FutureFest 14-15 March

Future Thrills illustration from the event - for Nesta
Trying to find the illustrator credit sorry...

Still trying to put the bits of my brain back together after a massive dose of mental stimulation courtesy of Nesta. The best bet, for now, would seem to be to pick out a few little observations, themes and moments that stuck in my mind...

Future Heroes
As I'd hoped, it was a huge thrill to hear two of my favourite writers and thinkers (Paul Dolan and John Lanchester). It felt like a real bonus to stumble on some new heroes along the way, among them Luciano Floridi, Vitalik Buterin, Positive Money, and Edward Snowden (I had to watch Vivienne Westwood through my fingers, sorry). Vitalik's talk on blockchains was funny and provocative and explained it brilliantly for outsiders like me (can't pretend I totally get it, yet, but I'm a lot closer now). Floridi's '4th Revolution' seems to draw together all the issues that were flying around over the weekend. Snowden was extraordinary: so cogent, decent, and dignified.

Yes, I am a Nudger
More on the 'Room without a roof' debate to follow, but it was sort-of refreshing to find behavioural economics apparently turning me into a category ('nudger', pejorative, one who manipulates others for nefarious or politically flawed / suspect reasons), and therefore into the enemy for a lot of attendees. Clearly the ethical debates around these interventions - and the suspicions of, variously, parternalistic state interference / a convenient fig leaf for stripping-out the state / corporate and government wheezes in general etc. - are alive and thriving. Long may that continue. (But it's really not that sinister, as I think Paul ably demonstrated.)

Bag open. Cats everywhere.
At first glance the blockchains concept feels like both the answer to a democratic deficit (the inner workings of high finance, say, in the hands of technical elites; and the mass of humanity dependent on, say, the ethical and technical competence of a few corporations in Silicon Valley to do an awful lot of stuff we now take for granted) and a threat to it (total transparency but total anonymity plus machine operations that can't be turned off??). The idea of, er, a hive computer the size of the planet (????) is exhilarating in its power to remake a lot of our current norms, and - put like that, obviously - a little scary. Equally, the potential for new forms of direct democracy feels double-edged: and there were some very pertinent questions about mobs and minorities (I'd say the jury's still out on whether the humanity we see revealed through today's massively open platforms is a particularly nice thing to behold?). Still, we won't be uninventing these things anytime soon, so we'd best all just get on with it.

Feersum Omishun
I would have loved to hear a bit more about what we could learn from existing visions of the future (from Charlie Brooker's brilliantly black dissections to Iain M Banks's vision of a post-money, post-human, post-enfranchised-AI universe). Tiny niggle but in the data viz discussion I felt a stronger case needed to be made by someone for the power of subjective and sometimes highly distorting information design to change society and human experience for the better (think: Tube Map, Florence Nightingale's diagrams, or even Booth's London Poverty Map).

Code Literacy here I come
This was the key thing I walked away with. Not just for my own or my daughter's sake; and not just because C++ and Python "are the new Latin and Greek" (in the sense, let's be clear, of being the new bedrock of our culture: the lowest-common-denominator educational building blocks?). As other discussions showed, this is an issue for feminism, education, a competitive economy, and consumer rights. But as the whole weekend illustrated - from big data to the Great Recession, from Snowden to start-ups in Africa - it has become a political and ethical imperative if we're to keep (today's and) tomorrow's technological priesthoods in check.

FutureFest site: videos appearing here very soon
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Top of the Charts

I love a good chart, me. Here's a few of my favourites: hover for info.

Rory's Venn
Rory Sutherland's on a mission to improve the balance between listening to people with numbers and people with intuition and ideas and Gawd bless him for it. (In short, policymakers and executives could do with getting more creative, while adland could get more evidence-friendly.)

The Trott Triangle
(Yes, it's a pyramid really but this sounds better.) A nice analogy from Dave Trott: if you want someone to do something your message needs to be noticed, convey information, and inspire the response you're after. When it comes to an ad campaign, say, It's best to start at the bottom, not at the top.

The Equation for Change
No one seems to know its precise origins / I can't be arsed to unearth them right now. But I saw it first on the excellent Only Dead Fish.

Carbon Mis-step

Or 'How I learned to start worrying - and love carbon.'

Since we humans are wired for loss aversion, it seems a shame that trying to combat greenhouse gas emissions got framed in terms of 'cutting down' (and reducing your - awkward analogy alert - 'carbon footprint'). Would this have worked better if we'd reframed it from the outset as the attempt to conserve as much carbon in the earth - say, in the form of fossil fuels and plants - as possible?

The 'carbon footprint' uses the psychology of guilt. We have to lose out, and 'carbon' somehow becomes the villain of the piece. Could the earth's natural carbon have instead become this incredibly precious, magical resource that we should hoard - on a par with endangered species?

(For some truly inspirational reframing of this particular element, give Primo Levi's wonderful words on carbon a read or a listen too.)