news
A Mixed Bag at ideacity
Photographer Rick Smolan with Natasha Pruss.
Last week 600 people attended the 2011 edition of ideacity in the hopes of being inspired. Fifty speakers were each given 20 minutes to share ideas on topics ranging from geneticists’ attempts to increase lifespans to how the development of projectile weapons kick-started human civilization. Some brought new insights, some rehashed material from other conferences, and some were stale upon delivery. The talks will all be eventually released for free online—a deal compared to the $4,000 tickets for hearing these talks live (although the site does helpfully note the prices to rival conferences, like TED, which boasts ticket prices of $7,200).
In case you weren’t able to spring for the ticket, a sampling of the ideas ideacity speakers considered…
Walt Mossberg
Mossberg is one of the sharpest, clearest technology writers around. His talk here put the swift technology changes we’ve seen into context (can you believe the first iPhone only came out in 2007?) and explained some of the refinements we’ll see in the future. His key point was that we’ll eventually become as comfortable with the internet as we are with electrical grid. His talk served as a kind of forecast of our forthcoming transition to cloud computing, in which we’ll be able to access our media, contacts, and information—our lives, really—from anywhere and any computer.
Rick Smolan and Natasha Pruss
Smolan told an amazing story about his time as a Time Magazine photographer bonding and then being charged with custody of Natasha, a young Amerasian (someone born in Asia with an US military father and an Asian mother) girl in South Korea. Since meeting Natasha, Smolan has chronicled her life in photographs—including the death of her Korean grandmother, her journey to a new land, and the birth of her own children—an ongoing record that puts concepts of ethnicity and belonging in a new light.
Dickson Despommier
Despommier is a proponent of vertical farming, in which agricultural production stretches up across the storeys of a building rather that out across a wide swath of land. The benefits to vertical farming, suggests Despommier, include better water recovery, a smaller environmental footprint, and an increase in local food production. For our province, once so rich in arable land, vertical farming may be a way for us to reclaim some of our agricultural.
National Post columnist Barbara Kay sees no honour in being sexually open.
Patri Friedman
Ex-Googler Patri Friedman unsurprisingly thinks that governments should be more like start-ups. In his talk, he compared governments to corporations, and wondered if Apple head Steve Jobs would ever stand for a company losing hundreds of millions of dollars as the American government has. Friedman believes that small city-state governments similar to those found in Ancient Greece would be more innovative and that people choose the best governments based on their pocketbooks. There’s no way that would cause divisions between classes, right? Especially not when Friedman believes in departing from land altogether and using cruise ships as permanent housing. As much as we’re sure that people would leap at the idea of living in an Apple-run city-state out at sea—iBoat?—his ideas rely on an unwavering faith in the free markets, something that anyone who has survived a bubble or two knows is worth questioning.
Barbara Kay
Oh, ideacity. You brought in smart, informed speakers on gender politics like Buck Angel and Nina Arsenault last year. This year you have the National Post’s Barbara Kay, who just recently perpetuated the myth that more demurely dressed women would attract less trouble and sympathized with the cop who essentially equated wearing revealing clothing with licensing rape. Kay spoke on violence against women and linked it to a lack of honour in Western society, giving, as an example, Slutwalk. Kay sees no honour in sluts—in this case, reappropriated by the organizers to define women seeking hot, consensual sex—probably because she sees sex as something to be quiet about. Except, well, when slamming other people for talking openly about sex, we guess.
Photos courtesy of ideacity.