TEMPLE: A TEMPLATE FOR A SOCIO-ECONOMY BUILT AROUND MINDFULNESS AS A TRANSITIONAL SYSTEM FOR END-STAGE DIGNITY AND OPTIMAL ENTROPY

Mindfulness (and other therapeutic or coping) interventions are allowed the status of mere bubbles in our stress-fraught society.  The spirit of this work is inspired by the Center for the Study of Existential Risk and their concern for any threat posed to "all humanity" no matter how small the probability. 

For 7-week seminar Crafting Mindful Experiences class taught by Fred Muench we were encouraged to prototype/ideate an app, device, experience which elicits mindfulness in everyday life.  

Scaling up several orders of magnitude from the letter of this prompt I decided to contemplate further on the post-automation world-building I began with the world of Semi and The New Church created as my final in Temporary Expert: the Anthropocene Edition with Marina Zurkow and the post-automation culture story we told as the culmination of Art Kleiner's long-standing Future of New Media course, both in Spring 2015.  These world-building projects are also related to the speculative world-building project I presented in Jeff Feddersen's Energy class (THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: An Android's Energy Future). 

At the center of this concept is a recognition that humanity cannot sustain current levels of economically-driven societal (and environmental) entropy ("growth".)  Even more integral are two related concepts (which require more state-of-research discovery/citations): 

a) that it is possible for humans to engineer an non-abusive institution for behavior modification and post modern (and post-modern) resource redistribution

b) that the focus on stress-as-positive-competition-facilitator is a construct of economic/industrially-driven science

TEMPLE attempts to encompass and expand on social support and stress-coping mechanisms of religious institutions and traditional culture but holistically adapted to future system entropy and globalization.  TEMPLE relies upon the reality that globalization and automation is total.  Labor and systems of credit, profit and consumption as we understand it are recently no longer functional in all global regions. 

Here is an image of the fractal arrangement of the experiential chambers which denizens of a post-Capitalist transitional society must go through as their daily duty (or data tithe, labor).  This is the institution of the "New Church" set within the universe of Post-Automation Culture and with the data-generation-driven new "economy" from my Testing Tomorrow's "Your Daughter's Daughter's Data: An Enfranchisement Manual."

Aggregate, anonymized data is collected (biofeedback, natural language processsing, etc) in order to allow the semi-automated system to gauge community health and developments (much like a managed wild-life population.)  The data collection is in fact a way of generating the "revenue" required for the resource distribution.  Visitors come here to receive mindfulness experiences/therapy/self-inventory and to request goods and services they feel they need.  A cleansing and enrobing intake area and other security measures ensure that all citizens (including pariahs) can take equal part in the community-synchronization ritual of TEMPLE.  

A series of interlinked experiential chambers make up a continually novel mindfulness journey through TEMPLE'S campus.  Some are communal (humming/mantra) some are individual (e.g. proprioception-oriented self-inventory, human time-scale meditation, biofeedback mindfulness meditation,  kindness and forgiveness meditation). 

A docent (AI or human) advises each individual at the culmination of the individual's journey.  Regardless of the docent's advisement - the requestor may receive the good or service they have requested.  This mechanism is a part of the central tenet of TEMPLE which assures social security.  TEMPLE is the defacto method for optimal resource redistribution.

It is assumed that some visitors will abuse the "ask and you shall receive" mechanism - but the proportions of Zipf's law allows for a much lower overall level of entropy across the entire social fabric.  Additionally, abusers of the system must continually go through the mindfulness practice of the system in order to get their goods - so some abusers of the system may eventually cease the advantage-taking. The system can be likened to "re-parenting" for human society as a whole. 

Fittingly, the visuals/model for TEMPLE were created in Google Sketchup with open source 3D models I found and modified - in the spirit of our coming future.  Read more in a rough draft write-up.

Future iterations will include an mock-up of a journey through a minimum series of experiential chambers, specific user profiles and use-cases,  researches and arguments for specific interactive and passive cognitive/psychological mechanisms, more details on the legal history, logistics, and structure of fictional economic system suggested here,  and a sample proposal for funding from entities such as Google, IARPA, Disney, CSER to research a real-world prototype - a la the recent Dutch living wage experiment.  Perhaps the latter as a PhD program application. 

FAMILY VALUES: A RECURSIVE DATA OBJECT AS COLLAPSED PORTRAIT

This is a JSON object representing me as my family and certain basic 'values' which are closely tracked by the US government.   This is a 'speculative' data architecture which I suggest likely exists or will exist soon in a similar form.  In addition, I propose data objects like this will be assigned to every human being on the planet.  

I presented this image as my Stratosphere of Surveillance course midterm along with my research on two projects involving the CDC, the Social Security Administration, and the International Statistics Program. 

Here are the project links: 

CDC, NCHS, SSA, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Renal Registry link vital statistics and health data for "poor, elderly, disabled" populations and to promote "safer, healthier, people"

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/isp/isp_fetp.htm

"A Training Course on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems" to help countries all over the world register marriage and birth statistics and international diagnosis codes (ICD10) for cause of death:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_01/sr01_058.pdf*

*note: In roughly 200 training slides only three mentioned confidentiality of health and vital statistics as being an "ideal" concern and none were instructive on how to ensure confidentiality in practice. 

These cross-agency and cross-government vital and health statistics linkage projects are vital for helping vulnerable populations.  I propose that they also expose vulnerable populations to certain sociological risks.  

See this enlightening quote from UNESCO on the origins of archiving and data collection for more on the connection I make between these two government projects and this combined 'portrait' of a simple yet powerful 'surveillance tool', the agencies that use it, and its subject :

The reasons why records and archives where kept where very much clear. To prove your right to the possession of a certain piece of land you needed title deeds; to determine the size of a population being governed and therefore the taxes that should be collected you required records of birth and death; to enforce government laws and regulations it was necessary to keep a record of the laws, decrees and edicts.  The keeping of records and archives was therefore not a luxury but a necessity on which depended one's ability to continue to rule and to have rights and privileges.  The records and archives were also preserved in order to prove the rights and privileges of those being governed. 

http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ramp/html/r9008e/r9008e03.htm

It is easy to see that the form of this data object reflects its contents: a family tree.  The code for 'drilling' into this data architecture is just a few lines.  My overarching intention is to show how simple it is to place disparate data, once collected, into an object which can be used to create historical and predictive models of things as complex and weighty as the shape of all of humanity.  There are around 5000 generations in human history. That is roughly 15 Megabytes of data per individual using this JSON as a yardstick. 

Imagine if this kind of concertina'd data structure could be appended to include ancient data such as the records systematically collected by the Roman Empire. Imagine if that data, current data, and our children's data were to be collected and stored together in this data architecture for one thousand, or ten thousand years from now as current state of the art storage and processing technologies will allow. http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/dna-data-storage-lasts-thousands-of-years-150817.htm.  (An interesting note also with digital DNA data storage: it cannot be accessed and read by specific indices - all of the data stored by this method must be read at once and then re-written all at once which also supports the conceptual affect of this kind of recursive object.) As sophisticated as online, mobile, and social network tracking and surveillance continues to become - this kind of basic foundational data must be organized in order to maximize more sophisticated data around the global population as different factions shift their economic stature. 

This project links to other work I did in Art Kleiner's Future of New Media class in Spring 2015 and Chris Woebken and Richard The's Testing Tomorrow's class earlier in Fall 2015.   This project also plays into world-building for my thesis project which is a science fiction screenplay about an AI who discovers the answer to saving humanity and biodiversity. This fiction acts as a kind of love letter to the complete faithfulness to purpose which captivated audiences in T1 + T2,  as well as to the ancestral aspects of Dune (Lynch , 1985), and Neuromancer.