The super-cool hackers over at queeriouslabs.net have coded an experiment based on one of my stories!

Back in 2014 I published "Degrees of Freedom," in the farsighted short story anthology Hieroglyph (which was edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer). The story is about indigenous rights, self-government, and new technologies for governance, and man did it have legs! It's still being taught at a couple of universities and garnered interest from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other entities.

Now, the adventurous hackers over at queeriouslabs.net have built a test version of it! You can try it for free over at the We Get It website.

In the story, wegetit.com is a popular site that's used as a kind of funnel to feed discussions into policy-generating forums. You can have conversations about any subject on wegetit, but one of the things it does is expect you to define your terms. In other words, when I used the word "liberal" in this post, what do I mean by it? When you use it in your reply, what do you mean? The theory is that the permanent rolling meltdown of understanding we see in social media is largely the result of people misunderstanding what each other mean by very basic words. I say something I think is innocuous, you get triggered by it because a word I understand one way is read by you in an entirely different way. And it goes back and forth, amplifying mistrust and enmity.

Wegetit tries to dampen out this feedback system by guaranteeing that people understand what each other mean, not just read what each other say. This first version is very bare-bones, but that's how systems are developed. You can just give it a whirl and see where it leads you. I'm playing with it and having a great time.

Thankis, queeriouslabs!

The Hieroglyph anthology has certainly had legs.  It brought a whole bunch of us authors and the editors to the White House to talk to the Office of Science and Technology Policy about how to engage a new generation of young people to go into the science and engineering professions. 

Below is a photo of us taken by Ruth Wylie on October 2, 2014. Left to right are myself, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Edd Finn, Elizabeth Bear, Kevin Bankston, Kathryn Cramer, Vandana Singh, Ted Chiang, Madeline Ashby, Lee Konstantinou, and Neal Stephenson.

We also discussed other issues, particularly the future of governance and how to manage thorny issues such as climate change.  My own story in the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," is all about governance, so I was in my element. 

This is where science fiction and strategic foresight meet for me--in events like this one.  Oddly enough, this is not the first time I've participated in such a hybrid event; much of my history with foresight for the Canadian government and army has involved using my talents as an SF writer to both filter and refine ideas that come from foresight.  I did my Masters thesis on how to employ storytelling methods to communicate foresight findings.

This visit to Washington was the capstone to a season of travels and adventures that took me to San Jose in August (for the Cognitive Computing forum), to UCLA in September (for the Digital Cash conference), and most recently to Phoenix for the World Bank's Evoke project.  I'm now happily settling in at home to work on a new novel, but hopefully this is just a hiatus and I can get out to more speaking gigs soon.

Project Hieroglyph presents: Stories and Visions for a Better Future

Wednesday, October 22, 7:00pm (Doors open at 6:00)

Crescent Ballroom, Downtown Phoenix
Co-hosted with Changing Hands Bookstore

Nine authors and scientists will share their ambitious, optimistic visions of the near future in a series of conversations and Big Idea pitches. Presenters will include authors Kim Stanley Robinson, Madeline Ashby, Karl Schroeder, Kathleen Ann Goonan, James L. Cambias, and Brenda Cooper; Hieroglyph co-editors Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer; and acclaimed cosmologist and astrobiologist Paul Davies. Learn more and buy tickets today!

Neal Stephenson's inspired vision to inspire a new generation to enter the sciences and engineering, the Hieroglyph Project, has launched its self-titled anthology.  We held a book launch here in Toronto on Sept. 13, which was well attended, and will be doing more events over the next month, all across North America.  

Here's what people are saying about Hieroglyph so far:

Symmetry Magazine

MIT Technology Magazine

Goodreads (average rating of 4.6 out of 5 so far)

Slate (story excerpt)

io9 (Madeline Ashby's story excerpted)

There's going to be a lot more; this is just a sample.  Meanwhile, we're doing launch events across the country.  I'll be attending two more, myself:  on October 2, I'll be in Washington, and we'll be discussing Hieroglyph at the World Bank Narrative Hackathon in Phoenix, AZ October 21-25th.  Hope you can make one of those!

(My story in the anthology is "Degrees of Freedom," which is about a separatist Haida nation in the Pacific Northwest that uses new technologies of governance to render the current national and provincial governments in the region obsolete.)