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

The Internet of Oh and One More Things

I'm not sure when it will be out, but I have another strange story coming out, this one in MIT Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows which is  available for pre-order. (I took everything way too literally and put in loads of reviews of technology). There's some sweet hype from io9 here. io9 you do come from the future!

Informal acknowledgements to go with the story. The twenty-two words beginning “Mercifully, the whole thing” are from William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” and the forty-nine words beginning “You know how to take a book” are from Max Black’s “The Identity of Indiscernibles” (see Note). Other background reading which was really helpful included Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, Erhan, “Show and Tell: a Neural Image Caption Generator”; Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, “Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images”; Margalynne Armstrong, “Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?”; Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America”; Brett Scott, The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English culture, 1830–1980; and Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. And thanks to Tim Maughan for selfie drones (see my pre-emptive response to his Superflux Drone Fictions).

And really special thanks to Nathan Crock and Bradford Tuckfield for invaluable assistance in thinking through the PrivilegeCheck thing -- in way more detail than actually made it into the story -- and to Samantha Walton, Lucy Kemnitzer, Rob Kiely, Mark Bolsover, William Ellwood, & Sarah Hayden for all your help with writing & editing. And to my ma for receiving suspicious packages for me.

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DeepDish SausageFest

Elsewhere: I think I finished this one before Google's DeepDream went viral and showed the internet what we had long suspected, that our monads are puppyslugs. But for what it's worth, this story definitely goes into DeepDream-type territory, so here's an interesting Medium piece by Kyle McDonald on more recent imagery generated through deep convolutional neural networks.

Earlier: I read TT 2014, by the way, and it has some great work in it (two of which are mentioned in my economic speculative fiction listicle. Speculonomics. Fictisticle.).

Later: There is more to story to tell about that world (because it's this world) so hopefully there will be some kind of sequel / prequel / interquel before too long.

Note: I figure NeurodiversiME partly works by scraping and sculpting content, so a few micro-plagiarisms are appropriate. Max Black ICE or whevs, come at me, orbs.

From "Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness"

(By Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, with an introduction by David Edgar)

Soon after arriving at the convent, on 8 December 1951, I was for a few weeks sent out to care for a lady physically and mentally ill. As Mother Michael advised me, I got this lady to the Catholic Home that I was myself later sent to. The Mother Superior of this Home subsequently told me she thought on first seeing me, that it seemed as if I was like the patient I was then bringing her.

Back at the convent, a small pimple on my knee became a big boil and for a short time I was in bed on penicillin with a high temperature. Then what happened was that I had gone down into a dumb-struck state. Trying to keep up with the others brought me to a standstill. A great cloud seemed to come over me. I was quite unable to express any feeling in words.

I seemed able to do things and then couldn't. Sister Angela showed me how to make altar breads. One day everything seemed wrong. She had to help me a lot. It was difficult to move. I was quite unaware of my own state. Mother Michael suggested I go to the Catholic Home to help. I knew the sisters there had had breakdowns.

Once there, I still felt dreadful, cut off, unable to contact anyone. My speech seemed to have gone. Sitting alone sometimes in the chapel, where I would say long prayers of my own, then playing with the earth, rather than weeding. Sitting watching people seemed more within my scope. Any sort of order to do this or that, especially washing up or any sort of housework got me caught, unable to move. Left alone, talking to myself, pleasing myself, was, in a sense, my only relief. Sometimes the Mother Superior sent for me. She would say, "How are you?" "All right." Then there was silence, nothing more. To me other people there were sick.

When they took me to London, to have ECT, I decided I must be sick, and wanted to go in a tax, not a bus. My trust was in them. My knowledge of the dangers of electric shocks and how some people "punished" other people by so-called "treatment" was then completely beyond me. This was in 1952.