Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “You’re not trying to build a new government. You’ve already done it.”

  Terry nodded slowly. “Not just out of augmented reality apps. We call those the prosthetic—the thing that lets you see power and ownership. Like I said, making the invisible visible. But it doesn’t do the deciding.”

  “The deciding—that’s Wegetit.com?”

  “Wegetit and the system around it, which we call Cybersyn. It’s built on the block chain, so it’s totally decentralized, peer-to-peer. It provides trusted communications, fraud-proof voting, citizenship, and other services for a new governing structure. It’s more fraud- and corruption-proof than the one we’ve got now. Except of course it’s not just for Canada. It’s worldwide.”

  Rob stared at his son. “It’s a damned good thing I am who I am, Terry. You’ve just admitted to treason.”

  “Not at all. If I can see the carbon bubble and I say, ‘I think the government should divest from fossil fuels,’ and you don’t, and it turns out that Canada gets burned as the bubble bursts, did I commit treason? No. I advised, and you had the option of listening or not.”

  “But what you’re doing with it here . . . that’s not just advising. You’re actually running the island with it, aren’t you?” All these maps of power and wealth—they had visible concentrations, end points, and those corresponded to people. If you could see the whole network of power around yourself, you’d know who to talk to in order to get things done. Even if you were just some anonymous Indian on the street, you’d be able to see what needed to be done, even if you couldn’t do it yourself. And using the block chain, it could all be implemented in a completely decentralized manner. No center of power to take down . . .

  “We’re running the island because nobody else is doing it. If the feds were doing any kind of a good job at it, we wouldn’t have to.” Terry said this without heat, but the words stung. Rob almost said, “We do what we can,” but in the face of what he’d seen here, that was no answer at all.

  He started walking again, no longer noticing the gorgeous scenery. Terry fell into step beside him. “We use Wegetit and the rest of it to develop public policy that’s actually made by the public and tested alongside official policy in the national Dorian, which is just an open-source version of SimCanada. They’re both Big Data apps. We see which policy works better in the simulations, and then we wait for reality to catch up and see what actually happened in the real world. And either we tweak the national model or we publish the winning policy choice as a padget—you know, a policy gadget like they’ve had in Europe since, oh, at least 2010. The local MLAs have been using the padgets to design policy for a year now; they love it because they actually get good advice for free.

  “You see what we’re doing here, Dad? We’re offering you the chance to do the same thing, only on the national level.”

  The implication was clear. If the feds didn’t play, the Haida could take it to the next level: they could start voting in the block chain and cut the government out of the loop entirely.

  Rob crossed his arms. “I’m representing the whole country. You’re representing a little group of hackers and malcontents.”

  Terry shook his head. “How many people voted in the last federal election?” There was an awkward silence. “We involve more people in decision making than you do,” said Terry. “You do the math.”

  Rob thought about it for a while, then said, “Why?” He meant, why you.

  Terry seemed to understand. “Because you raised me to want to make a difference. The Midwest United States is emptying of people ’cause the water table’s gone and the president says he’ll invade Canada if we don’t agree to reverse the flow of the Hudson Bay watershed. It’s the Garrison Diversion project on steroids—and that’s in the supposedly most stable, richest, most democratic region in the world. There’s water wars and mass migrations everywhere, disease, starvation, religious pogroms. Here’s the thing: solving all these problems is easy, from a science and engineering standpoint. The science has been there for decades; so’s the technology. We’ve got biotech, nanotech, access to space, robots, 50 percent efficient solar cells, nuclear fusion, for God’s sake! We don’t need to solve those problems. There’s only one issue that’s worthy of our time and effort right now, because if we overcome it, we’ll solve all the others.

  “The only problem worth solving is the problem of how we govern ourselves.”

  Their feet made no noise as they sank into the moss. For a while father and son just walked together. Rob could feel the web of life radiating out from them, almost like invisible light. The animals, the epic trees, the moss and the inch-long slugs crawling on it; they were almost like a part of himself.

  He knew perfectly well how this was supposed to make him feel. Oneness with nature, that was the game here. It made him mad, because it was all so obvious and naive—a tourist’s version of the natural world. Try living out here without technology for a week. Try emptying Vancouver into the countryside to hunt the forests bare. The population being what it was, the only reason there were still places like this was because there were places like Vancouver. All this back-to-nature crap wasn’t going to cease to be crap just because some new technology made a more compelling argument for it.

  There was no point telling Terry this, of course; a sidelong glance showed Rob the quietly happy expression on his son’s face. He thought that he and his dad were Having a Moment. It was one of those things he did; Rob could remember times when he’d used this tactic as a boy—used his happiness to try to change his father’s mind about something important. Sometimes Rob had let him know he was being an asshole; sometimes, he just stood firm and ignored the ploy.

  They’d come to a height that looked down on the shore. He could see their canoe waiting for them. Funny—he hadn’t felt it, the way he felt the ravens roosting overhead, or the deer half a kilometer off to the right. The canoe was a hole in the landscape. Damned interface.

  “Tomorrow, we can tell this story,” said Terry, as he began picking his way down to the shore. Rob sighed, watching him for a few moments, then followed.

  RESOLUTE HE MIGHT BE, but by noon the next day Rob was grateful for Krishnamurti’s call—it saved his ass.

  The whole morning had been given over to a festival—of art, song, traditional dances, and storytelling. Rob had known it was coming—he attended such events many times each year. So he’d set his glasses to overlay the briefs on the government’s position, so he could be ready when the negotiations started. Except, he kept being distracted by the performances.

  Each story, each song, and every work of art had been chosen to reflect the insights they’d collectively discovered on the first day. They’d been told this in the conference recap at breakfast, but what it really meant was only just dawning on Rob.

  When Krishnamurti called, Rob had completely forgotten the briefs, was in fact staring through them at an old Tsimshian fisherman from Prince Rupert, who was telling his story. For every one of the government’s positions, this man had a real anecdote that showed why it was awful, wrong, or would just be ineffective. The damnedest thing about it was that Rob was sure this wasn’t a careful propaganda ploy. Taken by themselves the old geezer’s experiences were as random as anybody else’s. But hovering in the background, visible through the glasses that everybody was now wearing, was the causal root analysis diagram. Somebody had redrawn it as an actual tree, and as they were done, each story, song, and artwork was being pasted into it as a hotlink. Their argument was already won; that had happened when the people in this room, Rob included, had collectively built that tree the day before yesterday. This morning was all about absorbing the implications. Which weren’t good for any of Rob’s positions.

  It didn’t help that Rob had bought the sensory substitution shirt from the outfitter (paying with Gwaiicoin), and with Terry’s help had connected to the conference feed he’d suspected was there. Now he could feel the complex web of kinship, shared history, and alli
ances that informed the identities of the people opposite him. Through the glasses, he could see the pyramids of power and money made visible by the rogue overlays. All the complexities of obligation, history, business, and government were there—you could almost reach out and pull the strings, twist them to and fro.

  So when Krishnamurti called and told him the news, Rob actually grinned in relief. “Thanks,” he said, moving his lips as little as possible. Then his eyes sought out Terry, who was sitting with the visitors near the door, and the smile vanished. This could get ugly.

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the place by lunchtime, except maybe for Rob’s. He had to admit, the whole performance had been damned convincing. What he’d seen and heard here perfectly described everything that was wrong with the Indian Act and two hundred years of colonialism, and with the causal analysis in play, the reasons were obvious to all. “So,” said Todd as he took the floor again, “we can now move on to our last two stages. First, commitment to change. And second, deciding the actual courses of action that we will all take to address the root cause. This will take up the rest of today, and all of tomorrow.”

  Except it won’t, Rob thought grimly, because I won’t be here to rubber-stamp any of it. As everyone rose for lunch he rose too, joints creaking from yesterday’s canoe trip. He did the usual glad-handing but pressed inexorably toward the door. Out of the corner of his eye he could see some of the industry reps talking heatedly on their cell phones as they paced in the corners. Shit was happening, apparently.

  He collared Terry in the parking lot and said, “Walk with me.”

  His son grinned and nodded in the direction of the bay. The water was gray today, reflecting the low tumbling clouds. “That was amazing, eh?” said Terry as they walked.

  Rob shook his head and sighed. “I just got a call,” he said. “We know the tanker running aground wasn’t an accident.”

  Terry stopped walking, a shocked look on his face. “No shit?”

  “ ‘No shit’ what? ‘No shit’ that it was deliberate, or ‘no shit’ that we found out? You knew all along.”

  “Dad, really.” Terry looked hurt.

  “Is that why you called me to come house-hunting with you? To get me to Vancouver in time for all this”—he waved at the center with its proud totem poles—“to go down?”

  “You really think I’d do that?” Now Terry looked angry.

  “Well, you are a Sky.”

  Terry glared at him. The moment dragged—and then his son laughed. “So what happens now?” he asked.

  “This is serious, Terry. If the evidence trail gets back to you, you could be going to jail for a very long time.”

  “Except that it won’t, we both know that. Besides . . .” Serious now, Terry gazed out at the ocean. “There’s a Dorian for that.”

  “Terry, I’m done here. When this hits, I have to walk away. No more negotiations. The government’s going to cry blackmail, and your little escapade here is going to fall apart.”

  Terry shrugged. “There’s a Dorian for that, too. What’s SimCanada got to say about it?”

  “I . . .” He didn’t know. “Dammit, who cares?”

  “You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” Terry crossed his arms, looking pensive. “If you pull out now, the conference will still go forward. Only you won’t have any say in the results. You could pull some stunt right now, and split off some of the industry guys, the conservatives and government lapdogs. But even some of them are now convinced about what should be done. And everybody else . . . they’ll still go on to make their commitments. You may preserve the Indian Act, but it won’t be the reality on the ground after today.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Rob turned away. He’d only gone a few steps, though, when he stopped again.

  “You know why I never came here?” he heard himself say. He hadn’t meant to say this—he shouldn’t have to defend himself. Terry waited patiently, so Rob grimaced and went on.

  “It’s not my roots,” he said. “I get to decide what my roots are. And these ones, this stuff you’re defending so cleverly . . . it’s dead. There’s no people in the world who can hold themselves together using band councils and elders and traditional dances. You can’t go back. The world’s moved on and sitting around a campfire deciding together just isn’t going to cut it anymore. It’s that simple.”

  Terry sent his dad a wry look. “You know, the first time I visited you on Parliament Hill, I was walking up the steps to the main doors, and all I could think was ‘This place is handmade. Out of stone.’ ”

  He sauntered off in the direction of the water.

  Rob stalked across the parking lot, fuming. What the hell was that supposed to have meant? Of course Parliament was built of stone; it was old. Old . . .

  He skidded to a stop. “Hey, wait a sec!” But Terry was already out of earshot. Rob sputtered, trying to say, “Yeah, it’s old but not old like the band councils, not like that wisdom of the elders shit,” but his son was too far away and besides, Rob could feel the world turning around him, the ancient and the new colliding in the goddamned sensory substitution shirt.

  They could have sensory substitution banned; but there was still Wegetit.com. Maybe that could be shut down, but there were already imitators. The mesh networks, autonets, the block chain . . . they blurred into the legal in every direction. And the overlays, Structured Dialogic Design, Nexcity, and the Dorians—now that the genie was out of the bottle, there’d be so many improvements so fast, that soon every citizen on- and offline would have or have access to the kind of political second sight that previously, only rare people like Rob had possessed.

  He didn’t have his glasses on, but it blazed in his imagination: the Dorian of the only future that was going to work. The face of a new government was rising like a sun above the campfires and lodgepoles, above the halls of stone and oak—a government not dependent on any single technology, not even the Internet, but rather the accumulated crescendo of dozens of little nudges, techniques, and apps, and hundreds of new insights into cognitive and behavioral science.

  It was obvious now: he’d only been invited out to Haida Gwaii as a courtesy, the way that he himself had invited elders to meetings so many times. To make them feel better while the real business went on invisibly around them.

  He wasn’t going to lose this negotiation, and he wasn’t going to walk away from it either. He’d never really been a part of it.

  Jeffrey was standing in front of the center, eyes darting around and a worried look on his face. When he spotted Rob, he rushed over. “I just heard. What are we going to do, sir?”

  Rob let out a huff of breath—half sigh, half laugh. “We do what we always do, Jeff,” he said.

  “One way or another, we keep the conversation going. We can’t give up now.

  “Let’s go back inside.”

  Its design/Shutterstock, Inc.

  STORY NOTES—Karl Schroeder

  Humanity’s biggest problem isn’t how to imagine or design solutions for our economic, environmental, and social woes; our problem is that we can’t agree to implement them. By 2013, for instance, international agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions was further away than ever, despite years of conferences, meetings, expert panels, and millions of dollars spent on studies. This issue—of how we decide important things in groups—is the “meta-problem” that trumps all other issues. If we solve it, our other crises become manageable. If we don’t solve it, it doesn’t matter how many fixes we come up with. If we can’t get them implemented, we might as well not have wasted our time.

  Wicked Problems

  Many of our most important problems are ill-defined. There’s little agreement surrounding possible solutions to such problems, and there’s no way to verify if a proposed fix will work or if one that’s been tried has worked. These are called “wicked problems” because you cannot simply engineer a solution to them. Fortunately, methods do exist to manage them—if not to solve these messes, to at least impro
ve them. One such approach is called Structured Dialogic Design, which was developed by the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, primarily by cyberneticist Alexander Christakis. SDD builds upon decades of research into small-group interactions to provide a process whereby people with radically different, even hostile agendas can sit down together and agree upon mutually beneficial plans of action. An introduction to the process can be found in the book The Talking Point, by Thomas R. Flanagan and Alexander N. Christakis.

  Decision Architecture

  There will be no “Facebook for politics,” no single solution to the problem of human governance, because politics is a wicked problem. That doesn’t mean we can’t improve political processes at all levels, perhaps dramatically, by solving many smaller subissues using communications technologies, cognitive bias filtering software, decision-making strategies, and so on. SDD is just one example of how to do this. The story “Degrees of Freedom” showcases a possible set of such improvements, just a tiny subset of the many possibilities. I’ve included more information about some of these below.

  Dorians

  Humans are hardwired to detect extremely subtle differences in facial expression. In 1973, Herman Chernoff suggested using this capability to make complex multivariant data more easily visible to analysts. Different parameters of a complex data set are mapped to different features on these “Chernoff faces,” making it easy for viewers to perceive small differences between sets.

  Extending this idea, Dorians are pictures of yourself that are more or less happy, healthy, or fit depending on how your current behaviors or habits are trending. Basically, they show you your future self as you might look if you keep doing what you’re doing. Dorians are a natural and intuitive interface for “quantified Self” apps such as sports and fitness trackers, though in this story they also interpret the results of more significant life choices.

  You can think of the augmented reality app Nexcity mentioned in the story as a form of urban Dorian (see SimCanada, opposite).