Thursday, July 14, 2016

Froggy Goes Piggy


I have a new story up at The Long+Short, which is about the future of collective intelligence, precarity, Intelligent Personal Assistants, augmented reality, Pokemon GO, cryptocurrency, payments technology, kawaii brands, fintech that attempts to visualize/gamify/humanize financial complexity, frogs, the gig economy, people powered healthcare, butts, the fragmentation and financialization of healthcare, pets, David Attenborough, and things like that.

Elsewhere:

Artwork by Mike Stout.

Other fiction in the series by JY Yang, Tim Maughan, and Ayodele Arigbabu.

Brett Scott researches, explores, and hacks economic and financial systems. He led the excellent Alternative Finance Workshop at Monkton Wyld Court, which inspired and informed the story.

That workshop was put together by Stir to Action, a community organisation who work around social and community enterprises, co-operatives, and campaigns, and innovative, alternative, progressive economics. They publish the magazine STIR, run workshop programmes and short courses, produces how-to resources, design financing to make things happen, and are generally great.

Also see the Nesta / Tim Maughan collaboration in 2013 that led to 'Zero Hours,' a biting indictment of what we might now call 'Uber but for having a job.'

Also see Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, based in Glasgow: the current project is now mostly finished, but hopefully will lead to other things.

The Long+Short collective intelligence stories are all (I think -- mine definitely is) released under the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license, which means you can do pretty much whatever you like with them (including commercially) so long as you attribute.

Chernoff Faces: a bold albeit dubious idea in dataviz, which informs the Pokemoney GOLD conceit.

Also see Twelve Tomorrows 2016 ed. Bruce Sterling, where I have a story touching on some of the same fintech visualization territory. I will be putting out an expanded version of that story as soon as I get some time. (Probably just on Medium, unless you are an editor of some excellent paywall-free site that would like to host it, in which case get in touch).

I am sick with fear ;D

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