The Space Collective

THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING

Among Southern California architects, futurist / filmmaker Rene Daalder is a cult-hero. Part of it has to do with his unrelenting enthusiasm for the future of technology (www.renedaalder.com). Part of it has to do with his enthusiasm for the role of architecture in this future. Most of it has to do with his ability to integrate seemingly fictional accounts of as yet unrealized scientific and technological applications into the reality of our near future existence. Fall 2007 will see the launch of a new website, SpaceCollective.org, which calls itself an emergent society of forward thinking terrestrials. This project, conceived by Rene Daalder in collaboration with Internet designer Folkert Gorter, assisted by editor Aaron Ohlmann, is an attempt at universal broadcasting. SpaceCollective will broadcast to the universe, beaming to outer space a month by month digital time capsule of human civilization. Volume met up with Rene and Folkert at LAX to talk about the future of everything.

Jeffrey Inaba: How did you start with the SpaceCollective project?

Rene Daalder: A few years ago I was asked by an Internet company if I could make some sort of story-driven website, based on a narrative that could play out online. So I came back to them with a concept inspired by the Golden Disk Carl Sagan created for the Voyager space probes, which are now leaving the solar system. The disk contains a time capsule about life on Earth in 1977 but the project was heavily censored by the powers that be, who omitted any indication of human genitals and rejected the Beatles’ offer to include their song ‘Here Comes the Sun’ for fear of alien copyright infringement; and the members of the United Nations fought over which country was entitled to contribute the longest speech. In my story I hypothesized that the time capsule also contained a secret contribution of Sagan’s friend Timothy Leary, the controversial 60’s LSD guru and futurist who supposedly downloaded his brain for the edification of alien civilizations that might one day intercept the time capsule. The consensus about my proposal was that it would make for a great movie rather than an Internet project, but at the time I was focusing on documentary film making and not very interested in making yet another feature film. As far as I’m concerned the vitality of traditional feature films has been seriously diminished lately because younger generations who have grown up with the non-linearity and interactivity of the web, gaming etc. are turning away from the linear content of movies, so movies are becoming an ever bigger gamble at the box office.
I realized that this is ridiculous in a day and age when you can actually start things off by first establishing an online community, and then make a movie for its members instead of taking a shot in the dark with a completely unpredictable audience. So my idea was to turn the model around and create a website that has an intrinsic value of its own and then make a bond followed by a movie made with the appreciative audience we have already established.
Around that time I met Folkert who is a very interesting Internet designer. What makes him so unique is that he’s one of the few designers around who from the beginning of his career has exclusively worked online instead of starting out in the print media.

I have always been impressed with the way popular thinkers from the ‘60s embraced TV, like Carl Sagan’s, “Contact” which together with Gene Roddenberry’s “Star trek” defined the space age, or Marshall McLuhan who introduced the revolutionary notion that media shapes human activity, and Timothy Leary who reinvented himself from psychedelic pioneer to being a “stand up philosopher” on TV; they all were maverick thinkers who helped articulate the future by adopting a pop culture vernacular. So the idea was to use the online platform to do something similar for our times in a radically different interactive medium. We were looking at all the social networking sites and observed that no matter how well they functioned, they ultimately were just attempts to corral as many people as possible without adding any particular value to the online experience. That’s when we started to think about a site that would provide the right context to harness the intelligence that resides on the web.
It seemed to us that it was best to create enough of our own content to frame the ambition of the project and set the bar as high as possible while employing pop culture strategies like the media-savvy thinkers of the ‘60s I mentioned. Our initial metaphor was to use the Internet to create updates of Carl Sagan’s time capsule on board of Voyager and by the end of each month beam them up into space.
When we started to develop Space Collective at the beginning of 2006 the Internet was making a big shift from a primarily text-based to a video-based medium, giving a whole new life to short-form video content, so that became the jumping off point.

Folkert Gorter: The primary feature of the Time Capsules we are creating is a monthly "episode"—a 3 minute video clip produced by Space Collective, functioning as a lead-in for the transmission. The video is accompanied by a selection of encyclopedia-style information, references, links and illustrations provided by the Space Collective staff, framing the various issues of the month.

RD: In the process of making these 3 minute episodes I was pleasantly surprised how well the short form lends itself to making broad strokes observations that extrapolate the past and the present into what we call the future of everything.

Here is the narration of the video that starts off the series:

VOICE OVER: Scientific evidence suggests that when the Earth was born, four and a half billion years ago, life rained down onto its surface in the form of bacteria from the skies. These micro-organisms proliferated for ages until evolution prompted them to spread from the sea to the land. There they networked into ever more complex life forms, which over long periods of time gave rise to us. What would come to be known as the man-made world emerged in fact from the same microbial master plan that spawned all life on planet Earth.

After colonizing the planet for billions of years, the migrant bacteria from space decided that the time had come to share their grand evolutionary scheme with the larger universe from which they hailed. As their spokesman they recruited a charismatic astronomer who devised a PR strategy that would carry their legacy back to the stars. His name was Carl Sagan:

SAGAN: We are made of star stuff. The cosmos is also within us. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself!

VOICE OVER: In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft were launched on an epic journey to the stars. On board they carry a Golden Disk, assembled by Sagan, which contains an inspired record of life on our planet for the edification of our neighbors in space.

30 years later the Voyager mission continues to chug along at the far reaches of our solar system – it’s message falling ever further behind the times as things on earth are changing at an exponential rate. Now, beyond the limitations of time and space, lies a third realm, populated by a vast network of connected individuals, linked together in an ever-expanding global consciousness.

This is the realm of Space Collective – an emergent society of forward thinking terrestrials, participating in the ongoing evolution of our species.

In February of 2007, the members of Space Collective will commemorate Voyager’s 30th anniversary with the first in a series of monthly updates of Voyager’s Golden Disk - to be beamed into space at the speed of light, from your computer to the stars.

FG: Besides the episodes and the relating meta text, the additional contents of the monthly Payload are generated both by the site's registered members and Space Collectives writers, curators and designers, providing the front page with a blend of public and "native" content, feeding into the site's continuously updated information and entertainment digest, loosely inspired by Sagan’s time capsule.

JI: The idea of the Golden Disk seems like it was historic because it meant that a group of people decided it was important to represent human civilization, and to make the effort to collect information about civilization and send it out to the universe. Do you think that a similar perspective on what the globe is today triggers everyone’s interest in Space Collective? That there is a generational moment where there’s a sense of reflection and comprehension about what a global condition could be?

RD: I think you’re right, we’re tapping into a community of young people who are eager to help us show how something way cooler could exist in our own lifetimes than what’s happening on this planet today. There is a profound sense of awareness that things are about to change in a big way. The old models seem to be falling apart left and right and there’s a great deal of eagerness to look into all sorts of viable scenarios for large scale transformation. To them the Internet has become a metaphor for unencumbered evolutionary potential, allowing people to see evolution at work as technology accelerates at an exponential rate. If we look today at Sagan’s time capsule, for example, it is striking to see how much it has become out of date in just 3 decades.

JI: So the reason why Space Collective beams monthly updated information is that things are changing so fast. How do you send it up from earth into the universe?

FG: The "Payload" grows until on the last second of the month it is sealed, stored and prepared for uplink: the system takes a snapshot of the database and encrypts it into a digital archive (using a technique similar to ZIP compression) which is then transmitted to a radio telescope facility for interstellar upload.

RD: Today we can beam messages up into space and bridge the distance that took Voyager 30 years in less than 15 hours, so, who knows, when an alien civilization will find the Golden Disk, they may also come across our updates to keep them current. But the main value of creating these time capsules may be our own sense of reflection you referred to. As Carl Sagan said, “Okay, we’ll send this message in a bottle up into space and hope that in a billion years someone may intercept it, and if not, then at least we had the chance here on Earth to look at ourselves through the eyes of a higher intelligence.” And it turns out to be a very inspiring notion that we may be able to communicate with a higher intelligence or extraterrestrial scientists or whatever, which allows us here on earth to guess at their advanced outlook, prompting us to aspire to levels of existence that we have not quite attained yet but with a bit of luck maybe will some time.

JI: What are the elements people come across when they go to the website?

FG: Upon arrival at SpaceCollective.org, visitors are presented with an overview of "this month's payload". This page is essentially a portal linking to the various areas of the site, featuring the best content from each section, selected by Space Collective's team of curators, providing the front page with a blend of public and "native" content

The "public" areas of the site contain the contributions in various forms by Space Collective's members. When they register, new members get access to their Personal Payload—a private area of Space Collective created for them, into which they can start to transfer personal information, post ideas, upload artifacts, connect with other members and upload anything they find worthy of inclusion in the monthly Payload. In addition to representing one's digital identity, these Personal Payloads function as "blogs"— where members write about their ideas and engage in what is called The Global Brainstorm—which is a rich-media discussion forum where conversations can be started or joined—and the various platforms for public "offerings", where audio clips, music, pictures, video or text can be uploaded for inclusion in the monthly Payload.

RD: Of course we will link to many other websites as well. In fact, if you were to make a daily snapshot of all 6 billion pages on the Internet, aliens would have a perfect picture of what’s going on this planet and how it’s evolving on a moment by moment basis, and they’d have access to a large percentage of all human knowledge as well. A lot of that has been put there by millions of people, without any leaders, ideology or financial considerations, which indicates how effectively a large group of people can spontaneously rise to an occasion and create a revolution that takes the establishment completely by surprise.

Let’s think for a moment about academia in the age of Google. What else is academia but an elegant old style search engine where professors have been leading young people by the hand to library shelves full of books, where treasures of human wisdom awaited them. But in the age of online search many of these books are becoming instantly accessible as Google will get them to you in seconds, cross referencing humongous databases that are not limited to library material but include the all-important information generated daily on the web as well. The impact of this phenomenon will be increasingly felt by traditional learning institutions. It has already bred an entire generation of different non-linear thinkers. In a recent study even the medical world had to concede that Google’s search results in many instances matched or exceeded their own diagnostic abilities.

It is undeniable that by now the writing is on the wall for almost every established institution around. Newspapers are hurting because, besides the numerous readers deserting them, they have lost half of their advertising revenue to the Internet. Hollywood is faced with impending changes in its distribution model that will force them to overhaul the industry. Record companies are desperately trying to reinvent themselves in order to stay in the game. The same will be true for politics. With the Internet in place it seems almost inevitable that completely different ways for people to connect with the issues they care about will end up replacing today’s version of representative democracy.

And then there is the next incarnation of our online lives, a glimpse of which can now be seen in the virtual community Second Life, where a whole web-based economy has sprung up around the sale of virtual real estate and residents are designing and building their own environment where they can live out their fantasies. An infinite number of human connections are now being made beyond geographic limitations, including business transactions, shared experiences in online games, and romantic opportunities that successfully carry over from the web into the physical world. This is not to say that the virtual world itself is by definition non-physical. Real time interaction through erotic devices can be triggered across the network and the simple notion of being “poked” by someone on the social networking site Facebook stirs near-physical excitement in some of the community’s members. The efficiencies of the virtual realm are even more stunning when we compare the flow of its online traffic with the daily grind of being stuck in endless traffic jams in the physical world.

These commutes no longer make sense. People can interact in real time with anyone anywhere across the network. The plausible notion that today all automobile traffic could be easily cut makes car pooling on congested freeways seem as outmoded as operator-switched party lines in the days of the hand-cranked telephone. But instead of acting upon these developments we are completely missing out on an opportunity that right now could eliminate serious air pollution, wars over fossil fuels, and massive amounts of down time.

Arguments like these typically make up the content of Space Collective’s 3 minute movies because we are looking at the situation through the lens of an alien intelligence, without getting bogged down with real world inertia. And the space metaphor is not the only way of gaining another perspective on these terrestrial issues. The other obvious vantage point is the fluent digital mindset that prevails in cyberspace where there is constant social experimentation going on. The Internet and the larger digital realm of computer intelligence it connects with provide us with the blueprint for the future far before the physical world is able to follow its lead.

JI: So in that sense, what you’re saying is that the Internet doesn’t help support what the real world is, but that the Internet becomes the operating system for the real world.

RD: Exactly, and in the case of Space Collective we use all the information that is available online to help people see the forest for the trees, opening them up to new perspectives. There are lots of people with the desire to change the world, but they have been conditioned that that is an almost impossible ambition to accomplish. Except, other than overcoming tradition and the built-in resistance against it, change is not difficult to achieve at all. Historically, when the people truly wanted something to be changed, they managed to change it right there and then. We talked about the internet generation and how their perspective has changed because of all the information they interact with
Now you can say that we still live in a world that doesn’t abide by their rules and that may be true, but they are certainly rewiring their brain in preparation for a profoundly different moment in time.

JI: A growing collective consciousness of a new set of values.

RD: Yes. It’s like the Berlin Wall a few years before it fell. People were still firmly convinced that they were victims of the Russian oppression, and you would visit these Eastern European countries, four or five years before the Iron Curtain came down, and you could sense that things were already very different than the people perceived them. You couldn’t help but feel that if they just said stop, enough, it would be over, and then one day it indeed proved to be as simple as that.

JI: You’re saying that people’s reality is focused more on what’s going on online, and that now the material world is something that only begins to approximate the world online. The collective sentiments, the thoughts that are being exchanged, the ideas that are being enacted online means that we no longer have the impediments physical barriers produce. So in that sense, something similar to the Berlin Wall, which was a physical barrier, have already been taken down for a community that is online and exchanging ideas. It seems like there’s even going to be a breakdown of a Berlin Wall that is the entire physical world.

RD: Very true.

FG: That attitude has been fully adopted by the younger generation, because they’ve grown up with the network. That’s their status quo, and their attitude is completely based around accepting that kind of interactivity between minds. The conventional boundaries of culture and geography are no longer an issue online.

RD: The theme of people migrating into the digital realm and the changing dynamic between these digital refugees and the real world has always been very prominently on my mind, starting many years ago when Rem Koolhaas came for the first time to LA and we were working on a scenario, called “Hollywood Tower,” where the film industry was going to be taken over by computer-generated actors. So the story was about this big revolt of the flesh and blood acting community against the studio’s embrace of the computer age. Ironically, in light of today’s tremendous popularity of computer animated films, after all this time that clash may yet occur.

Afterwards, I started to work at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. This is where the early CGI medium was invented, ILM, Pixar, Silicon Graphics Computers, all of that came out of there, and at the time we were working on the invention of texture mapping, morphing, flocking, all sorts of key software inventions that before there were CG movies would give us the first simulation programs and the notion of virtual reality, which will eventually become very important for much more immersive online games of the future and the sophisticated parallel worlds that are foreshadowed by Second Life.

More recently, I’ve also been working on a project called Strawberry Fields, which is based on the rights to 40 Beatles songs I own with my financial partners. It takes place in an entirely virtual world where the population no longer bothers to leave their domestic living machines until they rediscover the physical world. What happens in the story is that people make matches in the online gaming environment as they go through adventures together, and in the course of these adventures they get to know each other quite well. An adventure’s a very good circumstance to know if you’re going to get along with somebody. Plus the game knows a lot about you as well, so the game intelligence can help you make up your mind by evaluating the partners’ compatibility. So let’s say there’s compatibility, let’s say that the game will advise you and your virtual partner to meet in the real world. Then that physical encounter becomes an extension of the game, a pay off if you will of what you have learned about each other online.

JI: So you’re saying that, even though Space Collective and a lot of our discussion has been about the potential of the online environment, the Strawberry Fields project suggests that the online environment is not necessarily an end goal. You’re saying that there is a moment when because of your interaction with the digital world, the way you see the physical world is conceptually changed, and that the engagement with the physical world could actually benefit, if not be based upon the experience of being immersed in an online environment.

RD: Right, it’s a constant interaction, wherein the Internet essentially takes the lead. But what most people today see as a basic extension of their phone lines is in fact emerging as a massive computer utility where immense communities of users are interacting with an omni-present data stream. This utility is made up of infinite amounts of distributed intelligence residing on invisible computers spanning the globe. This is the domain where the world’s institutions, its vast archives of information and entertainment as well as the “inhabited” virtual worlds of the future will relocate. It will no longer be just the operating system for the physical world, it will be the intelligent infrastructure on which the physical world will be built.

For the sake of argument, imagine an all-encompassing simulation of the physical world which will allow us to adopt a much more dynamic relationship with reality, to the point where the man made world of old will begin to release its relentless rigidity and be inspired by the full immersion of a fluid virtual experience.