VR represents a shift from telling stories to building story worlds that people experience and interact with. There is a process of world building and experiential design that first creates the conditions of the environment, and then the full context of this world helps to drive the narrative design of the stories that can be told in this world. This process of building futuristic, sci-fi worlds requires a holistic understanding the co-evolution of technology and culture that takes a lot of imagination to visualize solutions to intractable problems embedded within the fabric of this new world, and then to future imagine what new and even more complicated problems will have been created. Monika Bielskyte of All Future Everything is a digital nomad who travels the world searching for the latest technological and cultural innovations so that she can build these sci-fi worlds imagining the cultural and technological context of the near-future for the entertainment industry, technology companies, and even urban planners and politicians from governments and physical cities.
Bielskyte is critical of a lot of the status quo of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters who tend to be self-referential to other movies and media rather than curating the latest innovations in tech and culture that is already happening around the world at small scales. She has a vision of the future culture that is post-race, post-gender, post-nationalities, but also has more holistic representations of diversity, a regenerative relationship with the environment, robust expressions of cultural creativity and hacking reality, an accurate representation of youth culture and fashion, moving beyond mid-20th century gender, family, and sexuality stereotypes, and imagining how the values of our culture can evolve beyond passive consumption to participatory experiences with spatial computing. A lot of the existing sci-fi worlds builders do have not thought about all of these dimensions of potential future iterations of culture, but rather resort to the lowest-common denominator, dystopic visions of ecological disaster and tyrannical thought control.
Technology and culture are in a continual process of evolution, and as a world builder Bielskyte finds an endless stream of inspiration and innovation that is happening in the real world. She cites artists like Yijala Yala, FKA Twigs, Sevdaliza, Solange, Alma Harel, and M.I.A. as being more progressive or innovative than representions of the future culture in blockbuster sci-fi films like Blade Runner 2049. Part of being a sci-fi world builder means curating innovative technologies or ideas that are happening at small scales, and then projecting out the implications of these cultural currents at larger scales.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I caught up with Bielskyte after she posted a tweet storm critiquing the regressive and dystopic future depicted in Blade Runner 2049. We talked about her work and process of designing the future, and the ethical responsibilities of world builders for putting awe-inspiring representations of the future into the world.
She notes the cultural differences of how people from the West tend to think individualistically about the future, and how the hero’s journey, monomyth narrative design tends to reflect a similar arc of the expression of individual agency. But part of the unique affordance of VR is that it can start to explore at the complex interconnected aspects of our reality through the process of sci-fi world building, and start to put more of an emphasis on the collective journey of the community coming together to solve these huge problems. She sees VR as a “possibility space” that can be used to actually design the futures that we want to live into.
THIS! 👇
Sci-fi creators lack the imagination to envision a future where we're in harmony w the earth, power, priviledge, money, & each other https://t.co/kbZpM3gqtS— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) October 31, 2017
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So today I talked to a professional world builder, somebody who designs futures, tries to imagine what is going to be happening, both in terms of the technology and the culture and our relationship to the environment, geopolitical context, and All of these things trying to project out into the future and creates these imaginal worlds that then help design these narratives that may happen either in the context of a film and a movie or within a technology company or a city who is trying to figure out how to do urban planning and design infrastructure for the future. So, Monica Bilaskita of All Futures Everything is a digital nomad. She travels around the world talking to people from all sorts of different backgrounds and cultures and what is kind of the cutting edge that she sees in terms of culture and technology and innovation. And then she brings that all together into these worlds that she creates. So I reached out to Monica after she had a tweet storm talking about some of her critiques and criticisms of Blade Runner. She is in the business of designing worlds and she just thought that a lot of the inspiration for Blade Runner was kind of dark and depressing and not really taking the cutting edge of what's even possible with some of the things that she's seeing in the world right now. So we're going to be talking about her vision of the future and some of the key components that she sees is lacking in the general entertainment and science fiction industry. And as people who are creating virtual reality, I'm sure a lot of my listeners are in the process of creating worlds, then it's a lot about creating these worlds of possibilities that are trying to inspire us and fill us with wonder and awe of what is possible, rather than to leave us in a place of an emotional void of being completely dark and depressed about kind of replicating what is already happening right now and just sort of extrapolating that out into the future as if nothing's ever going to change or evolve. So, that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So, this interview with Monika happened on Tuesday, October 31st, 2017 over Skype. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:22.923] Monika Bielskyte: Yeah, hi. So, I'm Monika Bielskite from AFE, which stands for All Future Everything. which is a sort of a creative brain trust without borders. And what we do is we design futures. We sort of dream out loud what possible futures could be. And I do that with my founding partner, Howard Goldcrand, and a lot of pretty amazing collaborators scattered around the world that we bring on different projects. And the way I design futures aren't just for the entertainment industry. It started off very much with entertainment industry and brands when I was younger, and then spread out to working with tech companies. And as of recently, also real cities, governments, countries. The reason how it sort of shifted is, I guess, I only design worlds for sci-fi, so I only work on future designs, as the company clearly states, you know, I'll feature everything. And it's very rooted in reality, in the real world. So in order to create a fictional world, I'll go and talk with the leading scientists, technologists, innovators, as well as sort of creative thinkers, makers, doers, imagineers, and then bring whatever I find most interesting in the real world into this fictional world to make it compelling. And I guess that practice somehow became appealing also for the tech companies, where I intervene to help them imagine geopolitical, sociocultural context in which they're technologies, products, platforms would be set in. I help them to imagine they're, you know, not future users, but really future people that they will be engaging with. And then that trickled down all the way to working with real physical places, again, cities, governments, countries, who realize that it's very hard to help, I guess, the citizens understand what is the larger meaning of certain policies or certain infrastructures that are being designed, unless they can communicate what is the future to which they're building. So that is what I do. I dream out loud what futures could be.
[00:04:33.582] Kent Bye: Nice. So it sounds like that you've been involved in this world building as a practice, both for film and entertainment. And I'm just wondering how virtual reality started to come into the scene.
[00:04:45.665] Monika Bielskyte: The way VR has entered my life, was I was doing innovation for Ridley Scott Associates. And Oculus was being just sold at that time and they were just starting to work on a Martian. And I was like, oh my God, we got to do this for the Martian. So we brought, you know, the first DK1 to the office with the crappiest demos, rollercoaster, whatever, but also eight eyes, early volumetric capture, because I thought it'd be awesome to capture some of that in Jordan. And Ridley had no curiosity to really try it out. So I got Jake and some of the key producers to try it. And I was like, we should totally think about it right now before we even think about the shooting. And basically, they were not particularly curious. But for me, after the first couple of seconds, I was like, this is exactly what I always wanted. My background is creative. I started as a photographer artist being really young. I started going to semi-war zones, post-disaster zones, like really dangerous areas, you know, from borders between India and Pakistan to the north in Cambodia, we're still at Khmer Rouge, you know, ended up at a gunpoint, to sort of sneaking into the Chinese earthquake area in Sichuan. Because I was really curious, I kind of really wanted to understand how the world was built, this real world. And when I was 21, I started a magazine and a creative agency, which very much was a unique world of its own. It was a magazine and creative agency and creative space in Paris. And we had crafted a sort of a world that was very distinct, including, you know, everybody who worked in a company were like characters that were dressed in a particular way and our events were very particular. So I kind of was building from my individual world to then my project became the world. So then when I departed the company, I started because some pretty known Hollywood people knew my magazine with fans of it, you know, I got opportunities really fast to come in and give some talks or do some consultancy. I started doing worlds for entertainment industry. And then within that very same year, when I just started off in Hollywood, VR started happening. And from the first time I saw the shittiest crappiest demo, I was like, this is exactly what I always wanted. This is exactly from when I was a little girl and I was born in a small town in North Lithuania, which was definitely not a world I wanted to be in. I had to start crafting these fictional worlds in my head to just not go crazy in the bleakness in which I was raised to all the way through, you know, throughout kind of my career, all the way until starting to work with some of these most recognizable names in Hollywood. When I discovered VR, I was like, this is it. We will actually be able to create these incredible fictional worlds and get people walking through them and inspire them and change them. And sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. And that's how I saw VR in what it could become.
[00:07:48.255] Kent Bye: So it sounds like that this process of world building that you're going out and you're actually either working with storytellers or actual like architects and urban planners to be able to look at what is coming when it comes to these cultural shifts, the technological shifts. And so I know that you were just recently involved with some of these gatherings with lots of other mix of scientists and science fiction writers and so Maybe you could talk about some of the big themes that were discussed in terms of like when you think about designing the future, what are some of the biggest open problems and either technological solutions or cultural solutions that you see are in the process of shifting and then creating worlds that are able to really reflect that?
[00:08:32.144] Monika Bielskyte: Well, that's a very large question. I mean, my style is very, very distinct visually, but also conceptually and You know, I definitely do not come with a neutral political agenda. I actually have a very specific point of view and I do not work on projects. You know, they go against my moral values. Let's put it that way. So my agenda is very much, can we imagine the future that is post-gender, post-race and post-nation state? Which does not mean that it's a future where there should be no more gender, race or nation state. I try to work on the kind of futures or embedding values, you know, and again, it's not about all utopia, everything sort of vanilla perfect, not at all. For me, it's just how can we sneak in some of these positive values, even when we working in dystopian or heterotopian context. So the idea is, can we imagine a future where we not defined what we're born to, but rather what we chose to live by? Another two, I guess, really big things that I'm specifically engaged with is environmental thinking. So I often say that there's no way for us forward unless we can shift from being the sort of destructive force to sustainable civilization, to regenerative intelligence. You know, I've been living since the past five years as a digital nomad. I literally travel the world all the time. and not just the usual metropolises, you know, sort of San Francisco, London, Tokyo, whatnot, but also Saharan desert and the depths of Rajasthan and Amazon forest. So nature is incredibly important for me. It's been part of my life, you know, in terms of how I live, you know, I try to be as conscious of my environmental impact as I can possibly be. And so I try to bring in nature as a subject into as much of my work as possible. It's not necessarily easy because especially in an entertainment industry, everybody's so in love with these sort of urban super cyberpunk futures, which I've been really good at. So I have a lot of examples of my work that are very much in that sphere. So people keep wanting more of that stuff. But I'm kind of right now putting out as much as possible in the open that I want to work on green futures that are actually fucking badass and cool. and really interesting, you know, and not, again, sort of cheesy and not really believable. So that's one thing, kind of seeing how I can bring a natural environment into the conversation, how we can imagine futures where nature and urban fabric are connected, where technology looks into biomimicry for inspiration. So that's one thing. And then the second key thing is creativity. So most of my talks that I do, they are in intersection of creativity and innovation, technological innovation, humanitarian evolution, you know, an angle sort of where politics meets media meets tech, and how creativity is really the key to our future, and how future cities aren't just about being smart, they're also about being creative, how smart future plus creative future can equal regenerative future. And I specifically look into a lot of practices that are happening today, you know, from any kind of urban creative interventions to just all the ways that creativity has always been the binding tissue for our society, how play is not just a sort of idle activity, but the way we build bonds with each other. And so that's something that I want to bring into future narratives, which we have been seeing much at all, you know, that that's what struck me. One of the major things that I didn't see anybody call out with Blade Runner is that literally I mean, again, I might be wrong, but I cannot recall through the duration of the entire movie, anybody smiling or laughing at any point at all. Like there was not a single moment of light or joy. I mean, even when you're in a really fucked up situation, somehow, I mean, at least me in my life, I've been in some very tough situations, right? Like, again, being in disaster zones and war zones and, you know, being born in Soviet Union, and living through the fall of the wall and sort of total economic chaos that ensued that. But somehow through all of that, which was very much real life dystopian moments, there still was joy and tenderness and laughter and friendships and all that stuff. And I just don't see much of that in future designs. So, yeah, I guess that's what I'm kind of super, super engaged with.
[00:13:24.621] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's a lot of different threads there. And I think that, you know, since you had just seen Blade Runner just a day or two ago, it's fresh in your mind, the visions of the sci-fi worlds that are being created. And one of the things that you tweeted out was that storytellers need to finally start taking responsibility for the world they are inventing and did a long tweet storm expressing a lot of your frustrations because you're actually working as a world builder within the context of the entertainment industry and you have a lot of ideas in terms of how to integrate these ideas of biomimicry or looking to nature or creating futures where we're actually in harmony with nature or have a society where we're beyond a lot of the current limitations with issues around race or gender and nationalities and that these are kind of like systemic things that are built into the worlds that we're creating in these dystopian futures And that I see it as a bit of a lack of imagination to be able to see what solving some of these seemingly intractable problems might look like to then kind of go into the next levels of complexity. And so the big thing that I always hear back from storytellers is that, oh, well, you can't have like a story without conflict. And there's these certain amounts of like embedding the current assumptions of our current worlds into like the hyper extended dystopian logical extreme of living in a world with complete ecological disaster like in Blade Runner or complete like blindness towards race or gender or diversity like also in Blade Runner. So there is like these many threads that we're seeing in the entertainment industry but first of all like what does that world look like in terms of like is it possible to create a world that then is able to then still have that level of conflict that makes a story interesting because even though it's more utopian doesn't mean it's perfect there's always going to be conflict. But yeah, maybe you could just kind of take it from there in terms of some of your visions that you were seeing and your reaction to Blade Runner and also if it's even possible to create these more perfect worlds that kind of are solving a lot of these current level problems and then imagining the next level complexity once you solve that baseline.
[00:15:38.115] Monika Bielskyte: Yes, absolutely. So as you know, I feel very, very strongly about these particular issues. I'll start with a very interesting few paradoxes that I discovered in my travels. My travels in the Western world, but also across all other continents, except for Antarctica, where I haven't been yet. The interesting thing, so I started asking people a question, what is their dream? I'll meet a new person and within a very short amount of time, I'll just randomly ask them a question, what is your dream? The interesting thing that in the Western world, about eight to nine people out of 10 will automatically assume that when I ask, what is your dream? It is going to be their dream as something for themselves, as something, you know, their career dream or that they want love or something like that, right? They'll just automatically assume that it's something that is completely centered to them. Now, when I ask the same question, almost anywhere else, and in, again, very different contexts. I mean, most of the people I meet somehow are in innovation spheres, but they can be students in Bogota, Colombia, or tech developers in Bangalore, India, or producers in Rio de Janeiro, or directors in Bombay, or organizers of a festival in Marrakesh, Morocco. Eight to nine out of them will automatically say a dream that is something for the community, their country, nature, this world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So their dreams are not self-centered, but just automatically they will think of something bigger than themselves. Now, an interesting thing with that, what really struck me is the correlation between how people think about the future. Another little detail, what I found really, really funny is that more than a quarter of white straight men will answer that question to me in a Western world that, well, they kind of already achieved their dream. They don't really have a dream. They just kind of want more of what they have, or they basically answered that, you know, they're kind of totally fine. You know, they're not aiming for something much higher or bigger or whatever. You know, and I'm talking about some of the people probably in the innovation industry, right? People that are creating content or designing new technologies. In the beginning, it just shocked me. And I was like, really? You're not dreaming of achieving something bigger or changing something? And they're like, oh, yeah, maybe. But automatically, when I ask them, they would be like, no, I mean, I got it. So the interesting correlation with how people think about the future, what I realize is that when I ask people what they think about the future and what they expect of the future in all of these countries, Colombia very recently just managed to sign a peace treaty that closed decades of a semi-civil war situation. Mexico, we know, has kind of amazing things about it, but a ton of issues. Brazil is going through massive political crisis. Morocco is afraid to be the next Libya or Egypt. India, obviously massive issues of inequality and all that stuff. And yet people will be way more hopeful in how they talk about the future, what they expect from the future, and what kind of agency they feel over future. People in the West, however, and especially men, will inevitably tell me, again, not all of them, I'm generalizing, I'm sort of looking at sort of majority, what is the majority of people, right? The people that have some very depressive visions of the future also in Bombay, you know, and some very hopeful futures in San Francisco. but just sort of grand averages, right? A lot of men in the West will answer to me, well, environmental catastrophe is inevitable because there's no way that the nation states of the world could come together and unite somehow to fight this major issue that we know we're facing unless some really crazy threat happens, such as, you know, something like an alien invasion. I'm not talking about a regular movie fan. I'm talking about somebody high placed in tech, right? And I'm like, this is literally a narrative of some silly, silly film that you're recounting to me. Is this really what you think? And it's actually spontaneously what they do think unrehearsedly. And so what really struck me is that in the wealthiest nations of the world, people see the future in the most depressing colors. You know, in certain places of India or Brazil or Colombia, people are in some way living in a dystopian future today, you could say, at least, you know, from a material point of view. You know, I think humanly, many of them are much happier there. And however, there's this massive rift between how the futures are being seen in the West, how technology is being seen in the West, which is mostly a threat, whereas in places like India, it's mostly seen a solution as a tool, really, not as a gadget that will do things of its own, but really it's like, how can we use that to solve stuff that we need to solve? So this is a very interesting contrast, which I kind of want to start with. And so in the kind of futures that I think about and I design, as well as when I do criticize the kind of visions that I see being very predominant in the entertainment industry is also I bring back to this perspective. The richness is really in our plurality. It's not in the singularity. There's a very famous Audrey Tan quote, which says, and when we hear the singularity is near, let us remember the plurality is here. And so I have this amazing opportunity to be exposed to the cultural plurality of the world. to all these incredible people that are doing amazing things, inventing the future today, solving major problems, inspiring their populations. It's not just about practical things. It's also very much about how do we motivate the citizens of the countries of the world towards this sort of positive or inspiring vision. And so I see people everywhere doing that, and yet I do not see any of that being reflected in the sci-fi narratives. that we are being given. And so as well, in most of my talks, I will ask people, what is the kind of future that you want? And people will start telling me all the hopeful things that they would like from the future. And then I ask them, oh, and what is the kind of future you've been seeing as given to you by the kind of entertainment industry and media platforms that are not niche, but actually reach hundreds of millions or billions of people? And the answer usually always is that the futures they're given are completely in a total contrast to what actually they hope for or they would like to for themselves or their kids or future generations. So that's kind of to kick it off. Should I now go into Blade Runner?
[00:23:11.283] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe to kind of ground it down into like, what's happening in terms of themes, you know, since you, you know, are mostly talking about contemporary science fiction, you're seeing these different tropes and themes. What is it that you're seeing in films like Blade Runner and other sci fi pieces that are out there in terms of the vision that those storytellers are creating?
[00:23:34.374] Monika Bielskyte: Yeah. So I try to identify some key points where I feel the future vision goes toxic that we've been receiving. And for me, the first one is diversity. You know, there's a total lack of diversity in future visions that we're being given. And it's done in such a way that becomes incredibly toxic for a society because entire groups of people or cultures are completely underrepresented. You know, when is the last time that we saw an indigenous native person in any future scenario? What is the last time we saw Africa in future context, that not being District 9? Now, what is the last time we saw any kind of Middle Eastern or South American context, which was not about insulting depiction of it? What is the last time we even saw any movies not coming from Asia, not, you know, original Ghost in the Shell, et cetera, but actually, you know, something sort of international production that introduces Asian context without just fetishizing it. You know, in a similar way, of course, with characters. Somehow, in both Ghost in a Shell and Blade Runner and countless others, you know, all the people in key positions, almost all people in key positions, you know, the doctors and scientists and the bridge guy, whatever, they will all be white, right? And yet we find no problem finding, in a case, let's say, of Ghost in a Shell, you know, the thieves and yakuzas and somebody serving you noodles to the Asian people. We find no issues with bringing these people as disposable bodies or taking their culture and using them as backdrop for our cities and Blade Runner, right? We have writings in Korean, Japanese, Hindi, and yet we don't have any speaking roles given to people coming from those cultures. So it's a really bizarre kind of extension of a colonialist mentality. And the message that subliminally it sends is that California today, and I don't know exact statistics, about 40% people of color. And in the future depiction that we're seeing, everybody that is somehow properly visible ends up being white. So what happened to this entire other part of population, right? And then the few people, I mean, especially in Blade Runner, I was so surprised. I mean, as well as in Ghost in the Shell, how nobody thought that that was not OK. The few visible people of color that there were, their depictions are so racially insulting. You know, the guy who paints loves nails, you know, in a similar way, like the Yakuza characters in Ghost in the Shell. You know, the two African-American characters that featured in Blade Runner, they were devoid of any dignity and really directed in a very insulting way. And for me, it was weird that I was made feel uncomfortable and a lot of people in my community didn't. And of course, all my African-American friends found it beyond insulting. So how come that the largest percentage of the white population will not even notice that? And of course, in the African-American community, people would be like, the shit's fucked up. In a similar way, the responses that, of course, goes to the shell elicited from Asian-American community. So these are sort of major issues for me. Diversity being number one and a kind of message that it sends in how we see or do not see people coming from different cultural backgrounds being able to play an active role in the future world towards which we're going. Number two is environment. So we keep seeing these scenarios of either sort of post-apocalyptic future or completely sort of somehow nature or natural thinking, environmental thinking devoid futures. And both of them lead towards the very similar thinking that environmental catastrophe is inevitable and there's nothing really we can do about it, which very much, you know, what interest it serves. It serves the interests of fossil fuel industry. We don't even realize that. Right. But that's the kind of subliminal message it sends, that like, anyways, your own individual action doesn't really matter because shit's going to shit anyways. Right. And I think it's just really, really boring. I mean, we're right now even seeing in China, you know, they're building vertical forests and they're promising to reforest, you know, a significant part of the country. The solar power that is being installed there, you know, exceeds the solar power that has been installed to the U.S. to date. But so much environmental action is happening around the world. People actually are waking up to it. Yet we do not see any of that integrated in the future visions. And I think visually it'd just be so compelling. Not just imagine cities with like, you know, oh, cities would have more trees, but what could be those future plans? What could be these genetically engineered plans that could grow over the buildings? What could be those algae pools or aquaponic plans that could be suspended and really embedded and integrated in the urban fabric? I mean, that could actually be amazing visual world that we could be designing. So it's not just ideological opportunity. It's actually, you know, it could be really, really, really cool and attractive and interesting and fresh as a world to be designed. Similar thing with technology. We know that some of the most interesting tech is being developed at the edge and inspired by biomimicry. And yet none of that we see. I mean, you know, interstellar's rectangular robot is a prime example of that. It just doesn't make sense technologically. You know, everybody's right now working towards generative designs, generative designs of robots, generative designs of cities, you know, buildings that grow themselves, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We don't really see much of that at all in the future designs. So that's, I guess, point number two. Point number three and major, major point is creativity. I see everywhere around the world from Montreal to Casablanca to Rio de Janeiro to you know, Bombay, street art festivals, mural art festivals are popping everywhere. There's a ton of creativity happening in the city on a street. People are hacking the urban design, people are hacking sort of, you know, human experience in the cities as well as outside the cities in completely sort of distant countryside places by making creative intervention in them. Now, how can we imagine futuristic technology being used for that? You know, drone, bio arts, robotics used to hack the urban design, especially with creativity and art. You know, whenever we see holograms or projection mapping or whatever in these future scenarios, it's always ads. We never even saw a moment where actually, you know, maybe it's a city that is full of these sort of futuristic hologram ads. And then some, you know, hacker just hacks all of that and put some kind of creative overlay for that one night to send out some specific message to whatever corporation. That'd be fucking cool. Right? So that's a big point. The number four point is youth culture. I want to see kids and teenagers the way I see them already in the world today. I did this VR and world design workshop in Rio de Janeiro and my two best students were these two kids aged 14 and 15 who somehow found out about the workshop and wanted to come so much they convinced their dads they could tag along. And they had the most brilliant vision. When they presented, at the end, their own project, it was about how we could have an AR overlay over Rio de Janeiro that could show what the city would be if it was ruled by kids. You know? You know, what would be, you know, what would skate park look like? What the school would look like? How, like, this urban garden would be, you know? And who would be the kid characters that would be your guides through that city? And it was absolutely awesome. And these kids were like funky and smart. And I never see any of that in the future scenarios. Just right now in Bangalore, I was hanging out with a kid and he was just 13. We're talking environmental issues and Donald Trump with him. I mean, he was lit. I can't wait to see what he's going to be not only as an adult, but just a proper teenager. And I don't know why I don't see any of that. As well as kids having agency, kids having opinions, kids having that playfulness and joy about them, but also their style. There's an amazing project I invite everybody to check out, Yijala Yala, Big Heart Foundation, and maybe easier to Google if you check Neomad Comic, and it's my friend Sutu Eats Flies, Stuart Campbell, does an incredible project in Western Australia where they basically found a creative center in the aboriginal community where they're teaching kids animation, design, VR, et cetera. And so kids created a comic with his help, but really they created a comic of their own where they are the characters, you know, where the characters look very much like them, but even cooler versions. They morph into these characters. They created fictional names and then became their real names. And in that comic, They look into their own culture, they look into their own mythology, but what really happens is they go to space, they discover these other species, they go on all these magical, futuristic adventures. And I don't know why I don't see any of that in any of these Hollywood sci-fi worlds. The kids are always somehow tokens for the adult fantasy, and I find it incredibly boring and a missed opportunity. So there's that. And then my fifth key point is, of course, gender, family, sexuality stereotypes. And that was something that really bothered me in a major way in Blade Runner. I mean, the first scene when Joy shows up and she's essentially a 50s housewife with a pearl necklace. It was just so, as a woman, that just felt so insulting. That here we are in this future where, you know, we have this amazing holographic technology that can manifest anybody that this perfect woman could be. And it's a housewife from mid 20th century.
[00:34:13.661] Kent Bye: Yeah.
[00:34:15.702] Monika Bielskyte: Like I would have loved to see in there somebody like FK Twigs or Sevdaliza or any of a ton of incredible women that really could have incarnated something that is, you know, your ultimate fantasy woman that would have had an agency and discourse of her own and a style. You know, in a similar way, like the girls dancing can can in the casino or the ballerinas on a street. I mean, like, how lazy is that? Like, put me like Solange and her, you know, like, I don't know if you've seen Solange, you know, fairly recent music videos where she had, you know, all sort of, you know, African-American girl dancers just doing amazing stuff, amazingly choreographed or even, you know, things like You know, Alma Harrell's work, the music video she did for Sigur Rós and the kind of sort of scene and dance that happens there. And instead of that, you've put me some cheesy ballerinas. It's just so lazy and so boring to continue projecting these type of imagery of women into the future. And it's also a totally missed out marketing opportunity, because if you would have actually brought in somebody like FKA, you know, or any of a ton of, you know, MIA, for example, right. You know, MIA is your ultimate female fantasy. Like that would be an amazing marketing opportunity as well. You know, and instead of that, you have Ana de Armas playing something that's almost like a cliche of sort of Eastern European girl. I mean, it's just really, really insulting, I think, for any women, you know, who are fighting to be respected, who are trying to break down these gender stereotypes. And we keep being fed that kind of stuff in the future. It's lazy and it's lame and it's really insulting. So we have to change that. Family archetypes as well, you know, couple relationships. I mean, how many people today are future families that are, you know, bi, trans, co-parenting, three parent families, different type of couple relationships. None of that we really see in these future contexts. Why? Like we're still stuck in that conventional archetype of 20th century couple. It's just so boring and creates really, really boring narratives and visually is way less appealing than what it could be. So I think it'd be so much more interesting if we could challenge that. And then I guess the last point really comes down to thinking how we invent all these new technologies, yet we are completely stuck in the existing value systems, which is just not true. Everywhere around the world, the kids, sort of the younger people, teenagers that I speak with, most of them are not really interested by material possessions anymore. To most people, it's about access rather than ownership. To most people, the values and experience, et cetera, et cetera. And so what, you know, how could we extrapolate from that? How technological tools that we acquire actually change how we live, right? Because all of these things aren't too connected. So I like to think that, you know, You know, if this particular technology is invented, it changes how, let's say, we communicate with each other, and it changes how we have sex with each other, and it changes how we have relationships in the work context, et cetera, et cetera. You know, if we eat a certain food, then that food has produced some of that, you know, so all, like, everything needs to be interconnected in the cohesive world design, and I just don't see enough of that, and I feel that's a missed opportunity. And so how that ties in a pretty interesting way with virtual reality, I mean, we know that VR, AR, MR, XR, it's not a new 3D TV, right? It's not a new screen form. It's not a new entertainment screen. Ultimately what it is about, it is the paradigm shift in computation. We're going to be leaving these rectangular screens behind and stepping into computational space where the world becomes our desktop, right? So most of the content that we'll be consuming in the future will be spatialized. And it will be less about the narrative, less about storytelling, and much more about story world experience. So we'll be able to really bring people into these worlds. Today, people are just watching the worlds, following a narrative thread of a world. Or in the case of video game, sort of interactive with a possibility of narrative threads. But where we're going with AR, VR, MR, XR, is that we will really be walking through that world. you know, from a content frame to the content matrix that we move through and interact with, what does it mean, right? When we're going to be viscerally in that environment, how will it be affecting our psychology, our bodies? And so I think responsibility not just doubles, not just triples, but is exponentially multiplied. And there's an amazing opportunity to bring people into these possibility spaces that could expand the human potential and not just sort of physically or intellectually, but also creatively and emotionally. And so we could imagine designing the worlds that are not perfect, that are not your kind of a ideal dream space of humanity gone totally right, but somehow somewhat with an element, a glimmer of hope, a possibility, a problem solved, you know, and maybe we can tackle one problem at a time. Maybe it's a world that still deals with some kind of environmental catastrophe, but it's a world that has really come together where misogyny and racism does not exist, right? Or maybe it's a world where people became conscious of the environment and are striving to preserve the environment, but then there's some kind of issue with, you know, nuclear leak or some kind of catastrophe that then threatens the entire environment. And then how this particular problem would be tackled by society as a whole, not like one singular hero story. but how people will be coming together to solve this particular issue. So I think these things become that much more interesting when we're stepping into the VR space and when we'll be able to really explore these scenarios and environments in a way that is spatialized rather than screen-based, in a way that is visceral, in a way where we are starting to make these choices ourselves. So there's that.
[00:40:41.687] Kent Bye: Yeah. No, I get the sense that with the virtual reality technology, what I see it providing is this opportunity to be able to build these worlds out and to be embedded into these contexts where all these changes may have happened. we have an opportunity to see what that may actually feel like, and then maybe start to, from that point, extrapolate, you know, once some of these complex problems are solved, there's always going to be new, even more complex problems that are so difficult to imagine, but that if we could create these future possibilities, spaces within virtual reality, then we can start to then build these worlds, and then from there, imagine these new narratives and stories that are able to kind of go even beyond what we're at now. I think that Star Trek was able to do that to a certain extent, and that's where we get ideas that were inspiring a culture for so long, especially the holodeck is just something that has been a huge inspiration to people within the VR community, and that was in a context of a very optimistic vision of the future, and then starting to, you know, once conflict has been solved, then what are people going to do with their time? And this is one of the things that they saw was this imagining a future where people would want to immerse themselves into these worlds and become an active participant in those story worlds. And so what I see is that there's so many different things that you're elucidating here that range from everything from the culture, through our individual morality, through the collective level of consciousness and awareness that we have, Such that we're able to become more grounded, more connected to each other. We're able to evolve both how we relate to each other, but also how we have created an architected society that is able to actually be fair, equitable, just to everybody involved. And to create these inclusive and diverse environments and contexts. and that there's a whole other layer of the kind of underlying operating system of our culture, whether it's the economics or the politics and these technological infrastructure, our laws, all of these things that are also like, what's the evolution of politics? What's the evolution of laws? What's the evolution of the economies that have this ecosystem that's a balance between competition and cooperation? And so, to me, as I look at VR and look at where we're at now, I see the possibility that change happens so slowly within the real world, but yet at the same time we have all these emerging technologies of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, augmented reality, and the blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, and all these ways are providing new ways to create a fabric of trust that is able to perhaps innovate on the existing systems. as long as the same value systems are applied to that and we don't evolve our ethics and our morals to move beyond surveillance capitalism, then we're gonna just keep on creating these inequitable futures that are just step by step creating these dystopic futures. And so I'm curious from your perspective, what you think about that and then what type of power you see is in creating these imaginal worlds that actually solve a lot of these problems.
[00:43:52.524] Monika Bielskyte: So, I mean, what bothers me is when we keep looking at technology as this magic pill, right? VR is the ultimate empathy machine. And guess what? It's not. It's one of the most powerful tools we have ever had to manipulate somebody's mind. But it could be used for good or it could be used for bad, right? I mean, dark web and VR, that stuff exists already, right? So it's really not about what is your intention with it? It's not about that you went to the refugee camp and filmed the refugees. It's really how you approach that subject matter. So what really we have to always bring it back to is the humanity. And, you know, mind you, I spend most of my time with my friends' nerds. So I am very much at the bleeding edge of science and technology, and I'm fascinated by it. But I constantly have to remind to my colleagues, as well as to myself, that it comes back to our humanity. You know, when we talk about artificial intelligence, we kind of talk about it without speaking about cultural intelligence. Right. And so these are crucial points for me. And that's why I feel creativity and play and youth culture and cultural diversity really need to be integrated. Star Trek had a lot of inspiring things about it, but it's still so much of the sort of world based on Western societal structures, on the adult vision of what the world is, etc, etc, etc. What I want is to start seeing these visions of a future that have playfulness within them, where people hack their reality, where the kids, again, are active participants, and they are making culture of their own that also inspires us in changing how we approach things. So That kind of sense of wonder and joy and awe that we could be experiencing in the digital sort of reality space, for me, would be the most amazing thing to imagine. How could we sort of step into the digital possibility space, not to escape into it, not to isolate ourselves in it, but so we could bring back some of those possibilities into our physical lives. So instead of thinking of it as an isolation space, can we think of it as a space of belonging, co-creation, you know? How can we think of it not as, you know, very much Reader Player One vision where like everything went fucked, right? So this is the only way to still exist. How can we think of it as, you know, maybe a tool to make the current physical boundaries obsolete? You know, I have friends all over the world And, you know, right now I've been having this conversation with actually an Indian friend of mine who is, you know, a very prominent, very, very successful person there. But just because he is a brown man with an Indian passport, you know, it's not like he could jump on a plane. I was at this sort of crazy, wonderful party that one of my friends and clients, Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, was throwing. You know, and I wrote to this particular friend of mine that, you know, wow, it would be so much fun if you'd be here. And he was like, well, you know, visa doesn't happen that fast. Right. So, you know, what could be a way for him to join in anyways? Now, that is something for fun. But actually, even people from European Union who have political activism as their background are being denied visas to go to US right now. And so some people are losing out on projects. with even major companies such as Google X Lab or MIT Media Lab, et cetera, et cetera. So how could these people, and especially, you know, innovators and creators from places that are even more difficult to come and travel from, you know, how a person from Nigeria, even if they're being denied a visa to Japan, could be able to transcend that boundary and somehow through, you know, robotic peripheral and VR, MR combination, to still participate, you know, in some kind of research or creative activity, you know, in Tokyo, let's say in two years time, right? How could they make these physical boundaries obsolete? So I feel these are the conversations that we really should be having in terms of how we could be designing in something that is actually genuinely awesome. And the only way that I feel will be able to do that if we talk very actively, talk about the problems and issues and things that are not OK. So for me, it's always a combo like I get really happy when after the talks that I give, people come to me and they're like, wow, I was equally inspired as I was terrified. I'm like, OK, I guess I did my job right this time. So how can we both like render people aware of possible issues and problems and these sort of more fucked up scenarios, as well as possibilities that not just advanced technology, but also advanced humanity could allow us. And I just, I see it just as such an exciting opportunity, not just conceptually, but also visually. Like there are whole worlds waiting to be created and explored that are not referential. I mean, this whole thread that I posted today regarding Blade Runner, You know, as well, when I posted the one on Ghost in a Shell back in the day, people are like, oh, but it kind of looked cool, right? It had these cool references to Tarkovsky, whatever. You know, I grew up on Tarkovsky, and I've seen all of Tarkovsky's movies by his time I was 15, and I still find it boring in a sense that it's been referenced already so many times. So movie people looking at movies to do movies is really fucking boring. In a similar way, how like VR people looking at movies and games to do VR is really boring. What about we actually look at the real world? What if actually we look into who are the most interesting people in this reality that are in somehow a sort of shape-shifting reality that is very physical and how we can bring them and expand what they could do and sort of augment what they could do in a physical world for this virtual possibility space. No, I think that'd be just so awesome. And again, with every project that I work on, I try to do that. And, you know, many times to this date, I of course faced the usual response. Oh my God, Monica, we love you. Your vision is super cool, but it's too forward thinking. It's too forward thinking for us. You know, we need just something a little bit more generic. And I'm like, isn't this movie about the future? Isn't this experience like, isn't this supposed to be something new? Like why are we really trying to put the square peg in a round hole? You know, but of course, as people, I guess, get to know my work better and get to know the discourse better, and it's having more and more residents, then more and more people start listening. So I definitely feel that there's a massive change in how people were reacting to some of my ideas, you know, just a few years ago and now, right? I was invited to give a talk on this specific subject, you know, how do we change future narratives for Google's launch of new hardware. Pixel, Daydream, Google Home, and the earbuds. You know, when I was selected among few people to represent the most curious minds of the world that are shaping tomorrow. You know, and a sign of approval like that all of a sudden makes other people be like, oh, actually, oh, so those ideas are actually not that crazy. If Google listens, so maybe we should listen too. So it's funny how you need these external stamps of approval. So then more people start listening, so the more people start listening, so the more people start listening. And what happens to a lot of creatives in that case is that then you sort of become your own brand and start repeating yourself. So what I'm always trying to do is to not become that. to keep traveling, to keep meeting people, to keep opening these conversations digitally on all the social media platforms, be challenged, engage as much as I can, go and talk with these, you know, with a 30-year-old kid in Bangalore, go talk with this researcher in Montreal, go talk with this nerd friend of mine in Kyoto and really, really listen and see how some of these amazing things that they're pointing me towards I could actually bring in in a way, again, that is not just appropriated, but is actually integrated and credited and becomes a real asset for a particular project that we're working on and becomes also an amazing marketing opportunity, becomes sort of marketing embedded within a product. And that is for entertainment projects as well as collaboration with tech companies, as well as sort of real fictional future designs for existing cities. So that's where I'm at.
[00:53:12.774] Kent Bye: Nice. So the, the thread that I picked up on there is just that there's a lot of possibilities for us to use virtual reality in this process of world building to create the futures that we want to live in. And so I guess the question that I have for you is what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:53:30.345] Monika Bielskyte: Um, before maybe I, I, um, I do that. Can I add a little thing? Cause it's a cool thing. Okay. Um, so. What's for me really interesting is not just the kind of VR that we can put out to the world, but really how do we work in VR to prototype these fictional futures, be it for fictional narratives or for real cities. So since almost a year, I've been working on one of the most exciting sci-fi properties that I cannot yet speak about, but hopefully I could soon go public with it. with an amazing director. And it's a huge, huge thing. It will be a series. And actually to design that world, we've been using VR a ton. So some of the earliest prototypes of the world, you know, besides the sort of early basic, basic sketches, we started doing immediately in gravity sketch until brush and fleshing out these spaces. And, you know, working with an artist and me stepping in and really looking around and seeing that street, seeing that particular interior space, seeing that particular sort of situation or a scene. And that's a massive game changer because already with the very basic existing tools that we have today, such as Tilt Brush and Gravity Sketch, we can already capture elements of the world design in a way that becomes so much more immersive and understanding for everybody in the team than when we were doing it on a sort of 2D format. You know, when director pops in his head and can look around and see the entirety of that particular street where the action is happening, then they really understand, oh, like, I like the height of these buildings, or I like this particular atmosphere, or no, we need to change this and this and that, right? And we can already imagine the opportunity also that it allows is that we're definitely not thinking movie or series anymore. We're really thinking a world. And how do we design a world in such a way that every platform, every medium becomes a portal into the world? And medium is not the message, but we're fitting the message to the medium. However, if we are fleshing out this world in a way that is spatial at its inception, it will be able to exist in all these formats. It'll be much easier to adapt it also for VR experience and AR experience and live pop-up and a game, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of, I think, I don't know if anybody else right now on any other major Hollywood project is really using VR in such an integral way and prototyping the world as we've been doing. So that's exciting.
[00:56:15.617] Kent Bye: Nice. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:56:27.062] Monika Bielskyte: It can enable the worst and the best, and it really depends on us what type of content we'll be creating within it and for it. The talk I gave at Google just last week was entitled A Curious Mind is the Eye, and it came from a project that I did for Brian Grazer. Brian wrote his book called A Curious Mind, and then I converted that tagline to A Curious Mind is the Eye, and the whole idea was You can expose anybody to the most wondrous things in this world, but unless they'll be curious about it, unless they will actually want to see that beauty and magic and wonder and also maybe pain and suffering and vulnerability, because these things are completely interconnected, you know, there is no beauty without also knowledge of pain, right? There is no love without understanding of death and separation. I mean, I don't even need to mention these things, right? So my point with it is that unless we can render people curious, they will remain blind no matter what are the wonders of the world that we could show them to. So the way I try to approach all the work that I do with virtual reality is how can this be a way to render people curious? to render people curious about realities that are not their own. And be it a different cultural reality, be it a different political reality, be it a different societal reality, be it a different gender reality, be it a different creative reality, be it a different physical reality. Like, how could we render people curious to understand the world beyond their own? To understand also the world just beyond this physical world. You know, I've looked also into a lot of spiritual practices throughout my life, from spiritual practices existing within many religions to, you know, shamanistic practices. Recently, for example, I was looking a lot into the practices existing within Central and South America, plant medicines and all that kind of stuff. And in some way that is sort of original VR. And reality is that were being opened for humans since this time immemorial by these sort of, you know, shamans and spiritual guides have played an integral part in the development of human culture, you know, and those were realities beyond just this existing physical reality. And every night we step in, everything that we consume during the day with our conscious mind, everything that we see actually gets processed every night by our subconscious mind in that dream space. So how, you know, we could use virtual reality to open people to new realities that exist on this planet to other people, to maybe other species. You know, how could we understand better animals and plants and our own biology, as well as of course, everything related to other human beings. But also how could we understand realities that are ours? that we don't necessarily tap into with our conscious minds. So, you know, be it these sort of shamanistic states of being or dream spaces that have always played culturally a very important part in sort of human development that we have completely lost within modern civilization, within the Western world. You know, it's still very important. Let's say in South America, that's very important. In Africa, these practices remain very important. But in the Western world, in a sort of so-called, quotation marks, civilized world, we've forgotten about that, how VR could maybe bring us back there. And at the end of it, it's, for me, it's how we could make us feel more connected to each other and make us see the richness in our plurality, the richness in learning things that are not our own, rather than become the sort closure space within our own little bubbles or escape spaces or these sort of spaces of, you know, fear, horror, violence, getting out negative emotions, exercising these negative emotions, actually how we could help us deal with all parts of ourselves in a way that is not just sustainable but regenerative. So hopefully less horror and violence in VR and more more possibility space in VR, more inspiration, more opening, more awe and wonder. And just physically, you know, like I like to see how people are when they take the headset off and do they feel more like almost like bent over and closed in physically, their shoulders more together, their head because they just experienced something scary and traumatizing or actually people come out of it and you see their eyes are sparkling and their body is more open and they want to go and share with somebody this amazing thing that they just had. So, you know, making people feel good in a way that is not just a temporary fix, but that just starts having a regenerative effect on who we are as humanity. I'd love to work on this kind of stuff.
[01:02:01.180] Kent Bye: Yeah, let's do that. So, yeah, Monica, I just wanted to thank you for joining me today. I think you were able to lay out a pretty comprehensive vision of what it means to be a world builder and what these creators within virtual reality technologies, as well as people who are writing these stories, the power and potential of what they can do with their spinning of these new realms that are exploring possibility space rather than kind of replicating our existing traumas. So I just wanted to thank you for joining us today.
[01:02:33.119] Monika Bielskyte: The pleasure was mine. Thank you so much for inviting me.
[01:02:36.700] Kent Bye: So that was Monika Bieliskita of All Futures Everything. And I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I think it's a really canny insight for what Monika is saying is that she's traveling around the world and she's seeing examples of both women and diversity and technology and innovation and permaculture and regenerative culture. that is already way more advanced than any of the representations that she's seeing within the current science fiction worlds that she's seeing. And as I've been looking at the evolution of technology, technology and culture go through these similar phases of like these initial seeds of an idea, then they kind of take off and they have like, you know, small communities and bespoke applications. And then it starts to kind of cross the chasm into larger distributions of going mainstream, whether it's a consumer launch of the technology or whether it goes beyond the innovators and the early adopters into that early majority. So you can kind of trace that what you see in individuals then starts to extrapolate out eventually into larger and larger scales and larger and larger ways that these different changes grow and evolve throughout the entire culture. And in the process of listening to Monica, I just kind of realized that I think that generally we have a bit of a lack of a mental model for how we are tracking the progress of cultural evolution or technological evolution. And how things kind of evolve in these Hegelian dialectic of, you know, things being born and a thesis and antithesis and a synthesis or going through these different phases of, you know, a beginning of a seed of an idea and then reaching out through different levels of scale until it scales out to be mass ubiquitous. So as virtual reality creators, you are in a unique position to be able to help curate what you already seeing happening in the real world. And that was a big point that Monica was saying is that a lot of people who are taking their inspiration from other science fiction movies or other games are often recycling these old ideas and that actually some of the most cutting edge and innovative ideas are just out there in the world happening at small scales. And what would it be for you as a world builder to start to take some of those ideas and start to really spread them out? And so there's a couple of main things that she is pointing out here in terms of the lack of paying attention to. And that is paying attention to diversity, the environment of how right now we have a lot of destructive forces, and that we're moving into a place of sustainability. But what would it like to move into a regenerative culture where we're actually improving the environment rather than destroying it? and then creativity about what we're seeing in terms of street art and hacking your reality, and a creative expression about being able to find new ways of storytelling. And then there's also the youth culture. A lot of films and worlds don't really take into account both, I'd say, the youth culture as well as our elders. I feel like there's a little bit of a sweet spot of the people that we pay attention to in our stories, of people maybe in their 20s up to like maybe their late 40s or 50s, but once you get into your elderhood or you're extremely young, then we kind of ignore both the lessons that we can learn from our elders, but also what our youth are being able to teach us about what is coming in terms of these next waves of innovation and behaviors. And then the final two things are just old stereotypes when it comes to gender or family or sexuality, whether it's assumptions and categories that we have for gender stereotypes or family archetypes that go beyond the normal male-female relationships and even into these alternative relationship paradigms, either open or polyamorous or non-conventional relationship structures. Where's that in the science fiction futures? And then finally, just no consideration of an evolution of our current value system. And I would add on to that, you know, our values, our political, economic and larger systems of our structures of society, what would it actually look like to have a healthy ecosystem on all of these different dimensions and levels? So Monica said that we're moving away from storytelling and it's more about creating these story world experiences where we're moving away from the content frame and into the content matrix. And that it's becoming more about, you know, creating these contexts of these worlds such that once you create the world, then you're able to start to say, okay, how does this world translate to all these different mediums? But it starts with building out the world first. And I retweeted Monica's discussion that she had about science fiction, and it generated a lot of people talking about lots of different aspects of this topic. And I think I would differentiate between narrative design and experiential design. I think with narrative, you're always gonna have conflict. And whenever you start to talk about dystopic or utopic futures, people think about utopia, and they think that, okay, well, if there's no conflict, there's no story, it's boring. And my perspective is that you've got to have a little bit more sophisticated model of cultural evolution when you're looking at where we're at now and how you imagine how the problems in our culture are going to be evolving to the next phase. But once those problems are solved, then there's going to be even more complicated problems that are going to come up. That's just the process of complexity. As you evolve through the complex problems, new, even more complex problems are introduced that you can't even imagine. And that's the role of creating these worlds as to what would it be like to start to create these imaginal worlds where we can actually start to imagine a world where this is a healthy ecosystem. But once you get there, you're still going to have these challenges of always wanting to live into the full potential of the human spirit, whether it's as an individual or as as a collective culture. And that was the other big thing that I got from talking to Monica is that she's coming from this vastly international perspective and not just sort of steeped into this individualistic perspective of the West, but some of the more collective ideas. And I feel like that in a lot of ways, a big theme of what I'm seeing in virtual reality is that you're moving away from isolationist, reductionistic mindsets into more interconnected, holistic thinking. Whether that's from looking at your perceptual system and what does it mean to create a experience, you have to take into consideration all the different dimensions of mental and social presence and emotional presence and embodied presence and active presence. And it's no longer that you're just telling somebody a story. You have to allow them to participate and to engage and to express their experience within the context of the world. in that it's this process of experiential design and not just narrative design. I'd say that narrative design is a subset of experiential design, and that part of the experiential design is creating the world. And once you create the world, then from there, you can use the traditional narrative design to be able to then generate the stories that you're going to be creating. When I talked to Malcolm McDowell, he talked about how working on Minority Report, they built the world first before they even had a script. And so I think that's a trend that Monica seems to be backing that up a little bit in terms of this process of working with the Hollywood entertainment industry to be able to build out these future worlds and to make a really defined vision of the world that has some political statements about how things are gonna either turn out in a way of being able to solve some of these problems And then from there, you're able to then start to generate your stories and your scripts. So I think that, you know, in a lot of ways we're moving away from this individual protagonist journey and maybe some of the stories that are gonna come out of these virtual reality worlds are gonna be focusing more on the collective and the community journey. Because in a lot of ways, the virtual reality medium is starting to be able to display social dynamics and social structures in a way that actually don't really translate all that well into a 2D medium. you're able to display a social graph in a way that you're never able to do in quite the same way in a 2D medium. So it's another way of showing how maybe the future is going to be less about the individual protagonist and more about the collective communities coming together to really solve these huge problems that we have. And I think that is just a mirror of what's happening in reality. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, there's a couple things you can do. First of all, just spread the word and tell your friends. Secondly, consider becoming a member to the Patreon. I just set up a Discord server for my Patreon account for everybody who is donating at $5 or more. I have a community where you can start to join in the other fellow members of the Voices of VR community, start to connect to each other, as well as, you know, have gatherings or Q&As and voice chat, all sorts of stuff that we'll be using that to have more ad hoc adventures within virtual reality as well. So, become a member today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
