Daily Archives: April 23, 2020

A scene from the music video for New Orders Singularity(via YouTube)For the quarantined sheeple, its as if rock n roll, punk, and hip-hop never happened.

History comes back to provoke us in New Orders Singularity music video, which debuted in 2016 but has found fresh popularity. Its new viral status owes to deep quarantine viewing. Confined spectators respond to the videos depiction of isolation, seclusion, and, finally, rebellion as captured in footage from West Berlin prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The actions shown in Singularity provide a strong contrast to the daily 7 p.m.ritual by self-imprisoned New Yorkers who crack open their apartment windows to clap, bang pots and pans, and cheer. The ceremony, supposedly intended to encourage the citys first responders, lasts only twice as long as a New York minute shorter than Singularity itself (4:13). This timid, self-conscious group activity has inspired appreciation of Singularitys nostalgia for genuine rebellion.

The Twitterverse is aroused by envy. New Order, the distinguished British dance-pop-synth band, had commissioned the Singularity video from designer Damian Hale, an expert in live-concert visuals, who compiled clips from B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West Berlin 19791989. That film was a fact-based chronicle of British music producer Mark Reeders experiences in Europes post-punk scene; its records frenzy, tumult, and chaos. More than a celebration of youthful uprising, it specifically exhibits live-wire reaction to silence and social obedience a marked contrast to Americas orderly sequestration during the COVID-19 quarantine.

Singularitys appeal raises questions about Millennial compliance so different from punk-era rebellion during this emergency. Does it set the stage for socialist dictatorship as newly ambitious mayors and governors, along with the hotly emboldened news media, control citizens behavior through fear? Singularitys images of dissent and unrest, edited to New Orders elegant dance beats, salute fearlessness and abandon by a generation that distrusted politicians and establishment media. Mark Reeder and his punk-culture cohorts sought to express their own sense of liberty. Scenes of close-quarters dancing and sex flout the seriousness of social-distancing. Repeated shots of various, vintage, flipped fingers seem aimed at 21st-century acquiescence itself.

Punk culture disregarded the maudlin fear of danger and embraced it an outrageous, unexpected expanse of FDRs idea that theres nothing to fear but fear itself, which COVID-19 politicians dont dare repeat. So Singularity commemorates fearlessness, and in doing so, it shames that 7 p.m.pseudo-civility. Compared with New Orders scenes of disorderly conduct, the polite clapping and cheering come from people in New Yorks most liberal, Hillary-supporting districts (from my neighborhood perspective, the nervously cracked windows are in swanky brownstones) that share a pampered sense of what resistance really means. Unlike those radicals in Berlins anti-Stasi youth subculture, the Manhattan noisemakers seem at a loss about what to do with themselves; they may well be of the ADD generation, former Ritalin kids who are now cautious homeowners and urban stakeholders.

The protests in Singularity havent yet happened in the U.S., tensely considering the reopening of the economy, but the fever of fed-upness (a better term than the now discredited resistance) indicates some underlying exasperation such as is inchoately expressed by the 7 p.m.bourgeois ritual. Singularity throws images of liberation back at a nation of sheeple. Baaing people. Applauding people. They really seem to be congratulating themselves for their own helplessness, for upholding government edicts during the clampdown, keeping quiet, and waiting all day for that brief moment when they can pretend to appreciate other peoples sacrifice. The typical liberal impulse is to mistake self-congratulation for altruism. A populace that disguises its own lack of self-awareness as gratitude demonstrates the essence of conformity and surrender.

This meek, docile applauding at 7 p.m. suggests a dire transformation of the American spirit. Its as if rock n roll, punk, and hip-hop never happened.

Some skeptics have asked: Wheres that rebel spirit? Wheres Antifa now to protest the confining of the indigent and shut-in, in the interest of justice the first steps toward fascism? Where are the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements when the republics freedom and liberty need to be restored, as those Cold War Berliners desired?

The popularity of New Orders Singularity offers a last hope against restrictions that are not entirely based on science but come from the fiat of leaders who claim to know whats best.The song Singularity mourns the loss of camaraderie, while the video supplies virtual, vicarious protest. Its a reminder of the punk ethic buried inside.

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Rebellion, New OrderStyle: What Happened to It? - National Review

By now, its well known that usage of video-conferencing software like Zoom has exploded as a result of the Covid-19 shutdown. What is less known is that interest in avatar-based virtual worlds and business-specific adaptations of concepts like Second Life, a well-known virtual world which peaked in mainstream popularity 15 years ago, is spiking as well.

Yes, weve been getting a ton of inquiries, said Philip Rosedale in an email to Singularity Hub. Rosedale is CEO and cofounder of High Fidelity, a software company currently building a new kind of virtual world thats not yet been released. Hes also the creator and founder of Second Life and said it is seeing a surge in use as well.

This is a strange moment for VR, virtualworlds, and the internetmore generally. We may now truly be forced to create an equitable public commons online, where historically weve had the fallback of real life proximity, Rosedale added.

While video-based software like Zoom will likely continue to be the preferred method for most remote business meetings during the shutdown, it is possible to wonder whether virtual worlds may prove uniquely useful now as well.

This point was underscored last week in an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal where Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson outlined why video conferencing on Zoom can feel so exhausting. In his view, Zoom forces people to display behaviors that are usually reserved for close and intimate relationships; what he refers to as nonverbal overload such as making direct eye contact for long periods of time and focusing on someone elses face. In the real world, Bailenson points out, individuals can control their own personal space, manage their distance from coworkers, and choose their location during a meeting. On Zoom, however, there is no concept of spatial distance since the experience exists in a flat 2D window.

According to Alex Howland, CEO of VirBELA, another virtual world provider, they have also seen a massive uptick in interest these past few weeks from companies, non-profits, and government agencies affected by the shutdown.

In VirBELA, users create an avatar and navigate a video game-like environment to attend meetings, collaborate around boardroom tables, use media surfaces to display documents or websites, and interact in ways that may capture social cues (like personal space) from the real world.

The most important benefit of a virtual world, then, may be that it replicates many of the behaviors you might expect to see in the real world. There is such a thing as getting too close or far away from someone, and this sense of spatial presence can be quite convincing. The Boston Globe even reported an anecdote in which one user in VirBELA felt uncomfortable and complained because their avatar didnt have a chair to sit in during a meeting.

And perhaps the biggest difference from video-conferencing is the ability to randomly stumble into a colleague you might not otherwise interact with.

In virtual worlds, users feel like they are at a place together and that place is persistent. This helps foster a sense of shared culture and brings back water cooler opportunities and unplanned social collisions that just dont happen on a conference call. We are even seeing people from the same global organization, in different geographies, meeting each other in the world for the first time by happenstance, Howland told me.

Several years ago, I profiled the case of a publicly traded business with a billion dollars in revenue per year and over 28,000 employees and contractors around the world which operates entirely inside VirBELA. (That company later acquired the virtual world business outright). It certainly registered as a mainstream turning point for the use of persistent online social environments.

Even before Covid-19 pressed the brakes on our economy, forcing employees around the world to shelter at home, parts of the business world were already moving in the direction of remote collaboration and long-distance communication. And while our current health crisis isnt steering us in a particularly new direction, it may be accelerating us toward the working from home destination many companies had already been aiming for.

While I dont expect virtual worlds to overtake the use of video conferencing for the vast majority of todays business meetings, it is worth noting the key attributes that make these environments unique. And the longer this global pandemic stretches on, the more it will continue to shape the future of what our working lives might look like.

As interest in virtual world platforms grows, its worth keeping an eye on whether they are a mere curiosity or here to stay.

Image Credit: stephan sorkinonUnsplash

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Why Interest in Virtual Worlds for Online Collaboration Is Spiking - Singularity Hub

One death in Steven Soderberghs terrifyingly prescient masterpiece, Contagion, stayed with me: Kate Winslets Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer who chased down peopled with a terrifying viral infection in an effort to warn those who might be at risk and reconstruct the viruss rampage through an unknowing society.

For most of us, Mears was probably our first introduction to contact tracing, a technique thats crossed centuries as a tour-de-force in battling outbreaks. The core idea is simple, if laborious detective work: manually seek out those infected, interrogate their movements through the world, and follow up with every single person who might have been in contact with the infected individual.

Its tedious. Its dangerous. Yet as a method, contact tracing has been wielded as a powerful weapon from typhoid fever to the 1918 flu pandemic, and more recently, from AIDS to SARS and the first Asian country responders to Covid-19.

Theres a reason contact tracing has survived the test of time: it works. Thanks to epic efforts at hunting down people with Covid-19which, in turn, was in part thanks to widespread testingSouth Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Indias Kerala district have emerged as success stories in their battle against a new foe, nipping new infections in the bud and dramatically reducing hospitalizations and deaths. Even Wuhan, under stringent autocratic surveillance from the central Chinese government, was lauded by the WHO as a positive responderthough their method of giving individuals a green, yellow, or red light as they return to society may give democratic countries uncomfortable chills.

But heres the thing: contact tracing has always teetered on the line between individual freedom and the good of the general public; the stigmatization of a viral scarlet letter versus keeping others safe; the price of health data sharing versus societal responsibility.

Today, thanks to the mini tracking devices in our pockets called smartphones, its easier than ever to bring an effective method for controlling outbreaks into the digital realm. Some epidemiologists even argue that due to the highly infectious nature of SARS-Cov-2, traditional analogue methods are both too dangerous and too slow; digital contact tracing is the only way to go. In a technocratic world where we rely on our gadgets every day for news, maps, health tracking, and communication, not using the digital tools we have to update a century-long method almost seems silly.

The good news is that western societies dont have to start from scratch. One reason why Asias democratic countries quickly responded to Covid-19 is because they all suffered through the 2003 SARS epidemic. They learned their lesson and were the first to implement digital contact tracing, with both successes and hiccups along the way.

Its time to learn from them.

There are multiple ways contact tracing helps limit the reach of a virus, but its power is mainly felt at the beginning and tapering ends of a pandemic.

Take South Korea. The countrys enormously effective testing regime in January was an exemplary highlight of how contact tracing can plug the viral gush at the beginning of an outbreak. While they reported the first Covid-19 case in the US, South Korea rapidly ordered medical companies to develop and roll out testing kits aggressively, allowing health workers to track cases and keep infections containeda rollout arguably more effective than in the US, which has since seen its cases explode in numbers. These data resources then powered Corona 100m, an app that alerts users of diagnosed Covid-19 cases within 100 meters of their prior locations. The apps been downloaded over one million times to overwhelming positive reviews.

Perhaps the gold medal in digital contact tracing goes to Singapore. Backed by widespread testing, citizens were encouraged to download a Bluetooth-based app called TraceTogether, which anonymizes a users phone ID but stores similarly encrypted IDs from people he or she has been in contact with. If a person gets sick, those stored ID will be used to alert previous contacts. According to TraceTogethers official website, part of the Singapore Government Agency, roughly one million citizens have voluntarily signed up for the service.

The US has missed the boat on stemming Covid-19 from entering the country. However, digital contact tracing also comes in handy as were considering reopening our languishing economy. Serology tests, which look for antibodies that (in theory) render people immune will help assess when its mostly safe to return to work.

But before herd immunity becomes widespread or a working vaccine is easily accessible to most, contact tracing will become a key component of squashing new infection sparks before they flare up. California and Massachusetts are just two states looking to hire an army of contact tracers as part of their bid to reopen the economy.

Its perhaps not surprising that two giant tech companies, Apple and Google, announced last week a team-up to explore digital contact tracing in the land of the free.

An immediate response Ive heard is that it wont work here. After all, the narrative goes, even democratic Asian countries have a different social contract with their governments. Theyre focused more on society than on the independent selfa Confucius-esque philosophy thats slapped onto most East Asian citizens. Western countries such as the UK have tried similar approaches before: in 2011, Cambridge Universitys FluPhone app was supposed to track the spread of flu on a population level, yet fewer than one percent of people in Cambridge adopted it.

Bollocks. Dont sell yourself short. FluPhone wasnt released during a pandemic. If Covid-19 has one silver lining, its how on average people in the West are just as willing to sacrifice personal freedoms and adopt strange new customs (face masks everywhere!) to keep themselves and others safe. (Outliers exist, but they exist in every country.)

However, societal norms aside, early lessons from digital contact tracing efforts show that there are serious problems that need ironing out, and for now, our phones wont completely replace human workers in tracing the pandemic.

The basic idea behind Google-Apples app is similar to TraceTogether: its Bluetooth-based, meaning that itll only work locally without logging your location data. For now its opt-in, in that you have to download the app on either iOS or Android. The companies stress that they wont collect personal or location data (though Google Maps certainly does unless youve opted out), and all phone ID codes will be encrypted, making it difficult to link to a particular person. The app will periodically check to see if its been recently in contact with someone diagnosed with Covid-19.

Theres obviously the problem of data privacy. According to Covid Watch, a similar community-based, open-sourced app that uses Bluetooth for tracking, at least 50 percent of a population will need to use it to make tracking effective, and if people are hesitant, itll fail.

Another pre-requisite is that we need massively wider testing, which is currently still mostly reserved for people with clear symptoms. The Covid Tracking Project reports that less than one percent of Americans have received the test, which means a tracing app based on Covid-19 positive data would be of little to no value. Others worry about the opposite, which is that a Bluetooth-based app could over-alert users. For example, the most common Bluetooth signals have a reach roughly five times more than the six feet apart social distancing guideline.

All of the above concerns are valid. Yet without implementing the app, theyre also theoretical. Whats clear from Singapores success story is that digital contact tracing by itself isnt yet enough to curb Covid-19. Health workers, for example, may need anonymized ID data to help track down potentially exposed individuals to encourage self-isolation or provide care. Without sufficient testing and social distancing, asymptomatic carriers will still unknowingly spread the disease.

Digital contact tracing may ignite every freedom, privacy, and independence fiber in your body in protest. Tech giants and government alike havent helped build a foundation of trust or respect for our private data. But without doubt, digitization is the way of the future: its a replacement for fallible human memory, which cant recall what you had for lunch two weeks ago, let alone everyone youve been in contact with. Its a safety guard for real-world equivalents of Dr. Mears, who risk their health and lives to warn you of health risks to yourself and others.

Since its invention, contact tracing has always towed the line between privacy and social service. With our actions and voices, were now helping lay the foundation of its digital future, not just for this pandemic but for all the ones to come.

Image Credit: StockSnap from Pixabay

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Contact Tracing Is the Next Step in the Covid-19 BattleBut How Will It Work in Western Countries? - Singularity Hub

The Singularity Machine, explained Carpentier-Alting, is a play about a family trying to escape a world in crisis through the use of a device that will transport them into the future.

Friday, April 3, would have been the premier performance of The Singularity Machine at the College of the Siskiyous Kenneth Ford Theater in Weed. The play, told in two acts, is the creation of COS director Neil Carpentier-Alting and deals with humanitys quest to survive climate catastrophe.

Who wouldve thought a play about the end of the world would get canceled by the end of the world? said Carpentier-Alting.

The Singularity Machine, explained Carpentier-Alting, is a play about a family trying to escape a world in crisis through the use of a device that will transport them into the future. The primary question that the play attempts to address is how humanity will survive the effects of the impending climate catastrophe and overcome societal divisions in time to pull together. Oh, and there are lots of killer robots too.

On the stage for their first and final technical rehearsal on Monday, March 16, COS students and actors were able to at least film some scenes with lights and technical props in action before the early shelter-in-place order went into effect on March 19. The students will most likely not be able to stage a live performance this year.

The play was a completely in-house creation. Carpentier-Alting provided the main inspiration with an eight-page narrative, and local musicians Dave Theno and Tristan Behm composed the score. COS dance instructor Wendy James provided choreography oversight, Nic Fabrio was in charge of costume design and Amy LaMachia oversaw makeup.

We were just able to get each scene on film, said Carpentier-Alting. We have had to move classes to an online format with the thought that we may have to do this again in the fall. For now, we are getting together with the cast to record our experiences with the pandemic with the hopes of making something out of it.

Stage Makeup instructor Amy LaMachia will continue teaching the students online. She prepared makeup kits for each student and says they will be able to finish the semester but there are challenges.

These students are so resilient and creative, I honestly cannot wait to see what they come up with for these remaining modules, LaMachia said. So much of what makes our department as amazing as it is, is the personal connection we have with our students. We hope to foster that even if it is through an internet connection.

The Singularity Machine was created as a piece of devised theater in which all the cast, crew and technicians collectively create a piece of visual art. The collaborative process uses dance, gesture, music and sound to tell the story. The play follows the quest of a father, mother, and their daughter as they travel through time to escape calamity. The father looks to technology to save humanity, while the mother looks to rouse others to their cause. It is their child who ultimately leads them to a new and better world. The dynamic piece of theater follows the three travelers as they battle sentient robots, meet strange alien civilizations, and travel through time through an on-stage portal. For Carpentier-Alting and his fellow instructors the focus now is on preserving the play digitally and thinking about a remount in the fall.

How do we plan for this level of uncertainty in this new world? Carpentier-Alting said. How do we plan for anything now?

Answering his own question, Carpentier-Alting offers the play as a possible starting point.

The play assumes adopting and cultivating humane practices in all aspects of life will help to create a broader safety net and increase the rate of survival, he said. Change is necessary for survival and growth.

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College of the Siskiyous play about end of the world canceled by end of the world - Siskiyou Daily News

It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek

Many of you likely recognize the truth in this quote from legendary Star Trek Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Many are dubbing the Covid-19 pandemic the biggest global crisis since World War II. Theres no way you could have had a foolproof plan to deal with it. Yes, scientists have long warned of a pandemic like this. And unfortunately, many countries have not been as well prepared as they should have been. But few businesses would have had incentive to plan for a potential pandemic where whole markets disappeared almost overnight.

Now its here, however, and the implications are massive. There is not one industry, not one organization, big or small, that has or will not be impacted.

So, what to do? Do we need to look at our organizations and see where we can cut costs and strengthen our core businesses? Yes. But protecting the core isnt going to be enough. Contrary to common practice and what may seem practical, businesses also need to double down on innovation.

Statistics show that in times of crisis innovation suffers. Organizations become more introverted and risk averse. But they need to do the opposite, not only to survive in the short term, but to also keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

Companies need to be constantly looking beyond their core businesses to stay relevant. And whatever the speed of innovation needed to be up until the point when Covid-19 hit our countriesit just became too slow. We now need innovation at warp speed.

The good news is that while there is a tendency to argue people dont like change and resist it, given the right context, people are actually remarkably adaptable. And the context has just changed dramatically. For the vast majority of people this is abundantly clear. All things being equal, with the right tools, this makes them much more open to innovation.

With that in mind, here are some crucial ways organizations can speed up innovation.

In Star Trek, the prime directivewhich dealt with ethical first contactwas essentially the most important rule or law to be obeyed above all others. For organizations, it should be to answer the question, How can we remain relevant in this radically different environment?

This means looking at core offerings and identifying how to adapt them to the new reality. For some industries where demand has disappeared almost entirely, at least for now, it means daring to pivot. Fast.

I would even argue we need to see something akin to pivot-mania. That doesnt mean acting in desperation, but acting with an acute sense of urgency.

I recently interviewed Brendan Ives, head of Division X at the telecommunications company Telia, for my podcast. One of Division Xs core focuses before the crisis was AI-enabled data products for retail. Then the entire industry just shut down before their eyes and demand all but died.

So, they huddled and discussed what other problems their work might solve.

Those conversations led them to pivot away from retail and channel their entire focus into digital health. Their new focus had the added benefit of increasing their potential positive impact in the world as it enabled them to directly work towards mitigating the Covid-19 threat.

Pivoting also applies to the individual roles people play in the organization. In Division X, employees had to change their perspectives on how they fit in the organization given the new reality. In many organizations, there may now be fewer people to get the job done and skills may need to be tailored to a different market. Every role needs to be revisited to ensure maximum impact.

Pivoting and identifying new strategic objectives is no small feat. To ensure you move in the right direction and get all important players on board, purpose, communication, and motivation have never been more important.

Having the right narratives and ensuring motivation are clearly related to having the right purpose. At Growth, logistics giant Maersks venture arm, CEO Sune Stilling initially set up the entity to build billion-dollar businesses. But they quickly learned that employees didnt find building billion-dollar businesses to be a particularly meaningful goal.

This led them to reflect more deeply on what should be driving their work and pivot their purpose to transforming trade and working to solve food waste.

Can we afford to only go after these kinds of meaningful ambitions right now? Perhaps not. But there are many opportunities currently to double down and ensure that, in addition to keeping your business afloat, you play an active part in addressing the crisis. This can be incredibly motivating for all parties.

Lowes Innovation Labs spearheaded many surprising initiatives for a retail chain over the yearsholo-rooms and robot assistants inside stores years back, exoskeletons for warehouse workers, 3D printers for outer space.

How did they get the company to try so many new things? The team developed a creative new approach to compellingly envision the future.

They gave inhouse market research to science fiction writers and developed future scenarios. Then they reverse engineered these futures step by step back to the present. Finally, they workshopped potential future-proof solutions and presented those solutions to top management in the form of comic books.

By shifting from boring PowerPoint bullets and graphs to visual storytelling, they were able to inspire seasoned, seen-it-all executives to say yes and grow the companys innovation capabilities.

While that may sound like a lengthy process, you can actually get it done in just a few days. If you dont have the resources to hire science fiction writers, then dont. Have your team make mood boards instead to visualize opportunities, and you have a low-cost version that will do.

Alex Goryachev, managing director of Ciscos Co-Innovation Centers, realized they were really good at partnering externally to accelerate innovation, but that they didnt apply that same principle internally.

Thus, there was no model for harnessing the tens of thousands of Cisco employees innovation powers. This led to the establishment of a hugely successful internal startup program with clear metrics that focused not only on actions but also outcomes. While that may sound obvious and bland, many, many innovation projects fail because they dont measure whats important.

To optimize for the quick wins you need in times of crisis, be sure to spend the time to set the right metrics. It will increase the likelihood of success and increase motivation because people know what theyre running after.

You also need to partner outside your company. You dont have time to develop all capabilities or technologies yourself. That was true before the crisis. It is more true now.

The good news is that openness to collaboration has never been greater. Startups, suppliers, and even competitors have never needed it more.

This provides the perfect platform for establishing win-win collaborations to accelerate each others businesses. Customers are also much more open to beta. They understand organizations have to work hard and fast to adapt to the new reality which may mean they dont always ship perfect.

Innovation is inherently risky. Innovation in times of crisis is even riskier. The stakes are higher. There is no way around that truth.

This means you need to create psychological safety at work.

Google conducted a two year study, built on top of research done by Harvard professor, Amy Edmondson, to identify what made consistently successful teams tick. Psychological safety was number one, by a mile. Even more important than team capabilities, rank, and prior successes.

Here are a few ways to create psychological safety.

Empower people to makes decisions. You dont have time not to do this because hierarchy slows execution. And lets face it, the people most able to make good decisions are likely the people in the trenches making stuff happen.

Create guiding principles instead of rules. Turn off the lights is a rule. Be environmentally conscious is a guiding principle. It allows people to make their own decisions and opens up opportunities for action.

Actively and visibly reward the right behavior. For example, some teams at Google hand out the Courageous Penguin award. You know when penguins assemble at the edge of an iceberg and look down? Theyre waiting for the first penguin to jump. That penguin doesnt know whats lurking under the water; it takes courage to jump first. Reward people who take on big challenges with uncertain outcomes, even if they fail. Celebrate your courageous penguins. It is contagious. It accelerates the desired behavior.

The world has changed for good. Hopefully, the crisis will soon be behind us. But its implications will follow us for years. Adapting to the crisis now by innovating at warp speed is essential for short-term survival. Even more, it sets you up in the best possible position to bounce back post-crisis.

Todays accelerated adoption of a more digital economy wont go away after the crisis. Yes, well start traveling again, visit our doctors in person, and take face-to-face courses. But we will have learned we dont have to do it the same way anymore, and we will have developed better solutions. New habits and business models developed to face the crisis will also prevail afterwards.

Im convinced there is a bright future out there. To navigate to it you must innovate fast.

To borrow another quote from Star Trek: One cannot summon the future, but one can change the present! Lets change the present and set sails for a brighter future. But most importantly, stay safe and take care of your loved ones. In the end, thats what really matters.

Image Credit: JR Korpa /Unsplash

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How to Navigate the Coronavirus Crisis With Innovation at Warp Speed - Singularity Hub