The Octopus Godfather of VR, Assembly for the Future, Extensions of Self and more
Today I’ll share recent trend molecules that have caught my attention. Some of them inspired the title of this article, credit to the authors. Thank you for reading and responding by email and my DMs I truly appreciate the exchange and feedback with you.
Ok so let’s get started.
From Zora’s latest issue ‘Intergenerational Dynamics’ here is a conversation with the godfather of Virtual Reality Jaron Lanier who Liam Casey describes as ‘something of an Oracle-at-Delphi character in Silicon Valley, predicting digital trends and lambasting bogus ones’. Read the Octopus is on line 2 here. One of my favourite quotes below:
‘I find Lanier’s curiosities in relation to blockchain to be simple yet essential. At the core, he’s concerned whether people in the space can afford groceries and pay their rent— after all, with all the emotional proselytizing flooding from Web3’s pulpits these days, practical realities and tangible results can sometimes fall on the backburner. His feelings on Web3 are a mixture of optimism, yearning, and a belief that the space can do better.’
🌎
Which brings me to the next suggested article for you (also on Zora because they have been on a roll) Where were you when you bought your first NFT? by Emilie Friedlander, which profiles five players in the Web3 space ranging from Writer, curator, and strategist Severin Matusek to Miki, Teacher and Grimescord admin. Quoting one of my favourite bits of the article:
’As I spoke with the culture fans who shared their stories for this piece, I kept flashing back to a passage in an essay by Severin, my first source, where he likens the experience of purchasing the Channel NFT to “surrender[ing] to the world” its creators were suggesting. “NFTs in that sense are ’magic beans,’ as Venkatesh Rao described them,” he writes. “They may or may not be access passes to a possible future that is partly created by the author(s) of the NFT and partly created by the expectations the holder projects into the token.”
🌎
This next piece is something I’ve had in my library for a long time but came across again recently given the exciting rise of the use of Protopia as a foresight model. Futurist Kevin Kelly defines Protopia in 2011 👇🏻:
‘I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.’
🌎
This has been the hottest summer on record. Researchers in the UK have established we are hitting 5 climate tipping points even at 1.1 degrees of global warming. From reading The Weird Way That Human Waste Is Killing Corals by Wired ‘s Matt Simon to the local newspaper here in Saint Malo Brittany, to watching Al gore’s recent Ted talk What the fossil fuel Industry doesn’t want you to know… We can see we are making progress but need a wartime effort and more radical legislation. I wrote about this in my forecast Osmosis for Gung Ho in 2019. Here’s what I shared back then. Where does that take us today?
‘For humans to fully address climate change will demand a World War-scale effort to remake energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and transportation systems. Changes to avert catastrophic global warming will cost about $2.4 trillion per year for energy investment alone. Projections indicate that in the end, we’ll actually save money an estimated $551 trillion in avoided damages.
🌎
AI, holograms help museums tackle Holocaust, slavery by Russel Contreras for Axios shares how museums are using a combination of immersive technologies and AI to enable exchanges between Holocaust survivors, enslaved people and museum visitors. This has been endorsed by Bryan Stevenson, perhaps one of the greatest activists in recent times, executive director of the Equal Justice League and the Legacy Museum Quoting the piece:
The use of technology such as generative AI to create immersive displays is aimed at fighting bigotry — and comes amid rising concern that AI also can fuel racism by amplifying bias from human-generated content on the internet. "The concept is to get closer to history, get closer to the people, get closer to the stories, get closer to the experience," said Bryan Stevenson.
🌎
This next part I sped up as at the time I was writing from Saint-Malo and needed to resume spending time with my mother whom I was visiting. For those of you who may not know, I am French American, born and raised in the 11th arrondissement near the Bastille.
Here are the rest of the links I saved up for you, in no specific order of importance, all equally inspiring from my own lens. As always I would love to know what you think!
Assembly for the Future by The Things We Did Next is ‘ a series of participatory gatherings in which the public create new visions for futures that may be realistic, idealistic or utterly fanciful.’
The Ecological Intelligence Agency by Superflux uses the idea of ecological AI to answer the question ‘How can we transform what the freshwater system looks like, 20 years from now and beyond?’
The Power and Potential of Marketing's Brainprint by Charlie Thompson for the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership explores ‘marketing’s brainprint as a conductor of the physical impacts we collectively have on each other, nature and our climate.’
This forecast has gone viral and it’s worth it: Pizza Futures by Nobell Foods. Cecile Poignant and I will be interviewing one of its contributors, Trend Researcher, Cultural Analyst and Meditation Teacher Chloe de Ruffray on our next Me We World IG live on September 12th at 4pm London time. Hope you can join us!
Transnomadica is a global research and curation project led by Maurizio Donadi utilising excess and leftover goods, driven by the principles of circularity.
Conceptual Designer Anna Resei created ANTISHAPE. The project asks ‘What happens to materiality and tactility in a world where images of objects become more important than objects themselves?’
Trust is a Web3 ‘network of utopian conspirators, a sandbox for their creative, technical and critical projects, and a site of experimentation for new ways of learning together ‘.
If you are obsessed with biomimicry you’ll love this innovation database by the Biomimicry institute called AskNature
Extensions of self will exhibit eleven international leading voices on how artificial intelligence relates to us humans. The exhibition ‘raises the question of whether algorithms and AI programs further cement social structures and inequalities, or whether they can potentially help us discover new and layered definitions of "normality" or "beauty."’
Geraldine Wharry
Say hi on Instagram or Linkedin
Thanks for reading! Reply any time.
When you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
Work with me - book a foresight advisory call
The Trend Atelier - join my membership community for futuring creatives and foresight professionals
Course - learn how to forecast like a futurist