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
This isn't mine but I think it fits the goal of this contest: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vp7xoPeWzEw
Something for this list: mycopunk _about mycomimetic architecture and how a structural upgrade of urban environments could repattern global society.
Is speculative fiction and synthetic all the way down. I love the weirdness of this new brush, some call it slop but for me its a brush and it paints little worlds. Each picture a slice of an imaginary universe, its very interresting to dicover these places from an artistic perspective because they have story too, one can link text with image generation and things become very magical at times. And trippy. Feels very new frontier - because of that i do not mind these artefacts that sometimes distract the eye and break the illusion. The trick is to not come too close in full-screen, give it a little distance or mobile device. Ones eyes will do the upscaling.
Some whitecoat magic* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdsnF46S0Lo