Fight The Future with Superstruct

Until now SecondLife is perhaps the closest thing the real world has seen to the type of deep alternate reality presented by THE MATRIX (1998). Although SecondLife would have to undergo many milestones of evolution to get there, it’s not hard to see that one day virtual realities will be ‘home’ to scientists, researchers and many others in the future.

A new start-up Superstruct, aims to use this model of online gaming to launch an alternate reality game (ARG) that crowd-sources predictions of how future scenarios might play out. “The hope is that by staging a rich gaming environment and using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and its own custom-made Web 2.0 tools, the IFTF can both draw attention to its mission and get thousands of people to give it some excellent ideas. The institute, in other words, is crowdsourcing the future,” says Dan Kaplan who wrote about Superstruct for VentureBeat.

Superstruct is the brainchild of the Institute for the Future (which admittedly sounds like something out of a Marvel comic book), a non-profit think tank that sustains itself by conducting research and offering 10-year forecasts and selling them to other NGOs, non-profits and government groups. Last week they launched the prelude to Superstruct in the form of faux newscasts depicting the occurrence of five ‘superthreat’ disasters that threaten humanity: a super disease called REDS, a power struggle between oil producing states and those that intend to offer alternative energy solutions, an anti-cyberculture movement, fallout from rising food prices and a scenario where there are 250 million displaced climate change refugees. Outside of the first and the last scenario perhaps the most chocking thing is how much Superstruct’s future sounds very much like the world right “now”.

While the Institute for the Future remains tight-lipped about what will happen when Superstruct goes live next week, it has revealed some cool details. For example, Tim Kring, creator of TV’s Heroes, will be a honorary game master, as will sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Even some institute clients, like the Center for Disease Control, will somehow be involved. Meanwhile, paid community managers are already setting the stage with blogs and Twitter posts written from the perspective of 2019.

Gorbis says that the scenarios created for Superstruct are not knee-jerk reactions but careful, internally consistent projections and that the dangers they represent are entirely real. The threats outlined in Superstruct are insidious — the kind that start about now and unravel over the next ten years. Given current trends in economics, energy, demographics, climate change and cyber warfare, all of them seem plausible enough to send slight chills down the spine.

The word “superstruct” is a verb that means building new structures on top of existing ones. Throughout history, superstructing is one thing humans have done quite well. The other thing we do with virtuosic flair is destroy the structures we’ve built. For most of history, if one society destroyed another or combusted, there were “backup copy” civilizations that went mostly untouched in other regions of the globe. Now, no corner of the planet is far from another. The Institute for the Future created Superstruct because it suspects that without cooperation on a worldwide scale, the crises of the medium-term future could collectively obliterate everything our species has achieved.

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