Rule of Nature — A Fictional Panel

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Pots­dam Insti­tute for Advanced Sus­tain­able Stud­ies, we pre­pared a fic­tion­al pan­el to be per­formed at Bits & Bäume, the con­fer­ence look­ing at issues of dig­i­tal­iza­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty in Berlin. 

Workshop and Initial Ideas

A design fic­tion work­shop took place a month before the event, which gath­ered a group of aca­d­e­mics, entre­pre­neurs, pol­i­cy-mak­ers and cre­atives to col­lec­tive­ly imag­ine and draft futures around the top­ic of autom­a­ti­za­tion and ecol­o­gy. Dur­ing the ses­sion, par­tic­i­pants engaged with top­ics as var­ied as "Dream Econ­o­my," "Auto­mat­ed Nature," or "Space Organs." Then from this process, a fic­tion­al sce­nario emerged. One with­in which auto­mat­ed envi­ron­men­tal gov­er­nance would entrust obscure algo­rithms to accu­rate­ly trans­late plan­et-wide data cap­tured through omnipresent sen­sors, but also to devise and enforce new reg­u­la­tions. Added to this core were oth­er fringe phe­nom­e­na such as advanced dream imagery allow­ing peo­ple to cap­ture such dreams and trans­late them into vir­tu­al and even phys­i­cal spaces, or sen­so­ry trade net­works, through which users were able to expe­ri­ence oth­ers’ neur­al activ­i­ty, their plea­sure, their death, as well as the sen­su­al expe­ri­ence of a deep-space probe.

See also
Pre­som­nic Image Per­ma­nence Device & Dreamscapes

Inter­fac­ing Any­thing, Any­one, and Everything — 

 18 Dec 2018 

The Collaborative Fiction Crystalizing

Based on this col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly built future soci­ety, we craft­ed three fic­tion­al per­sonas and a hybrid one — half fake, half real: Ker­stin Fritzsche, IASS employ­ee, retained her name and role, only tak­ing on the extra hat of EUAEGI col­lab­o­ra­tor, the fic­tion­al ‘Euro­pean Auto­mat­ed Envi­ron­men­tal Gov­ern­ment Ini­tia­tive’ already at work pro­to­typ­ing a new social sys­tem pow­ered by geo- and bio-dynam­ic algo­rithms in the town of Treuer­bri­et­zen. This fic­tion relied heav­i­ly on ‘GAIAI,’ the soft­ware archi­tec­ture devel­oped by Earth Intel­li­gence Sys­tems’ make-believe CTO Kai Andreas Ingólf­s­son, which was already put to the test dur­ing a con­tro­ver­sial project in Cos­ta Rica. As Dr. Thomas Müller, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and founder of Human-Machine Medi­a­tion prac­tice HuMM, would explain: such projects raise impor­tant eth­i­cal ques­tions about the role of humans in deci­sion-mak­ing, about dig­i­tal illit­er­a­cy and oth­er already exist­ing inequal­i­ties which are sure to under­mine the already under­priv­i­leged, and about the risk of cul­tur­al agglom­er­a­tion should local speci­fici­ties be dis­re­gard­ed. Dr. Müller was our third panelist. 

A Fictional Public Panel

Titled “Let Nature Rule — Explor­ing solu­tions and impacts of auto­mat­ed envi­ron­men­tal deci­sion sys­tems”, the talks were mod­er­at­ed by our last fic­tion­al per­sona: Hon­duran jour­nal­ist Alber­to Jimenez Men­doza, whose years liv­ing with the Kayapo and Wajapi com­mu­ni­ties in the Ama­zon for­est led him to inves­ti­gate the issues of defor­esta­tion, ecosys­tem man­age­ment and biopira­cy — an expe­ri­ence he nar­rates in “The Real Jun­gle Book”.

The pan­el talk, under Alber­to Jimenez Mendoza’s mod­er­a­tion, allowed our fic­tion­al guests to present, dis­cuss, argu­ment, and argue on a vari­ety of top­ics merg­ing the real and the fake, and through the fic­tion, rais­ing impor­tant ques­tions on the sub­jects of envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment, bias by design, dig­i­tal (il)literacy, enforce­ment of polit­i­cal agen­das and civic out­reach, human trust in algo­rithms, the need for change in gen­er­al, and the means we as a species are will­ing to give our­selves to that end. Dur­ing half an hour, each of the pan­elists con­tributed to build and com­mu­ni­cate a com­plex pic­ture, an effort which cul­mi­nat­ed in a Q&A ses­sion reveal­ing a strong dis­com­fort with some of the top­ics raised. Par­ti­san­ship made itself sen­si­ble, with some audi­ence mem­bers con­vinced by the need to push for Auto­mat­ed Envi­ron­men­tal Gov­er­nance at any cost, while oth­ers shared Dr. Müller’s con­cerns about the val­ue of sav­ing a human­i­ty void of culture.

When the veil was final­ly lift­ed from the fic­tion, Ker­stin Fritzsche switched her EUAEGI hat for that of IASS to explain that her institute’s inter­est in our design fic­tion method stemmed from its capac­i­ty to spark debate from dif­fer­ent van­tage points, each of them an extrap­o­la­tion from where we cur­rent­ly stand as a soci­ety — although none of the projects pre­sent­ed were true, the ques­tions raised in the process were of the utmost impor­tance. Mean­while, feed­back ques­tion­naires were being dis­trib­uted with­in the audi­ence in order to gath­er insight and their opin­ions on auto­mat­ed envi­ron­men­tal governance.