The Intersection: Who’s in the Driver’s Seat — Us or Our Technology?

The intersection, a quick movie in collaboration with superflux, creates a hopeful destiny that reimagines extractive, hyperconnected technology to serve network, guide nature, and price human relationships.
My low stability of -$1.50 glows crimson above my wrist as i go thru the turnstile and input the station. Alternatives to top up via crypto or credit are greyed out on my virtual wallet; those debts are empty. Guess i’m looking the ads these days, just like they’re looking me.
As i sit down on the train, photographs — shoes i’ve usually wanted, modeled by way of my favourite influencers, with charge plans to shrug off my empty bank account — flash before my eyes. There’s no hiding from them — the algorithms music my eye-motion, my heartbeat, my temperature. They recognise what i want before i do…

Generation is causing our perception of truth — and of each other — to splinter. The same stories and statistics may be twisted and contorted to match a desired narrative depending on which slice of the internet we’re tuned into. Social media content is engineered for our reaction, “taking our hopes and fears, our ache and struggling and using it as content material between advertisements” (the intersection); pitting us against every other in a race to the lowest line. We stay in essentially distinct worlds — each with its own set of information — depending on the media we eat.
The common person touches their cellphone 2,617 times each day, and cellular phone dependancy (nomophobia: the fear of going with out your smartphone) is rising. This begs the question: are we using technology, or is our era using us?

What if this fact wasn’t limited to our displays?


Ingestibles, wearables, embeddables; smart houses and peer-to-peer surveillance; the internet of things (iot) and commercial iot; 5g; clever towns; facial reputation, temperature checking pandemic drones, and satellite imagery — a new layer of ambient (ever-gift, constantly-on, hyper-related) era is seamlessly enveloping the sector around us. Ambient facts collection and algorithmic selection-making permit our bodily environments, like our gadgets, to be infiltrated with facts and metadata constantly gleaned from our seek histories, our purchases, our places, our sleep patterns, our menstrual cycles.
Our bodily and digital worlds are developing to end up almost indistinguishable. This net of ambient generation is shaping our new reality. Query is, is that what we need?
With the surrounding and interconnected nature of ambient era, we’re barreling in the direction of a society in which every interplay with the bodily and virtual global is truthful recreation for extraction and exploitation.
This global isn’t technological know-how fiction — its creation is in progress, atop a complicated net of existing technologies and systems already leveraging the non-public facts of customers.

Omidyar community’s exploration and future sensing group has been tracking this evolving trend when you consider that 2018. Our preliminary investigations provoked many questions: what could this international look like with a brand new layer of ambient era? What currently drives its improvement and the path it takes? What is the enjoy of these already commonly marginalized, excluded, and/or discriminated towards in present day tech and surveillance systems? What is probably the experience of immigrants, minorities, aged, unique wishes, rural, urban, etc in this international? How could our interplay with era, government, businesses, society, each other trade? Will those generation developments best be extractive, or is there a global wherein they might be supportive, or even regenerative? Is it possible for this world to be designed from an area that acknowledges our interconnectedness and facilities numerous perspectives?


Making of “the intersection”


To initiate the possibilities of this hyper-linked global, we partnered with superflux, a speculative design and foresight organisation. We hoped to initiate creativeness approximately futures that would evolve what we, together, would love our courting with era to be, as we construct the infrastructure, protocols, norms, social systems, and guidelines, for a era environment that can be empowering for us all.
“i don’t need the tech we build to eat the arena, however to reinforce and help it. We’re starting to build some thing new. A new way of networking and connecting. The tech was built from the floor up. To help people, in place of mining them.” — the intersection
Together we produced “the intersection”, a short movie that explores the future of ambient era via the lens of 4 protagonists whose lives have been formed with the aid of the dissonance of extractive era norms, misinformation, surveillance capitalism, and context crumble:

  • Ericka, a young activist whose movement for justice is derailed via a never-finishing feed of incorrect information and conspiracies concocted to extract statistics.
  • Jake, a journalist whose work is diluted and corrupted with the aid of ai structures that helped him prioritize clicks over the reality, taking news out of context and pandering to readers’ “intensely monitored, exactly categorized fears.”
  • Amp, a hardware engineer who got down to alternate the sector using technology, best to have her utopian dream shattered via the realization that the only problem she became fixing changed into finding new approaches for technology organizations to make cash.
  • Tammi, a climate migrant who became a refugee in her own u . S . Due to the fact her family refused to evacuate within the face of an approaching storm, mentioning “fake news” reports.

As the movie starts, the future of ambient tech is all-encompassing and ever found in every thing of life. Personally, then together, the protagonists find approaches to re-evaluate their relationships with generation — to repurpose and remodel ambient tech to serve their groups, aid nature, and value human relationships. They arrive together to reconcile their variations — illustrating how humans can be united by way of a commonplace cause, irrespective of how exceptional their backgrounds and world views can be. The movie ends at a brand new starting, open to audiences to form — in which should we head from here? What could we do nowadays, if we knew that is wherein we were heading?
“we desired to show in an experiential way, the interconnected nature of the issues found in our world. Whether environmental, social or technological, those domain names don’t are living within neat categories, they overlap and intermingle, giving delivery to new hybrid paperwork which are as tricky to outline as they are to deal with”– anab jain & jon ardern, superflux.
We are hoping this film makes the future of ambient era extra tangible, activates us to research our courting with era, and encourages us to build in the direction of a more just, pluralistic global that centers the studies of those most marginalized among us.

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