A simple format change to an experience can transform it, but to work into opportunity it’s the stories we’re putting into our ears every day that need a switch, says Timo.

 

I hadn’t thought about live silent podcasting before.

As I and my first panel of guests stepped up to the stage, all of us holding our indiscrete headphones, preparing to place them over our heads, we looked at each other like baby hedgehogs facing an A-road.

“What, we really do put these on while we’re speaking? ..Up there?”

They looked at me like daddy hedgehog had lost his mind. Shouting over the traffic. We really are doing this, then in other words. I said yeah. We put on our indiscrete headphones and stepped on stage.

I looked back at a sea of audience faces all wearing their own headphones and awaiting the experience.

And then we just enjoyed a great set of introductions and a good chat. Like it was normal. And like we could actually hear what was happening.

 

VentureFest South grows in my affection a little bit every year. It’s a coming together of business folk from various sectors in South Central, helping us find can-do ideas and support to do them, and also define a region that doesn’t officially exist, caught between the south-east and the south-west.

I have now hosted a number of stages, talks and discussions around principles of innovation, always a privileged invitation to join in with such can-do community. But, y’know – trade expo halls are noisy. So in the past, competing with stand chatter, our modest PA couldn’t fairly drown out all other business by being loud enough to comfortably sit and listen to live, unless you were streaming it from home.

This is where events legend Shirley Wynne-Jones quietly opened the door to a new experience for me – “We’re going to try doing it as a silent disco” she said with no drama.

“Kay…” I replied quizzically. Cut to me and my momentary image of snuffling hedgerow babas by the busy roadside.

I hosted three panels during the day, and the experience of silent disco-ing the discussions produced an odd effect. I found myself slowing my heart rate down to a smooth jazz radio guy’s pace; being intimately in everyone’s ears while on a stage was not a normal day up front at an event. But it felt, in the end, like a live podcast experience – absorbing and intimate.

And intriguingly, where audiences in the space are normally a bit patchy, this year every seat and pair of headphones was taken.

Which was fitting. Because It meant more of us could tune into the implication and tone and essential message of Venturefest South – tune out the noise of crisis and hear the possibilities. There is support, funding, networks and opportunity to make new things happen if you want to. And if you want to, you won’t be completely alone in the endeavour.

Driven with grounded passion and a notable degree of showbiz by ED GOULD from agency Carswell Gould, it is a chance for creatives like him and I to help businesses not just tell their stories but write new ones. Yes there were wooden bikes, jet packs, battery packs, VR startups, scary robot vehicles from the DSTL and all manner of businesses sharing shiny capabilities. But my interest is the human energy that creates all this – so, yes, I did get the finance panel talking about art and storytelling.

And I think, therefore, it’s interesting in our time of crisis and deepening economic chills that all of the five main pitches for a financial support prize at this year’s festival were concerned with enabling healthier ways of doing business.

Taking a chance on an idea is no smooth venture. But the story you surround yourself with can change everything for you.

Time we all cancelled a lot of the noise and tuned into the possibilities.

—

Catch the news story about this year’s VentureFest South right here >

What do you want out of 2022? Whether you are a scientist or an artist, if another world is possible beyond the bleak projections, are there spells we can cast right now? Because I think so.

Photo by Hao Wen on Unsplash

 

Has waking up in another year in the singularity left you a little flat?

If an elderly aunt left you a little flat, say in Eastbourne, right now you might think of simply moving into it for a spell and staring at the sea for a few hours a day. Very nice idea.

But, as our third year of pandemic dawns, if you find yourself isolating anew with ennui or just thinking about how to re-align your energies with work, you can thank Covid and all the market challenges to your business for sparing you going to the Consumer Electronics Show this year – tempting as shopping for your next physical avatar might seem from the garage.

If you’re half a futurey thinker, you’ll know how CES likes to excitedly flatten everything into a sellable techverse to drain the life out of more culturally complex blood and leaf views of the world and make sure you’re still signed up to the techbro cult. Fight me. But this year, Nima Zeighami spares you having to turn up or even metamobilize yourself around the conference exhibition in Vegas by smash-cutting straight to a handy thread of “every ridiculous usage of metaverse” he’s already seen there himself.

Given that I have never attended CES, my expectations of it are set interestingly low. And you haven’t visited 2022 before, so how low are yours set for that?

Y’might wanna revise them up.

 

The Meta outside is frightening.

 

However Adam McKay’s Don’t look up made you feel, if you watched it, disaster on a collision course is a reality no one wants to wake up to. But the killer asteroid sledgehammer in our lived story together is no act of God. It’s a mental projection manifesting. And maybe it’s doing more sucking in than slamming in.

Maybe we’re really facing a black hole.

If you caught my little Momo Christmas lecture, Is Generation X about to discover what its name stands for, you might recall that I mention the idea that Ray Kurzweil’s exploration of The Singularity might be more of an era than a moment in a server. Namely, our era. It was Vernor Vinge, scifi author, who really coined the term, somewhere in light of something supposedly said by John von Neumann – but RK famously fleshed out the law of accelerating returns, in which Moore’s Law of computer processing power and various other modern societal factors combine into an apparent speeding up and speeding up of all technological progress.

A speeding up going somewhere very massively transitional to the idea of simply being human.

 

 

Interesting that Vinge and Kurzweil were writing such things at just about the same time Generation X was being written by Douglas Coupland because all this to me feels like some great imagination barrier to our hopes for the human future. Fueled as it all is by the great sucker punch of our prevailing economics. Don’t look up, at best feel lost and lose yourself in more of it.

Happy new year.

Now, ordinary sensible people like you, but without your dazzling richness of futurism thought, don’t think about The Singularity, let’s not be academic and silly. But, just like a black hole, it’s sort of lurking there unseen somewhere in our collective nihilistic psyche, exerting queasying influence. Representing all that is too much to process for us – which is kinda Ray’s point, chimps – especially in an era of insurmountable seeming crisis. Crisis that we forget is ultimately cultural.

How DO we change this story we still think we are in? It preoccupies me.

While you’re saving money to buy a SpaceX ticket to experiencing your own Overview Effect, good news just in from the Coping With Now desk: Your expectations make a difference.

 

David Robson’s new book, The Expectation Effect suggests there’s a bit of science, or at least data gathered, to support the idea that humans can manifest what they look forward to. In his review of the book, Oliver Burkeman says: “Robson’s central point is that the expectation effect isn’t an amusing psychological quirk, but a fundamental aspect of our interactions with reality.”

“We defensive pessimists could do with remembering that sometimes things do actually turn out really well – especially if you expect them to.”

Call it placebo or cognitive behavioural self trickery, the way you see the world does seem to sort of come out. Even when the whole system is gamed against you. And those ways of seeing come from some personal blend of iris-level, skin-deep and way-deeper than that within us.

This obviously may seem like another bulletin from Conversations between people with no real problems. But even getting out of bed each day starts with the damn fool idea that you should have a go, and what would happen if you didn’t?

What might happen if you chose to look up? And see differently?

 

UNSEE THE FUTURE – EP29: Experience, part 1 >

Catch up on Momo’s look at the whole idea of the metaverse, before we were all using the term.

 

The Singularity is an era. Or an opera.

 

While tech corporate giants are hoping to sell us a consumer escape into The Metaverse, the rather deeper glimmers of a nacent metamodernism might feel at first like a return to spells and dragons if you’re a rooted impirical modernist catching first whiffs of it. But without getting into what might be emerging from this new primeval cyclone, it is at least true that there are psychological practices that can do an awful lot to reshape the world around us as we all gawp at the literal tunnelling clouds.

Practices very practically worked with by artists every day.

Embodiment, testing, ways of seeing… it’s not wizardry in a dark ages sense. It’s the everyday human magic of manifesting things into the universe. Creativity. When we can be arsed.

Maybe The Expectation Effect is another useful narrative trick for reconsidering the story you think you’re in this year, and if you do you want to change that story? I would say: Think. Like. An. Artist. And think of the world you want to project.

And maybe that’s a way I can help.

 

Whether you are a technical specialist or a creative, starting next month, each Friday morning you can dip into a new chapter from my forthcoming book – Unsee The Future: Think like an artist and change the world. I’ll be explaining what this practically might mean for different roles in an era of crisis – a historic period we’re all trying to live and work through which, I believe, needs such thinking more than it needs anything else.

Plus, in a forthcoming new podcast series in tandem with it I’ll be sharing more about just how possible different worlds are in the teeth of our slowly collapsing expectations. I’ll be meeting solarpunks, artists and changemakers already re-imagining the stories we think we’re in.

 

Manifest what you want to see in the world. I hope to make it my new lodestar. Become a Momo:amigo and subscribe to follow my explorations of ideas, people and music – and together let’s learn how to encourage the more hopeful human tomorrow.

BECOME A MOMO AMIGO – sign up for the regular Unsee The Future mailers:

 

 

The seven rules of The Metaverse >

Take a look at Tony Parisi’s handy overview of what we’re really talking about.

 

We as a generation can do most things in bed now. So what can the poor, hard working era of crisis do to get more of us out of it?

Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash

 

Here’s an easy question, and it will make you chuckle in its innocence:

If the climate crisis appears to be signalling the radical die back of life systems on Earth that are keeping us alive, thanks to the consequences of late stage capitalist economics, why are we mostly still living like “consumers” trying to really ram home the results?

See? Naw. I’m like an adorable baby activist.

Go on, here’s an almost-as-easy one to pin on your fridge, while we’re doing this:

If Mark Zuckerberg’s launch of Meta signals a grim double-down from the tech giants hoping to shackle our lives and data to their platforms and devices, jacked in everywhere to their matrix, why are we all still on Facebook?

Oh, me, eh? Bless me.

So one more, weary parent:

If, here in the UK, the police bill signals a move to criminalise peaceful protest and stimulate an atmosphere of fear around it, why aren’t we filling the streets to stop it? While some of us cheer on lion-hearted, hooded anti-vax men bravely breaking into Christmas markets in Luxembourg for gluvine, why aren’t all of us across the political spectrum not scaring the shite out of the current British government for daring to begin outlawing free speech?

You haven’t got time to answer fatuous simpleton pressingly obvious questions no one else is bothering to answer, I know. You’re a grown up. Too busy wishing you could go back to bed.

It might be more precise to simply ask: What gets us out of bed?

Besides the endless task of keeping the wheels on something vital that’s falling apart.

I think I’d rather put that question like this:

“If not the relentless era of crisis, what are you currently plugging your passion into?”

 

 
 

WHAT WILL WE STAND FOR?

 

Tina Fey said that trying to write satirical comedy right now is like tiptoeing through a minefield. It’s making even big hitters timid. Which is interesting, since audiences seem to give stand-ups the most freedom to say what they like.

But what is funny right now? And what will any majority of us hear?

Next week, as an artist, I am sharing a little livestream event that will feature a brand new music video. One which the lovely first lady of Momo has judged insightfully with the words: “As funny as frightening.”

 

As part of a bigger creative project, the new single references a theme of science fiction. But really expresses an idea so common, so fundamental to our shared culture, it is almost unifying in the way we accept it.

In sharing what that is, I will first share a talk. In which I wonder just what new idea might help galvanise more of us to plug in our passion to the problems we’re facing. For all the mico niches marshalling and stirring our feelings in passionate dividing groups around the disaffected globalised world, is there a simple perspective that could redefine the most of us feeling in the middle? Just trying to live our ordinary lives. Exhausted. Is there a new idea of us that could finally light up new futures in our imaginations?

An idea that might help more of us unjack and finally plug in?

Don’t feel you have to get out of bed for it. But I’ll be taking questions.

And asking one big one.

LIVE EVENT: Thursday December 16 2021 18:00 GMT >

Innovation. Yawn. Wake me when something new actually happens, amirite? Except, is the era of crisis slightly demanding a lot of it? Like, really it – green-revolution level it. So is it the perfect time for ‘ordinary’ businesses to level up what we even think the word means?

All images ©Carswell Gould 2021

 

The morning I was due to host a session for VentureFest South’s Festival of Innovation 2021 I cheekily tweeted that, secretly, no one really wants innovation, despite everyone name-dropping it at business conferences for decades, because it means changing one’s worldview and everyone’s faffing processes.

To which passionate mate Richard from Feria Urbanism replied that we don’t just not really honestly want it, we don’t even need it.

“We really don’t need innovation” he said. “The answers are already all around us. This isn’t nostalgia or an opposition to industrialisation, automation or computerisation. Just that advanced stage capitalism requires “innovation” for continued growth and that continued growth tends to be driven by a continued consumption of resources that we cannot sustain.”

 

I told him I would open the session with this as a quote. He asked for royalties, late-stage capitalist that he is. But he concluded with the point I had in my mind also:

“How we define innovation is critical here. Who creates that definition and why? What forces influence of that definition?”

  

Breaking barriers.

If there’s one phrase that I seem to have heard a lot lately, it is “breaking out of silos.” And a more regenerative view of the future will certainly demand a much more popular understanding of how inter-connected life on Earth truly is. But more than this, encouraging sustainability will mean actively breaking through cultural walls to learn each other’s sector languages and blend those perspectives. Stop just talking to your own people.

With a key sponsor of VFS21 being The UK’s Defence, Science & Technology Lab (DSTL), when Matt Chinn from the organisation stood up and said: “Hey, gang, I have a £1billion to spend – bring me your ideas” you could hear a lot of nice peace-loving people around the hall flinching and wondering how to break into the Ministry of Defence.

Breaking through old ways of doing things, old habits, is a culture change challenge. And indeed the primary problem facing our era of crisis, arguably, is economic culture – the way we value everything, like goggles we see the world through.

Innovation does indeed seem tied to our existing ideas of business success – namely “growth”.

But a reality check before we even shout “climate crisis!” may be this: 99% of all businesses in the UK are supposedly SMEs. Small. Local. ..Is this a clue to how we might innovate for sustainability? Us ordinary Fortune 8 billion lot.

 

 

Juxtaposing passions.

Our panel brought together different specialist perspectives on potential human futures, from bio research, to data, energy and cleantech community building. Some interesting key words fell out of our discussion, after each guest had presented their starting point, from their work.

Community and ownership, for example. And the reality that all business, all new ideas, all data have emotional contexts.

“How do you get people to change their mind?” asked Chris, from Knownow. “Storytelling. We love stories, we think in pictures, Telling compelling stories that give people hope, give them vision, let the cogs go and let them be innovative – everyone can be innovative. You don’t have to have a particular qualification, you just have to have imagination.”

 

While bringing a data perspective to sustainability, Chris is bang on for me there, obviously – understanding that emotional context we’re really doing everything in. And how useful, therefore, is the narrative principle of emotional truth, something we’re all instinctively keeping an ear out for everywhere.

It’s clear that you and I get passionate when we feel something affects us. When we own it. So how do we engender ownership?

Collaboration – that’s the invitation of Venture Fest, at its heart. Collaboration solves problems but crucially for a time of crisis it also builds communities.

“I think it’s about listening. Listening to people. “ said Petra from the DSTL. “What really are the drivers of our behaviours?”

The resulting conversation was a rich one to spend some time with, so I recommend you do.

Amid a flurry of truly inspiring innovations happening all over society as the green revolution begins to flower, is the real opportunity of sustainability the chance to unlock gaps between people like never before?

Is this how we get to solve human planet problems we’ve not managed to before now? And is this why “thinking global” has to “act local”?
 

Watch the session: Sustainability: The greatest innovation opportunity in 100 years? >

 

 

Discover VentureFest South >

With sincere thanks to my guests:

Petra Oyston >

Technical Fellow within the Chemical, Biological and Radiological Division of Dstl

Chris Cooper >

CTO, KnowNow Information

Paul Cole >

Founder, powerQuad

Matthew Pullinger >

Industry Liaison Officer – Low Carbon Technologies at GreentechSouth

—

 

An endless stream of disaster stories keeps us busy. Eternally. And it’s robbed us of faith in any good shared futures. But could we yet light a candle for something better than a new Utopia?

 

I know. We can’t afford to dream. It’s not what you have time for on the front line. Which I think we’re all on, mentally, in a networked society like ours. Which means we’re all feeling a. lot.

Hearing from a friend in Delhi these past two days brought home the realism of the images from India across our news feeds. He works in a hospital there and simply confirmed how fiercely the Covid emergency is overwhelming care capacity. He thinks infection and death rates are way higher than the official terrible figures. But it was his tone, in simple text, that brought us up short, feeling it from him. He sounded hopeless. Not out. But soul-drained.

Do you feel soul-drained? Whether you’re practical front line or not. As a nurse, doctor, teacher, police officer, how could you not be? But as an events organiser, a performer, an artist? You’ve had your own kind of helpless for 14 months. And if you work in local government, trying to administer local life at all possible scales with dwindling public investment in what you do? I can’t imagine the grind, hidden away. Now talk to me as a social message board moderator. How is your faith in humanity?

And this is all before you or loved ones have actually experienced Covid.

And all this is just Covid. You know enough about the climate crisis to not want to look at it.
 

But can we live like this? And are we supposed to? What do you imagine a better world actually looking like?

If you feel you daren’t even talk this way, I feel the same. Especially because I am no decent activist. I’m no rebel. I’m too reasonable and to easily part of the sleeping problem.

But is there a habitual reason you and I find it impossible to squarely, boldly picture a more hopeful human tomorrow? One that’s got little to do with realism after all?

And is there a practical alternative to the cyberpunk dystopia we’re all just accepting as inevitable? Is corporate techno-global non-democratic misery all that lies ahead? Deeper addictions, deeper sleeps, deeper fears, worse abuses?

Or dare we believe another world IS possible?

If we can picture it?

In my special new episode of Unsee The Future, I look at a topic that I’ve been ruminating on for a couple of years. And I wonder if it’s a way of seeing the future that could change everything.

Is it an art movement, an environmental movement, a political movement? All of them and something beyond. The reason I think it could be the beginnings of a whole new story of us is that it isn’t a new Utopia at long last – it’s something better.

I think it’s time we all introduced ourselves to Solarpunk.

It could change the way you put faith in the human future. By realising that – duh! – faith, like confidence, is built by doing.

Unsee The Future EP31: Solarpunk. This is very definitely just a beginning.

 

UTF31: SOLARPUNK – FIND THE COMPLETE BLOGPOST AND PODCAST HERE >