The Burning Issue

My story on the $10 million business known as Burning Man, from the July issue of Business 2.0, is up online as of today at CNN Money. But it's been causing a ruckus for a few days already, since cunning Burners (who are, as the story points out, among the most tech-savvy people in the world) figured out they could read it on the Olive software magazine-reading service. And what did they make of it? For a good cross-section of Burner reactions, read this thread on the Burning Man tribe at Tribe.net, the counterculture's social network of choice. As expected, a few did Chicken Little impersonations at the idea that Burning Man is inviting companies to the event -- but I'm heartened by the fact that many changed their minds once they read the article twice.

Full disclosure here: I'm a Burner myself, I've been going every year bar one since 1999, and I love the event. (That picture of me in silver cowboy hat? Now you know where it came from.) But I also know there are a lot of issues with the Borg, as the private Burning Man company is known; for better or worse, it is a for-profit business with not a lot of external oversight. If my article let a little light into the Borg, and sparked a debate over the direction it's going, so much the better. I'll stand behind every word in it.

Notes from the Future: Yahoo x Infinity

May 1, 2037

Thirty years it is now, thirty years since that fateful day in May 2007 when Yahoo! made good on its promise to give its users -- a mere 250 million of us, back then -- unlimited email storage. How little we knew then what it would mean. At first, everyone saw it as a publicity stunt, a way to one-up Google and Microsoft, a way to revive Yahoo!'s reputation. There was even some talk that they'd have to reverse their decision if all their email users took them up on it.

Which was ridiculous, of course. Storage prices were already dropping precipitously. But this was back before anyone really thought of any of these companies as vast public utilities, before the words "global server farm" had entered the popular consciousness.

Alright, so unlimited email storage was cool. We'd never have to comb through and delete old messages again. But what else could we do with such a service? What possibilities did infinity offer? Our minds were boggled, and we gave up on thinking about it altogether -- almost. Like a lot of transformative tech ideas, the email storage revolution had to wait around while our paradigms shifted into gear.

The Future of Drugs

In the 20th century, nothing seemed more variable than society's perception of mind-altering chemicals. Ninety years ago, the scientific consensus on heroin -- developed by the same company that brought us aspirin -- said it was a safe substance, and there was little chance of anyone forming an addiction to it. Care packages sent to World War I soldiers at the front included (perfectly legal) doses of cocaine and morphine. Tobacco was recommended by doctors as a digestive aid as late as the 1950s. I need hardly mention, and could hardly chronicle, the mass chemical binge known as the '60s and '70s. Ecstasy started life as an aid to therapy. Marijuana has been, alternately, a medical savior and a murderous menace.

But there are signs that our attitude to drugs will start to settle down and come to some sort of consensus in the 21st century. Amazingly, in all that time, there's never been a single scientific study that ranked all drugs according to the amount of long-term harm they cause human beings, based on the testimony of medical experts, free of hype, politics and preconceptions. That changed last week, when such a study appeared in the Lancet, the UK's leading medical journal, courtesy of researchers at Bristol University. It wasn't entirely scientific, as the panel behind the drug harm rankings did contain a smattering of legal experts who have only encountered drug abuse anecdotally, in the criminal justice system. But that just makes the study's results all the more surprising.

The Trouble With Gee-Whiz Gadgets

I'm writing this column using the hottest gadget to have entered my house this year. It's not a flashy PDA cameraphone with a Bluetooth headset or a WiFi-enabled MP3 player with streaming video capability.

In fact, this isn't a new product at all. It's a three year-old word processor called the Neo--and everything about it points to the future of electronic devices.

The Neo, by a tiny company called Alphasmart, was initially designed to be used by students and their educators. But in true Web 2.0 style, the users spoke louder than the designers. Over the last three years, Neo has been embraced less by students than by an unexpectedly different audience: journalists and writers, who have written little hymns to the Neo in magazines, blogs, and even a Flickr group where they share pictures of their Neos.

Why?

Because it's supremely easy to use. It is the ultimate writing tool for an ADD age, as countless reviews on popular sites like Boing Boing have pointed out. You can't do anything other than write on it, in one of eight enormous files. It's the size of a sheet of paper, light as a shoe, and the battery lasts for 700 hours (no kidding) on a single charge. No need to plug it in or sit through a long, noisy startup sequence - the thing is instantly and quietly turned on like a lightbulb.

Continue reading "The Trouble With Gee-Whiz Gadgets"

Scenario Planning: Holiday Edition

Normally Future Boy doesn't give a jot for snail mail, that spam-filled assortment of dead trees and colorizing chemicals. But this holiday card from the Global Business Network was irresistible. It perfectly illustrates the art of divining the future by scenario planning -- a still-obscure management tool that we had a heck of a time illustrating for the story on China's future that the GBN did for us. But it's a simple process, really, as this card shows, and breaks down as follows:

1) Pick two trends that could go to one extreme or another in the future. In this case, your wallet could be full or empty, and your holiday cheer likewise.

2) Draw the two trends as intersecting lines, with their extremes on either end of each line.

3) You now have four quadrants, each one a different future. For example: the future if you have a stuffed wallet and a sour mind, and so on. Predict each one in relation to something you want to know about -- in this case, gift-giving. Go crazy! Be imaginative!

4) Make sure you/your company are equally prepared for each of those four futures. Are you as ready for fruitcake as you are for peace on Earth? Will a lump of coal put a dent in your bottom line?

Um, it was a, er, dark and stormy night, no, day ...

FUTURE FORECAST: NOVEL-WRITING MADE RIDICULOUSLY EASY

It's November, which means, of course, that National Novel Writing Month is upon us. I've never done a NaNoWriMo, as it's known, because the thought of writing 50,000 words in a month on top of my day job seems like more deadline-driven lunacy than even the greatest Gonzo journalist can handle. But this year I find it impossible to resist. That's because I have a review copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, the speech-to-text software I mentioned a few posts back, and the dumb-ass idea that I should write an entire novel without my fingers ever touching the keyboard. I've got myself convinced that it'll be far, far easier when I can hear the rythmn of the language, that I'm somehow placing myself in the vanguard of a grand, million-year-old tradition of storytelling. The words will just flow out of me as if I were a shaman telling stories to his grandchildren. I shall of course keep you updated on how that goes.

Day of the Hydro-Hybrid

The latest Future Boy column is up on CNNMoney, pegged to the forthcoming launch of BMW's Hydrogen 7 car. Why is this a big deal? Because it's the first hydro-hybrid on American roads, a giant leap ahead of the concept of hydrogen fuel cells. As I wrote:

Here's the big problem with fuel-cell cars: They're all or nothing. You need a massive infrastructure of hydrogen-fueling stations for drivers to happily tool along with a clean conscience. If that support isn't there, they can't. But the hybrid concept is - pardon the pun - fully road-tested ...

With the growth of hybrid technology, you can envision the day when your family car has as many fueling options as your family itself. While your kids run inside the gas station to load up on Mountain Dew and Nesquik, you stand at the pump and order a special brew of corn ethanol, switchgrass ethanol, diesel, hydrogen for the hydro tank, and an old-school, highly-taxed, strange-smelling substance called gasoline.

Attack of the Allergy-Free Cats

FUTURE FORECAST: PURRRR-FECTION

It's one of the great ironies of my life: I'm allergic to cats, and yet I adore the little self-important critters. (Of course, as I never fail to point out when this discussion comes around, it's not that I'm allergic to cats per se. In point of scienfitic fact, my body is having an allergic reaction to the feces of the mites that live in cat fur, which seems quite a sensible thing for a body to have an allergic reaction to; it's all you people breathing in cat mite crap with no ill effects who are the freaks.) And it would seem I'm not alone in this dilemma: fully one-third of cat-allergic Americans are so enthralled, they keep kitties in their homes anyway.

So I've been watching the development of hypoallergenic cats -- genetically tinkered to resist mites and their detrius -- with great interest. According to this New York Times article, San Diego-based Allerca is about to start shipping the modified mogs in January. The price tag is too rich for my blood -- $4,000 -- and the screening procedure appears to be more stringent than that for adopting orphans. (Well, to be fair, orphans didn't require a multimillion dollar investment or a genetics lab.) But this is just a start, a slippery slope I look forward to society sliding down. Waiting for cheap allergy-free kitties is like waiting for a one-terabyte iPod -- wait a few years, keep yourself busy doing other things, and it'll happen before you know it.