Dean Johnson, futurist and head of innovation at Brandwidth, explains how the Internet of Things relies on continuity of experience. 2:02 — About Dean Johnson and what he does 5:14 — Mobile technologies 8:50 — How we developed our first gadget 20:27 — How does an iBook work 21:05 — Urban environments 23:50 — Libraries 25:42 — How do we actually interact with content 37:26 — Why the iPad was so popular and successful 42:19 — Back to the future

“The definition of an ominous optimist is someone that goes through bad days in his life but is still optimistic for the future” says Mat Randol in “Ominous optimist ft. the solar system.” Such an affirmation synthesizes well the tone of this conversation with Mawena Yehouessi & Steffi Njoh Monny, respectively founder and editor-in-chief of the online platform Black(s) to the Future. In it, we discuss about the political role of science fiction and speculative visions for the African diaspora through humor and (terrestrial and extraterrestrial) gravity. Steffi Njoh Monny, as in Steffi Graf—same name, same date of birth, only twenty years earlier… ...

Building on his research for his landmark 2018 publication Politigram & the Post-left, artist Joshua Citarella has been conducting a series of interviews with Gen Z users who post radical political content on social media, as part of a forthcoming Rhizome commission. This event brought together three of the most sophisticated figures he has encountered through this research, all of whom are associated with the fragmented online communities known as “post-Left.” For the event, each participant was asked to prepare micro-lectures describing possible and preferred scenarios for politics and society over the next twenty-five years, and to comment on the role of internet culture in shaping ...

Even before 2017’s floods, fires and explicit nuclear threat, the doomsday clock had been ticking towards midnight, spurred on by the warming planet and the hothead in the White House. Survivalists have been around since the 1930s, but all of a sudden, prepping (making plans for civilizational annihilation) started to feel like the not-crazy thing to do. But how to go about it? Become a one-person militia and stock up on camo and bullets? If you’re a too-rich tech bro, you disrupt the apocalypse: get Lasik, build a panic room and buy an apartment in a luxury tower submerged below ...

If you want to change the world, you need to start with great ideas. This volume focus in particular is on the cutting-edge thinking and wider theoretical questions and themes that underpin the series, from reflections upon what our ideas of “future” really mean to the changing role of the architecture profession as a whole. Comprising speculative visions, essays and texts, this volume serves as a theoretical backdrop for the practical approaches seen in Volume 3: The Site. This volume comprises speculative visions, essays and texts from contributors including: Ana Jeinić, Miloš Kosec, Clément Blanchet, Amateur Cities, Liam Young, Something Fantastic, ...

This volume is a call to practical action leading on from the theoretical approaches seen in Volume 2: The Studio. It presents a further selection from the Future Architecture platform call for ideas, and focuses firmly on the nitty-gritty of practice with projects and strategies that are on-site or site ready to shake up that future. These are the inspirational solutions and ideas, which could soon be transforming the landscape of architecture and our cities, reasserting the agency of what architecture in its widest sense can offer and mean. Contributors include: Aleksandra Zarek; Andrej Strehovec; Plan Común; Esen Gökçe Özdamar and ...

Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. What if another kind of ...

The public discourse around AI is oscillating between salvation and the apocalyptic, often referring to images from Science Fiction. Meanwhile, in our smartphones, in search engines or in automatic translation, forms of artificial intelligence are already part of our everyday life. An ongoing artistic research on the topic brought Geneva-based artist Lauren Huret to California, where she conducted interviews with four protagonists of the discourse: Computer scientist and entrepreneur Monica Anderson (Artificial Intuition), computer historian Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum), writer and editor R.U. Sirius (MONDO 2000) and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis. Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of ...

Astronaut Luggage is a collection of short texts written along the last years and circulated online, rearranged around five main topics: the Apocalypse, commodities, drones, history and politics. Adopting the forms of the essay and the short story, Rothstein sets himself in an “atemporality” that allows him to tell stories in which the distinction between reality and fiction is not important. As he writes in the introduction: “None of these stories are true, but none of them are false, either. These distinctions are not the point, at least not immediately. The difference between fact and fantasy are important, just not ...

Atlas Survival Shelters in Montebello was started by a man who makes luxury metal doors for Beverly Hills homes. After having difficulty finding a proper bomb shelter, he decided to build his own. Visiting Atlas, you only get a whiff of the Right Wing Prepper tendencies that seem to inform the place, like a magazine they make about bunkers with a cover showing an armed man surveying the landscape behind a stack of sandbags. On their website, hundreds of photographs show their corrugated metal shelters furnished in a midwestern style, complete with decorative oar, a painting of dogs playing poker, ...

Austerity and Utopia is the first in a series looking at other potential narratives for mapping our current landscape through redefining the social, political and economic terms of engagement. It was planned a long time before the pandemic. Our current situation was unimaginable just a few months ago, but that it was not easily predictable does not mean that there were no elements pointing to a possible crisis of this nature. Yet the collective search for measures of care and climate justice in the attempt to redefine the neoliberal understanding of austerity and utopia – two major points of the ...

This unspeakable horror was prepared by Stylus, a “global innovation research and advisory firm, which works with businesses to stimulate innovation and growth.” Full of quotes like “Globally, 69% of UHNWIs have become more conscious about displaying their wealth in public over the past decade,” it’s a guide to trends in maintaining wealth and well-being while assuring nobody resents you for it. There are suggestions for how luxury brands can stand out through charity or “meaningful minimalism” and coerce the desired UHNWI’s to their brands. Also included are tips for where and how to hide when society crumbles. In times ...