General Seminar Season One
General Seminar N°14
Holiday Special!
🎄
WEB3 WTF!?
Come out to General Seminar! We’ll get together..have a few laughs..and unpack these WEB3 shenanigans.
This General Seminar Sold Out in 2 hours! But, you can listen to highlights here on the Near Future Laboratory Podcast!
On Wednesday Dec 22nd at 11a PST, join me and extra special guest participant Patrick Tanguay in a discussion. 90 minutes. Limited to 16 participants. $20/seat.
SIGN UP NOW!
There are only 16 seats available!
We keep it small and tight so we get more time for everyone to think, listen, and contribute their musings and have an active engaged discussion!
C'mon. Come out to General Seminar 14..we’ll get together..have a few laughs and figure out all this Web3 stuff!
AND YEAH — WE’VE GOT MORE!
SIGN UP QUICK! LIMITED TO 16 SEATS! $20/SEAT!
(FWIW EVERY PREVIOUS GENERAL SEMINAR HAS SO TOTALLY SOLD OUT!)
GENERAL SEMINAR N°13
INCENTIVES
Join me and my chum Katie Dreke as we discuss what the f**p is going on with INCENTIVES so we can all collectively make sense of this wooly mammoth of a thing and what it means for the near future of, well..what it means to be a social being.
SIGN UP QUICK! ONLY 16 SEATS AVAILABLE. $20/SEAT!
INCENTIVES Carrots and Sticks.
🥕 🪵
CARROT & STICK.
LOOT AND A TOKEN! (YAY!)
AIRDROP SOMETHING NEW (FOMO! 🤑)
I GOT RUGGED! ME’THINKS SOMETHING’S BROKEN..🤔
INCENTIVES. They make people go. They make people do things.
And, not do things.
It’s humans that run companies and governments (at least until the AIs take over anyway…) So, incentives make humans make companies and governments do things.
Or, not do things.
But it’s also bigger than that…Communities. DAOs. Collectives. Campaigns. Systems. Economies. Loyalty Programs. Games.
SIGN UP NOW! OR READ A BIT MORE!
GENERAL SEMINAR N°10 — CRYPTO GAMING
Join me, Julian Bleecker, my co-hosts Katie Dreke and Nicolas Nova — along with extra special guest participant, my pal Ian Bogost, [game designer and professor so, like..there’s an adult in the room thankfully..] to discuss with us CRYPTO GAMING so we can all collectively make some meaning to all this barely sensical stuff and get to somewhere near the bottom of this mishegoss.
SIGN UP QUICK! Only 16 Seats $20/SEAT!
I heard that that game Axie Infinity — which I’ve never played and I’m not even sure exactly how one plays it if one wanted to — is earning some people in the Philipines 10x what they could earn otherwise in the local economy..if they were able to find a job to earn. And it might be that there are now the blockchain’s equivalent of pay-day loan entities who will loan you the required game token so you can get in on the action. Maybe their not extractive like the extractive pay-day loan folks, I can’t say. But loaning someone an asset so they can work to hopefully make some filthy lucre has one of those B.O. smells where you’re not sure if that’s bad B.O. or the good B.O.
General Seminar N°9 — SYNTHETIC BRANDS/SYNTHETIC MEDIA
What? Why? Well — because I want to know what the heck is up with this show Alter Ego that is plastered all over the metro buses here in Los Angeles. (That, but so many more questions..but that’s a start!)
Join me, Julian Bleecker and strategy & innovation consultant Katie Dreke — along with our special guest participant, strategist & writer Jay Springett (a/k/a @thejaymo) who also is the feller behind the most fantastically concise podcast, 301 Permanently Moved. We’re here to discuss with you what the heck is going on with SYNTHETIC BRANDS/SYNTHETIC MEDIA.
(Listen to a special episode of the Near Future Laboratory podcast featuring highlights from SYNTHETIC BRANDS/SYNTHETIC MEDIA!)
SOLD OUT!
There are only 16 seats! $20/seat!
Like — what the heck? The log line is “A singing competition where contestants reinvent themselves and perform like never before — as their dream avatar.”
Wait..what??
Yeah. That’s what it says.
If I was an alien anthropologist and came to Earth and saw this and..you know what? Nevermind. It still doesn’t make sense even as an Earthling and this is why I want to invite you to #discuss this weird nonsense phenomenon that feels futuristic and exciting and lonely as if we have to create synthetic versions of ourselves to be our best selves. But. Even more than that — the topic of “Synthetic Media” broadly is fascinating, especially as new means and mechanics for telling stories (visual and otherwise) are emerging. Unreal Engine 5 is just, like..mind-blowing. (I would be more precise than “mind-blowing” but I can’t right now because I’m still learning about it and I am at the jaw-dropped-to-floor phase of that learning.) And then, what?
Tie in blockchain mechanics, social tokens, DAOs, and all these other new social formations for fans, creators and audiences and something is happening. Come join me and a small handful of other thoughtful, engaged, meaning-makers and let’s get to the, well — somewhere in the middle of this phenomenon.
16 Seats. $20/seat. 90 minutes. Wednesday September 29th at 11am PST / 6p GMT!
And-also — in the meantime, hop on in to our Discord server where the discussions are already running!
General Seminar N°9 SYNTHETIC BRANDS/SYNTHETIC MEDIA!
General Seminar N°8 — SOCIAL TOKENS FUTURE WORK — with your regular hosts Julian Bleecker & Nicolas Nova, with Extra Special Guest Host, the inestimable Matt Jones (this Matt Jones). Wednesday September 15, 2021 @ 11a PST / 6p GMT.
All these questions about ‘The Future of Work’ and I mostly can’t help but wonder about ‘The Future of the Worker’. And it’s not just that COVID-19 was the Black Swan that forced questions about what it is to work? and what is work without the old-fashioned, beforetimes workplace/office?
Ever heard of a Human IPO? What about Social Tokens and Tokenized Fandom? Does it completely make sense in the same way that bottled water makes sense?
No? Me neither.. It’s just at the edge of my ability to understand — and that’s fucking exciting.
Join me and my friendly, modest, humble and thoughtful co-hosts for General Seminar N°8 — (SOCIAL TOKEN == FUTURE WORK) where we discuss to make sense of the future.
I won’t give you any pat answers nor deliver you a 200 page PDF full of crappy and trendy words to read. What I will do is provide a space for us to discuss together amongst a group of mindful, thoughtful, live, real-time humans so we can do a bit of good, old-fashioned, collective sense-making.
./ LIMITED TO 16 PARTICIPANTS/.
SOLD OUT MOST RIKI-TIK!
Join our DISCORD to stay in the conversation!
SEPTEMBER 1 2021 11a PST / 7p GMT
SOLD OUT!
General Seminar N°7 — METAVERSE — with Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova & special guest participants Patrick Tanguay and Dan Hon.
The topic of this General Seminar is METAVERSE. The goal of the seminar is to collectively master our ability to make meaning and make sense of this concept which is also a suite of implemented utility technologies — headsets, databases of visualized assets like “land” in Crystal Voxels. It’s also a science-fiction territory as represented by Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash”, a way to get rich quick-like, an XR/AR/VR marketing term, and a “sector” for venture capital funding. So — what is it?
Our objective isn’t to precisely and technically define METAVERSE. Our goal is to come away from the seminar with a richer sense of what it will be like to live in a METAVERSE world, and how it can/will/should shape the experience, mechanics, and dynamics of social formations in the near future.
RESERVE YOUR SEAT. LIMITED TO 15 PARTICIPANTS. (SOLD OUT QUICK! YOU CAN STILL FOLLOW ALONG IN OUR DISCORD VERSE — JOIN HERE.)
SOLD OUT!
General Seminar No. 6 - Augment Reality - with Julian Bleecker & special guest participant science-fiction novelist Tim Maughan.
The topic of this General Seminar is Augmented Reality. The goal of the seminar is to begin to make some sense of AR more wholistically — more than the instrumental technology and its associated hyperbole. We want to have a discussion about AR as it would be in the lived world. We want to approach the AR quandry by imagining and describing augmented worlds with a higher degree of acuity and with rich inquisitiveness as to what it will be like to live within a social world of reality augmentations.
RESERVE YOUR SEAT. LIMITED TO 15 PARTICIPANTS.
General Seminar No. 5
The Design Fiction of Science Fact
June 16th 2021
SOLD OUT!
When I think of the relationship between fact and fiction my mind toggles between a hard-and-fast boundary as if each is as solid as a block of concrete, and an infinitely permeable effervescence, almost quantum like in the unexpectedly peculiar interactions. Fact and fiction are one another simultaneously. Design Fiction plays in the space between.
I’m currently reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez. It’s like Tom Clancy but science-fiction, with a drama that kicks-off about 10 miles from my home in Venice Beach without a date but the tech feels like 2003. (Woops. Bad guess. Published in 2010).
The plot revolves around an existing computational artifact that’s been pumped up to about 11 so it now threatens the world, which you need if you’re going to be the Tom Clancy of science-fiction. But it’s just plausible enough to be factual, and just implausible enough to be exciting, techno-thriller fiction. So..which is it? There are no tentacled, oozing alien blobs or marauding Orks. In Daemon there are hapless cops, beat-up early model Ford Tempos, CAT-5 cables, WiFi access points, computer games used as meeting places for ne’er do wells. It feels like it "could be."
What are we to make of this interplay between fact and fiction? What are the ways we can understand each that provides space for a richer understanding of them together, or separate? How can we expand their different meanings to do more, better?
What are the metaphors and imaginaries of science fiction and science fact? How do the two play amongst each other? Is it simply that ‘science fiction and science fact each inform the other?’, which implies they are separate? Or are they each other by different names out of convenience because we do not have a stable meaning-making mechanism that can support any other comprehension? Or is it that a quantum relationship would disrupt the bedrock of knowledge such that simultaneous fact-fictions would result in chaos and uncertainty? Or a metaphor based on gaseous intermingling doesn’t help fact or fiction?
General Seminar No. 4
DAOs Part II
June 2nd 2021
SOLD OUT!
"Think of a DAO as a bunch of people in a Subreddit, and that Subreddit happens to have a bank account."
Last week in General Seminar: DAOs Part I, we had a ranging discussion about the DAO. What was proposed was that we continue the discussion. Which is awesome.
I am proposing that we do so by doing some DAO Design Fiction, where we imagine the possibilities for DAOs in some near future context.
What would be a news story — or Classified Ad — about a DAO? What is a Youtube advertisement — or crappy tutorial video — about fixing your DAO with you've misplaced your blockchain hash? What police procedural show is produced that features DAOs? For that matter, what police procedural show is product by a DAO? Think about how the DAO, while exciting now, might be so routine in this near future that it is just a normal, ordinary, everyday thing. What’s the scandalous TMZ-style headline story about the Billie Ellish DAO? Why did your DAO not let you get off the freeway? Since when did your local power utility become a DAO?
We'll imagine these Design Fictions in materialized forms — not just answers to questions, but as these things might take form as in-world artifacts, like utility bills, snack food, a newspaper headline, a slogan on a service van, an app terms & conditions screen, the cover page of a quick-start guide, a patent drawing.
General Seminar No. 3
DAOs Part I
May 26th 2021
SOLD OUT!
“For the past years, the outsized narrative of DAO as an alternative to venture capital dims the light of its much more profound, and much more interesting potential — a fluid, programmable, modular social network that is by design global, transparent, and collaborative. DAO has the potential to become a new frontier of belonging, to create a new species of collective characterized by the alienation of trust from the ownership and control.” — Tina He
It’s been said — precisely by whom is a source of some confusion — that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of Capitalism.
In this General Seminar we will discuss one particular imaginary for an alternative arrangement of collective activity — the nature of the DAO.
General Seminar No. 2
The Imagination of Design Fiction
May 19th 2021
SOLD OUT!
This meeting of General Seminar will present an opportunity to appreciate the evocative nature of Design Fictions and their ability to limber up our imaginations.
We will start with a brief introduction to what we mean by that. Next we will provide some stimulus material — Design Fictions that we have created, and ask you to take these pieces as 'evidence' or 'symptoms' of a near future world. Consider yourself an anthropologist or detective trying to understand more completely the world from which these artifacts came? What sort of social formations exist in this world? What lies beyond the object itself? Where is it used and who uses it? How do people in these worlds live, learn, and socialize? The instrumentalities, norms, behaviors and aspirations that you understand of your world today — how and to where have they evolved in this near future world represented by your 'found' artifact?
General Seminar No. 1
The Shape of Design Fiction
May 11th 2021
SOLD OUT!
I've taken recently to using the metaphor of 'contours' or 'shapes' when describing how Design Fiction artifacts evoke a sense of a world from which they may have come. How does this metaphor shape sense making when thinking about near futures?
The construction of the artifact as a 'scrap' that is the expelled from some processes of a near future world, or a 'symptom' that expresses some set of conditions of living in a near future is another way of framing the Design Fiction artifact.
The topic for this inaugural General Seminar will be a discussion of approaches, techniques, and metaphors that aid in the discovery of and meaning-making about possible near futures through the creation of Design Fiction artifacts.