Futurism and Media Theory: A New Renaissance
futurism
This year, I’m aiming to put more time into developing my craft as a futurist, media theorist and public lecturer on technology’s impact on humanity. Most of 2019 had been dedicated to building the foundation of several new AI projects, including a general-purpose intelligence platform, Lyrical. Bootstrapping a tech platform and AI practice left little time for thought leadership and speaking engagements, but I realized just how much I loved being a public intellectual, hence my renewed inspiration.
We are at a very critical time in history—one that will decide our success or failure as a species. It’s going to require an “all hands on deck” approach, which is why I’m committed to rebooting my thinking on AI, building technology with humanity’s best interests in mind, exploring how collective intelligence emerges, and navigating a world riddled with surveillance capitalism and uncomfortable levels of dystopia.
The term “futurology” comes from the Latin (futurum, or future) and the Greek suffix –logia (the science of), and it was coined by a German professor named Ossip Flechtheim in 1943, who, along with author H. G. Wells several decades earlier, proposed “futurism” as a new academic discipline. It’s an interdisciplinary field combining mathematics, engineering, art, technology, economics, design, history, geography, biology, theology, physics, and philosophy. As a futurist, my job is not to predict the future, but rather to shape and impact it by collecting data, identifying emerging trends, developing strategies, and calculating the probabilities of various scenarios occurring in the future. Forecasts are used to help leaders, teams, and individuals make better, more informed decisions, even as their organizations face great disruption.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the second wave of futurists began their work, developing statistical models and using computers to determine how society might look in the future. Back then, futurists were primarily concerned with the far-future ramifications of what was then quite novel: space travel, the Pill, desalinating the oceans, artificial intelligence, personality-affecting drugs, overpopulation and geopolitical instability. Arthur C. Clarke, Herman Kahn, Anthony J. Weiner, Theo Gordon, M.S. Iyengar, Eric Jantsch all imagined what was scientifically probable, while Yujiro Hayashi, Daniel Bell, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alvin Toffler wondered what those ideas might mean for government policy, journalism, democracy, academic independence and our collective economic welfare.
We’re now in a third wave of futurists, but the work done in the 1960s provides a good backdrop to what’s being done today. I’ve studied the works of those earlier futurists, learning from their models and analysis. Like them, I’ve developed my own system for forecasting with respect to business strategy, market research, and innovation, but my interests are at the intersection of media / design theory, computer science, and cognitive architecture.
media theory: where i came from
My career started in media and communication theory. I received my B.A. Communication from the University of the Pacific in 2000. My first job out of college was working as an account executive for one of the largest media companies in Asia, ABS-CBN International. I also worked as a producer and journalist for soft and hard news programs, as well as producing commercials for ABS-CBN clients. I also produced a short film noir that screened in competition at the Sundance film festival. I ended up leading ABS-CBN’s interactive division just as things were heating up in the dot.com era. This experience gave me a strong foundation in media business and production, while piquing my interest in innovation and the cosmological effects of technology transformation.
This led me to a series of startup endeavors—all of which were at the intersection of media, data, technology, and customer experiences. I grew fascinated at how the best and the brightest in Silicon Valley were being recruited to optimize attention, engagement, and business outcomes. I learned how to build businesses both poorly and successfully. Working in the media technology space made me more cognizant of how social media impacted our behavior, and how it evolved to become the dominant form of mass communication. I began to develop theories on cognition, creativity, and innovation. While working for a media agency I was able to get an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. My thesis explored the intrinsic properties of innovation from a design thinking perspective that integrated cognition with principles in physics and marketing. Several versions later, my book, Mindshare, was published in 2012, by MotionPub—which received the USA Best Book Award that year.
I landed an amazing job at the AI tech unicorn company, Rocket Fuel, in which I also rose up the ranks quickly, from being a Director of Emerging Media Strategy to being the Managing Director of Rocket Fuel’s Innovation and Media Lab, where I led a team of data engineers, researchers, and solution architects to extract insights from over a hundred petabytes of online observations—including a consumer behavior study on red and blue states. But something more interesting started to happen. I was still very much entrenched in building AI products but I was also getting invited to speak at conferences and private events. I began to build my career as a public intellectual.
Being both a practitioner and AI critic allowed be to see both sides of any argument—first I played the role of a futurist with unbridled optimism. But now I’m more of a pragmatist. I led research initiatives on artificial intelligence’s impact on the future of experiences, work, ethics, capitalism, and the symbiosis of humanity and technology in the cognitive era. I published over a dozen whitepapers on AI’s impact across a variety of industries, created curriculum for thought leadership, enterprise enablement strategies, and a vast amount of business consulting frameworks to help leaders navigate an increasingly complex future at the intersection of planetary-scale computation, consumption, and economics. This was the most interesting aspect of my job, but I began to develop an aversion to marketing and advertising. Watching the award-winning AMC series Mad Men provides the best literary explanation for my growing distaste. But big tech started to have a bigger problem.
The Rocket Fuel years were joyful and invigorating, despite the company’s bad press due to the lack of transparency and data promiscuity. Rocket Fuel was one of several media solutions that were involved in the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2015-16, at the peak of the firm’s campaign initiatives with Trump—which has been well-documented and is the subject of the popular Netflix film, The Great Hack. There were also numerous blowback white-ops accounts on irresponsible use of client data. This experience shaped my current media theories on AI data ethics, surveillance capitalism, and the future of humanity. This is what now drives my conviction in media arts and digital communication.
Agency clients and the press criticized Rocket Fuel founders for hubris. I joined Rocket Fuel in 2012—at the peak of its successful run right before the IPO. Several years of fast spending and a decline in the managed service business would lead the company to a distressed sale. Rocket Fuel went public then turned into an Icarus cautionary tale after it acquired the data management platform company, X+1 in 2014.
In 2017 I not only stopped drinking the Kool Aid. I was completely put off by my entire industry category—advertising and marketing platforms that automated the optimization of digital business outcomes for brands and enterprises. My job at Sizmek was to get people excited about the future of marketing with AI. My thought leadership’s aim for clients to infer that Sizmek was a leader in AI-powered marketing. Only there were two big problems—I was no longer excited about marketing, and I was definitely not excited about Sizmek.
You have to take the bitter with the sweet. With over two decades of experience in cultivating the most powerful AI technologies, building teams, and leading AI research projects, I now realize that I have a unique interdisciplinary perspective in artificial intelligence and its impact on society and geopolitics. Having technical insight into the inner works of AI platforms and companies gives me a comprehensive perspective in how AI will impact the global economy, culture, our jobs and ethical issues surrounding data governance and technology regulation. This helped crystallize my career path as both AI researcher and media theorist.
the future
I’m now setting my sights on a long-term research initiative that explores the human mind, surveillance capitalism, designing a new web, and how artificial intelligence can power the future of work across industries. This gets me really excited about my career path, and our purpose in shaping a more prosperous and abundant future.
My long-term research goals explore technology transformation and cognitive cultural change as a result of digital disruption and the emergence of artificial intelligence.
In my new work-in-progress book, Aion, I explore human progress through a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the self, her role in the future of humanity, and what it means to live in an increasingly more simulated and cognitive world. The book is a comprehensive design brief building on the foundations of Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack, and brings together a culmination of perspectives on technology transformation, social psychology, philosophy, quantum mechanics, and macroeconomics. My hope is that it will help readers navigate the world with more confidence by understanding the hidden forces and interdependencies of various physical, digital, and socio-economic systems. These underlying principles should guide us toward abundance or lead to our ultimate demise. I will be posting frequently on the topics above to understand what subjects people are most interested in, please stay tuned for more!