Absolute junk
Notes on ghosts, military secrets and egg sandwiches
MuseumNext is on the horizon! The first in-person edition for a while. I’m leading two sessions.
Field Play - The city is your playground! A social session on parlour games, mind games and group play for delegates to meet each other, make mischief and discuss the application of game design in museums.
Empowered Teens - Unpacking the Critical Action Lab! A 90 minute workshop for museum professionals striving to support youth leaders in climate action. It’ll be packed with insights, activities and techniques for multigenerational co-design.
Free ticket!
Would you like a free ticket to MuseumNext? RRP £600!
Do you (or would you like to) work in the world of arts, culture, museums and heritage? Reply (or comment) and Thought Den will sponsor the worthiest candidate to join us in London on 11-13 June (full ticket for three-day conference provided).
Ghosts and military secrets
I’m enjoying Discord, which has a far less bumpy learning curve than all that Mastodon shenanigans.
Discord has a Ghost is one of the more original “experiences” to land on it, with a neat asynchronously distributed knowledge mechanic. That’s a fancy way of saying each person knows something slightly different. So a bit like Cluedo.
Discord is also a goldmine for investigative journalist teams like Bellingcat, who tracked the source of a recent leak of US military secrets. A high-ranking chap made a habit of leaving top secret documents on the breakfast table and his son traded them on Discord for bragging rights. The most delicious bit is they found the son because he was using his Father’s old Flickr handle. Thank you “Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat”.
Good things going bad
[The section where I pose questions / shake fist at world]
Glastonbury Tor. Setting sun to the West, rising moon to the East and nowhere better to be. You head up to soak it in. The tower is packed with unbearably bad djembe drummers. The views are blocked by Insta couples and TikTok punters. Some noise-cancelling headphones and an AI-powered smartphone can solve this but — where does that leave civilisation?
Lime bikes. Cycling is a good thing in my book. But Lime bikes are rage magnets. An entire street blocked by incoming riders for the Hackney Half. Wheelchairs blocked by a toppled island of green. I like the Lime CEO’s argument that endless streets filled with parked cars is the real problem. But how frustrating that a technology so positive can cause such negative feelings.
I suppose this is negativity bias. One bad apple can spoil the bunch. Or to use a more striking analogy: a drop of ice cream in some shit doesn’t change the appeal of said shit (but a drop of shit in your ice cream certainly swings things).
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Just Buy Nothing
Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology was binned from its supermarkets because, for every 1,000 transactions, 700 human lookups were required. This is the “miracle tech” designed to cut queues forever. But thousands of “mechanical turk” workers in India had to watch endless feeds of people grocery shopping like an inverted, torturous version of Supermarket Sweep.
I’m gunning for the small win here, but if AI can’t parse fifteen high def camera feeds to determine whether an egg sandwich exists or not, the apocalypse is some way off.
Technology has always been a lever to drive consumption and the shopping trolley is a prime example: carry more, buy more. They weren’t popular when launched in the 1930s, so the inventor-capitalist used the psychology of social proof to normalise their use. He paid employees to walk around his stores using them!
Letting tech reduce the friction is…a slippery slope?
It’s time for me to go. Where have you been for the last 2 months!?
Bye for now,
B.
PS - Visit a Heat Pump is one of those Nesta projects that might actually move the needle. And it’s quite cute!
The MuseumNext ticket has been assigned! I've been in touch with the lucky winner. Thanks for throwing your names in the hat :)
Such a nice post, as always ✨