Author: Elise

Me: When you think out to 2050 — how do you think about it? How do you organize your thoughts and inquiry and experimentation?

Colin: I’m going to free associate which may or may not have connections to this.

1. My pal and office mate Henry Jenkins is working on a civic imagination project. Workshops with people to imagine the future generally. They choose 2040 or 2050, and map out what they would like to see, what they would expect. And use narrative and popular culture mashups to create a tale of how we got from here to there. Part of the thinking being that we live in the tyranny of the possible and we see barriers and can only imagine modest change rather than imagine something more ambitious and positive that we would have to WORK to achieve. Let’s have this grand vision. What they find that’s interesting is that people regardless of politics, people have similar visions but don’t know how we’re going to get there when they think about near-term stuff.

Henry is a pop culture, science fiction junkie and just a neat person. He’s the digital culture historian at the Library of Congress right now. We’re doing an event with him in late January on podcasting and he became a huge podcast fan. Something neat there and opportunity around him and his network. Around civic and community and what that looks like, what our lives are like. One lens.

My immediate reaction to your “how to explore it” question is, we’re too siloed into disciplines. And the action is always at the intersection of the buckets and how they connect and interplay. That’s an obvious pushback. How do you make the buckets DIFFERENT from the way we normally think about, or set them up so we show an interdynamic system. Because clearly the environmental bucket would affect everything if you label that, it would be limiting.

Two things in this zone: Alex McDowell — production designer who teaches at USC who made a bunch of movies. Most famously Minority Report. Fight Club, and a bunch of other things. When he did Minority Report he faced the challenge you were in making it. They said, when you make a movie they give you a script with a plot and everything. The only thing he was given was, “Imagine if we could see five minutes into the future.” That was the whole thing. There was no story. So he brought together and interviewed all these people who were working on different aspects of the future. They did this practice called world building where he created an integrated view of what the future could look like. So it wasn’t like in one domain there were assumptions in one direction, and there were assumptions in another direction. So that you could see how all the aspects moved together to create a coherent world. So that if you saw this massive development in batteries, it would have a ripple effect in education and transportation and in the end it feels much more real. Many people have argued that Minority Report is a compelling and coherent as an experiential view of the future.

Ann Pendleton Julian. She leads world-building studios. And she’s in LA now and we would love for her to stay here.

NOTE TO SELF: World-building studios exist! Go see one. (For example they build a world after a scenario, for example the seas rise two feet by 2050 and do a whole studio around it, and design things for that future and explore problem solving to respond to that future.)

“We think this whole world building stuff is an interesting mashup of futurism and storytelling and creates an environment to do problem solving.” There could be a project where we really tap into heavy hitters. Just to put in perspective, JSB (writing partner/supporter of Ann) is just now stepping off board of Amazon.

There are a bunch of people who want to use world building to think about what’s happening but also to prepare challenges and opportunities.

Me: But I need limits! Because of what I’m making.

Even without the limits of what you’re making it’s still a really hard question to figure out how you want to organize. I’m unburdened by knowledge!

I believe in dog fooding. We need to be doing reflection and practice. We should thinkign about stuff and learning and trying shit out. How do you integrate the learning in a natural way so that it’s more real? Maybe the thing is, we need to create some buckets ultimately but we don’t knwo what the buckets are. So is there a way we can have conversations or activities to chunk it out into smaller pieces. You dont have to understand the grand organizing scheme but explore it in a way that listenrs can follow along and engage and get you to see how to then organize it. A phase that’s exploratory and unburdened but not try to be too smart by half when you havent even delved into it. Maybe X period of time, now we’re gonna come at it from another angle. Now we’ve learned and we’ll build it out. So that way it’s iterative. Between different data points. As opposed to assuming that before we start we know what stories.

What if I did it around humans? I start with a body, and then bodies in love, and then humans in community, and so on?

My immediate reaction is, that sounds good.  If you start with say the future of work, there are assumptions baked into that. Like that we need to work. or the need to be educated, and those values are baked in. Maybe that might be functionally real. But I like the idea of what we really NEED? What we need to survive. It puts you in a position to build a world based on what we need and want rather than what we have. That way you’re not as burdened by the tyranny of the possible — how do we transition from late capitalism and democracy — and that might be real but this is more interesting, saying what do we want to achieve around live and love and shelter? If those are necessary or possible? How do we work back from that? What does that look like? The neat thing about live, love, connect, removes it from a US context and a global set of questions. The people who don’t live in our context can open up universes of possibilities of whats’ happening in other places or the values in other places. Other cities and communities are thinking about the future. Increases potential ideas and potential audience. That way we are lowering the barrier.

Some constraints are your friends. The constraints I like suggest a constraint but truly you could do a lot under it and yet are meaningful to the audience. Here’s are time immemorial questions. And these are the most fundamental questions of humanity. And of society. So let’s ask em. We have a blank slate.

Who should I talk to next?

The Berggreun Institute. This guy Nicholas Berggreun, used to be called the homeless billionaire is a think tank foundation something and as with any organization there are some uneveness there but there are some people there I really like, including the VP who runs most things. His name is Dawn Nakagawa. She’s leading the exploration of 21st century governance and what it looks like in the emerging world we’re entering into. She’s super sharp and creative and they’re trying to be anti-academic in a good way. Thinking about inquiry and action. I like her and trust her.

They have a program called future of the human, with a guy named Tobias Rees, who I like a lot. Who’s like a philosopher. His idea is that metaphors about being human  are breaking down — what does it mean to be a human in the future?