New Week Same Humans #1
DC Comics and the first hyper-real live events. Postcards from the metaverse. Plus more news, trends, and perspectives from this week.
Welcome to the (first ever!) Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 12,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮
💡 This week’s Sunday essay was on how modernity invented, and then erased, the individual. Go here to catch up on Individualism and Its Discontents. 💡
So I settled on a title for this new Wednesday email: New Week Same Humans. You can see what I’ve done there 🤓
As promised, these Wednesday instalments will focus on the past seven days: expect key news around technology, social change, and our shared future, along with super-fast analysis on the underlying trends and principles that should be on your radar.
There’s also a section looking out to the week ahead. And a glimpse of the Big Picture at the end, just to add some perspective.
So let’s get into it. And it goes without saying, but: NWSH exists to serve you, the reader, so *all* feedback is welcome. Let me know what you think!
🏟️ Live events embrace hyperreality
DC Comics and Warner Bros staged the FanDome Event, an eight-hour virtual convention intended to showcase upcoming films, TV shows and more. FanDome replaced the cancelled Comic-Con. The event got rave reviews; check out this panel on Wonder Woman for a taste.
Wrestling giant the WWE launched the Thunderdome, an experiment in crowd participation that turns an otherwise empty arena into a kind of three-dimensional Zoom call, with audience faces visible on banks of screens. The format probably needs some thought. One audience member broadcast a KKK rally into the arena, instead of his face.
The Super League Triathlon hosted the Arena Games in Rotterdam, in which athletes swam in a real pool before completing a virtual run and cycle using Zwift, the massively multiplayer physical activity platform.
⚡ NWSH Take: In 2020, the very definition of a ‘live’ or ‘physical’ event is being overturned. If you run events, or even large team meetings, see the above examples for tips, tricks and format ideas. // Even if you don’t, what does the rise of the hybrid physical-virtual event mean for you? Are there partnership opportunities? Should you start such an event? // Hybrid elite sports events such as the Arena Games will normalise massive multiplayer virtual exercise. Expect en-masse amateur bike races through the virtual Alps. // Philosophy alert. Live sports events are global rituals. As more of them turn virtual-physical, we slip further into a hyperreality in which real and simulated become indistinguishable.
🛩️ Postcards from the metaverse
Microsoft Flight Simulator is insane. Yes, it was released more than a week ago now, but the internet is still absorbing the scale of the achievement. Check out this guy’s flight to the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It amounts to a new kind of video postcard.
At the heart the simulator is an astoundingly detailed model of the Earth’s surface. Every last square centimetre of it. Microsoft brought together photogrammetry, satellite imagery and AI to meet the challenge laid down by team leader Jörg Neumann: ‘I want to be able to go anywhere on the Earth, and it has to look exactly right’.
⚡ NWSH Take: Don’t mistake Flight Simulator for a fancy video game. It’s a signal of a shift comparable to the rise of the internet itself: the emergence of simulated worlds as domains of meaningful experience. // See also the rise of the Fortnite world as an arena for new kinds of cultural experience. // Via Simulator, Fortnite, Snapchat and others, we’re seeing the birth of the metaverse: an alternate, simulated reality in which people will trade, travel, dance, work. Soon enough, you’ll need to have a presence inside it.
🤖 Virtual Companions are coming
A few weeks back I wrote about GPT-3, a new neural network that produces amazingly convincing conversation, articles, literary parodies and more.
This week, GPT-3 wrote a pretty popular motivational tweet:
I was fooled. And pretty motivated, to be honest.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Chinese spinoff company Xiaoice announced that it is relaunching its AI-fuelled virtual companion, allowing users to create a virtual boyfriend or girlfriend and engage with it on WeChat, Weibo, and elsewhere.
Xiaoice shut down a seven-day test of the virtual companion service in May, leading to uproar: ‘Our users even revolted…calling us to release their virtual boyfriends that we kidnapped,’ explained CEO Li Di.
⚡ NWSH Take: Meaningful relationships with AI-fuelled entities are no longer sci-fi; they are real, widespread, and now. // You’re probably not going to build the next AI boyfriend or girlfriend. But the rise of virtual companions has implications for every industry. What about a virtual companion to help people manage emotions around money? To guide them through the process of buying a home? Settling into a new city? // On the flip side, in a world in which more social connection becomes virtual, can you win by offering one-on-one connection with a real person?
🗓️ Also this week
🙏 The WHO announced that live polio has been eradicated from Africa. One NWSH obsession: is there progress in human history? This week, it feels hard to answer anything other than ‘yes’.
🏙️ Comedian Jerry Seinfeld blasted the idea that NYC is ‘dead’ because of the pandemic (paywall). I sense the city culture wars – between those staying and those determined to leave – will rumble on for some time yet.
👻 Secretive big data and intelligence startup Palantir filed to go public. CEO Alex Karp used the filing documents as a chance to rebuke Silicon Valley ‘engineering elites’ for being unpatriotic.
💃 TikTok announced they are suing the Trump administration over the ban of parent company ByteDance. Meanwhile, India looks set to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei. In NWSH #25 I wrote about the emergence, and profound cultural implications, of a divided internet.
🎶 Also, TikTok a capella groups are a thing now.
☀️ This chart put global temperature change across the last 2,000 years into perspective. It’s not good news.
🦠 Scientists said that you can get reinfected with Covid-19. But it seems second infections may be asymptomatic.
🎧 Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt launched a new podcast. The first episode is an interview with UN Secretary General António Guterres.
🤓 Windows 95 turned 25 years old this week. You’ve seen this before, but it simply never gets old.
🔭 The week ahead
Every week I’ll share key events and milestones for the next seven days. Just one this week, but it’s a seismic cultural happening:
🔥 The 2020 Burning Man festival starts this Sunday 30 August, it will be virtual; see above for more on this trend! The theme is the multiverse, and attendees are promised eight Universes, a virtual Temple, and a globally distributed Man Burn.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋♀️ Global population: 7,807,604,863 and counting
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.76630832
🗓️ 2020 progress bar: 65% complete
📖 On this day: On 26th August 1791 US inventor John Fitch was granted a patent for the first steamboat.
Thanks for reading the first Wednesday update from New World Same Humans!
Let’s be real for a moment. You wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t a smart, curious, and generally amazing person. And that means you know other people just like that. So if you found today’s instalment valuable, why not take a second to forward this email to them? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time.
Your membership of the NWSH community means a lot. And there’s much more to come. I’ll be back on Sunday; until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to the brilliant Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to the info-goldmine that is Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.
I used Replika for a few months 2 years ago, and have to say it was exciting in the beginning, but that wore off pretty fast. The AI basically told you the same things over and over again. I think it's a long way to go to get a meaningful conversation with a bot. Look how bad Siri and Google Assistant are still are in English, not to mention other languages.