EXPERIMENTAL SOCIETIES:

Prototyping Social Structures for the Future

About this Event

“We cannot create what we can’t imagine.”― Lucille Clifton

Whether any technology has positive or negative impact, to some extent depends on the people that create it, and the way that it is used – these are social factors.

What kind of social structures, political, economic, cultural, would support the use of technology in ways that we hope for instead of the dystopian outcomes that we fear?

Join us this evening to talk through our social structures, whether they are serving us and how we might go about designing social structures for the future.

Just like physical space, we often take for granted assumptions, norms, rules and incentives of the social space we inhabit and participate in. Our institutions, our economy, marketplaces and even social networks tend to be based in competition and scarcity. What would it look like to explore entirely new economic and social horizons?

“In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change? Our challenge is not just articulating attractive alternatives, but identifying credible strategies for actualizing them.”

Will we design our collective futures, or fall prey to ‘what comes next’ and hope that it’s not worse than what we have now? 

This evening we discuss the what and the how of how we get to different social spaces through experimental societies and governance.

Dr. Zarinah Agnew, UCSF, Irrational Labs.

Zarinah Agnew is a neuroscientist by day, community builder by all other hours. Zarinah’s academic research focuses on the neural control of complex voluntary movements of the two most dextrous human effectors, the hands and the articulatory system. Zarinah’s theory of social change and labour of love focuses on the commons, experimenting with collaborative governance and prefigurative politics. Academic science takes place at UCSF, science in the wild through Irrational Labs, rogue science, all day every day.

Website: http://www.zarinahagnew.com/

Publications: http://bit.ly/Z-pubs

@zarinahagnew

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Snacks and Drinks will be provided

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Your ticket fee goes towards supporting Foresight Institute’s mission to advance transformative technology towards futures beneficial to life and the biosphere. If that’s not something you are currently able to contribute to, do still join. No one will be turned away for lack of funds at the door. You can shoot us a message via our Facebook page for sliding scale access.

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