Kodsnack 556 - Informed hope, with Monika Bielskyte

Recorded on-stage at Øredev 2023 just after her keynote, Fredrik chats to Monika Bielskyte about finding, building, and approaching better visions for the future.

We discuss things such as:

• Disabilities for innovation and better design
• More inclusion in design for people on edges improves the world for precisely everyone
• Why does a concept like protopia feel so new? Why have we been stuck thinking about dystopias and exclusive utopias for so long?
• Informed hope. Everything has a context, and the context matters! No huge solution for everything
• Design with, not for

We all create the future all the time. Propaganda and disinformation wants to overwhelm, to disengage. But we can all counteract this and improve the world by doing good things in our daily lives. Put more good information into the systems - and remember to make it cool as well!

We never arrive at a perfect future, it’s the steps we take and what we make here and now that builds it. All or nothing is the old utopia-dystopia thing again - the zero-sum game. Dystopian storytelling is way too easy.

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• Øredev
• The Øredev 2023 video playlist on Youtube
• Protopia principles - scroll down or search the page for “principles of protopia”
• Monika
• Monika’s keynote - Challenging dystopianism: futures literacy & radical imagination
• Neurodivergence
• PTSD - post-traumatic stress disorder
• Sensory hypersensitivity
• The military-industrial complex
• Marinetti - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the fascist manifesto in 1919
• Marc Andreessen - a man who could be replaced by even a medium language model without anyone really noticing
• Torill Kornfeldt and Tim Urban at Øredev 2015(!) discussing AI and superintelligence versus the biologist view

• From Los Angeles to Doha
• Subtitles aren’t just for deaf people
• When your country gets invaded
• From a neurodivergent lens
• At the bleeding edge of harm
• Lack of curiousity
• Informed hope
• Written by a chatbot
• Look how the subduing worked out for us
• Open to be wrong
• Beyond just inflammatory headlines
• Create the best possible world
• We lift each other up