Designing the future
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
We have two guests here who talk about how science fiction can change the world.
00:22
I'm keen, as you are, to know how this works. Welcome, Anne Schüssler, she's a software developer, and Uri Avere, he's the director of Autopia Festival, and it's in the keynote. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. You go first.
00:42
Alright. I'm a bit excited. Thank you all for coming, and I'd like to thank the Republika Conference and the lovely people at this stage that I've been harassing for the past 5-6 hours. So thank you. And the Zukun Foundation, who's been lovely to arrange for me to get here. A little bit about myself.
01:01
I'm a creative consultant, I'm the founder and director of the Autopia Festival for science and science fiction in Tel Aviv. I was recently program manager at Geek Picnic Jerusalem, and last year I was program consultant at the Frankfurt B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, which means I have thick geek blood.
01:22
But my first and foremost love is for science fiction. And I consider myself a science fiction evangelist. And my goal today is to have you all walk out as better ambassadors of science fiction. And I'd like to start with philosopher Slavoj Zizek. This is him speaking at the OWS, at the Occupy Wall Street in Zakhorty Park back in 2011.
01:50
And he told a joke to the protesters that I'd like to repeat. I should say I heard it first from Adam Kuprimint, another lovely utopian speaker who will be speaking tomorrow, so I encourage you to visit his talk as well.
02:04
Back to Slavoj Zizek. So, the joke. And so he goes. It's an old joke from communist times. A guy is sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. And he wants to keep in touch with his friends.
02:22
And he's going to send them letters, but he knows that he's going to go through censorship. So he tells his friends, let's establish a code. If I write you a letter, and the letter is in blue ink, it means it is true. If I write the letter in red ink, it is false.
02:41
After a month, his friends receive his first letter. And it is all blue ink. What he says is, everything here is wonderful. Stores are full of good food, movie theaters are filled to the brim, and they show great films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious.
03:02
The only thing one cannot find in stores is red ink. So, language is paramount. It is key. We supposedly live in free societies, but we lack the words to articulate our non-freedoms. The language used by those who would sustain the status quo, the powers that be,
03:25
mostly that of capitalism and recently the war on terror, misuses and distorts meanings of words we use to describe our society. Words like democracy, information, terror, and freedom itself.
03:41
And we desperately need red ink to voice ourselves. Now, science fiction. It's a highly creative storytelling art form. It's a source for unbound inspiration, for tech entrepreneurs, for scientists, for designers. It's a wonderful platform to engage kids with STEM education and the general public with science and technology.
04:04
But all these lovely attributes of science fiction I'm going to put aside and suggest to you science fiction as our red ink. Now, science fiction creatives have a much harder task than their colleagues of realistic fiction. And we're going to do another talk about the paradox of realistic fiction at a different time.
04:24
Their stories don't take place in Tel Aviv in the 1980s, or Berlin in the 1950s, or New York in the 1920s. There are no ready-made blueprints for science fiction. They need to imagine, to design an entire new world. It can be a future, it can be an alternative present, an alternative past, or a completely new world.
04:47
And they need to design its physics and ecology, its history and economy, its technology, its pop culture, its language, and its slang. And then, on top of that, they need to create compelling characters that will lure us into the story they want to tell us.
05:03
Now, world or scenario building, the what-if question, and I hope Randall is okay with me promoting his book, is the basic framework of speculative and fantastic creativity. And it enables science fiction creatives to ask basic questions about the structure of reality and society.
05:22
It is the goal for many of them, indeed, to debate those structures. Be it the nation state, the military, the corporation, the city, the family, religion, citizenship, democracy, police, justice, money, age, gender, sexual orientation, privacy, identity, mortality.
05:40
All and many more have come under the inspection of science fiction creatives. My counterpart for this talk, Anna, will go in depth with a few examples, and I'll try and quickly cover a future past, capitalism, anonymity, child soldiers, crime, refugees, and space. Time me. It'll be fine. Ten minutes.
06:02
So let's start with a future past capitalism. The first two science fiction examples were not chosen by me. I'm glad to say they were chosen by Yanis Varoufakis, and I chose him. Over the past year, I became very attentive to what he has to say, the former Greek finance minister, and in his recent TED Talk,
06:22
he imagines a world beyond capitalism as we know it. And he refers to that world with two diametrically opposing scenarios, describing them, and I quote, as a Star Trek-like utopian society where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe
06:42
and opposing that utopian scenario is a surveillance-mad hyper-autocracy, a matrix-like dystopia. Now, these two visions of the future are so well-known, so well-defined and powerful on their own that they need little or no introduction by myself or by him,
07:05
and as a science fiction evangelist, I'm proud and quite unsurprised that he chose these modern myths to propagate his ideas. I'm going on to anonymity, and perhaps the most well-known of examples in recent memory,
07:22
of course, V for Vendetta, graphic novel by Alan Moore, film adaptation by the Wachowski sisters, while with extremely different messages, these two, the novel and the film, both discuss the power of anonymity. The film is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary,
07:40
and it actually gave the literal and virtual face for an entire movement first and foremost dedicated to anonymity. Going on, military service. The 1985 Orson Scott Card novel, Andrew's Game, with a 2013 adaptation to the film by Gavin Hood,
08:02
was prescient in many ways. The power of the video game is there, online debates and the blogosphere are brilliant ideas presented in the novel, but one of the major topics it evokes is military conscription and child soldiers, presenting a world where genetic and psychological tests
08:22
determine if from childhood you'll be drafted into the army. Most wars were and still are fought by teenagers and young adults, as well as, sadly, children, still children. And we should also remember that childhood itself is a social construct that only recently came into prominence.
08:44
Andrew Dame suggests an existential threat to all of humanity, a defensive war, a war to end all wars. But isn't that always the case? Our next topic is crime, and let's recall the 2004 Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report,
09:05
starring Tom Cruise based on the Philip K. Dick story. The production has done a marvelous job working with scientists and engineers to imagine a tech-plausible future for the year 2053. Now, ubiquitous, personalized commercials and touch screens
09:22
have arrived much earlier than expected. Autonomous cars will soon be with us, but the truly interesting idea explored in the book and in the film is that of pre-crime. What if one could stop and arrest people a few seconds prior to them committing the crime?
09:40
Now, the ability to do that in the story is fantastical, but the idea is now explored by law enforcement agencies from the US to China and by anti-terrorism and intelligence units everywhere, utilizing big data analysis to look for patterns and calculate whether a community, a group of people or an individual
10:02
have a chance of committing a crime or a terrorist act. It would definitely cut lines at airports, at major sports events. It will increase profits. But what would it do to the average non-white person or the ex-convict or any member of a marginalized group?
10:22
So, what does one say when confronted with the fact that these methods will save lives and stop terror attacks? Once again, the need for red ink. I would be remiss if I would not speak about mice migration and the refugee situation with two magnificent examples.
10:42
The first would be District 9. The 2009 film by South African Neil Blomkamp takes the alien invasion story and turns it on its axis, telling a story not about attackers or infiltrators, but about helpless refugees. The marketing campaign that preceded the film
11:01
contributed immensely, as you can see, to the film's conversation about segregation and racism. And remember, the director is South African. The second film I want to explore with you is a work of art. It's Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón, 2006,
11:20
a masterpiece of cinema and its science fiction. And it asks a very simple, yet very profound what-if question. What if all over the world women stopped having children, stopped having babies at all? With that single question, Cuarón takes us on a journey into a bleak future devoid of laughter,
11:40
devoid of naivete, and with no hope for the future. And it's no surprise that the most powerful scenes depicting massive migration and a refugee crisis from recent cinematic memory are from that film. It's an image from that film, obviously. Now, a little bit about space, because I've been very bleak.
12:04
So, apart from the Star Trek utopia, most of these visions are dark and pessimistic, and there's a reason for that. We're all interested in what can go wrong. We're all interested in critiquing how things are today, and not big on positive visions for the future. And so is our science fiction.
12:21
Not to say that science fiction is storytelling, so it requires conflict. And thus, utopias will appear more in philosophical essays than they would in science fiction narratives. But for recent times, somewhat positive, outlook towards the future and of the human spirit. I should definitely mention Interstellar,
12:42
a sober and inspiring, I felt, return to space travel, post our disappointments from the visions of the 20th century's science fiction space escapades and the NASA missions. Whether we like it or not, our future in the long run is in space. The cinematic return to the stars,
13:00
Gravity in 2013, Interstellar 2014, Matt Damon, The Martian 2015, corresponds with new space initiatives of recent years. Whether it's Elon Musk's SpaceX mission to colonize Mars, the Google Lunar XPRIZE returns us to the moon, and the newly established Breakthrough Starshot mission,
13:22
led by Stephen Hawking, aimed to reach Alpha Centauri with unmanned, as yet unmanned, unfortunately, spaceships in less than 40 years' time. To start summing up, and setting up Anna, science fiction is a laboratory for big visionary ideas,
13:40
a place celebrating the possible, but even more so, the impossible, the grotesque, the taboo, the ludicrous. The what-if question may seem naive, but it is highly suppressive. It is the possibility for possibilities, the radical notion that things actually can be different.
14:00
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. That's Arthur C. Clarke, and that's the heart of science fiction, a voyage of exploration, a challenge of our conceptions. Science fiction creatives are explorers. Every step they take into the unknown expands our imagination and our language.
14:23
Be it Big Brother, cyberspace, virtual reality, the computer virus, the technological singularity, the robot, Newspeak, Hivemind, pre-crime, The Matrix, and I could go on and barrage you with so many other examples. They enable us conversations that we were not able prior.
14:42
They are the purveyors of our red ink, which we so desperately need. I'll end with a quote from Bruce Sterling. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are wise fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public.
15:01
We can play with big ideas because the garish smutly of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously as our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly like background radiation. That's me.
15:28
Can you hear me now? Yes, thank you very much. You and I were kind of, how do you say? We didn't know each other before.
15:42
We just had a very similar topic, so that's going to be interesting. I'm coming from it from a more personal angle a little bit. That's what we decided. And from a more literature angle. And I decided to call this why science fiction is good for us. When I told my husband what I was trying to,
16:01
my thesis that I was going to present today, he said, well, that's interesting. Do you think you can bring that across? He is very critical. He doesn't let me get away with things that I just say and say, okay, I think that's that and that. I'd like to start with saying something about me and science fiction and fantasy. For me, it's both.
16:20
I like both science fiction and fantasy. I'd like to focus a little bit on science fiction, but I think most of it is true for both genres. I'm a big reader. I started reading before I got into preschool for some reason. And it was only at the age of about, I don't know, 23, 25 or something that I realized,
16:41
oh, I think I like science fiction and fantasy because those are the books that I like most. It wasn't like I thought that I was a geek. I just suddenly realized that, oh, this is the genre I like. I didn't pick these books on purpose. And that's how I got into all of this. I'm now reading books with an online book club online,
17:01
and it's a lot of fun to compare all of our ideas about science fiction and fantasy, and it's still my favorite genres, but I read books from all over the place, so it's not just that. And I know there are a lot of prejudices against science fiction and fantasy. It's a lot about, is it escapism? And it's all just entertainment and made-up words.
17:22
It doesn't have anything to do with the real world. And I don't think that's true. They are made-up worlds, but they have to tell us so much about other worlds that we live in and the society we live in. They kind of give us so many ideas about how to change things and how to make the world better,
17:41
and that's what I'm going to tell you all about today. How do I do this? Ah, yes. This is a quote. Reality is already there. Why should I picture it? It's from an interview from a very famous German fantasy writer, and you're going to have to stay until the end,
18:01
and then I'll tell you who it is. That's how I'm going to keep you here. And I think it's a very good quote. It's the exact opposite of what a lot of people say. It's why do you read about made-up worlds? And he said, so it's a he, so you know that already. He said, well, it's already there. Why should I picture it? I'm going to make up new stuff
18:21
and not write about the things that are already there. And when I prepared for this talk, like I said, I'm in an online forum, an online book club, and I asked around, I said, well, do you have any examples? Do you have any examples of books that meant a lot to you, that taught you? Do you have any examples of moments when you suddenly realized,
18:41
oh, this story gives me so much more than just a story. It gives me an idea about something in the world today. And this, I think it's a long quote. I'm sorry. I know you're not supposed to do this. But here's someone who actually made a lot of remarks about David Brinton. I'm not sure if you know this.
19:01
I read Existence because my boss told me it's a great work. I usually have bosses who read science fiction and fantasy and make me read their favorite books. That's how I had to read six books of George R. R. Martin because my boss wanted someone to talk with him about that.
19:21
And Existence really is a great book. It has so many ideas. And he said it's wide-ranging. It takes a look at internet, at journalism, at social media. It looks at climate change, at genetic engineering. There are so many topics. And David Brinton invents worlds that are not dystopias.
19:41
They're kind of like utopias even. But of course there are things wrong with them because there has to be some kind of conflict. Otherwise the story doesn't work. I actually try to focus on two parts that I think are important today. One is surveillance. That's the Plaza de, I don't speak Spanish,
20:03
the Plaza de George Orwell in Barcelona. And yes, I think you get the irony of this sign. And I get, when I look at today, I get why a lot of people don't understand why it's very important to question the little changes,
20:22
to ask why do we have to have cameras everywhere? Why do we have to have surveillance everywhere? Because it's so easy to say, well, I'm not doing anything wrong. It doesn't hurt me. I want security. And I get that. I really get how a lot of people don't realize that all these little changes take freedom from us
20:41
because they're just little. There's just one camera. It doesn't hurt me. I don't have to go there. I'm not robbing anyone. I'm not killing anyone. So why should I be worried about this camera? But if you read a lot of science fiction, you see where it all ends. And then you realize, okay, maybe we have to be more careful
21:00
because now I don't think it's dangerous. But if we install that, and then maybe we watch that, and then maybe someone installs some kind of surveillance there, and suddenly everything is watched, and suddenly we don't have any freedom anymore. There are a lot of young adult fiction nowadays. They're really always dealing with dystopia,
21:21
and I'm kind of a young adult fan. I like reading these books. And a lot of them deal with exactly these topics of losing your freedom because everything is watched and you just can't be yourself and you can't do anything that's remotely different from anyone else.
21:41
And that kind of schools you in thinking that maybe it's not that bad now, but where will it be, and if you keep on doing this for the next 10 or 20 years? And I don't think I want this world. This is maybe the best book you can read now about surveillance. It's Cory Doctoroff's Little Brother,
22:00
and I think it must still be free on the Internet if you want to read it because Doctoroff's a really cool guy. And this is a quote from the book that says, it's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you, and that's what all these surveillance topics are actually about. They're not about there being a camera.
22:22
They're about taking your freedom from you one step at a time. And here's another example. Maybe some of you remember that's something that Eric Schmidt said. I said in all these street view thing that he said, if you don't have something that you don't want anyone to know,
22:42
maybe you shouldn't be doing it the first place. And I think that's a very wrong thing to say. And I think he retracted it a little bit afterwards or at least said there, well, it's not actually what I meant, but maybe it was what he meant. And I think it's important to realize the very difference, that of course it's not about me doing something wrong.
23:03
It's about I don't want to be watched with all of the things I do, even if they're not wrong. They're private. They're mine. Nobody has to know about them. This is another great book, I think. It plays in the near future. I'm not sure. Has anybody read that?
23:21
Just a few years. You really should. Although I've heard different opinions, I really liked it. It plays in the near future, and they have those little, they're called apparats. And what's special about this world, it plays in New York. It's a love story, basically. But everybody knows about the other person's credit score.
23:44
And also, I'm not sure if that's a word we use, but actually about their fuckability. So they have scores about that. And so if you're someone who's not really cool, who's not really rich, you have a problem in this world, because everybody knows that.
24:04
And that was the book that really played to me, because all of the things you notice there, they are already here. All through the book you keep thinking, well, we're not quite there yet, but maybe in five years, maybe in three years, it's so close to the future
24:21
that it starts to scare you where we're going. And there was recently an app, I don't remember the name, but it was about rating your friends or rating people. So not just your job or something, but it was really about rating people. And I think there was a lot of backlash, and they started, okay, maybe that was not a good idea,
24:41
so that everybody could rate anybody else and say, well, he's a jerk, and then put it on the Internet for everyone to see. And that was, that kind of, I think that project kind of got shut down, but when I tried to find out what it was, I stumbled upon this, and this actually seems to be a thing.
25:02
It's an app where women can rate men for dating, and as a woman, I mean, I think that's maybe kind of great, but I'm not sure if the general idea is a good one, but we'll see how that plays out. Preparing for the talk, and I'm going to move to another topic now.
25:21
I was really, really glad when in a podcast I heard a fantasy writer talk about why he writes fantasy and not real books. And that's what he said. The question, what is evil, gets clearer. I translated it from German, so I hope that all of this gets across.
25:43
When we don't talk about terrorism, old age poverty, or racism directly, but shift it to a world where all of this can be felt, but you can't put your finger on it and say, I know this, I read about this in the newspaper, I understand this, and it's exactly this alienation that helps us understand what it's really about, and I think that,
26:01
I kind of, when I heard this, I thought, okay, I just have this quote, and that's my talk summed up in one quote from another person, that's great. And I, actually, how many minutes do I have left? Four minutes, okay. I read this book, this is not a fantasy book, it's not a science fiction book,
26:20
it's a German book about refugees. It was nominated for the German Book Prize. It's a great book, but I had a problem with it because I noticed that I was comparing it to my life. And I was comparing it to my experiences, and I was starting to question the book and its ideas
26:42
because I was constantly caught up in trying to find out if it was real, if it actually held up to what I thought was happening in the real world. There's another simpler example, something more superficial, maybe.
27:01
It's when you see sitcoms, or this is apparently Carrie Bradshaw's apartment, and you know the prices of apartments in New York, and you say, how can they afford that? And it takes you out of the story because you think this is unrealistic, this is maybe great for the series, but once you try to compare it to real life, you notice all the little things that don't add up.
27:24
And that's a problem with books and series that play in the real world because you have the real world right there and you can compare. This is me. This is more awkward for me than for you now. And this is me with my history, with my experiences.
27:43
I don't think knowledge is the right word. It's stuff I know. I'm not a professor. And my prejudices, of course, everyone has prejudices, and all these things add to what I can take from a story because I'm constantly comparing it to my history. I have my knowledge. I have my history, my prejudices.
28:04
And this is a book by N.K. Jemisin. It's very great. It's just recently. I think it was published in 2015 or 2016 even. And there are people called orogenes there, and orogeny is some kind of, you can sense the earth and the falls and the shifts.
28:22
And there's a derogatory term for it, and it's called roga. And maybe when you call it roga, there's some kind you notice there's something there. And this is also from my online forum, and it's Joanna who said that the term roga means inhuman,
28:40
and I ask it not lesser. She said, I'm white. Oh, that's not good. I'm never going to completely get it, but I like to think that this book helped me get it a little better, and that's a good example of why fiction has value besides just escapement and entertainment. It can also promote empathy,
29:01
and that's what I think it's all about. It's about empathy. It's about understanding something, and sometimes this works better if you're going to take something completely out of your own context, if you give yourself nothing to hold on to but just a completely new world, and then you have to make up your mind about all these things and get an idea of what it's really about.
29:22
You have this quote again. It's Walter Murs. He said this in an interview in 2001 with the German newspaper Die Zeit, and this is one of my favorite quotes of all times. So thank you. That was it. And I think we don't have any time for questions. Thank you.
29:45
Thank you very much. If you have some questions to them, please, because we are running out of time, catch these two persons. I guess you're still around and catch the faces too and get your answers.