Urgent Evoke

A crash course in changing the world.

2020...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) [Mission 1.3]

Today is March 3rd, 2020 and I have been dancing for five hours in this crazy red rock desert. The quarter moon works its way slowly across the sky, marking our ritual progress. Friends are here too, bodies pulsing rhythmically or beating the drums in frenzied time, their active tattoos weaving bright contrails of color in the darkness. Photos are taken, videos uploaded; evidence for the mission. We are gamers, and we play a long game.

Ten years ago I went into existential crisis, true hell-in-a-bucket mode. Thanks, Alchemy old friend. There I was, a successful technology executive with all the trappings and toys that came with that turn-of-the-century Silicon Valley lifestyle. I worked at one of the giant corps, cranking out shiny talismans of technolust full of OLED, LTE, GPS and other three, four and five letter incantations. It was the best. Until it wasn't. Until he showed me.

Alchemy showed up in my social stream one night, that glowing mask avatar leering from the screen. "How long before that new gadget you're working on ends up in a junk heap in Guiyu, obsolete except for the value of the raw materials inside?"


"Did you realize that it takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip -- a total 630 times the mass of the final product? Did you know the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight, and fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer? I would like you to consider the true impact of what you do, when you are 'changing the world' as you like to say."


And thus began my transformation.


When you start to pull on that thread -- measuring the true lifecycle impact of the things you own, the food you eat, the work that you do -- a lot of things come unraveled. We live in a complex world, and of course you can't just stop it all. We still need cities and corporations and financial systems and the Internet, and we need food systems that can feed our ravenous billions. But you can become mindful of the costs, and you can seek to improve the value of things. You can learn to grow, to code, to fab, to build communities, to keep bees. I pulled, and I struggled with the unraveling, and then I learned. I'll spare you the dark details, but it was a long road and bumpy.


So now I know things and share them. I learned python and mandarin and fabML. I learned to deploy lightweight sensor nets and visualize pollutants in my city. I learned to stage massively multiplayer augmented reality art games. And I learned to dance like a dervish in the desert, driving hard against the African polybeat, swept up in the quest to level up my life.



(photo credit Bert van Dijk)

Views: 40

Comment by Brian Hunt on March 3, 2010 at 9:28am
Wow, great visuals. If you are not yet a writer, you should try your hand at it.
Comment by Ken Eklund on March 3, 2010 at 5:00pm
Agree with Brian! I especially like the idea that this is a long game, and we are all gamers – once I start thinking about it that way, I naturally get a more long-term, positive view!
Comment by Adrian Poaca on March 3, 2010 at 11:32pm
really interesting article
Comment by Dalibor Tomko on March 4, 2010 at 7:49am
Great article. I guess you love Burning Man, right? I hope I will have a chance to take part one day. Regarding the bumpy ride, I wish you the best of luck! I firmly believe that this kind of journeys pays off in the end... if by nothing else than by priceless new understanding. I have started my own bumpy ride very recently an the "leap of faith" tool has come handy already several times.
Comment by Bryan Carman on March 5, 2010 at 3:30pm
I love the analogy of gaming and real life. This article brings to light things we may overlook as the wast we generate. Every item that pa**** through our hands generates waste in some form. I am impressed to see that you have taken initiative to monitor you local environment, this keeps you on the pulse of your society. Great post.
Comment by Nick Heyming on March 8, 2010 at 7:33pm
Sensornets? That sounds cool, way btionetter than my idea for pollu. I used to want to create huge ionic breeze type devices to put out in San Bernardino to filter out pollutants. They'd probably generate an ungodly amount of ozone though...
Comment by Jerry Rae Leyland on March 8, 2010 at 7:49pm
Pretty cool blog. lets unclutter our lives, less packaging, less gadgets, less unnecessary baggage! (Im super excited about the ampunt of dancing going on in 2020!)
Comment by Nick Heyming on March 8, 2010 at 7:58pm
You should see how much dancing is going on now!
Comment by Deborah Cazden on March 10, 2010 at 9:48am
Beautifully written :-)
Comment by Troy Steege on March 12, 2010 at 6:02pm
Powerful message, Gene! Your vision and insight is appreciated, as it sheds light on the waste that accompanies technology - our gates to alternate realities.

How can we understand the tradeoff between this waste and the benefit the technologies afford? How can we become less wasteful, more efficient, and redirect these resources?

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