This new generation of online “head shops” is at the centre of a rapidly growing market in highly potent synthetic drugs, such as Spice, that mimic the effects of illegal substances such as cannabis and ecstasy.

European drug agency officials are also alarmed by the way the online retailers are reacting to moves to ban individual “legal highs” by rapidly marketing alternatives. Officials say it is like trying to hit a moving target.

Well, d’uh – do you really expect them to just sit there in the firing line waiting to be picked off? I think what we’re seeing here is something like a singularity for the recreational chemicals industry, whereby the legal machinery of the countries that most want to control such substances moves too slowly to control the exponentially faster response to market demand. It’s a whack-a-mole gig – knock one substance into the ground, and two more pop up to replace it.

I’d hardly be the first to suggest that perhaps this rapid response in the balance of supply and demand is the first nail in the coffin lid of attempts to banish recreational drug-taking, but given the UK government’s laughable unwillingness to heed the suggestions of the drug policy advisors that it appointed, I’m not going to be the first voice they ignore, either.

But I think it’s safe to say that drugs – designer or otherwise – are not going to go away any time soon, legislation or otherwise. So what’s a beleaguered incumbent government to do – quietly admit defeat and lose the vote of the hand-wringing middle classes, or pour away time and resources doing a King Canute impersonation?

Is there anyone among Futurismic’s readership who can say with a straight face that more restrictive legislation will prevent drug abuse, in the UK or anywhere else? If so, tell us how and why in the comments. Feel free to suggest new alternatives to legislation, as well.

Designer drugs develop faster than designer legislation

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The Cyber Tracing team at Wragge & Co was set up to deal with what the law firm said was a rising problem with people making anonymous statements that defamed companies, and people sharing confidential information online.

And Wragge boasted the new team would ensure there was �nowhere to hide in cyberspace�.

(Yeah, right – good luck with selling that idea, guys. If it was coming from a team of Estonian teen hackers, I’d give it some credence. But from a handful of lawyers in Armani suits?)

The four-strong team at the Colmore Row firm is a combination of IT litigation and employment law specialists.

One of the members of the team said redundancies and other reorganisations caused by the recession meant the numbers of disgruntled employees looking to get their own back on employers or former employers was also on the rise.

Wonder why that might be… The article raises the United Airlines stock crash of 2001 as an example of the sort of misleading reportage that can have serious effects on a company, but it’s not exactly a logical leap to assume that whistleblowers and former employees and customers with legitimate axes to grind would be among the voices that certain corporations would very much love to sweep under the carpet, and the threat of unmasking anonymous reports might well prevent them from being made in such wide numbers. Business as usual for free speech here in the UK, then; they can’t legislate against it directly, but intimidation and ambiguity works just as well.

That said, the internet is pretty vast, and some of its denizens are smarter than others… and I suspect Wragge and Co’s fees for hunting down anonymous commenters will reflect those realities. It also remains to be seen how much they can achieve when working on sites hosted in countries where the jurisdiction isn’t so clear-cut, or sites like Wikileaks which are geared toward protecting their sources. What we can be sure of is that when lawyers can see a paycheck, there’s dirty laundry waiting to be washed… and we can expect the corporate (and political) world to wise up to the web pretty fast now that the full extent of its power is becoming apparent.

The Anonymous Hunters: corporate critics and whistleblowers beware

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This is important for two reasons. First of all, it’s a major step in Linden Lab’s attempts to turn a decent profit from Second Life, which it has struggled to achieve with the free-to-use business model of the public version. If they can convince some big players of Second Life’s utility as a collaborative business tool, the subsequent inflow of money might enable them to step up the bug-hunt and fix some of the virtual world’s bigger flaws. IBM have been a presence in SL for some time, as have other big corporations (to whom we can now add the US Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command branch, who are financing a “therapeutic space” for amputee veterans using SL Enterprise); the potential for the same tools in a more secure environment (e.g. devoid of flying penis barrages, for a start) may entice more money into Linden Lab’s coffers, and open up the field for competition from other virtual worlds. So now’s the time to set up a business making sharp business suits for executive avatars, I guess…

Secondly, the veil of privacy will doubtless encourage experimentation, and should lead to some new and weird ways of interacting with (and creating within) synthetic spaces. After all, you wouldn’t want to go developing your top-secret big-money idea in public where anyone could see (and copy) it, would you? Imagine for a moment that DARPA decided to set themselves up with an SL Enterprise installation… I’d pay a good big bribe to check out the crazy crap they’d have filled it with after a year or so of getting to grips with the interface, that’s for certain.

And, of course, one can’t help but be reminded of the abandoned corporate virtualities featured in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, most particularly Idoru. Like the adandonware websites that already festoon the web, sat on some server somewhere, waiting for a rental agreement between two companies that no longer exist to expire, the metaverse could soon become a multimetaverse, with a few vast virtualities with public access and countless little bubbles of digital existence locked away behind firewalls and restrictive protocols. Urban exploration is a growing trend at the moment, but in a decade or so, the adventurous people will be cracking their way into abandoned corporate and gubernatorial realities to see what they can find lying around… and hell knows some of it will be more interesting than rusty old swivel chairs.

Second Life Enterprise: virtual worlds behind the corporate firewall

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Simon Choppin, a sports engineer at Sheffield Hallam University, said the Pistorius controversy rested on whether his prosthetics increased the efficiency of his limbs, allowing him to achieve higher speeds for less effort.

“So, simply, you can move the prosthetic quicker and you’re ready for the next step faster than someone who has a leg,” said Choppin. Another possible advantage was that the prosthetics might allow the athlete to get back more of the energy they put into the track compared with able-bodied athletes. “But this [Grabowski] paper suggests you’re at a disadvantage if you’ve got one of these blades.”

We can hope that the competition authorities will look at research like this and allow transhuman athletes to compete alongside everyone else, at least until more advanced prosthetics confer a genuine and insuperable advantage (which is bound to happen eventually). But given competitive sport’s strong role in maintaining the mythology of the perfect conformist human body image – think back to the disgusting treatment of Caster Semenya, for example – I suspect they’ll find some other reason to keep the Olympics “pure” and “fair”.

Transhuman equality? Athletes with a prosthesis do not have an unfair advantage

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Via Chairman Bruce

Rio de Janeiro is a city with a population of just over six million in its central urban areas, of which, according to officials, an estimated 20% are residents of favelas. These favelas vary enormously in size and character. These urban islands, like those of the earth’s waters, have formed according to several genealogies and geologies. Some, like continental islands, share a history and underlying structure with those around them, as if they have collectively broken off from a land mass. Others, like volcanic islands, seem to develop independently and suddenly from more isolated and turbulent forces. Still other favelas, like coral atolls, build slowly on an underlying urban structure. These metaphors show how favelas differ in their relationship to their surroundings—their seemingly insular status belies the fact that submerged structures tie them to the city.

Read on for more details about the utilities and transport infrastructures that enable favelas to exist, and the socioeconomic pressures that ensure they keep growing and multiplying in spite of all attempts to curb the expansion. [image by anthony_goto]

And as an added bonus, here’s a game-changing technology to drop into your fictional favela – Contraptor is the name of both an organisation and the open-source rapid prototyping system it has designed and built. Like a more sturdy and diverse answer to the RepRap, in other words – an affordable way to put the means of production into the hands of pretty much anyone with a few hundred dollars and an internet connection [via Fabbaloo]. You’ve got your setting, you’ve got your novum – and you’ve got a thousand stories waiting to be written.

Required reading: mapping the favela

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