What is Laughing Squid ?

Laughing Squid is an online resource for art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond. It is run by primary tentacle Scott Beale, who is also the publisher editor of the blog and is joined by the occasional guest blogger.

So, I’ll try expanding on that a bit more on this blog post, but first, a little history:

Laughing Squid was founded in November of 1995 by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ‘96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List and for a while Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then started focusing on web hosting in 1998. In December 1999 John Law invested a small amount in Laughing Squid and joined as head of “special projects”. David Klass soon followed, investing a small amount as a silent investor.

Ok, on to what we actually do. Here a few things that make up Laughing Squid:

1. ART, CULTURE & TECHNOLOGY - As our tagline suggests, one of the main objectives of Laughing Squid is promoting art, culture and technology, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. A secondary goal of ours is to help connect the art community with the tech community, by letting artists know what tools and resources are available to promote their work and in turn get the geeks out from behind their computer and experience more art.
   
2. WEB HOSTING - Since 1998 we have been providing dependable web hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers. This is our primary source of revenue. The “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, web hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from the web hosting side of Laughing Squid helps to fund the community-based side of Laughing Squid. Our web hosting operations are located over at laughingsquid.net.
   
3. BLOG - In January 2005 we launched the Laughing Squid blog, essentially converting most of Laughing Squid to WordPress. There I post about a variety of things (with the occasional guest post), mostly relating to art, culture and technology, with the primary focus being the San Francisco Bay Area.
   
4. THE SQUID LIST - For the last 10 years we have been running The Squid List, a curated list of art, culture and technology events taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is both an online calendar, as well as an email list.
   
5. EVENTS - Speaking of events, Laughing Squid typically organizes at least one large event each year and sometimes a few smaller ones. For our 5th anniversary in 2000 we sold out the Great American Music Hall. In 2003 we went to New York and had our big “Laughing Squid: NYC” show at the now defunct CB’s 313 Gallery. From 1999 to 2003, we produced The Tentacle Sessions, a monthly artist salon. Here’s a list of the events that we have organized over the years.
   
6. PHOTOGRAPHY - I shoot a lot of photos and have been since high school. For the last decade my primary focus has been documenting San Francisco’s incredibly diverse art scene and in the last couple of years I’ve expanded it to the current explosion in web technology and related events. Here’s over 20,000 photos from 2005-2007, plus a few thousand more from 2000-2005. Some day I’ll get around to scanning and uploading all of the pre-2000 stuff.
   
7. PROPAGANDA - We’ve been pretty good at promoting ourselves through the years. Our infamous logo, created by the super talented Matt Dong, has been making the rounds since around 2000 and shows up on our t-shirts, stickers and buttons. We also commissioned a series of 10 post cards from some of our favorite artists.
   
8. SQUID - Well as you might guess, we love squid. In fact, we’re so into squid that we launched a whole blog devoted to just squid: squid.us
   
9. COMMUNITY - A big part of what Laughing Squid does is connecting people and organizations with other people, organizations and resources in the community. This often includes helping to organize, document (photos or video) or even sponsor an event. A few of the events and organizations we have been involved with over the years include Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, BrainJams, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine, just to name a few.
   

Spy vs Spy story also covered

Spy vs. Spy is a wordless black and white comic strip that has been published in Mad magazine since 1961. It was created by Antonio Prohias, a Cuban national who fled to the United States in 1960 days before Fidel Castro took over the Cuban free press.

The "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon was symbolic of the Cold War, and was Prohías's comment on the futility of armed escalation and détente.

This cover of Make Magazine #16, “Spy Tech”, was created by MAD Magazine art director Sam Viviano and features the most notorious spies of all time, Spy vs. Spy.

via Boing Boing Image via Make

The Future is Not a Story

For a story to be interesting to humans, it has to feature interesting content occurring at the human level. A story about the interaction of worms and rabbits is not very interesting to humans unless the characters are entirely anthropomorphic. Conversely, humans cannot write meaningful stories about content above the human level, because we lack the cognitive complexity to imagine such things.

The future is not a story to entertain you. Brought up on Star Wars, Star Trek, The Terminator, and many other stories, many geeks view the future almost exclusively through the lens of overly-beloved fiction. Though these geeks may not consciously think, “the future is basically Star Trek coming into existence”, the initial reflex when confronted with a cool new piece of technology is to make a fictional reference. For example, look at the comments on practically any “futuristic technology” headline that appears on Digg. No one can resist.

However, the universe does not care that we find only stories at the human level interesting. The vast majority of natural phenomena are dictated by structures that are far smaller or far larger than humans, and often far less complex. In the near future, as humans create transhumans, the script of history will start to be written in a more sophisticated font that we lack the cognitive wherewithal to make direct sense out of.

This “interestingness bias” causes futurists to come up with showy stories to get attention. One particularly flagrant example is BT futurologist Ian Pearson, who in 2002 predicted notebook computer screens with contrast as good as paper by 2003, mobile phone location used in traffic management systems by 2004, the first organism brought back to life in 2006, anti-noise technology built into homes by 2010, and the highest-earning celebrity being synthetic in 2010. All these predictions have either failed or are on the way to failing, and seem to be made more for show than seriousness.

If I were in charge of a futurist seminar, one of the first things I would probably do is discourage anyone from mentioning any fictional story whatsoever. I do believe that fiction does have something to teach us about future possibilities, but the bias towards interesting stories is so overwhelmingly strong that most casual thinking about the future is thoroughly contaminated by it. No narrative can predict the future, because the future is a blur of uncertainties from our perspective, and will only appear like a narrative in retrospect.

This bias towards interesting future stories is particularly worrisome in the context of unFriendly AI. People anthropomorphize advanced AI and come up with a thousand interesting and semi-ironic stories for why it wouldn’t be a threat to us: for instance, AIs might find humans “boring” and blast off into space, or create their own basement universe, or figure out so much knowledge about the world that they dessicate from existential ennui. These scenarios all strike me as B-grade science fiction. More likely, when confronted by a recursively self-improving unFriendly AI with abstract mathematical goals unrelated to human concerns, the simple outcome is death. No robot wars, no citizenship battles, no epic historical dialogue between the President of the United States and the AI leader. Just defeat. How’s that for your interesting story?