New Week #99
Russia wants to shoot down Starlink satellites. The writer who coined the term 'metaverse' is building his own metaverse.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To Begin
This week’s instalment is much shorter than usual. That’s because I’ve been away from my desk and at the NEXT Conference in Hamburg. It’s a two-day mini-festival of technology, creativity, and innovation; I’ve been happily gathering ideas and inspiration to fuel future NWSH instalments.
Still, I want to share quick thoughts on three stories that caught my eye this week. Each of them relates to something — a talk, panel, or conversation — I heard at NEXT, so taken together they give a good sense of some of the big themes in play at this year’s event.
I opened the show with a talk of my own. For those who are interested, I’ll come back in the next few days and share a text version. It was a big picture look at this moment inside technological modernity, and offers a new synthesis of much of the thinking I’ve done out loud in this newsletter across the last two-and-a-half years.
Enough of all that for now! Let’s get into the snippets.
🗓 This week
🛰 Russia is threatening to shoot down Starlink internet satellites. A Russian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly blamed the US for allowing too many private satellites to enter orbit, and claimed those satellites would be a ‘legitimate target’ if used against Russia.
The statement didn’t mention Starlink, but Elon Musk’s satellite company is clearly the target Putin has in mind. Starlink has been providing internet across Ukraine since the early days of the invasion, and that’s proven crucial in helping the Ukrainian resistance to coordinate, and also to deploy the Bayraktar TB2 drones that have taken out so much Russian artillery and, in so doing, changed the course of the war.
One of the highlights of this year’s NEXT was a conversation between David van Weel, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, and Richard Barrons, a former UK Armed Forces Chief of Staff. Their fundamental message was shared and clear. First, connected technologies are transforming warfare. And second, the coming 30 years will not be as geopolitically stable, or as peaceful for Europe, as the last 30. The convergence of nuclear proliferation, new tech, and geopolitical tensions means, said Sir Richard, that we are ‘in the deepest of shit’; digital innovators in liberal democracies need to ‘get on the pitch’ if those nations are to remain secure.
See the (cold) tech war between the US and China, which I wrote about in New Week #97, in the context of this broader geopolitical picture.
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🖼 This mega-thread on Twitter showcased the work of AI image generation tool Stable Diffusion during its first month online:
Unlike OpenAI and Google’s text-to-image models, Stable Diffusion is available open source. I wrote about it back in New Week #96, when I related how US citizen Jason Allen used the tool to take first prize in the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition.
Scroll the Twitter thread above, and there’s no denying that the work users are producing — from illustrations, to animated films, to virtual humans — is stunning. For example, this project:
It’s hard to see how this tool and others like it won’t disrupt multiple huge industries. Cue much discussion at NEXT, along with the question: in this the end of the visual arts? The consensus answer — unsurprising among a tech crowd — was ‘no, it’s the beginning of new forms of conceptual art’.
The tool is the creation of startup Stability.ai, founded by Emad Mostaque. Mostaque’s view that his creation is best understood as a ‘generative search engine’ accords with the idea I floated, also in New Week #96, that the current crop of AI language and image models are best understood as a radical new kind of search engine; tools that search our linguistic or visual heritage and then create outputs that align with what they’ve found. More coming on this soon, including, I hope, an expert guest post from a NWSH community member.
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💥 The science-fiction author who coined the term ‘metaverse’ is creating his own metaverse. Neal Stephenson invented the term in his 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash. Now, he’s co-founded a tech company called Lamina1, which will create a platform on which independent creators can build their own virtual worlds.
There was much metaverse talk at this year’s NEXT; what else would you expect from a 2022 tech conference? But after the hype we saw in 2021, the metaverse fatigue was also palpable in some quarters; one senior leader in the creative and ad industries that I spoke to said that the incarnations of the metaverse being floated by Big Tech and others are only ‘impoverished versions of the real world’.
There’s more than a little truth in that. But my fundamental take remains the same: don’t get hung up on the current incarnations. To get an advance look at the impact of the metaverse in the coming years, instead explore the way virtual worlds will unlock new ways to serve fundamental human needs such as status, social connection, and the quest for meaning.
Stephenson’s startup is a play to wrest the metaverse away from Big Tech and instead empower the bottom-up creation of virtual worlds. It’s a noble aim. Yes, the emergence of these virtual worlds is fraught with risk: that we end up isolated from one another, estranged from the world around us, and captured to an even greater extent by Silicon Valley corporations. A Metaverse for the People is a dream worth fighting for; NWSH will keep watching.
Dream Generation
Thanks for reading this week’s quick instalment.
Whether’s it the new age of warfare, the rise of AI art, or the emergence of the metaverse, the ongoing collision between new technologies and human nature continues to surprise, delight, and terrify. New World Same Humans will keep working to makes sense of it all.
Normal NWSH service will resume next week, when I’ll also be back with the text version of my NEXT talk.
Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.
very interesting as always, thanks !