Forget Black Mirror, it's time for a Bright White Mirror
a meme contest with a hopeful twist
Sick of endless dystopian sci-fi, and depressing, fatalistic comedy? Me too.
Yes, comedy and cynicism tend to go hand in hand. And internet memes are the main comedic currency of our times. That said, our future is far from certain. Which means it needs us, the creators of it, to dream big, and dream well. Which is hard for us to do when the TV & movie industries are hellbent on producing endless dystopian, apocalyptic fiction. If the world only imagines and consumes that kind of content, its far more likely to end up there.
So we need more inspirational art, stat.
Fortunately the folks at Foresight Institute just ran a $10,000 contest encouraging people to make inspiring, uplifting, and forward-looking memes and short-form media. They also asked me to be one of the judges, and the results just got published.
Here are some of my favourites:
“P(Bloom)” by @10BillionFuture
This from Anders Sandberg
This one by Su Hyeong Lee legit made me lol:
This tight depiction of the power of hyperstition by MahmoudDAO
And drumroll…. the winner is:
“Voices from 2099” by JellyFishDao.
Watch it. It’s good stuff.
Got an idea for your own positive, win-winny, vision of the future?
Drop a link to it in the comments, and if I like it, I’ll amplify!
Liv
The hyperstition framing is probaly the most interesting angle here. If we're constantly consuming dystopia we're essentially collective training ourselves to expect the worst outcomes. What I've noticed working in tech is how much easier it is to pitch a defensive product (protecting against some threat) than an aspirational one. The incentives are twisted toward catastrophism becuase fear sells faster than hope. The Foresight contest flips that script but I wonder if there's a middle path too, like solarpunk's version of pragmatic optimism whre the future still has problems but we've actualy built systems to deal with them instead of just descending into chaos.
This isn't mine but I think it fits the goal of this contest: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vp7xoPeWzEw