I love it when someone comes up with a clever, concise way of explaining a really big phenomenon. I suppose you can say I’m pro-glibness in that regard. Oliver Burkeman’s dispatch from Southby — I’m sad to say that this is the first time I haven’t been in five years, due to a prior commitment — is clearly a pro:
The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival’s 330-page schedule of events, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. This is not just grandiosity on their part. Rather – and this is a technological point, but also a philosophical one – they herald the final disappearance of the boundary between “life online” and “real life”, between the physical and the virtual. It thus requires only a small (and hopefully permissible) amount of journalistic hyperbole to suggest that the days of “the internet” as an identifiably separate thing may be behind us.
Riffing on Tim O’Reilly’s concept of “sensor-driven collective intelligence,” Burkeman writes:
When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.
And he continues with a discussion of gamification, an idea I’ve been obsessed with for at least a decade that is taking off.
This all reminds me — ahem — of a rambling, mostly incoherent piece I wrote that touched on the launch of Foursquare in 2009:
The Foursquareverse is designed to grow denser over time as users layer recommendations and other content over the physical map. In “Synthetic Serendipity,” Vinge imagines a world in which millions play games that layer new virtual realities over the mundane everyday world. Like Foursquare, daily tasks are assigned new meaning and value. For example, taking a particular bus route could represent slaying a dragon in some elaborate medieval scenario, or delivering a package could win you hundreds of gold doubloons in an alternate-reality pirate quest.
Over time, these games could become an instrument of subtle and not-so-subtle social engineering. Economist Roland Fryer has experimented with cash incentives to encourage literacy and good study habits for schoolchildren. What if schoolchildren were enrolled in a series of overlapping virtual MMOGs that incentivized, say, showing up to class on time or acing pop quizzes? This might sound absurd, yet it lends an interestingly subversive edge to success in school — kids would literally be “gaming the system.”
If this all sounds a little eccentric, well, who knew that you’d be Tweeting or joining Facebook or doing any number of other things that once struck you as flatly absurd? In a way, this concept of layering games over real life is an extension of something we all do: apply our own standards and expectations to the social world. As Will Wilkinson has argued, the harms associated with economic inequality are to some degree mitigated by the fact that an open society generates countless status hierarchies that cut against conventional hierarchies based on wealth. Wrestling fans care about things that don’t really matter to NASCAR fans, and Persian dentists in Beverly Hills don’t generally compare themselves to Bengali skateboarders in Brooklyn. As new cultural forms emerge, so do new hierarchies, e.g., among Deadheads and goths and neoprimitivists. Virtual game layers simply introduce new hierarchies designed to make life more fulfilling and fun at a faster rate than we’ve seen in the past.
Ephemeralization + gamification = the future. Or ephemeralization + gamification + irradiation + red ant infestation = the nightmare version of the future.