(2024-05-04) Complex Adaptive Media Systems

Chris F on Complex Adaptive Media Systems (CAMS). “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. The medium is the message: Marshall McLuhan would be disappointed by how we are thinking about AI-enabled media. Our focus is on forging the tools and not wielding them. When we have the tools, we are engaged in acts of mimicry. (ugh this piece seems mostly magical thinking around LLM, blockchain, and metaverse)

We are not appropriately thinking about the scale this new technology allows for and the second order effects of that. Our brain is trapped in objects when it should be thinking in systems, worlds and simulations.

The reason we are not thinking this way is because the answers we need to organize this newly emerging scale lives outside technology, where most AI thought happens today. We need to be drawing from biological and ecosystems thinking.

how we can form new models of value creation and distribution.

venture past AI ethics and think ontologically about networked relationships between things

As a part of that process, we need to rethink how we tell and interact with stories. Stories alone are not enough to relate to the human experience anymore. Simple parables or heroic journeys fall short when relating to a world as complex as ours

Now that we have the ability to do so, our media should more accurately reflect the evolving nature of the world

Memes are alive. Long form storytelling should be too. We need to think in worlds that have arcs and scaffolds, but not fixed scripts. We need to move away from passive consumption on our couch and into a shared public life of communal mythmaking.

A Thought Exercise

When you think of virtual worlds today, you think of gaming.

All of our media is actually limited to the delivery interface it is designed for, but that’s not how we interact with our world. Our base reality is multimodal.

Before, media was primarily limited to a specific medium because of technology. That changes with AI.

What if you wanted to talk to a character in Hyrule while you walked through a park in your town?

What if you wanted to create a new quest that puts yourself in the Hyrule and do it in a way that doesn’t require staring at the Switch, but rather in any number of fashions as you go about your day?

What if the events from that, the places you discover or objects you create get added to the world and the world adapts to what you do? What if your actions matter in creating the world, not just defeating it? This is what CAMS proposes. To free virtual worlds from the confines of gaming. To free long form narrative from the structure of books and movies.

Complex Adaptive Media Systems (CAMS) is a new design pattern that allows us to do just that.

With scale comes the requirement for new ways of thinking

At each level of scale additional complexity emerges that requires new models of organization.

The same is true of the internet, but how it governs and organizes itself more closely resembles our natural world, which is one giant biological system made up of collections of subsystems

It just works as a decentralized process better known as a complex adaptive system.

We are no longer thinking in terms of a website or a collection of NFTs. We are thinking in terms of constellations of objects and entities interacting with each other over a network

A complex adaptive system is a network of individual components or agents, each acting according to simple rules or strategies, without any centralized control

Climate change is the most pressing issue facing our continued existence

we aren’t doing a very good job of managing it. Why?

One big reason is the unapproachability of the problem

Another problem is the massiveness of it

Climate change works on large timescales

When do you think about climate change? It’s not on the normal days

You couldn’t live if you spent every waking hour worrying about global warming, so instead your awareness phases in and out as its effects manifest themselves in the world around you.

What do you call something that exists and is real, but is massively distributed in space and time? Whose effects are present, but unapproachable and only experienced indirectly? It’s a weird thing to consider and no one really had until 2010 when a philosopher named Timothy Morton coined the term hyperobject.

Before we better define and describe hyperobjects, it’s important to note that they can be any number of things. To make this more digitally relevant, we can actually classify Facebook as one of the few web services in the world to be big enough to be a hyperobject.

Unless you are in a small subset of people who personally know Zuck, it’s almost impossible to approach or influence Facebook

We aren’t thinking big enough about the scale and scope of the networks we are building.

With AI coming of age, we are about to have the ability to virtualize and miniaturize both hyperobjects and complex adaptive systems, and transform them from massive things in the world beyond our control to digital systems in virtual worlds that we can conjure up and have agency over.

An Introduction to Hyperobjects

so vastly distributed over space and time that they dwarf our usual perception of scale and duration

Hyperobjects influence how we conceptualize everything from storytelling to user experience, demanding that media systems accommodate not just the immense size and scope of the data they deal with but also the intricate and interwoven relations they foster amidst audiences and content creators alike.

Understanding hyperobjects thus offers profound insights into creating media structures capable of not merely containing information but engaging with the expansive, interconnected fabric of 21st-century life

Properties of Hyperobjects

Hyperobjects wield distinct properties that unfold across multiple dimensions, challenging our standard conceptions of physicality and affecting profound implications for our interaction with the world. These properties—viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity—represent cornerstones in understanding the overarching impact of hyperobjects.

Viscosity, in the context of hyperobjects, refers to their persistent tenacious influence

Nonlocality is the aspect of hyperobjects that denotes their omnipresence and the impossibility of pinpointing them to a specific location or moment in time.

Temporal undulation

Phasing expresses the intermittent perceptibility of hyperobjects

interobjectivity is intrinsic to the nature of hyperobjects. It reveals that hyperobjects arise from the symbiosis and interactions between multiple entities

Together, these multifaceted properties prompt a significant shift in our narrative approach.

In the framework of Complex Adaptive Media Systems (CAMS), appreciating and incorporating the properties of hyperobjects is essential to evolving and enriching our media landscapes, as we aim to craft narratives as boundless as the hyperobjects themselves.

Digital Physics

we are not talking about Wolfram’s theory that the universe is mathematically designed and knowable in computational terms. Instead, we are talking about the digital physics that govern how objects can behave and interact with each other in the virtual environments they live in.

Social media algorithms decide who sees what content and when. I’m not guaranteed to have all my followers see a tweet I made

how a character moves through a video game

When we design networked software and deploy code on the internet, we have the arbitrary power to define the physics which govern everything that happens within the system

Time in virtual space can be governed by computation power and the speed at which you can simulate events

Liminality As Native AI Media

AI is the first tool we’ve had with the scale, intelligence, and speed necessary to transform large amounts of information in a way that is reactive, fast and fluid. It gives us the ability to turn liminality into a presentation layer or form of user interface.

Conclusion

Faster, cheaper, better will result in a scale that tips the design and operating requirements past the point where traditional management approaches are effective.

While managing Google is not radically different from managing JP Morgan, managing the global economy (if it were actually possible) is. That’s because the global economy is a complex adaptive system, and it is impossible for us to systematically get our hands around the entire thing. Instead, we have to settle for influencing it by acting on the defining features of it as best we can.

CAMS are envisioned as a new form of media which means their primary purposes are entertaining and educating human beings

An interesting development is that scripted dramas across novels (World War Z), TV (Lost) and movies (Inception) have started taking on more sophisticated forms of storytelling which resemble the properties of hyperobjects.

In fact many of the properties of hyperobjects adapt themselves well to narrative form on a grand scale.

One could say that the largest media franchises are accidental hyperobjects already

Now is the time to start thinking about what comes next.

We are changing from a passive broadcast media which needs to resolve neatly at a creator’s determined cut off time, to a participatory, ongoing model of networked media in which the ending is not known ahead of time, but rather found collectively through communal action

If generative AI and the economic incentives of blockchain L2s simply result in more media without changing how we interact and experience it, then we’ll drown in a sea of meaningless spam that debases all work whether human or machine made.

That will not happen however, because humans are intrinsically wired to seek meaning. We are on the cusp of creating virtual, networked worlds which we can all exert agency over