New Inspiration - Monika Bielskyte

"People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better."

-Ray Bradbury

Today I've been to an inspirational, thought provoking talk by Monika Bielskyte at the Google Curiosity Rooms. The talk starred her in the role of a time traveller designing future worlds of diversity and wonder.

When I heard "future" in the sentence, I immediately assumed it would be focusing on advanced technology, isolated people with no or little emotions and homogenised people as seen in almost every sci fi movie which I'm not especially attracted to. However Monika's future world is against this one way of thinking. She talks about the possibilities and the beauty of diversity, culture, post race, post gender, etc. I haven't been to many tech talks but this was definitely a breakthrough for me as her point of view is combining technology with humanity rather than treating them separately.  She dreams of not just socially and environmentally, but also culturally engaged futures. Why don't we build the futures we see in the films more positively and show us having solved the current problems we have rather than fighting with aliens, she asks. 

Going back to the themes of science fiction, she made some important points regarding how Hollywood futures lack aspects such as diversity, environmental thinking, youth culture, intersectionality, creativity, spirituality, the evolution of economic/values and gender/family archetypes. In the dystopian futures, women are still represented as sexual objects, first world cities are entirely full of white people and you could only see heterosexual families whereas even in today's world we have gay families, 3 parent families, etc but the future we see in the movies or books still undermine the realities of today. In the new Blade Runner film, although there's a strong theme of Japanese and Korean typography and food, they are very few major Asian characters.

Monika travels around the world from Tokyo to the Amazon, the India/Pakistan border to Canada to look for inspirations of how those cultures envision the future. She's got one hell of style looking like someone who might have come from future. She's so articulate and approachable, smart and elegant both in her manners and sharing her thoughts. She insists that we should find and tweet and share the work of indigenous and under-represented communities and include them in our conversations. There were quite a few women asking her about how she managed to get over the challenges of gender bias, mansplaining, and all that feminist issues. She was very genuine and encouraging with her answers like she said there were times when she went back to her room and cried but how she didn't give up. She said "Don't be discouraged, even if you are the stupidest person in the room still be there." She doesn't especially like to be in the spotlight but she does it so that she can influence more young women to step up. 

It makes me a lot happier to see many more female names among the speakers and I'm also extra delighted that Google didn't make a big fuss about it which I believe is an indication of people normalizing female speakers in the topics which were once considered male dominated.

Some more quotes from the talk:

"Ayahuasca is the original VR" 

"Unless they are curious, people are blind to opportunities"

"There are no answers, only choices."

"Fuck Technofetishism."