http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/scenario.txt from: morgan.garwood@thing.nyc.ny.us date: january 1996 On Scenario Planning the best place to begin is by asking "What Are The Right Questions?", how do we go about looking at these phenomena, what mental frames do we use to understand them ? As you know, there are many types of "net intellectual" out there, with many competing agendas. For instance, there is GBN, or Global Business Network (Peter Schwartz, Peter Drucker, Laurie Anderson, SUN Microsystems, etc. all rolled into one) which exists to bring Net Brains and Business Brains and Government Brains all together. But, really, in whose inerest do they operate ? This is the "Cooperative/Synergistic" model for the new era we are entering... large groupings of very different but immensely talented and intelligent people who will get together and do "thought jams" on a subject for you for a fee of $35,000 dollars a year. This model is based on the old SRI (Standard Research Institute) structure (also like the old RAND corporation), but updated with better tools, and made more Groovy. They are big fans of Scenaio Planning, and Wired made a fuss over them and their New World scenarios for the future. We might begin by taking those scenarios as they described them and using those as starting points for our ideas (!). The other model is the old school Dialectical/Synthetic which dominated the first part of the century in the "Free West/Red East" tensions, and is now reformulating itself in the "Jihad vs. McWorld" faith/feeling vs. reason/technology splits. You see, these constucts can contain each other, because the GBN Grooviness is the celebrity zone of McWorld... we don't exactly know what the Mullahs think about all of this. Then we have that sector that is Paranoid/Dangerous/Weird, which ranges from global mafias, Scientologists, arms brokers, former KGB operatives u.s.w., who live in a permanent psychology of Cold War. Under that we have "Decomposing World", places like Rwanda, which seem beyond repair (for a while, a loooong while), and off to the side someplace we have Enclave/Fortress world, like entire clans of rich Indian industrialists that live in fortified high-rise buildings utilizing high-tech security. There are also big money migrations, like mega-rich Chinese getting out of Hong Kong before it reverts to China, fleeing one Enclave/Fortress world, and joining up with McWorld in America and Canada. Of course Internet, and Internet culture are thoroughly involved in "meme brokering", allowing meme-filtration, meme-hybridization, meme- horticulture etc. to accelerate toward phenomenal growth and phenomenal instability at the same time. This is the mental/cultural equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion in genetics, and for some it will be a Boschian (as in Hieronymous Bosch) moment (medieval worldview on acid), for others it will be Eco-Intensive (Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, et al.stone age worldview on acid)..for others it will be the age of the Borgias (Machiavelli on acid) and for others, a perpetual childhood (Mickey Mouse on acid). Seething with life, like a primordial ocean filled with everything eating everything else while something else is eating it, parasites boring holes through flesh of predators while smaller parasites are boring holes through the larger parasites, and viruses are boring holes through viruses, with the DNA itself fighting it out for dominance within the nucleus of the cell! (Darwin on Acid!) Hey Hey, My My, Virtual Reality Markup Language is on the way... in the long run it's ALL about bandwidth. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de