Who will Design the future?
By: Marion Poggioli
Tags: Elon Musk, Speculative Design, Ecology, Planet Centric Design, Design

Early May, in the news, they were talking about Elon Musk’s interview in The Joe Rogan Experience.

In this interview Elon Musk was predicting that in around 10 years from now, humans won’t be talking anymore.

They will be using brain implants that will allow the back and forth transfer of data between them without having to actually speak.

I wonder if I would have been as choked to hear such information a few month back, before the Covid-19 pandemic.

But after having had the opportunity to pause for a few month, this interview gave me such a vision of horror and made me feel in danger. Out of control of the crazy machine that is going on in the race for more tech innovation and world colonisation. More growth at any cost, regardless of social norms and respect of the environment.

As a matter of fact, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, is already working on such a brain implant.

So far, it is branded as a medical research that could help treat brain diseases. They present it with the following words:

“Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) hold promise for the restoration of sensory and motor function and the treatment of neurological disorders”

Health is a safe door, a safe strategy, to be making humans accept such a technologies without freaking out. “This is meant to help our species”. The issue is that there seems to be very little attention applied to the matter of what collateral impact could emerge and if those are really what we want to leave to our children.

After spending 2 month of self isolation, reflexion and observation, I can see how there will be a huge gap drawing between people that realised with the crisis that they want to reach a more natural and respectful way of living, and people like Elon Musk.

People like Elon Musk, who on May 8th 2020, after seeing how much our society models are reaching a never-seen-before stretch point, how people are missing one another and have a natural instincts to reconnect to nature, still seems to be pursuing the race towards living in the Sci-fi books they were reading when they were 14 years old. Without thinking of what long term impact on Nature, Human beings and societies, such projects will have.

People like Elon Musk who doesn’t only have the dreams, but also the millions of dollars to make them come true.

So, I can’t help but thinking, who will design the future in the end?

Looking back at the western Evolution so far

To understand where we are, I find it necessary to understand where we are coming from.

The Cambridge dictionary gives the following definition for the word Evolution:

The way in which living things change and develop over millions of years

Potatoes Planters, Jean-François Millet

For centuries, people were living at the rhythm of natural light and seasons.

At the rhythm of Nature.

Before the industrial revolution, societies were composed of a majority of farmers that were going through hard labor to work their master’s land and feed their community.

At that time, class division was strong.

Most people didn’t know how to read and write. Education was a privilege.

Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des sciences des arts et des métiers, Diderot, D’Alembert

The XVIII century then arrived and saw the rise of the Age of Enlightenment all around Europe.

Philosophers influenced this period strongly with ideas of liberty, knowledge for all, fraternity and separation of church and state.

Books, like the French encyclopaedia, appeared (heavily illustrated because at that time, the majority of French people didn’t know how to read), bringing a strong symbol of a model of liberty of thinking.

XVIII century rooted an idea of equality, knowledge for all and freedom. Which eventually led to revolutions in some countries like France.

Les temps modernes, Charlie Chaplin

The industrial revolution that came one century later, continued to help human being free from hard labor, giving them more time to concentrate on technology, science and divertissement.

Industrial revolution also reduced class division.

Fast forward to nowadays time. We are the direct descendants of the industrial revolution.

Thanks to it, we live in a time where people have never been more connected to each others, where knowledge is democratised and accessible to the biggest majority, where comfort and food has entered most people’s home.

Where we live longer and healthier.

But that’s also a time of mass consumption and a time where we don’t remember the name of our trees or in what season our food grows.

Duane Hanson, Lady Market

A time where birds and insects, but also glaciers, are disappearing at a pace never reached before.

A time where, what we identify as comfort and hobbies, is putting us and our environment in danger.

We saw Nature as a domination for a long time, now we are almost completely disconnected from it.

We spent the last few decades being human centred.

We reversed the forces and dominated nature in a way that was never done before.

But there is one important thing we forgot along the name of our veggies: we forgot that humans are part of Nature.

We forgot that nature is a chain and humans are only another link in it.

And that our survival naturally depends on the health of our environment.

If you want to protect humans, you need to protect nature.

It is so elementary that I find it quite funny that this simple fact was never really thought through apparently.

How could this still not be the priority in 2020?

Meanwhile our extraordinary brain capacities allow us to invent things like brain implants that may allow us not to speak to each others in the future: yay.

It is strange for me to say, but Elon Musk with his interview, suddenly appeared to me as some creature from the past.

Someone considered as a forward thinker but that seems now completely outdated to me.

When I hear his projects I feel like I don’t want to live in his world and I wonder how I could avoid it.

His projects are only one exemple within million others currently being studied on the planet and considered as the future that would make sense to go towards. Making humans even more powerful, even more virtually connected to each other, but even less to their environment and to each others in real life.

Even more self-destructing.

Thankfully, if there is something we can take out of this crisis, it is how much power lies in the way we consume, or not consume. In the way we contribute or do not contribute.

The power of capitalism

Our current system is built only on capitalism and capitalism destroys nature and liberty to a certain extend because it makes us dependant.

It sets how happiness should look like by bombarding us with propaganda from the first day of our lives until the last.

It shows us images of what should be associated to a clean and perfect world where everyone is happy, travels the world, have kids, can speak to a machine to get the lights on, looks like 20 years old all their life and eats immaculate food regardless of the season or the origine.

Capitalism brings an illusion of comfort and provides soil for giving humans a purpose: getting more, going higher. Being first.

A never ending quest where the pilgrim feels surprised to be never finding the promised happiness. “It must be higher, it must be in another technology, another owning”.

The more we want to reach the ideal promised by capitalism, the less we reach it, because sadly, the way it is based currently, is on the concept of a never reachable horizon.

Capitalism advertises its model to the entire world. The entire world should benefit from the capitalist model because it is what makes humans happy and safe. Because it is an economical model that works.

Capitalism is the “evangelisation” of the modern times.

At the cost of our environment and liberty of thinking.

With the start of more flexible rules around the confinement, you can hear them all in adds, trying desperately to bring back the people to be consuming.

“Safely come to our insurance company: we wear masks and we have hydro-alcoholic gels”, “Travel restrictions over on June 15th, 1000 flights per day, flights from 39,99euros”. Just as if nothing happened and nothing was learned.

“Travel restrictions over on June 15th, 1000 flights per day, flights from 39,99euros” screen shot from an email from Ryanair, June 2020

But I want to believe this crisis awakened a lot of us from a life long coma, and the thin ray of light we see at the end of the tunnel starts to have more power than any bullshit from the old world we are still bombarded with.

A new age of enlightenment is starting and we not only want a change, we need it.

Taking action

I am writing you all of this behind my MacBook Pro, while listening to some Vivaldi’s 4 seasons through the Sonos in my living room connected to my Iphone XR.

I also find great comfort in technology.

And I can’t imagine being separated from it right now.

Don’t get me wrong: I measure how much of a privilege it is for me to be making such critics.

I measure that Capitalism also means countless jobs.

So how can we find the balance?

Knowing that many people around the world are envying the lifestyle we promote and that if the 7,7 billion people on the planet were living as we do and consume as we do, the human species would die in suffocation pretty fast because nature cannot provide this lifestyle for all.

I don’t have all the answers but there are some things I truly believe in:

1- We have to stop being selfish and make a weaning effort against the lobotomisation we were born into.

And it is NOT an easy thing.

It is an active and consuming thing to gain back awareness of our personal impact in today’s world.

We have to look at how we consume and what we consume carefully. It is clear that we cannot blindly trust any brands just because their marketing material looks nice.

We have to do our research. And it is tedious.

But it is necessary because the real power lies in our wallets and our freedom of thinking.

In a way, consumption is design: because the way we consume and what we consume, designs the society we leave in.

Buying local, traveling locally, looking into who innovates for Humans but towards the protection of Nature.

And buying from them as much as possible.

This will force industries to change their offers.

And if we cannot afford buying “clean”, we need to encourage each others to be creative.

“Only those who know how to use their hands are free. Only those are not depending on anyone”

2- As for Designers and other jobs in the tech industry, I think it is also our duty to be reflecting on who we are working for (essentially: who do we give power to with our time and skills).

And while doing the job, I think using time and tools like Speculative Design frameworks, to be able to envision as many potential impact as possible, should become mandatory on every single projects where it is needed.

We are in the best position to encourage change.

Without the big clients coming from unclean industries, we say we couldn’t stay afloat as consulting agencies, but without us, they couldn’t either, so we have the leverage to encourage a pivot.

The stakes are too important to be negligent on these questions.

Togetherness

Ecologists and anti-capitalists have been called naive for the past decades.

I believe the term applies now to pure capitalists.

And surfing on trends will not be enough for them to stay alive.

A deep change has to happen.

Coming out of this crisis, I think we will see an intense and high friction between two very different visions of what the future should look like.

My wish is that we encourage each others to wake up from our coma and understand how much power lies in every single one of our actions.

My wish is that we change the strategy from throwing anything and everything in the world just because we can, without taking the time to make sure deep studies and speculative design have been done and all potential impacts have been thought through.

My wish is that we create more collective reflexion about new and old technologies and that it doesn’t stay only the domain of tech workers.

My wish is that the world colonisation made by the Silicon Valley and resource heavy industries takes a step back, pause, rethink their businesses and include more diversity of thinking into their organisations.

My wish is that we stop being in silos and we co-design a better world, together.