepages or newspaper homepages measuring and broadcasting real-time political sentiment.


SOCIETY - INCREASE IN INDIVIDUAL AGENCY
Blogging, MySpace, YouTube, polyamory/multiamory attitudes, social networks and reputation building have compounded to create a more open, freedom-oriented, feedback-giving, opinion-forming sharing and discussing deliberating society. This has ultimately resulted in greater agency-taking by individuals in all areas of life, as political agents, as economic agents, as social agents and in every other area of virtual and physical reality.

Applications for human agency will continue to proliferate allowing the further empowerment, liberation and democratization of the human spirit, triggering higher degrees of actualization, happiness, contribution, participation and productivity.

Universal voices, Message separated from Medium, Ubiquitous choice

Doug Rushkoff at the 2004 PopTech conference makes several great points related to some of the ongoing themes discussed in this blog, listen to the talk here.

Theme: Increasing democratization of the world
Rushkoff cites the European Renaissance as where media (e.g.; books) became distributable and everyone could access it and have opinions, it was the birth of the individual; the Renaissance human tech culture is currently going through is that everyone can now be an author. Some examples are via personal websites, blogs, building our own software (open source), applications (free APIs), games and new online mini-worlds/experiences. It is interesting to think about how collective consciousness models and other tools may evolve for orchestrating and making accessible not overwhelming all of these voices (15-20 million blogs as of Jan. 2005 and growing exponentially). They'll likely (self?)organize into like streams but should they?

Theme: The medium is the message - the tool is the innovation
Rushkoff cautions that the sexiness of the medium heavily influences the message, for example, because TV was new and personal and invasive in the home, Dan Rather could end newscasts saying "...And that's the way it is" and everyone would believe him. We don't believe the newscasters any more as full arbiters of the situation they are discussing. As critical thinkers, we need to separate the message from the medium and evaluate the merits of the message on its own. The message may be much less powerful and overwhelming than the medium, especially with a lot of new media likely on the way - holographic, 3-D, brain-implanted, etc. How are blogs as a medium influencing the message?

Theme: Shift away from market-centric life structure and value systems
Another interesting point Rushkoff makes is that yes, we are awash with choice, which is good, but it is only in a market context. He uses the example of if you are in love with someone, the only current societally accepted way to act on that is to be married. We don't yet have true choice in lifestyle and many other areas. Take work, for example, it is rare that it's not structured as location and time specific, when being efficiency specific makes much more sense. In the tech world is an example of a successful efficiency-based transition: search is going from statistics-based to relevancy-based. Hopefully new attention on the presence of choice in some arenas and not in others will allow it to be drawn into where it is not.