If you’re like most people who pay attention to the news, you’ve probably felt it. We are living in a transitional moment, a time of great uncertainty as old realities are giving way to new ones. Right now, the future looks fuzzy and it’s hard to deny that humanity’s collective vision of the future is in a crisis of its own. Everywhere you look in film, television, novels, and social media, the future that everyone’s talking about is a dark one. Dystopia is the default.
That’s a big problem because the future hasn’t happened yet, which means that if we want a better one, we have to start thinking about what that would look like.
We deserve great things, but we can only have them if we can envision them first.
The future isn’t fixed. It’s what we make of it, and that’s something that my guest on today’s episode, Monika Bielskyte knows firsthand from direct, personal experience. She grew up in the Soviet Union, a country that seemed like it would last forever until one day it didn’t.
She’s done a lot since then, but today Monika is working as a futurist and media consultant for nonprofit organizations, businesses like Nike, and films like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In all of her work, she’s focused on building a vision of a beautiful possible to counter the doom and gloom of the future dystopias that are all too common in our present-day media.
The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
09:07 — Hope and the power of fiction
16:27 — Humanity’s progress and the stakes
25:00 — Most superhero movies emphasize human disempowerment
33:04 — Reactionary oligarchs’ urge to disclaim their own humanity
42:41 — The future as the imagined past within reactionary futurism
49:34 — Why reactionary futurism redirects public focus from present injustice
53:04 — Toward a vision of regenerative futures that are self-sustaining
01:07:33 — Why hopeful futures avoid false binaries
01:15:26 — No human is ‘typical,’ so inclusion must apply to everyone
01:22:48 — What many left-of-center people miss about generative AI
01:31:59 — Embodiment in AI and machine learning
01:36:39 — Radical tenderness and the beautiful possible
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Monika Bielskyte. Hey, welcome to Theory of Change.
MONIKA BIELSKYTE: Hi, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to join you all the way from South Africa.
SHEFFIELD: Yes, we are doing a long distance episode today, so [00:03:00] very fun. And it’s about a very important topic which is something that everyone has a stake in the future. But before we get into the the broader points here, because we both believe that existence and minds are embodied let’s start with your personal background. Tell us about your story and how does it inform your views on all this?
BIELSKYTE: I guess I’m very much with Robert Sapolsky in thinking that we do not emerge from some kind of ether or vacuum. We are very much shaped from the sort of cultural and biological substrate that we are part of that sort of nourishes and fertilizes us.
So culturally and historically, I was born into a very particular moment in a country that doesn’t exist anymore, Soviet Union and grew up in newly [00:04:00] liberated Lithuania. As a child, I was taken to the Baltic Way, which was the protest where about 30% of the population of the Baltic states held each other hand to hand in a continuous line across the three countries: Estonia, Laia, Lithuania which very much sort of precipitated was part of the things that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’m also a Chernobyl kid. Uh, my parents were next to Priya when Chernobyl blew up. So in a way it’s a bit of a miracle that I’m even here today. And. Again, I got to witness as a child the collapse of a totality and regime that seemed to be inevitable.
And yet it did collapse. And yet things did change in the country that I grew up in. And they didn’t change that much. Just about 30 minutes from our capital in a country called Belarus [00:05:00] just next door to us. They have had the longest lasting dictatorship in the whole of Europe. And so what all of that taught me is that future is something that you shape and you don’t shape it alone.
You shape it with your entire community. You shape it also in exchange with everything else that happens in the world. And today as a futurist that gets to talk about how futures get to be shaped. Of course, I am informed by that very visceral experience of that nothing is an inevitability, but you know, some hills are more uphill to climb for sure.
and I always think, you know, how growing up, just sort of one day from the next. We were told as children at school that this history that we were taught was the wrong history and now we [00:06:00] receive new history books and this history is the right history. And of course, sort of was swung between these different extremes, right from completely erasure of cultural, national, et cetera, identity in favor of sort of that hegemonic Soviet ideology to then in favor some kind of over idealization of certain aspects of national identity.
I also have to mention that I am a descendant of survivors, both of the Stalins Gulags and Hitler concentration camps. So this idea that there is never that easy goodie or badie and how populations oftentimes get caught up between hostile powers and where one thing being horrendous does not make another thing good, and how one bad thing weaponizes another is also something that seems to be sort of very natural for me to grasp [00:07:00] and much harder to a lot of other people, especially in the global north, especially in the western world.
So I really think of myself as a product of that particular moment as a product of the collapse of the physical walls that. Kept the population in right, that closed people in you were not allowed to leave the Soviet Union and the opening up of the digital wall walls. And so I could never also take these digital platforms for granted.
Like a lot of my peers that grew up in the Londons and Paris and New Yorks could because as a child, you know, in a very small town in North Lithuania, I didn’t have access to almost any resources at all to educate myself. And so the first sort of access to the digital communities of knowledge was something that, and it was absolutely, life changing and was [00:08:00] really kind of the foundation of what I got to become today.
And I think this is really important, this perspective that I have, that I think is really quite different to a lot of again, typical global north futurist discourse is one of the reasons that motivates me to open up this field to more people, right? I currently live out of choice in the global south in Johannesburg, South Africa.
I’m myself of mixed sort of Eurasian identity, and I see just how important it is to open the field of strategic foresight and futurism, to people that have different cultural disciplinary. Disability, et cetera, et cetera, identities because they have a lot to offer. While at the same time, of course, we’re preserving the rigor within the field and the critical inquiry instead of making it free for all.
SHEFFIELD: [00:09:00] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. and we will get to this point later about the idea of a, future that has everybody in it.
Hope and the power of fiction
SHEFFIELD: One of the other things in your work that I’ve seen is this idea that everybody has hopes, even if they don’t label them as such. And there’s a lot of nihilism, which we will also talk about in cultures, we have hopes and expectations for the future, whether we want to or not. And what we expect plays a big role in what happens, I think.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah. I mean, people act like we are also hopeless today, but I believe if we were really as hopeless as we maintain ourselves to be, we would be out there committing suicide on a mass scale, right? Every morning to wake up. And to do even the most basic things, you still have to [00:10:00] maintain a certain degree of hope to even go through these basic motions, right?
And so hope is really vital. But also it’s sort of being drenched away from us. And part of sort of, I think there’s this interesting dynamic of hope and hopelessness by how much our depictions of the future within science fiction realm have been dominated by the hopelessness of dystopia in a way.
This normalization of doom and gloom. And then there’s nothing that you can do about it is meant to disengage us, right? If we believe that nothing can be done about the future, well then we do nothing about it. And for the longest time, there was that discourse that I was pushing back against that. Well, dystopia is what cells, right?
[00:11:00] People want to see dystopian visions. And really it’s only a particular type of person that want to see dystopian visions. And that person happened to be generally the kind of person also get to, got to direct those visions, right when your life is very safe, very secure, very boring. Not particularly traumatized in a way, seeing these sort of fantasizing about the end of the world, doom and gloom is something that is exciting, but truly for the majority world, people that have lived through dictatorships, people that have lived through oppressions, people that have these visceral stories in their blood and their bones of their ancestors surviving in a way ends of the world.
You know, and anybody that contains trauma of violence or sexual assault in a way we don’t really entertain those dystopian stories that can be [00:12:00] profoundly re-traumatizing. And so hope is something that I believe we’ve been longing for on that grand scale, and yet there hasn’t been as much of it.
And whenever we see those examples in something like Black Panther. Right or recently Heated Rivalry, which is not sci-fi in its sort of presentation. There’s no rockets or spaceships or intergalactic space travel am my own uploading within it. But it’s really futuristic in terms of terms, the social reality that it imagines the kind of social, cultural trauma healing, right?
that it posits as actually possible. We see just,
SHEFFIELD: Oh, I’m sorry. Do you mind for people who don’t know what Heated Rivalry is to give a little background of it, if you’re talking about it there, please.
BIELSKYTE: So Heated Rivalry [00:13:00] is this TV show produced independently supported by Canadian government. That is a gay hockey show. So nothing sci-fi about it on the surface. However, the kind of narrative that it presents, the kind of possibility for sense of community, for queer love for healing family trauma for neurodivergence inclusion that doesn’t become fetishized.
In a way it’s more sci-fi than most of the sci-fi that we have seen. Something like Black Panther. It had a lot of, you know, typical Disney, Marvel cinematic universe, aspects of futuristic weapons and spaceships, et cetera, et cetera. But some of the most distinctly futuristic aspects within it was just how pluralistic it was, the fact that there was still cultural plurality.
That there was still multiple species, humans and non-humans that [00:14:00] remain in communion together. That cultural traditions still survived alongside the bleeding edge scientific research. Right? And those visions have resonated with the audiences. And so for the longest time, we’re told that people are not into that kind of depiction of the future, that future depiction that is hopeful, that somehow still contains what is, what could be deemed as sort of cringe expressions of love and affection and vulnerability is in fact something that we, as most of the people in the world that have lived through our own respective traumas, we actually long for, we need and we want to.
And if we’re recognized that not just our actions, but also ideas have consequences, that history is not just sequence of events, but predominantly of ideas and worldviews. [00:15:00] That ended up shaping these events. We understand just how urgent it is for us to have different depictions of the future. So when people ask me, aren’t you not depressed about the future?
I say, considering how depressing our future visions have been, it’s surprising that we are not doing worse than we are. And if we understand that we are unable to do something before imagining it first, it is also unsurprising why so much? Our, so much of our future decision making is deeply flawed because we do not really have these imaginative yet reality, sort of real data, real science, grounded future visions that seem realistic, yet inspiring and energizing.
And so I think this is one of the greatest priorities. You know, if we understand that those who control the fantasy, [00:16:00] control the fiction, that these fictions end up shaping our actions we need to start with imagination first. And that imagination should not be just optimistic, wishful thinking. It has to be reality informed.
It has to understand how the status quo has been manufactured, and yet imagine possibilities beyond it.
SHEFFIELD: It does. Yeah. And, we will come back to that.
Humanity’s progress and the stakes
SHEFFIELD: Just as a historical matter, I, two points that, that I’m thinking about is one is that it’s easy to think about a terrible dystopian future for yourself. But the reality is that humanity has come a very long way from where we were, not just from our earliest ancestors, but even in the past few hundred years, or even the few past few decades.
So that’s worth always keeping in mind. People sometimes think, oh, well this is like in the U.S., I run into a lot of people who think oh, this is the worst [00:17:00] time in our nation’s history. It’s so depressing I can’t take it. There’s just so many bad things. And I’m like, well, you didn’t really follow the news in the 1970s when there was all kinds of regular domestic terrorism in the United States. That’s not happening right now, at least. And there’s a lot of other positive things that have happened.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean, again, the, kind of stories that I grew up of my grandparents and my parents and the kind of things that they have survived really do not allow me to drown in self-pity of how terrible the world that I inhabited. And I think that’s a really, important reminder, right?
That if you actually have read about human history, then on one side you don’t become complacent because this notion that it cannot get worse is completely false. It can get so, so, so, so, so, so, so much worse. And at the same time, this moment [00:18:00] that we live in, we should obviously not be passive at all about it, but it is definitely not the worst that we have historically lived through.
So I think, you know, on one way, you know, we have to remember that sense of urgency and how with this exponentially potent, especially destructive technological tools, because they can be very powerful without being positively constructive. The stakes are increasingly high. Yet at the same time, we are not living in the worst moment in history.
Some groups, some populations in some specific geographies at this moment might be living one of their worst moments in history. But on a global scale, we still have an incredibly good life. And yet if we do not work for the future, sort of not to slide from our feet, uh, we might end up seeing the worst aspects of history being repeated and maybe much faster because the technological tools of [00:19:00] destruction are.
Exponentially more potent and fast moving.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, It’s a balance that you have to keep and, and ultimately the only people who can have the time and ability to wallow in how bad they think things are that is a position of privilege actually. It is not a position of oppression.
But the other thing I was gonna say is that, just as a historical matter, the idea of how fiction and how stories and what you take into your mind from the world and from media, that was actually something that Plato, the, ancient Greek philosopher was concerned about, like, so in his Republic book about which was people often think of it as what he thought of as his ideal society. And I’m, I don’t think that’s quite true. But one of the points that he makes in there is that he wanted to censor all depictions in the arts [00:20:00] of negative things, because to let people see the protagonists doing terrible things to each other or to other people or themselves that had a negative impact on their minds and, what they, and their sort of desire to strive for justice or to improve things.
And I think he was right about that. Now, obviously, we wouldn’t wanna ban that. But what he said, I mean, it, does kind of underscore what you were just saying a moment ago.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean I really think again, of these examples of, Jacob Tierney and Ryan Kler and how, you know, even when they spoke Jacob Tierney is the director, he rivalry, and, uh, Ryan Kler, director of Black Panther and Sinners more recently. How even in the process of creation, right, on the sets it was really important to create [00:21:00] that sense of community, of understanding, of vulnerability really supportive the, very opposite of kind of the toxicity of the film set that Hollywood is known for, where sort of, especially women get pitted against each other, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, where sort of, you know, uh, the team is being dehumanized and sort of exhausted to a point of mental collapse.
I mean, I’ve, worked on some projects where, you know, some people literally ended up in, in psychiatric hospitals with the burnouts because of just how dehumanizing, the treatment from the director and or producer was. and then when you see what emerges from their creations, both in heated rivalry and let’s use sort of sinners as, a sort of newer example in Black Panther there’s a lot of very difficult thematic being broached.
There’s a lot of drama. There’s a lot of challenge that our heroes have to overcome. Some of them do [00:22:00] meet tragic ends in sinners, not thankfully for now in heated rivalry. though we always kind of on the edge of the seat, we always expect things somehow to end badly because we’ve been trained, right?
That bad things happen to good people, right? And that’s why you shouldn’t be good. You shouldn’t be loving, you shouldn’t be caring. And what’s so interesting from that and I think specifically with sinners, you know, it is sort of labeled as a horror movie. A lot of people actually, again, who have trauma, who do not love horror genre or anything that has too much violence in particular, have avoided watching it because of that label.
And yet when I watched it, there are moments within that film where wine creates these wonderful protopian glimpses, you know, and I’m obviously very biased because I had the chance to work on a fairly minor capacity as a futurist, uh, with him on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But I think [00:23:00] he is one of the.
Most sort of change making directors sort of not just generational talent for what he puts out on screen, but also how he puts it out, right? And the profound humanity that emerges. And these glimpses. Even within very dire circumstances that are presented in a context of sinners movie there are these moments of a glimpse into a possibility of a world.
And it’s not just what that world looks like, it’s also what my friend, peer, and colleague Jenka Gurfinkel writes, it’s about what it feels like, and it’s also kind of what I speak in my framework, embodied futures. There’s that almost sort of visceral sensation of a possibility of joy and that joy and the present again, as Jenka says, [00:24:00] makes join the future seem plausible.
And I think this is so much of what we need. And, in the past we almost had these very binary storytellings, you know, it’s either punishment, detonation, glue warnings, or it’s some kind of perfect future prescriptive sort of moralizing paradise vision. But you should not be questioning whose blood flesh and bones this paradise was built on.
And, protopian thinking, right? That sort of realistic, yet hopeful thinking and visioning engages with something that is much more complex, right? Imagining possibilities of a world where humans strive to do better and do better, but it comes with hard lessons, right? It comes through strenuous effort.
It doesn’t just come easy. It’s not about just being right from the first go. It’s about trying and learning and acknowledging and expanding your horizons and your humanity in a [00:25:00] process.
Most superhero movies emphasize human disempowerment
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. The other thing that’s different, I think about the Black Panther franchise is that when you look at most superhero movies-- and God, there are so many of them-- they tend to deemphasize in a lot of ways the regular person, the regular community, the regular nation.
There might be a token, little scrappy little kid who who does something, or something like that. But by and large, these stories are about a future and a present in which you don’t have any ability to participate as a regular person. that really has a, bad impact I think, on a lot of people.
And when I have done reporting on, for instance, people who believe in the, Q Anon conspiracy theory, like they, they have as their belief that, well, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the show. I’m just going to sit [00:26:00] back and eat popcorn. Because they, really do imagine that there are these fantastical figures, like Donald Trump who are gonna save them.
But it isn’t even just these far right people that have these views either. Like a lot of the rhetoric I think from people who are opposing Trump in the United States. They seem to have this idea of, well, if we just tell people what he’s doing is wrong, then that will stop it and it, doesn’t work that way.
There is no “adult in the room” who’s going to save you. There are no people who are going to come to your rescue. You and us we’re the ones that we’ve been waiting for, because there is no one else in this planet or this world.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to remember that the very notion of superhero, I mean, it, kind of has roots in the eugenic ideology and sort of eugenic thinking of the Uber mech, right? And of course, the [00:27:00] Uber mech requires the un mech, right? The superhuman requires the subhuman. And, uh.
Those who control the fantasy, control the future, the fictions, if they’re potent enough, if they’re compelling enough, always end up bleeding into reality. Right? it’s not just that reality informs our fictions end up shaping our reality because this is what we consider to be aspirational.
So of course there’s this direct pipeline from a superhero and, it’s big cape coming in and sort of saving the day and saving everyone, and then somebody like Trump, standing there on a podium all the way back in 2015 and saying that he alone can save the world.
And people believing that. And I remember vividly that moment, I was actually considering moving to LA ‘cause I was working a lot between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And the moment he announced his candidacy, I, completely reconsidered. I was like, you know what? I am not making that move.
I don’t see myself living in the US under under him. [00:28:00] I already was thinking how difficult it might be to travel, and deal with TSA with my kind of travel pattern at that time. And, and people literally did not think it conceivable a lot of university educated, progressive, sort of the who’s, who of our intellectual community really thought of it as a joke.
And, and I did not. Because in reality, at that grand scale, we are shaped by these popular fictions. And it has always been the case when I started doing the work that I do. And I started doing sort of public speaking. And I was saying that science fiction really matters. It’s serves as a blueprint.
It shapes what do we consider future worthy? What do we think belongs? Who do we think belongs in the future? Right? And it does not reflect necessarily reality. Science fiction has mostly misguided us to think that something is futuristic, when really it just [00:29:00] seems futuristic. And not just because it’s culturally, socially political, outdated, most of the time it’s outdated from a scientific standpoint.
But again, going back to that point, within indigenous cultures, there was always that, duh, the most basic degree of understanding that every song, every pattern, every story, every ritual, sort of essentially every form of content is of core form of content that guides human behavior, that guides our values, that guides what we consider to be aspirational.
And yet somehow, especially in the western world, at some point, you know, before the connections between the, Ted bro actions and the ideologies they follow became truly sort of undeniable. So many people try to say, relax, this is just entertainment. It doesn’t matter. These are just movies.
These are just games. These are TV series. You know, this [00:30:00] is not how future gets decided. And nothing could be further from a truth. Future is decided by people acting upon what they consider to be worthy acting upon. And so today we find ourselves in this world, right, where still so many of us believe that somebody is gonna save the day, that there is gonna be on one or the other side, that magical superhero.
And then, you know, on the other side, you also have quite a lot of people, I guess on the lefty side that will say, well, no, you should not engage with any of that structural change, with any of that political change, with any of that corporate change by working again with the power structures that be.
But the reality is that all of these systems of justice and injustice of equity and inequity, they are made out of all of us, right? And so we need the [00:31:00] grassroots push and we also need that infiltration of structures of power to make them a lot less hostile to, to the grassroots. And so there’s always that continuous flow.
And when people ask me as a futurist, so what can I do? A lot of times they say, well, you know, but you know, I’m only working in advertising. I’m working on something so superficial. I’m not here saving the environment. I’m not here solving these dreary military conflicts. And my answer to that, that with whatever that each of us does, we will actually be much more capable of changing the world when we engage in our field of expertise instead of going and doing something else.
Instead of just go, I mean, it’s wonderful to go to some protest or support some kind of NGO, et cetera, et cetera, you know, on the weekend or once a month or once a year, then not doing that at all. But the truth is that if we really consider it, what is [00:32:00] the core of what we do? What is the core, our knowledge, what is the core of our expertise?
And we think how I can do it in such a way that I’m able to shape the future somehow positively through something that I’m really, good at, instead of just doing it how it’s always been done, how I can shape the future through that, through this thing that I actually have expertise, power, insider knowledge, and influence within.
And if all of us were to do more of that, and if all of us, you know, instead of just hoping for these, single leader, but also to leaderless movement. S if we understood that the real movements, the real change that lasts, it’s about leader fullness. It’s about all of us doing the things that we the best at and tapping into each other’s knowledge and expertise and, engaging with each other.
Not just because we’re the same, but because we are able [00:33:00] to contribute to each other. I think we’d see more of a change that we want to see.
Reactionary oligarchs’ urge to disclaim their own humanity
SHEFFIELD: So we’ve talked a bit about the things that people who support democracy can do, and we will circle back to that at the end of the conversation here, but I do want to talk about the people who are working to end democracy at this juncture of human history. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that’s how they feel and, but it’s, it, it can be difficult I think for sometimes for people to understand that because these people are not coherent when they speak and they don’t have a, good ability to write. They’re not really interested in reading. The only things they ever write are kind of on. On Twitter. But one person who is a bit more articulate than the rest is this guy named Mark Andreessen, who is a billionaire investor. One of the earliest internet figures as well.
And he basically said in a recent interview that [00:34:00] he has no interiority, that he never does any introspection on anything that he does, and that this is a great thing in his life. So we’ll roll the clip here and then I want you to, fire back at that.
Okay.
David Senra: Introspection.
Marc Andreessen: Yes. Zero as little as possible.
David Senra: Why?
Marc Andreessen: Move forward, go. Yeah. I don’t know. I just, I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s, just, it’s a real problem and it’s a, problem at work and it’s a problem at home.
BIELSKYTE: I mean, I think so many of these people are just like colossally stupid. They have been at a right place, at a right time. They have the right amount or like really wrong amount of ruthlessness to become so rich and powerful. But most of them are not that smart, and even people that are labeled as very [00:35:00] strategically smart, let’s say people like Peter Thiel, when you listen to their discourse, when you listen to his sort of antichrist lectures, when you listen to his, idolizing of thinkers in scare quotes like Curtis Jarvin and just how juvenile that discourse is. They’re really not that smart and above all, they are extraordinarily miserable. That’s just the fact when you look, I mean, I think this recent documentary Manosphere, right? It exposes so many of these people’s lives as truly miserable, as truly sad, as truly pathetic.
And yet because technology is not neutral, algorithms are not neutral they have had this sort of algorithmic amplification on their side and people like Mark Andreessen had [00:36:00] sort of, corporate business, sort of financial amplification on their side. And so they succeed in accumulating so much power.
Right? And I mean, I think of it as, it might seem like as a strange peril to draw but stay with me. I think we had this very unique momentum in this last winter Olympics. With the figure skating for the first time in a long time, Russian team was completely absent from it. If you know anything about Russian figure skating, you know how corrupt it is.
You know how it takes these underage girls, how doped and almost like tortured, abused they wear to sort of achieve these gravity defying pirouettes. But at the end of the day, even if they would succeed winning gold medal after gold medal only for an incredibly short amount of time, right? Because after that their body would be bust.
There was this [00:37:00] assumption that somehow they are pushing the boundaries of skating. And yet in this last Olympics, when the Russians were finally absent, something completely different happened. A sense of community, the difference between different skaters and especially a sense of joy that was delivered by ultimately the gold medal winning American Chinese figure skater Elisa L.
And it truly sort of opened up a whole new consideration of what figure skating can be, of what sports, what athletics can be. And in a way it was very much sort of an uphill battle because how can you win against such torturing of the bodies that Russians were known for against such exquisite doping techniques that Russians were known for?
And yet that victory did happen. Maybe in that temporary Russian absence. But it made even the [00:38:00] viewers think maybe this is what we had is not at all what we want. Not at all what we need from sports. Maybe this joyful momentum that is not about abused, emaciated, exhausted children’s bodies on the eyes suffering for our entertainment.
Maybe this is the kind of world that we actually want to inhabit. Maybe this is what we want sports to be. And so I do think that sort of like mass realization that happened and, how viral these moments of the winter Olympics went, taps into what we spoke about. He had rivalry taps into what we spoke about the success of every single Ryan Kogler project against, again, all of the studio infrastructure.
Odds also speaks to this moment with the techno fascists and sort of their mirror reflections as the influencers of the manosphere that we actually are [00:39:00] beginning to see them for how pathetic they are. When we look at somebody like Elon Musk. Now, less and less people are looking at him admiringly and say how he will be saving the world and look at him as somebody profoundly pathetic, profoundly sad, profoundly miserable. unfortunately was ruthless enough again to accumulate truly extraordinary amount of power. And I do think that during the last presidential campaign, there was a fundamental mistake that was made when the Democrats moved away so fast from the Tim Waltz’s framing. I of the weird, these guys are weird.
These guys are not aspirational, not like projecting power onto these people, even if we cannot deny their power. Right? They’re very powerful, right? But the more we project, the more we are scared, the more in a way we give them that [00:40:00] power. And if you know anything about the history of dictator, if, you know how calco for example fell, it is when we finally start seeing these people that have ruthless, accumulate extra amounts of power as truly pathetic, as truly unad, admirable, as truly non aspirational, and we start crafting a new vision of what can be.
And again, when we start really looking critically at what these people say with, Marc Andreessen’s introspection is something that wasn’t went in 1920s. I mean, considering how much he seems to be introspecting himself, he is denying that very basic fact. In his techno-utopian manifesto, right?
He says how tech ethicists and tech critics are the enemies of progress. And you should just be accepting the first thing that the tech grows are offering to you. Again, nothing could be further from a truth, to just [00:41:00] accept whatever you’ve given. That’s not a positive attitude, that’s a negative attitude.
That’s believing that we only deserve this much to actually engage, not in just kind of criticism, no for the no’s sake. If we understand that no is not enough and you follow your nos by what are the shared yeses, you understand that to not accept the very first technological policy, et cetera, et cetera, offering and to work together towards something that is not gonna be perfect, but something that will be better, that we can keep improving.
That’s not a negative attitude. That’s the most positive attitude that we can embrace. And so I think it’s really important to sort of dismantle these ideologies that the manosphere influencers, the tech bros are pushing, but not do it in such a way that gives them more power, but do it in such a way that shows them for the sad little pathetic.
People that they are, even [00:42:00] if, they have succeeded in accumulating true extraordinary amounts of wealth in the process
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. it’s, that dictatorship is a state of mind in both the dictator and in the population. Because it, doesn’t work if you don’t allow it to work. Ultimately, they want the bandwagon effect. I mean, that’s how they do everything in their world. You look at the, all the Wall Street investors, they’re just a herd of lemmings.
Like they, they don’t have independent thoughts. They all do the same thing. They all respond to the same news reports. They’re easily manipulated. They’re so easily manipulated, in the fact, that people are constantly betting against the majority of the market and, making a lot of money off of that.
The future as the imagined past within reactionary futurism
SHEFFIELD: The other thing though, is that the vision of the future that they’re offering is actually an imagined past instantiated. Like that’s really what they’re doing. And you can see it in the science fiction that they like, which tends to be like mid 20th [00:43:00] century fiction.
And, I did a separate episode on this with Jeet here from the nation for people who wanna check that one out. They constantly refer to space as similar to the frontier times of people living all alone, in the forest or on the plains or something.
And, spaceships are prairie schooner in space. and, these are just not realistic at all because the reality is that, space is such an expensive endeavor that only governments can pay for it. So there is no imaginary cowboy out there doing space stuff living by himself.
That’s not real at all. And the only people who are gonna be in space are government employees and the people that are their contractors.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah. So I mean, I think the issue with the whole kind of space discourse and I do agree that, space exploration, astrophysics is really, important. But I’m [00:44:00] very much on board with what, adam Becker writes and More Everything forever. And I love that he wrote about it, as somebody that grew up with the same fantasies, that because of these fantasies, he went and studied and became an astrophysicist.
And then he came to realization that this whole vision of space being the frontier that we will expand onto, that we will get to live on Mars. And Alpha San Tori is delusional, you know, and it’s not delusional because it’s morally, socially, culturally, politically wrong. You know, these are subjective notions, and we could be arguing about it to the end of time.
It’s scientifically wrong. The real future frontier is not rockets or silicon, it’s biology, right? Sure. We need better computation. Sure, we need better rockets if we want to reach Mars, let alone transport significant amounts of load that supposedly could allow [00:45:00] us to live on Mars. But reality is our biology is completely intertwined, entangled, interdependent with all life here on earth.
Our bodies cannot survive completely different atmospheric composition, completely different atmospheric pressure completely different gravitational field. Our bodies cannot survive without everything that replenishes our microbiome because majority of d within our bodies is not even ours. Right?
It’s our microbiome and our microbiome. Is again, this whole ecology. We are not brains floating in jars in the space vacuum. We are ecologies, entangled with a broad ecology. We fully interdependent. There’s nothing. you know, I speak how 20th century was really sort of anchored in that engineering paradigm.
And again, we could argue or not about it if it was a necessary step or we could have skipped that step and, our world would be radically different. But [00:46:00] history, it is what it is. 20th century was the engineering century. But where we are moving now, it’s the century of biology, right? And within biology, nothing is a replaceable part.
The moment you change any element, everything else changes. That little empty space immediately gets filled with something else, right? And there’s no clear binary, there’s no zero one. There’s always that grain zone, gray zone of change and transformation. And so to really think of these futures as interdependent as biological to think of society, when nobody can escape in their magical bunker and do well, let alone, they’re not gonna be able to go and escape on Mars.
And they’re not gonna be able to upload their mind into computer matrix and live forever. These are all just sci-fi fantasies. These are not scientific propositions. And so again, through that you understand. How delusional that thinking has been and [00:47:00] how so many of these people are not that smart. Now, the problem right, is that the more rich, the more powerful, you know, as a politician, somebody like Putin as an example, right?
Of surrounding yourself with yes men that tell you can invade Ukraine in three days. You’re gonna be conquering Kiev. Ted Bros surround themselves with people that tell them, just throw another X amount of billions of dollars and you’re gonna make science disappear. To a point where Ted Bros a clashing with a scientist.
Scientists, even if science is just some kind of, it’s a material manifestation. it’s an technology. Sorry, I’m restarting. Even if technology is just a material manifestation, it’s an outflow of scientific research, right? So if you deny the science, no matter how many billions of dollars you’re gonna throw at it, you’re not gonna succeed at it.
But the problem, right, is that this, yes man phenomena is not [00:48:00] anymore just something that the written a powerful are capable of having access to in a way, AI psychosis, we’ve democratized the yes men through chatbots. So many mediocre people without power are able to engage with chatbots and the chatbot will respond to them in the sycophantic manner that yes.
Your ever idea is great and amazing, ingenious, yes, you should do more of the same that you were doing that caused your problems and this is now gonna solve your problems. So we live in this world of increasing infectious delusion where we tend to be celebrating all the wrong things and, these very juvenile ideas are getting amplified on a mass scale.
And I don’t think there’s going to be solution to most of these problems without real push for much greater [00:49:00] information. Literacy, science, literacy, historical literacy. And I don’t know where it’s gonna come from because this has to be funded or it will not happen. But it’s really a vital aspect if we have to have a more livable future, right?
it all starts with a vision, and that vision is shaped by information that we have access to. And if the information is completely misguided, completely inaccurate, then the whole foundation will be skewed. And so I think this is something that is really, important to address. And we haven’t been gone to.
Why reactionary futurism redirects public focus from present injustice
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s also that they are trying to, these techno salvationist or, techno fascists even, we can say because they do cite people who were actual fascists. Like, Filippo Marinetti, Andreessen is, says he’s a hero of his. But aside from that, the, what they’re doing is trying to [00:50:00] redirect humanity from the, near future in which we improve our lives and Im improve our health and take better care of each other and the planet.
They want to move the focus from that to 500 years from now, we have to think about when, or we have to think about, well, the sun is someday going to become so big that it will swallow up the earth. Well, that’s not going to happen in such a long time that we kind of don’t need to worry about that.
And in fact. The best way, if you actually were serious about that, is to fund the scientific programs that you were just mentioning, Monika. that’s and then you look also at the Trump administration, attempting to cut hundreds of millions of dollars or billions, I think, if I’m remembering right, from the government science program.
So like you can’t say that you are wanting to be, have someone to be someone [00:51:00] who has credibility on the future and then also say, oh, and we don’t want any scientists. That’s not how it works. That isn’t how it works.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean, again, so much of the stuff that’s happening in America seems so shocking and novel to many Americans and even many Westerners. But it doesn’t seem shocking or novel to most of the post-Soviet because this is exactly what happened in Russia under Putin, right? Quality minds will question stupid decisions.
So one of the ways to entrench your power is to eliminate. Anybody that would have the capacity for critical thinking that could I undermine your sort of ideological ravings. And so trying to make, you know, and it goes beyond Putin, like, I think one of the most [00:52:00] extraordinary historical examples that had some of the most dire consequences because it resulted in a famine and Soviet union, and then also the famine, the great famine in China was Lisen COism, right?
Liko was a biologist that crafted this whole ideological take on evolutionary biology that fit with the Soviet communist ideology I ideology. Yet it was scientifically misguided. It was scientifically inaccurate. And that led to decision making from which tens of millions of people died. You cannot wish reality away and you cannot, as we’ve seen, right?
So many of Russian oligarchs, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have jumped off the windows and balconies and had sudden heart attacks, even if they had no previous heart [00:53:00] conditions. So what that points to is that.
Toward a vison of regenerative futures that are self-sustaining
BIELSKYTE: You cannot have successful business is the nation state that has collapsed. And if the nation state is dominated by the leadership and policies that are increasingly removed from real data, from real scientific research, when the scientific research is ideologically guided rather than real curiosity and real information guided, the nation state ends up collapsing, and then the business and your corporate profits end up collapsing.
And, there’s just, you know, it’s, almost this Prego level thinking, right? Uh, when Prego made a deal with Putin, you know, somehow it seems that Prego thought that, you know, well, he’s gonna be the one that will not fall out of the window. Somehow he’s gonna make that [00:54:00] unique deal with Putin, and, somehow he’s gonna be fine.
But it just doesn’t work that way. And so I think the sooner people wake up and the sooner they realize that if you want to have longevity for even your corporate profits, for your business success, for your nation state, you actually have to inform your decision making by pragmatic data. And not by ideological ravings.
And so it’s, really extraordinary watching what is happening right now, but it’s also profoundly unsurprising. And, even more so, you know, in contrast of you know, seeing, for example, China’s decision making, right? When there’s this sort of fantasizing to return to petro masculinity under the current American regime versus the sort of really aggressive move towards what is framed as ecological [00:55:00] civilization by the Chinese government, right?
And trying to export that model and funding sort of, to a greater degree the sort of transition towards regenerative power grid than even the Marshall Plan. Now that comes with all of the strings attached. We cannot sort of idolize that at all, right? But at the same time, one approach tries to return to some kind of fictional past and, nostalgia ends up becoming poison.
And on the other side we have sort of that more pragmatic, more science informed thinking, and we know that over the long term, this is what wins. Now, I think, you know, the, big mistake of a lot of commentators and observers and, A lot of, even sort of young, sort of ideological people is to just demonize that this is all about financial incentives.
This is all just about money, right? And I think it’d be [00:56:00] easier to fix things if it was just about financial incentives. It was just about money, right? Because when somebody just thinks of their financial profits, you can somehow negotiate with it because there’s a certain logic to it, right? But I think the motivations are quite different.
And in fact, it’s more dangerous. They’re much more diluted, much more ideological. And I always say that it’s very hard for people in positions of power to imagine a world where not only their power is obsolete, but their very understanding of the world and the future is obsolete. And so you have to grasp that when you build out your future strategies, that it’s not just about financial loss or financial gain. It would be more simple if it were just that. Because if it were just that, [00:57:00] we would see much more pragmatic decision making because ultimately there’s no money to be made on a burnt out planet, right? There is no bunker that is gonna be strong enough to hide you if the entire world collapses. And so that cynicism, that nihilism, that also loss of what we spoke earlier on, of, hope into the future is profoundly dangerous.
And again, this is not new for me because it’s very much exemplified in Russia, right? Russia is the only, or one of the very few countries that believe that climate change is gonna be good for them, right? And it’s gonna be good for them, not because it’s actually gonna be good for them. I mean, sure the Arctic routes could be open, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s gonna be good for them because it’s worse for everybody else.
And the depth of depravity that results when people start believing that the future [00:58:00] will be better for us, not because that it will be objectively better because we improve our sort of state of being, but because everybody else is gonna be more effed. the ne holistic cynic politics that result from that are really profoundly dangerous.
And, this is something that we need to be profoundly wary of. And, you know, I’m seeing that, I’m seeing quite a lot of that emergent right now in the us. It, really kind of reminds me of everything that I heard of sort of these last years of the Soviet Union. So not just Putin’s Russia, but these last years of the Soviet Union before it collapsed.
And we need to be really, aware of that and counter that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why I often say that despair is reactionary and hope is progressive. Because yeah, like they, they, want, they can only win by making you think their imposition [00:59:00] of an imagined past is inevitable. But one of the big obstacles though, for people who oppose them is I think that in a lot of ways, the broader left isn’t offering much of a talk, even discussion of futures and, and presenting a, vision of a beautiful possible because you can’t defeat the imagined past.
If you just say, well, let’s go back to the neoliberalism, or let’s have a endless, discussion about who gets to speak first or whose oppression is worse. No, you have to create ideas and inspiration to rally people to towards something that’s wonderful because otherwise they’re just gonna think that all these people with these, billions of dollars, that they’re inevitable if you, have to give them a north star towards something beautiful, I think.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah. and you have [01:00:00] to understand that, you know, again, The majority of the population in the world is religiously conditioned and religious narratives, have been speaking of those sort of es, sorry, I’ll restart. And most of the religions have been speaking about eschatological ends, right?
So this projection of somehow end of the world doesn’t emerge from anywhere and doesn’t resonate with sort of anything. It, resonates with existing sort of substrate. A lot of the people that push these end of the world visions have been raised in religious backgrounds that preach that, and now they sort of just repackaged it as some kind of technological rapture, technological salvation.
A lot of be it sort of Aya regime in Iran, be it Putin, they also project these sort of end of the world visions. And to counter that, you cannot just magically [01:01:00] think reality away. you need to offer something that feels tangible, that feels inspiring, that feels energizing. And if you just offer sort of preachy environmental discourse, if you just offer sustainability, that tends to not be unfortunately exciting and energizing and inspiring enough for our minds.
And that’s where. That regenerative vision really comes in and is really, urgent. And so I say that a lot of the existing familiar political binaries, communism, fascism, left right, progressivism conservatism especially, is in this increasingly ideologically distorted conspiracist world.
They do not really stand the test of time anymore. And the real emergent binary is extractivism versus regenerist. And so how can we juxtapose [01:02:00] where these extractivism future visions, where these extractivism technologies, where these extractivism policies are taking us, versus what could regenerative vision actually not just look, but also feel like, and that is really, vital.
And it has to be credible, it has to be realistic. It cannot be sort of wishy-washy, hippy dippy, leapfrogging the current issues. It has to actually sort of very tangibly address them. And I mean, it’s, interesting ‘cause this whole week I’m reading through a bunch of scripts. As part of my futurist advisor role with an organization called Climate Spring, and the role of that organization is actually to green light fund support, produce more regenerative future visions in the long media format, filming tv, right?
So these initiatives already exist, but we need many more of that. And this is where I [01:03:00] emphasize this framework of story world design, which is, might take sort of quite a bit of a modification away from world building, because world building feels very authoritarian for me. It’s kind of, you know, with Chand Dega or Nita May with Brasilia, a genius architect comes in and decides what the future city is gonna look like, and then everybody else has to inhabit his utopian vision story world design. It is much more organic, right? It, recognizes that we need infrastructures, we need technologies we need in our cities connectivity and productivity and thorough affairs and power generation, et cetera, et cetera. But thinks about the future city beyond it just being a smart city, right?
It thinks of it as livable city, as joyful city. It thinks of what is that human experience. And it doesn’t just design actually for humans. It designs for life because we are part of [01:04:00] an ecosystem of life, as we said. Our microbiome is an ecology, right? So we are ecologies intertwined with other ecologies.
So my invitation is how can we bridge gaps between the different disciplines, between the scientists, the architects, the urbanists, the policy makers, and people that know how to make shit sexy, quote unquote, the advertisers, the filmmakers, the script writers, the visual effects artists, right? These people know how to make things look mesmerizing.
These people know how to craft stories that drag us in that, that make us almost addictive, right? To follow the narrative arcs of, certain characters. And so it’s really important to go beyond manifestos and think tags and lofty statements and really [01:05:00] show immersively, sort of open these portals into the possibility of a different world, and really utilize this techniques of story world design coming from media, entertainment and science fiction, but to craft glimpses into our possible futures and really bring people in.
So we don’t just preach, we don’t just say that you shouldn’t do this bad thing, but we make people excited to do this good thing and to do this good thing together with others. And I really, believe that this is one of the most urgent things. And then another, I think key kind of framework that I’ve been working on is embodied futures and embodied futures.
That’s really sort of reframing that it’s not about being anti-technology. It’s not about being anti quote unquote progress. Even if you know that progress definitely needs an asterisk next to it. [01:06:00] It’s reframing innovation as something that doesn’t happen to technology because of the technology and through technology, but it happens to our bodies because of our bodies and through our bodies.
Our cognition is embodied. So whenever we consider any innovation proposition, be it again technological tool, platform policy, et cetera, et cetera, we have to think, is this weaponizing, undermining or replacing our embodied experience? Or is this supporting, amplifying, assisting our embodied experience?
And it’s not just the sort of eugenic idea of what bodies look like or how they could be stronger, better, faster, but really what do we feel within our bodies? What do we feel when we exchange with other bodies? And what do we feel being on this planetary body? What is the sensory experience?
What is the [01:07:00] joy? What is the pleasure? Even as we age, break pain, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it’s very important to bring these conversations, into the very serious political policy, technological scientific research and funding space too. Because unless we succeed in communicating to the broader, audiences, we will continue failing in bringing the change that needs to happen.
Why hopeful futures avoid false binaries
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely true. The other thing also is that these people who are trying to destroy democracy, they, they do it often by presenting false binaries. So, and, Donald Trump, his entire political career is based on that. But when you look at the history, all of these, dictators or close to dictators who gain power, they do it by, by, presenting a [01:08:00] false binary that, if you, well, you don’t have to like me, but I am not anywhere as bad or as evil as, insert.
This group here that you don’t like. So, whether it’s a, ethnic minority or a religious minority, or a gender minority or a, non-religious person, these are all things that they, try to tell you are a threat to you. And so they, so that they can get away with not representing your interests.
And, I, and that’s something that I think, that is something that I everybody can do, is to talk to people in their lives to help them see those false binaries and to avoid them and to, to the extent possible, have build community for people to enable them to not be forced into those false binaries.
Because, that’s the other thing you were talking about how these, these oligarchs are, lonely [01:09:00] and miserable, but because of the eco extractive economy that they’ve created, a lot of other people are facing those similar circumstances. But because primarily because they don’t have any money and no opportunities.
And so, being able to just be with other people who have the, desire to protect democracy and to have a. A more positive vision of the future. That’s, something great and that is something that people can get from going to a protest as well, to, be able to see people who, because they want you to think that it’s inevitable and you are crazy if you don’t agree with them.
BIELSKYTE: Yeah. And at the same time, right, none of that change, none of that. Embracing more of our plurality is going to happen through threatening punishment or in [01:10:00] position. Fundamentally people change when their curiosity stick out, right? And so I think that’s kind of the biggest thing. We’ve been celebrating being right, and we haven’t been celebrating learning enough, right?
So most of us have born, most of us are indoctrinated into one or other form of bigotry in a way, ableism, for example. It’s the water that we swim at. We still, you know, even you have very woke, people are using terms like tone deaf, blind spot, being blind to that without even realizing, that it makes this automatic assumption that somebody who’s blind would be ignorant, that somebody who’s deaf would not understand conversational context and how to behave within it, et cetera, et cetera.
So, all of us lack knowledge in one or other domain, be it [01:11:00] disciplinary or cultural or social, et cetera, et cetera. and I think this is where story world design, this is where bridging these gaps between disciplines can really be helpful. Because when you invite people to be curious, when you make the proposition of participation.
Being more exciting than isolation. When you take away that fear of cringe that comes with allowing oneself to be vulnerable by showing your curiosity, then things begin to change. And I really, believe in that. And it’s really, hard because, you know, I’m a woman in a very male dominated domain, and so much of a time in my professional life, I’ve been literally wanting to punch faces by how people have talked to me and, behave with me.
And yet I kind of think of, you know, how do I foresight my own actions. So [01:12:00] we all have to kind of get better at foresighting our own actions, you know, in the particular moment, getting angry, getting pissed off you know, wanting to punish somebody, wanting to scream at somebody. You know, and I’m not talking about literal Nazis, right?
‘cause that, like some people are, some people have sociopath, psychopaths and, very much sort of beyond redemption. It’s really how to, how do you make the power they had have, access to less destructive. But majority of the people in the world are not right? Most of the people are not ignorant because they choose ignorance, right?
There are some like that. Most of the people ignorant of something or other because they just didn’t have access. To enough understanding and, again, just access to information does not equal understanding. Right? Accurate facts do, does not equal accurate understanding. But it’s, we have to kind of think in that moment of my anger, which most of the time is very justified.
I could act in a very [01:13:00] rash manner and I could feel justified, I could feel sort of very pure about it, but what consequences it will result in, and we all must get better at that. Last year I spoke at this media conference in Germany and one of the main conversations in relation to that was how journalists, how media people need to get better.
Not just at reporting the facts, but reporting them in such a way that comes with an understanding. What kind of behavior, what kind of actions, what kind of consequences that type of reporting could result in. Right? Are we able to speak beyond just the sensational fact and, speak to what could be potential future implications?
Right? And I think we need more. We all need more of that. It. And we’ve [01:14:00] been lacking that, instead of just wanting to build a wall and push people away, which is the easiest option. and again, I, viscerally feel that in my body ‘cause I felt that way so many times in my life. Fundamentally, this will not improve things for the better.
So we need to find a way to make people curious and, help them see how engaging across cultures, discipline, domains, disabilities, neuro divergencies, genders, generations, what is that we can learn from each other? How can we expand our horizons? How can we help each other see what we have not been seeing before?
And, I guess my own personal engagement in, the deepest way is with the realm of invisible disabilities. And I really believe that we shouldn’t be reading books about autism or cancer only when it touches us first person experience of cancer should be something [01:15:00] that, we should just want to understand before it happens to us, before it happens to our loved one to understand in different aspects of neurodivergence, considering how many neurodivergent friends, colleagues, acquaintances we might have, you know, and how it could expand our horizons.
I think, you know, we should do that before we have that face-to-face interaction.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and also, oh, and. Also just on that point. Sorry. The,
No human is ‘typical,’ so inclusion must apply to everyone
SHEFFIELD: one of the other fascinating things about some of the cognitive psychology research is that, it, the idea of neurodivergence, it almost doesn’t even exist. Like there is no right way to be a human or to have a mind or to think, and, that’s really come out with regard to, research showing that the, inner monologue of people, like some people basically don’t have one at all, and some people have one that never stops.
And there [01:16:00] is no right way, to think. and this is a really good example of that. So it’s, not just that, that we can see others experiences, which we may have in the future for ourselves because everybody, as you’ve said, will be disabled at some point. But it’s also that even how we are in the present moment that’s worth appreciating as well, and, understanding that there is no wrong way to be human.
BIELSKYTE: yeah, I mean it’s, I guess it’s, neurotypical doesn’t really exist but neurodivergent does, not, so many people tell me like, oh, but we are all a little autistic. And I’m like, absolutely not. And a lot of the times actually, people that were saying that we all are a little autistic are people that were undiagnosed autistic.
And they would make an assumption that, and I actually did the same assumption for most of my life until my early thirties, that, [01:17:00] but everybody must struggle with this specific thing. They just know how to pretend better. And it was a huge realization, in my early thirties to confront that not everybody’s struggling with this thing and not even close to the degree that I struggle with.
And at the same time, because of my autism, I also have, as much as it causes me frictions with especially sensory environment, et cetera, et cetera, it also gives me a whole additional density of experience and pleasure, right? When it’s not about friction, when it’s about sort of satisfying sort of sensory input or sensory experience or informational exchange, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think we have to acknowledge that nobody is typical, right? Nobody is abled in the same way, and yet nobody is disabled. And yet all of us will, unless we die, a certain death [01:18:00] will become disabled. And I think, you know, through that it’s also kind of important to acknowledge as much as this. Quote unquote witch hunt.
That came about towards DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. I mean, it’s truly, again, exemplary of, the rising fascism. But some of the DEI efforts also have been perverted. They have become sort of very tokenized taking one person from a particular group and presenting them as somebody that can represent all of the group ticking off
SHEFFIELD: Or taking a economically highly privileged one and saying that they not only are representing of their entire group, which they may not have much of anything in common with, but also that their struggles are somehow even more challenging than somebody else from another group who, grew up with their parents murdered and, lived in foster system for their [01:19:00] whole childhood.
BIELSKYTE: Well, I think, privilege is quite correlated with gender, skin tone, ability, social group, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s not universally correlated. So, I mean, I’ve refrained privilege as something that removes you from the consequences of your actions, and it does not necessarily make you bad.
However, the more you are removed from the consequences of your actions, the less you are able to be informed. In making the best choices that would lead to those consequences. So, you know, the how I’m trying to reframe inclusion right now, this sort of design with not for and the leadership of the most impacted that it’s simply results in better product, better policy, better experience, better platform, better story.
If you do it from the perspective or engage profound with a perspective of the [01:20:00] people that have a visceral understanding of the potential consequences of whatever thing that gets to be proposition, especially whatever innovation that gets proposition, then you ultimately end up designing, writing, doing manufacturing, building better.
And when you do it that way, when you proposition that way, not as some kind of charity work that you have to do to these people that you don’t even want to have any connection with, and you say, well this is actually a smart methodology. This is a way to do things that will actually end up benefiting most of us.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And but you know what you were saying though, it is, it, is also the case that for most, like, businesses having inclusive design and trying to make a future that includes everybody, that’s actually better for your bottom line. Because [01:21:00] there, why would you make products for people who are not interested in them?
They’re not gonna buy it.
BIELSKYTE: Especially, it’s better for your bottom line over the long term, right? and I think this is the biggest challenge, right? Is, things that can be good for you for your immediate quality returns. Quarterly returns is what can undermine your business or your nation state over the long term. And it’s, if you, not, if you are not planning to live for just another three months.
And if you care at all also about the impact, reputation, and legacy, you have to think beyond the quarterly returns. And long-term resiliency is only built by actually, again, engaging with your real consumers, with your real citizens, with the real science, with the real data, rather than just trying to shape real reality to the ideology that seems more convenient for [01:22:00] you.
And again, we come back to this thing of needing to step out of your comfort zone. But how do we frame that? Do we frame that as some kind of charity chore, something that, that seems dreary and undesirable? Or do we find a way to reframe it in such a way that it’s about expanding your horizons, learning new things, discovering something that could actually make you a more interesting, more complete more wholesome as a person.
And so I think, that narrative needs to change towards curiosity and inspiration. I just keep getting back to that all the time, without inviting our curiosity, by just being preachy, by just being didactic, we are not gonna achieve the change that we need.
What many left-of-center people miss about generative AI
SHEFFIELD: And unfortunately, one area where that preachiness is very common is on the subject of artificial intelligence or ai. Like, it seems to me that the [01:23:00] broader left has effectively seeded an entire emergent technology to the far right.
And this is basically the equivalent of, in the early to mid nineties, everybody on the center left saying, oh, well, we don’t care about the internet. This internet is bad. It’s run by some bad guys. ‘cause hey, mark Andreessen was there in those early days. So that means you can’t use the internet, right?
Because Marc Andreessen in was the co-creator of the Netscape browser, the first browser that most people ever saw. And the, reality is though, that technology, of course it can be bad, and of course there can be terrible people that are the leaders of various corporations or whatever, but technology by and large is neutral.
It’s what you make of it. And there is a lot of people out there who can’t afford to get, go to school, and get a degree in [01:24:00] something. Or they live in a, in an area where there aren’t any universities to go to. Or, and, and so for them is, would you rather them have nothing in terms of getting information about improving their lives?
Would you rather somebody not have a website or launch a small business because they can’t afford to pay a programmer? Which, so you would rather not have the carpenter have something, for himself or somebody living in, Egypt or something and, she has an idea for an app, but she doesn’t know any programmers.
She’s not a programmer, but she can so, vibe code her way into it. Why would you take that away from her? Why would you tell her not to use it? I would say that what we really need to have is a full involvement and engagement with this issue. And encouraging government participation and government bringing accountability because.
The, these people like Elon Musk and [01:25:00] Peter Thiel, I mean, they want to create feudalism with this. And if we completely see the topic to them, their chances of doing that become a lot higher, in my opinion.
BIELSKYTE: Speaking about vibe coding, I was just reading Gary Marcus’s article on de vibing and how there’s gonna be a whole interest industry emergent around di vibing because it represents so many security risks. So I mean, I personally
SHEFFIELD: not perfect.
BIELSKYTE: I personally, don’t believe that technology is neutral.
However, different technological tools have different specific tools. Specific platforms have different capacities for destructiveness or constructiveness, right? And something I think the, very big thing that gets forgotten all the time especially in sort of more progressive technology conversations, is how [01:26:00] something that is really bad at its constructive capacity can still be really potent in it.
Destructive capacity. This is where a lot of, on one side we had a lot of delusional discourse about crypto, where, you know, people were preaching it’s gonna save the, solve the financial pose of the global south, which was, you know, just utterly ridiculous. And on the other side, we had a bunch of people saying that this thing is entirely useless, but it is not right.
Crypto was created to commit crimes, human arms, drugs, trafficking, child pornography, ransomware. These are real utilities. And fundamentally, this is what powers this technology. This is what makes this technology useful. The outcome of it is profoundly destructive yet. It’s not useless, it is useful, right?
So in this case, it’s very non neutral. [01:27:00] Now you have other platforms that tend to be sort of more positive, and that’s why I keep arguing for innovation that is powered not just by military funding and military research, but for, but by accessibility and invisible disability, especially inclusion, it ends up resulting actually in all disability inclusion.
It’s just that invisible disabilities tend to be more overlooked than wheelchair access, blindness and deafness. and those technologies tend to have much more of that constructive positive capacity. So their, neutrality leans towards sort of more positivity. But even with military technology, you know, it’s very easy to say that we should not engage with any sort of military technology development until your country gets bombed, until your country gets invaded.
This is reality for a lot of people. For example, the Baltics. Right. There was very little military technology being developed in the Baltics until Russia invaded Ukraine. And right now [01:28:00] a lot of the tech industry has pivoted towards military tech because it’s a matter of survival. So, you know, even something that is not neutral, that is actually with, this very high destructive capacity as technology sometimes is quite necessary.
You know, I almost think this kind of parallel of the all sort of like anti GMO discourse when it became the sort of this grand conspiracy and sort of anything. GMO is the devil, whereas the reality, if we want to have sustainable, let own regenerative food systems, it’s gonna be all hands on deck, right?
We’ll need to bring back indigenous crops. We’re gonna need permaculture, we’re gonna need to be composting at scale, even within our cities. And we will need tons of genetic engineering, tons of biotech, new sort of yeast, fungi, algae based materials that will be again, [01:29:00] developed through the bleeding edge of, the sort of, uh, highly demonized GMO technologies.
And yet the future will have to contain all of that. If we want to have regenerative food systems, it will not just happen by us magically returning to our indigenous path. For the few of us that even have it right, because of the reality of this global geopolitical economic setting that we cannot escape.
There’s no island far enough, there’s no bunker safe enough, right? To escape from the broader realities of the world. And I really think with ai, it’s something very similar. I remember getting on this, uh, big spat. I think it was still on Twitter before maybe it was even X or maybe just after it turned x with, you know, some reputable professor that was saying that, you know, we should out try ban any students using gen AI anywhere.
And my response to that was [01:30:00] that is absolutely wishful thinking, especially, somebody like that, speaking from elite institution in a global north, teaching students that had the resources, even if those resources came in a form of a loan to study in such an elite institution, the reality for most people in the global south is that you have to learn whatever tools available to you in order to succeed.
This is very similar and you know, a lot of my colleagues and peers that I so deeply admire whose books I read and was shaped and inspired by, and again, with the advent of ai, some of the discourse. Came as so profoundly privileged, right? With a tenured professorship, having written a few famous books that resulted in really high speaking fees, you are set for life.
It’s very easy for you to tell somebody [01:31:00] here in South Africa that don’t go and work for Google because Google is the devil, right? People need to pay bills, people need to feed their children. And again, Google should not be the only option, should not be the only answer, right? How we need to be realistic.
And as I said before, we should not just accept these tools that are being given to us, because that’s passive. that’s, actually negative, right? We should see, well, what is this emergent technology? What is happening in the world right now? And how can we do our utmost to shape it to be less extractive, less destructive, more constructive, more regenerative, and it’s gonna have to be all hands on deck situation, or we are not gonna come out of it, right?
So we cannot see that space. And yet we should not just ignorantly embrace.
Embodiment in AI and machine learning
SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. [01:32:00] Yeah. And there’s a, there’s an interesting development though in the field of ai that the industry is realizing that embodiment matters. Like, that’s the other fascinating thing about all of this. So, yeah, and Laun, who is used to be the head of AI over at Meta, he quit the company because Mark Zuckerberg believes that intelligence is just disembodied abstraction.
And he said, no, that’s wrong. Intelligence comes from the body and ideas are grounded in experience. And so he quit and he just raised a billion dollars to start a company called a MI Labs headquartered in Paris. So, like, that’s a, it’s a positive development and it’s a, validation of the idea that embodiment matters because, if there is gonna be some sort of intelligent or [01:33:00] intentional computing, that is how it will happen.
It comes from the body because our minds. Or what our bodies do.
BIELSKYTE: I mean, what’s so interesting, right, is that LeCun used to get into these serious bat with. Spats with Gary Marcus saying that Gary Marcus was wrong and he was right, and ultimately what he’s doing now and, what he’s working towards and all sort of world model stuff and integration of neural networks and symbolic ai sort of rule-based systems.
Yet finding a way to still reserve, quote unquote, it’s not really creativity, but, ways to come up with novel solutions. So I mean, I, find it really interesting, right, when you’ve been long enough in the industry, how people oftentimes deny the fallibility of the approach as long as convenient to them and, then also dip out of it to do this other thing that [01:34:00] more critical voices have been pointing towards.
I mean, I’ve experienced so much of that myself. And again, being a woman, a very male dominated field, like every man and his brother and his dog, tries to sort of explain how they know better my new methodology to, to respond to that. I try not to engage in the argument. I say, okay, how much money are you willing to bet on it?
‘cause I’m willing to put a lot of money on this and. Really funny, especially when you throw like a pretty significant amount, all of a sudden they’re like, huh, I wouldn’t think that you would put so much on it. ‘Cause it’s not, we’re not betting out of a hundred dollars. Right? So it’s really interesting, right, how people kind of move, promote a very sort of fallible idea until it becomes too unconvenient.
And yet at the same time, when they move away from that erroneous idea, I think it’s important to allow for [01:35:00] some of these off ramps because if they just keep sticking to it because there’s nothing else, then that’s how we end up, right? with a black pill ideology and sort of black pill actions and sort of outright destruction.
So, and to be honest, again, I’m not in Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, but I, do have had friends that were on a science advisory board of Chan Zuckerberg Foundation and through that for a fact, I do know that he seems to understand the biological complex and biological reality of things.
He has engaged with enough top neuroscientists and top researchers in biomedical field, mostly I imagine through sort of, maybe Priscilla chance push. But. I
SHEFFIELD: So he should know better, but.
BIELSKYTE: I, think he does know better. I think it’s just what is convenient for the business right now. I would [01:36:00] argue that somebody like Elon Musk maybe does not know better because he’s really stuck in his sort of juvenile fantasy that, is, kind of at the root of, even like throwing it back to 1950 fours, Vernon Brown’s, Mars products where, you know,
SHEFFIELD: Or sees himself, like he’s very big on reality is a
BIELSKYTE: a
SHEFFIELD: Right. and like, that’s just garbage.
BIELSKYTE: the, real issue, right, is that it’s not that Elon thinks that reality is a simulation.
Everything is simulation. He believes all of us are a simulation. He’s the only one that is real, that is the greatest danger.
SHEFFIELD: that’s, that is the implication of that. Yeah.
Radical tenderness and the beautiful possible
SHEFFIELD: You have this idea that you’ve talked about of radical tenderness. And I think that’s right because ultimately because of this despair, because of this tragic morality of, reaction is that is just so weighting down on everyone all the time, whether it’s in politics, [01:37:00] whether it’s in fiction, whether it’s in, whatever TV show you’re watching on YouTube. The idea of having tenderness and being against this irony poisoning. That’s something a lot of people want, even if they don’t realize it yet, but when they see it, they love it.
BIELSKYTE: A hundred percent. Again, when people ask me if, if I’m not hopeless about the future, how do I sustain my optimism? You know, I actually say I’m, not optimistic, I’m realistic, but every morning I wake up and I choose to live. So I have to, find reasons for it.
But I guess my biggest influence, especially over the last few years has been my best friend my late best friend or asja. She just passed away from cancer after five years [01:38:00] of going through multiple lines of treatment. She got diagnosed early stage. She got diagnosed, early in, in early stage in the pandemic, but with, stage four cancer.
Was given just a couple of months to live. And yet she, of course, she, how do you not get sent to despair? How do you, not completely collapse in a face of news like that? And yet she sought out other opinions and she sought out the best available treatment and she was an amazing person.
The entire life. We’ve been friends, for 26 years, and we have never had a fight, even if we had disagreements. But somehow I never, ever doubted that she loved me or that I loved her. And she wasn’t just like that with me. she was like that in her community. And so when this happened to her, [01:39:00] people really showed up.
And when she needed also to create boundaries so people show up in a way that she really needs, not just that they want because sometimes, you know, people project their fears and their desires again on the person that is potentially dying. She also created those boundaries. So it was an incredible journey, right, of, seeking out the best available science, really thinking what kind of brought her to that moment, addressing the, stress and maybe the sleeplessness and working too much.
And also looking through those deeper layers, right? of, of, trauma, of pain, of sort of emotional stuff. Because anytime you want to heal you, you have to think of all of that, right? You have to think of that very hard data. You have to think of sort of your kind of habits and lifestyles, et cetera, et cetera.
And you have to think of that less [01:40:00] graspable sort of spiritual, emotional narrative stuff. And so she did all of that. And one of the most vivid, one of the most memorable moments was when her and her, partner, husband bought a house in the countryside in Lithuania, and she was planting fruit trees, not just flowers or some salad or something that could be immediately harvested, but fruit trees, right.
Something for the future. Anybody observing that would have thought that, that’s crazy. Why would she ever bother to do that? Why actually would her partner decide to marry her halfway through the treatment? And yet she did. And yet he did. And yet we all did. And even after, with all of that, and even after she had this sort of amazing recovery, no cancer [01:41:00] detected just about a year ago in December, the cancer came back and it came back incredibly suddenly and all of us lost her.
And it feels so unjust and so violent and I mean, the earth kind of really. I was in Japan when I received that news and scrambled to try and get the flights. And by the time by the time I actually was looking to the flights, I wasn’t even able to reach her before the passing. You know, and it makes no sense, this level of injustice, this level of loss of somebody so luminous, so incredible, so inspiring.
feels like, I mean, truly you. If there was God then, really, uh, he or she, they do not exist. But I think of imprint, I think of how I would not exist without her. My work wouldn’t be like that. And there’s, and it’s not just me, it’s, I think tens if not hundreds of [01:42:00] people that were inspired by all that she was through her life and how all of us were changed for the better.
And I think one could only wish to have such an extraordinary impact with your life. And I think that’s kind of what making the future is. You know, none of us is here permanently, right? And sometimes it’s just us opening the door so that others could walk through them. Sometimes it’s, just a conversation that will open somebody’s imagination.
Sometimes it’s just a gesture that will make something seem more possible. Sometimes it’s just that spark of curiosity. And, as painful as, this moment and period of grief is I think of how much of a brighter future she created with her presence and just how much she fought. Through all of the side effects.
And if you know [01:43:00] anything about chemo and you know how dire those side effects can be, and yet how much she clung to life, how much she appreciated right before that, you know, she was somebody very healthy, very athletic. She was a mountaineer, she was going across these glaciers, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, you know, she would still go to the mountains, but she was not able to do climbing or any of that kind of danceful stuff at most that she could do on some of the days is take the elevator and go for a walk.
And we had conversations about it and she said, you know, I was going from peak to peak and it was hard for me to notice really what is that experience of being on the mountain is when I was chasing those peaks, when I was chasing those achievements. And it’s only when I was not able of doing that anymore that I got to appreciate the shadows in a valley that I got to really breathe it in and really feel it.[01:44:00]
And unfortunately, I feel most of us realize just how much we have in terms of access, community privilege, possibility, grace from others. We only realize when it’s too late. And so we should do that before it’s too late. And we should kind of think of journeys like that and, and, live up. To the standard that the best of us sets for us and not, desperate.
That nothing is forever and not desperate, that we can’t hold on onto everything that we have right now and really think, well, what is beyond just peak to peak? What is beyond just those easy successes, where is that moment of joy? And again, I come back even to that example of the Olympics and Elisa Lu and the toxicity of athletics as we have known before, and how it [01:45:00] would break down people’s bodies, in pursuit of those gold medals.
Because that’s the only thing that would make athletes life valuable. And how this particular gold medalist really kind of divided everybody’s expectation by taking a break, taking her time away and coming back to that sport in such a way that she could do it with her whole self and find joy even in the falling, even in the difficulty, even when she was stepping on that largest stage in the world, that fundamentally it was about giving her all and getting opportunity of that stage and that performance.
And in a way, gold medal or not, that’s just the side effect. And I think as humanity, this is kind of what we need right now, a little bit, right? Just do the best that we can right now without being too [01:46:00] concerned if, any of this stuff is forever.
SHEFFIELD: then
that’s enough. Then that’s enough. Yeah. I mean it’s, ultimately. I’m, starting to come to the idea of saying, that the process is its own reward and, we should aspire to laugh easily, think clearly, and love freely.
BIELSKYTE: and recognize that we need each other.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
BIELSKYTE: Like as much as it’s so hard to show our vulnerability as much as so hard to extend ourselves and say that I need help, I need support. For me, that’s, been the biggest gift from being in disability community. Engaging with that conversation is really understanding that what’s really aspirational is not independence.
It’s interdependence. [01:47:00] It’s showing up for each other, not just how we want to show up, but how others need, and allowing ourselves to show others what we actually need. And it’s only together that will succeed in changing anything. There’s gonna be no magical savior that will step in and, change the day.
It’s gonna have to be us. And that will allow us to have those uncomfortable challenging conversations, not just because we have to, but because they are interesting, they’re valuable, and they will be the foundation of whatever new things that we’ll get to create together.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Well, so for people who want to support or see what you are up to, Monika what’s your advice for them?
BIELSKYTE: My website is Monika Futures Design. Look me up there across all social [01:48:00] media and I’ve been working to develop Protopia Futures Design Framework, embodied Futures and Story World Design. I am really good at all intellectual and creative things, and very bad at all practical skills in life.
So I’m very, keen to team up, collaborate, support, and be supported in the, aspects that are more challenging for all of us. So reach out. And definitely, I’m always keen to hear people’s feedback and hear people’s insights because that’s the goal. Learning rather than being right.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Sounds good. All right, well, this has been a a great conversation and thank you for being here.
BIELSKYTE: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you’re a page subscribing number, you [01:49:00] have unlimited access to the archives.
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