The Future Prototype
I spent last weekend at Further Future, a Burning Man offshoot that feels like the love child of Burning Man and Coachella, with a hefty dose of TED for good measure. Despite the dominant party vibe, the organizers intention was, like TED, to inspire changemakers to create the future and forge deep connections between people who can help each other get shit done. The festival has been criticized for being an elitist and problematic extension of the plug and play camp trend at Burning Man, but I can understand the value of creating an easy experience for tech elite to rub elbows and conspire to change the world.
They did a fine job of executing on this Burning Man-Coachella-TED hybrid (as fine as fine gets in your second year when it pours rain for one of the two days of the event), but the end result was more an amalgamation of existing festival / conferences than a truly innovative way to think about provoking change makers to create the future.
I’ve been thinking about the future a lot lately, both at the macro, institutional level and at the micro, personal level. The weekend before last I found myself amidst a group of remarkable spiritually tuned dreamers, conspiring nothing short of a full redesign of human civilization. What might a post capitalist society look like? How will we organize our economies when AI takes on more and more non creative work? What’s a better model of governance than our current deeply flawed democracies? How might we redesign language to make ourselves more empathetic? How can we hack our biology to make super humans? I felt like I was in the middle of a science fiction novel and it was fabulously thought provoking.
On a personal level, I’ve been changing dramatically of late. I’ve continued to go deep down the path of yoga: practicing and meditating daily, studying the texts, sharing my learnings, and implementing its ethical and personal principles. My practice has opened my eyes to the spiritual deficiencies of our current cultural context. I realize with the corruption of spirituality that is modern organized religion, the intellectual rejection of its practices is tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As I experience my own slow and steady spiritual awakening, I’m realizing that so many of us are asleep, disconnected from the inner voice that guides us towards the manifestation of our fullest potential. Slowly but surely, discovering what is true to me and not what I have been socially conditioned to believe is who I should be, is enabling me to evolve into my best and happiest self.
It was in this personal context that a friend of mine on the Further Future team posted inspiration pictures for our attire. Forget about the Burning Man fur, was the message. Dress for a post apocalyptic future. I love showing up as my alter ego Boots to Burning Man. She’s a less responsible, more care free, funner version of myself. She goes where the wind takes her and delights in the freedom from schedules and time that confine her daily existence off the playa. She’s immensely creative, open minded, and enjoys the opportunity to flaunt her sexuality without judgement.
I extended the attire prompt further: what might my future alter ego look like? I loved the provocation. How might I imagine myself in a further future that is unequivocally better and more evolved than today? Like Boots, my future self would ooze creative confidence, and she’d apply it to everything from the clothes she wears to the ways she interacts to the dreams she dreams for a better world. God knows the future needs more creativity than the present. She’d challenge assumptions in order to envision something better than the default so many of us blindly accept. She’d have a spiritual practice that would help her know her true self. She’d be more empathetic and community oriented, happily helping out people in need. She’d radiate positivity and kindness in the interests of spreading joy one smile at a time. She’d have a hard time walking past trash on the ground without picking it up. She’d understand the implications of her consumption decisions and refuse to support pernicious business practices for her own convenience. She’d carry around a titanium spork and a water bottle. She’d definitely spend more time in the present and less time with her face stuck in front of a glowing screen. She’d focus on being grateful for all she has instead of upset about the things she doesn’t. Her name would be Idania, a variant of my grandmother’s name that’s also my daughter’s middle name. A nod to both the past and the future that unapologetically embraces her role as mother alongside her career aspirations.
This thought experiment of my future self got me thinking about the festival writ large. What might a future society look like? How might we restructure ourselves socially and economically? How might we interact? I’d hope we weren’t a highly stratified society where inequality was even worse than it is today. I’d hope we live in an environment of thriving civics where political debate is the norm instead of the sensationalized, celebrity soaked media we consume today. I’d hope that women weren’t confronted with impossible standards of beauty that left us feeling inadequate for our perfectly healthy and beautiful selves. Surely we’d eat less meat, or we’d eat meat that was produced in a lab instead of through raising and killing sentient beings. We might embed RFID chips on our bodies to pay for things instead of using credit cards (we did experience this at the festival in the form of our wristbands, and it was awesome). We wouldn’t be ok with a social equilibrium that leaves people starving and dying of preventable disease while we buy ourselves yet another disposable pair of cheap jeans produced in unfavorable working conditions. The list goes on and on and on. What if we could envision and prototype a future socioeconomic culture on a microscale at a festival?
What about the architecture of the city itself? Burning Man is fascinating for its unique ability to erect and dismantle a city of nearly 70,000 people each year. You don’t get to prototype urban infrastructure in real life, but you can do it in a festival context. With an event of only 5,000 people, it’s even easier to test big ideas. What if Further Future did a partnership with Sidewalk Labs to prototype concepts for the future of the city?
What about the future of organizations? We can’t continue with our current white male dominated, profit maximizing, negative externality creating corporate forms. The future organization puts social values on par with profit, is run by a team that represents society in terms of both gender and race, and is commitmented to progressive business practices that do the most good and least harm. What if the organization creating a future experience for the weekend was run like one of these future organizations instead of accepting the current default?
All of this is to say, what if Further Future was truly a future prototype, in every possible way? What if instead of inspiring us to imagine the future whilst listening to Eric Schmidt speak about the frontier of self driving cars and AI, we were inspired by getting placed in an actual instantiation of the future? What if each year that possible future iterated and tested more and more radical concepts? What might us elite changemakers do if the festival organizers provoked us to show up as future, more highly evolved alter egos who also evolved each and every year? How would it change and inspire us if we spent a few days in that kind of space?
It’s a crazy ambitious idea, but I think it’s a pretty darn exciting one. I’m sure this is beyond the vision of the Further Future team. They’re a for profit entity after all, and the logistical implications of this kind of radical iteration year after year would seriously compromise return on investment. Even in its simplistic TEDoachellaBurn mashup form, we had a great time and I’m sure we’ll return to again.
But seriously, how cool would it be if we could truly show up in the future, just for a weekend?
