Episode 25 – Geoff Snack (Dark Futures, 1/5)

This special episode is the first of 5 talks delivered on stage at StartWell's Event Space on King St W in downtown Toronto on November 28, 2019 for a globally roaming annual series called Dark Futures. This talk was presented by Geoff Snack, a strategist at the Toronto design and experience agency JAM3, and is titled "New materiality Things that don't exist" *Dark Futures is presented by globally renowned Futurist, speaker, researcher, and author Nikolas Badminton. (https://nikolasbadminton.com/) [expand title="Podcast Transcript"] Qasim Virjee 0:11 Welcome back to this the 25th episode of the start well podcast. As always, I am your host Qasim Virjee, the founder and CEO of start well. And for the next five episodes, we've got something very special. They comprise the talks that were presented live in our event space on King Street in downtown Toronto as part of a series that roams the world and happens annually hosted by a chap named Nicholas badminton. Nicholas is a member of start well, and he's a globally renowned futurist advisor and author who works with everyone from trillion dollar companies to investment funds, progressive governments, and an organization's in between to shift their mindsets from what is to what if he essentially develops foresight for his clients. And the outputs of that are things like increased revenue, reduced risk, and global impact. So very interesting guy who's brought very interesting speakers to our stage. And for this, the first episode that we're broadcasting of dark futures Y, Y, Z recorded on November 28 2019, we've got a talk by Jeff snack, and the title is new materiality, things that don't exist. Geoff Snack 1:36 Everybody, yeah, is this good? Awesome. Um, so many good talks earlier, everybody's so smart. Um, so this is a deck for talking about the future of things. My name is Jeff. So I do strategy UX. I also work in education. And I'm also like, just a pretty enthusiastic guy. I love stuff, like I love. I like buying stuff. And I like collecting. So that's the thing I do. And then in addition to that, I fund that habit by working at digital and experience agency called jam three jam threes in the building today. Whoo. That's true. And then I also teach at OCAD. I teach a fourth year illustration course in digital media, so I teach them how to use the internet, for better or worse. And I'm also doing a little bit of work for OCAD small business incubator called CO. So that's me. Um, do you guys remember this billboard campaign by the musical artist, Kanye West? No, um, this was a tweet that Kanye did. And he kind of mocked up this billboard campaign, the billboard like doesn't actually exist. And the album itself doesn't really exist in this form. Then this tweet was kind of put out to eventually Jandi became Jesus's King, sort of, as we all know, with Kanye West, and like the future of albums like he has been changing the tracklist of his albums, and iterating on them, because they all exist digitally. This blue vinyl release does not exist yet. Um, this sucks. But this is a political straw. So the Trump campaign is actually charging $15 for these straws as kind of like they're called trigger straws. Because that's what people sometimes spend their time doing. But the point of this is that this straw is not made for drinking at all, like this is a political straw. And it's more gestural than it is for actually consuming, consuming your beverage or also consuming things like you are buying this as a gesture. And that sucks. Come at me, it's probably not gonna go to market, at least not the way it looks right now. And then there's fortnight. I don't know a lot about fortnight, but I know you can buy like digital uniforms and stuff in there. And it's like, made 3.3 billion I think last year. So anyways, like, none of these things actually exist in the real world as we see them, like even that trumps s