On Getting Started in Experiential Futures

The Omidyar Sessions, Part 2

This post concludes an edited transcript of a webinar I did recently for The Omidyar Group. The first part was about some of the strategic purposes and elements of foresight work; this second part deals with organisations venturing into experiential futures. Both represent my responses to practical questions posed by folks working for various impact philanthropy entities in a range of broadly intrapreneurial roles, but the key points may be applied to a wide range of contexts.

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People are asking about the usefulness of immersive scenarios, and also about the creepiness of certain examples.

The first thing is to recall that “immersive” is not the only possible scale of this work. That’s important because making something immersive can be a pretty high bar, in terms of labour and time, and potentially other kinds of resources, like expenditure of political capital to try it for the first time in an organisation. So experiential futures is not only about immersive experiences where you inhabit a future, or a set of them, for a period of time: that's just one end of a spectrum. At the other end are things at a smaller scale, easier to produce; artifacts from the future. These are closer to the kinds of assets produced all the time within organisations to communicate ideas and fertilise conversations, but they come out of this approach of “how do we make something from the future?” All this falls under the design-space umbrella of experiential futures.

The other point to note is that creepiness is only one possible tone that an experiential scenario – object or immersion – might evoke. A project like NurturePod might be creepy to some people, but an intervention like the Tunisia 02014 scenario wasn't creepy at all; it was super aspirational, and even (against that backdrop of extreme turbulence) almost utopian. So again, in the same way that we should be careful not to overidentify the immersive end of the design spectrum with experiential futures more broadly, because there's a lot more options than that, we should also be careful not to overemphasise certain moods or genre conventions, because there’s certainly not just one flavour of future out there.

And I think that is part of the utility. As an experiential futures practitioner, someone who has been mapping and using it over the last dozen years, and coming to understand its potential, I operate from a recognition that there’s a vast amount of variation for us to work with. Any kind of future that you may want to have people think about, or to think about yourself, can in principle be mediated in any number of artifacts or situations. Whereas traditional futures practice has usually used a very narrow set of strategies.

My students recently completed an assignment at Carnegie Mellon, a class of 40 designers, where in teams of four or five, each team turns a classroom into an immersive scenario that that the entire class group steps into and spends 15 minutes in. We call these rooms Time Machines. (This is inspired by H.G. Wells, who was not just a founding figure in speculative storytelling, but a founding figure in futures. Wells invented the idea of the time machine in the late 19th century.) Our use of the term refers not to a device, but to a space designed to think and feel with. The students don't have a huge amount of time or resources to do this, so notwithstanding what I said before about immersiveness possibly being more demanding, it doesn't necessarily have to be. It really depends on what you're trying to do.

This mindset (experiential, transmedia) invites you to going through the process of figuring out who you are trying to reach, and what kind of vectors you have to them. Say that it's the leaders or founders of some large organisation, and that they are super busy people and you're lucky to get a 15 minute appointment. This tells you something about the kinds of ways that you may be able to engage, or the kind of impact that you will need to design for. In this case maybe one option would be to make something to send them or put under their office door. They could open an envelope and find this physical thing from the future. Then it's not a room they have to be physically transported to, which could be really hard to organise.

Part of the value of having the wide design space of “experiential futures” lies in actually thinking through the options, because it forces you to figure out what is important about the futures conversation that you want to have, with the people you want to engage, and how you hope to move the needle in that encounter. Is it to get them to take some problem more seriously? Or maybe the topic is something they obsessively discuss, but the longer-term thinking around how it could evolve is limited, because they lack high-quality hypotheticals to work from. So maybe that's a clue to the interventions you could be doing. Thinking through the design space is in itself a potential value, and the action that follows can be that much more tailored and intentional.

In the case of me and my colleagues, all this experimentation started with workshop or process design. So before we ever imagined the approach of creating hypothetical artifacts and bringing futures to life in a performative way, like many futurists we used to run workshops where the standard settings would be for people to read a scenario we'd written, and then respond to it based on the mental model that it conjured for them. And that can be quite effective in some ways, but it always relies on a certain level of what we might call systems imagination, which is not a ubiquitous skillset. To read something about how the world, or a community, could be wildly different 20 years from now, and be able to think and feel that through properly, is not a task that everybody finds easy. (In fact, it often doesn’t work at all, in terms of leading to the kind of strategic and operational changes that it is supposed to prompt.)

We realised that we needed to make a greater effort on our side, so that less effort would be required on the participant or audience side, in order to get to higher quality, more granular, more viscerally grounded conversations about alternatives. My dad used to say, “hard in the writing, easy in the reading,” and I think this is useful not only for writing, but for any kind of communication. You as a practitioner have to put the hard yards in on your end, particularly if you want to engage people who aren’t always thinking about this stuff, or who are time poor. Everybody's got reasons to put the futures conversation aside and deal with the urgent things in front of them. But by creating experiences that enliven the hypothetical, whether they be immersive, or tangible, or interactive like a game (these are all part of the same design landscape), you create different types of portal into strategic conversation and raise the chances of high quality engagement. This is part of the job.

Turning to the ethics question, which comes up especially around guerrilla futures and staging what-ifs that present as-if real, it's really a case by case matter. I don't think the extremes of “always” or “never” are useful. “It's never okay for people to feel for a moment like something is happening that is not happening” would prohibit even, say, surprise parties. And the “always ok” end isn’t right either. “It's just a hypothetical, what’s the worst that could happen?” Well, potentially a lot of harm. (This is why shouting fire in a crowded theatre is illegal.) And circumstances change. Just recently we had the 80th anniversary of the War of the Worlds broadcast from Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre, an amazing moment in the history of media. This was a 1938 radio dramatisation of the H.G. Wells story about an alien invasion, which was taken seriously by some proportion of the population across the U.S., because it sounded just like it might have played out on radio at the time if there really had been an alien invasion, where your regular programming is interrupted and so on. This was a first, so they didn't necessarily know beforehand that it would create the kind of turmoil that it did. But when the same strategy was adapted for broadcast in Spanish in Ecuador in the 1970s, the people who did that couldn't say they didn't know, and I think somebody was killed in in the panic that ensued, and that's not defensible. It has to be a case by case thing, rather than always or never.

Somebody else has asked, if we were to apply experiential futures to our work, when and where would we use it?

You could tie it in to the strategy generation process discussed earlier, using engagement with alternative futures to generate options: have the people in the room take the scenario seriously enough to come up with ideas about what could be done either to make more likely the things that they’d like to see happen from that scenario, or make less likely the things that they wouldn't want. Using the experience and its emotional affordances as a way to create motivation to engage in that discussion over that longer time horizon, instead of it being like, “Oh, that's 20 years away, too far to worry about it.” That why immersive scenarios can be so striking: done right, they kind of collapse the distance, temporal and psychological. People in the room get angry, or excited, or sad about things being hypothesised as happening decades from now. And the time horizon for the scenarios, how far out you're inviting people to think, is also a really important and context-sensitive variable. If it's too close then you're not stretching into the variety of things you may need to deal with. If it’s too far out, there’s the risk of snapping the bonds of credibility, and you kind of check a box, “Okay, we talked about 2050, can we please come back to reality now?” Judging where the sweet spot is, between too far and too near, is part of the art of this work.

And then there’s a question here about opportunities to integrate futures and systems practice. Well, in some senses they are already integrated. Many practitioners, including me, see futures as the deployment of a systems mentality and way of thinking about change. Systems and futures are not these two completely separate things, “Oh, golly, how do we mesh them?” They actually have a lot of shared history. For example, The Limits to Growth report from 01972 is a landmark of systems literature and of futures literature, which is not a coincidence because they have some common roots. Still there’s lots of opportunity for continued integration.

One last thing about the variety of ways experiential futures can be deployed. I mentioned it as a prompt for discussion of possible strategies, or for testing existing strategies. It could be used as a way of exploring particular issues or points (what ifs) in the possibility space, on a more ad hoc basis, rather than a fully-fledged systematic one (multiple future rooms staged in parallel).

And experiential approaches can also be used as a way of bringing to life, for deeper scrutiny and discussion, the futures that are already in the room, or in the culture. There's a framework that a colleague of mine, Kelly Kornet, and I have developed called Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF). It begins with inquiring into the images of the future that a particular population or person has: What do they worry about? What do they hope for? What do they expect? This is called Ethnographic Futures Research (EFR), and it goes back to the 1970s. You draw them out on those things sufficiently to produce, or really co-create, a scenario; asking a bunch of questions to help structure the thinking. Then you “experientialise” it by taking these scenarios and turning them into artifacts or experiences. Then you might loop back and put artifacts from those futures in front of them, or put them in a space where those futures are dramatised. “Remember that conversation where you said these words about how the future might look, or what you're worried about, or hopeful for? How does it look now?” Or, it could be that you do the ethnographic interviews with the leadership of an organisation, manifest their imagined futures, and then put a wider constituency into these mental models brought to life, as a basis for deepening the conversation. So there are different ways that this stuff can be deployed for organisational strategic purposes, as well as for citizens.

I hope that these brief touchpoints we've had are starting to trigger some thinking that might be useful, and offer ways of amplifying what you’re trying to do, by adding experiential futures elements.

***

(Thanks again to TOG's S&C team, and everyone who contributed time, energy, and excellent questions during this phase of our collaboration.)

Related:
> Experiential Futures: A brief outline
> The Experiential Turn (with Jake Dunagan)
> Dreaming Together
> The Original Time Machine Assignment
> Time Machines in The Futurist
> Time Machines in The Economist
> Guerrilla futures ethics (The Futures of Everyday Life, Ch. 6)
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF)

Apocalypse for one

Image via.

"If the world ended tomorrow, would you be happy with how you've lived your life?" 

A recent program by British hypnotist and television personality Derren Brown recently made this question the basis for an immersive experience created to convince one individual that the end of the world as we know it had arrived.

Twenty-one year-old self-confessed layabout Steven Brosnan was, unbeknownst to him, selected from among thousands of candidates, primed over several weeks for the outlandish scenario about to unfold, and then thrust into a calculatedly harrowing experience designed to teach him to really value his life. The whole thing was then broadcast on national television in the UK as a two-part special.

A consummate showman, Brown has created a number of ingenious made-for-TV experiments before. Three in particular were previously recommended to me with great enthusiasm - The Heist, The System, and Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live - by my friend Jane McGonigal, a designer of what (a few years ago were called) alternate reality games. ARGs are (were?) a class of interactive role-play to which the nifty transmedia narrative stunt at hand bears more than a passing resemblance.

Derren Brown: Apocalypse designs a complex experiential arc around just one person. So evidently a key challenge was identifying the right candidate; someone who, as Brown says: "...currently leads a self-centered existence, and who takes his life, his friends, his family and material comforts all for granted. I'm hoping he'll be able to learn from the meticulously crafted experience I'm going to put him through. And by taking everything away from him, I hope to make him recognise the value of what he has."

The elaborate setup involved getting his entire family to play along, hacking their smartphones and doctoring media feeds to make the signs of impending disaster increasingly frequent, and then finally transitioning the subject into a fully immersive situation which he didn't know was hypothetical. Therefore throughout, amid all the actors and family members involved, he's the only one who doesn't realise he's on camera. Think Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds radio play meets The Truman Show.

I won't describe the whole program blow by blow. If the description appeals, you'll be well entertained and should check it out yourself (video embedded below). Also, my thoughts shared after the break will contain spoilers and may not make complete sense if you haven't seen Apocalypse.

Now, futures as a field, I'd say, shares with education as a whole a common presumption at their heart that virtual experience can be as valuable as real. (Unfortunately, only a small proportion of education encounters are designed for maximum experiential impact. The same could be said of foresight.) Yet, even when carried out according to the most uninspired and dull-as-dishwater of conventions -- chalk-and-talk in the classroom; ploddingly written scenarios in the futures world -- both implicitly have an underlying faith in simulation (or for futures, simulacrum). Put another way, that article of faith is that you can learn from a situation that is constructed, that's not entirely real.

Such is Brown's basic supposition here, too, the plan being to simulate global catastrophe as "teachable moment" for Steven. The idea is that someone's life can be transformed by an encounter that, even though faked or engineered, presents as real to them, and so produces genuine revelation. And that's just what happens, or what seems to happen, in Apocalypse. We might say Brown's goal is to create an experiential learning journey (here, it's explicitly modeled on The Wizard of Oz, a classic "hero's journey" as in Joseph Campbell's mythic/archetypal Jungian framework). It's a thoroughly ingenious concept for a television narrative, and entertaining as all get out to watch. Yet I've also had a creeping sense that it's not entirely successful in the execution, and I've been trying to figure out why that is.

The reason I'm writing about this is because, as a designer of experiential scenarios, I'm keen to learn from these rare examples how to construct better immersions into hypothetical narrative situations, in order to make the practice more effective. What makes experiential scenarios tick, and how might they be improved? (To be clear, then; anything that seems critical about what I say here is part of an attempt to work with these thoughts as a practitioner, rather than gratuitous sniping from the safety of my armchair.)

I found parts of the show, especially the first half, very moving. The setup with the gradual introduction of ersatz news feeds into Steven's bubble, and the staging of a segue into apocalyptic territory is brilliant. For me, one of the best moments comes when the program makers reproduce during a bus ride their (clearly Orson Welles-inspired) radio-based dislocation into catastrophe, and then it ups the experiential ante magnificently.

However, after the apocalyptic bit of the story kicks in, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe. You might find it all terrifyingly realistic; I wanted to, but simply didn't. You might object that it's not our (as audience) credulity that matters. Yet it does, I think. When a hypothetical strains belief, it simultaneously becomes harder to believe that anyone else could buy it, either. The specifics of the apocalyptic narrative and experience that Steven is expected and appears to buy into get exceptionally silly. Without going into detail, having already warned about spoilers, one word really makes the point: zombies. An inspired Truman Show-esque first half morphs into a less convincing knockoff of 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that some controversy arose in the UK over the central character of Steve, who was accused of being an actor complicit in the whole deal. These are claims that Brown has denied and debunked, but doubts may remain; based neither on Steve's half-finished acting website profile, nor on his amusing physical resemblance to an actor from a noodle commercial -- but rather on the internal merits and coherence of the program itself.

I won't go into the performances of the questionable actors by whom Steven is surrounded, or some of his reactions which, at times, even if real, felt even less credible. (Perhaps I'm just not a very experienced viewer of reality TV -- and if I watched more of it I'd realise that real people in reality actually behave like the way I consider bad actors act.) As it happens, I'm less interested in establishing the truth here as such than I am in understanding what's at stake for the program in its believability. You see, for the viewer of Apocalypse, its emotional and intellectual impact rely on an authentic deception. We are invited to empathise with Steve, for whom life as he knew it is ostensibly over. If it turned out that Steve were just another actor, there would cease to be anything truly novel or worthwhile about watching him go through this exercise: we've already seen our share of (more highly produced and impressive) end-of-the-world diversions. So the interest here turns entirely on Steven's being unwittingly drawn into a simulated catastrophe, which means it is significant only to the extent that he experiences as real something which is not.

Brown knows this, and makes that very point in his own defence: pretending to all this with an actor at the centre of it would be pointless. Well, yes and no. There's room for a cogent sceptical view here that a sufficiently cynical TV producer could benefit greatly from persuading an audience of millions that they were really putting an unwitting man on the street through armageddon's onset, while in fact orchestrating the whole thing with an insider-actor. This, the sceptic might argue, would obviate the investment risk should a carefully selected actual dupe clue into the subterfuge and suddenly ruin a presumably expensive and logistically elaborate end-of-the-world simulation-for-one. So the question comes to rest on Brown's insistence on his own integrity as an artist.

But here we come to a problem for the audience's experience of the show, one which is built-in, and unavoidable: Derren Brown, the "man behind the curtain", is fundamentally questionable. By no means am I saying I don't like him, or that his work isn't vastly entertaining, thought-provoking and insightful. I do. It is. I'm simply pointing out that a large part of the show's very premise, and part of the basis for our interest in watching it, consists in his charismatic persona and cultivated talent for understanding people and creating situations that play on their foibles. He's a master persuader, hypnotist and manipulator. No pejorative connotation intended; that's his schtick, and it's why we watch. But if Brown is being straight with us, the audience, then he is indeed deceiving Steven monumentally. On the other hand, if Steven's colluding with him (as I - and apparently others - had occasion to suspect), then Brown is deceiving us, his audience. Either way, there's a tangled web, and our charming host is right in the middle of it. Such ambiguity is at the very heart of his profession as an illusionist and mentalist, and shows up in all the situations that he creates. Little wonder, then, that some people question his veracity.

To continue the line of thought above for a moment more: if he were discovered to have been pretending, Derren Brown could still have a workable artistic alibi -- that the joke was deliberately, all along, on all of us, the audience. Maybe there's a meta-point in the offing here around our own susceptibility, but there's a trust we place in him, despite his own "untrustworthiness" which is the premise of our interest -- and if it were betrayed it would be a real pity. Especially amid all the fakery, the grain of truth still matters. 

All of this reminded me of another exquisitely ambiguous viewing experience, Exit Through the Gift Shop, the outstanding film about street art genius Banksy. It presents as documentary but leaves you (or at any rate, left me) wondering whether the central character, Mister Brainwash, was fabricated. He's such an outrageous character, and his commercial success as depicted in the doco such damning evidence of the cynical commercialisation of art, that it all seems too perfectly perverse to be true. A couple of years after watching it, I still find myself on the fence about Exit Through the Gift Shop's documentary status. And that's actually something I absolutely love about it -- and in some ways perhaps I'd prefer not to know the truth -- because it so effectively acts out one of the key questions it raises, regarding the importance of authenticity or truth as a value in the art world.

Now, as irritatingly and gleefully postmodern as some might like to get here, rejoicing - or wallowing - in the unknowability of the truth of it all, let me prepare to draw a conclusion: Exit succeeds because of its ambiguity, where Apocalypse falters. Let's be fair: if the show succeeds, it's despite any doubts about Derren Brown's and his subject Steven's veracity, not because of them. Audience doubt about Brown's truthfulness puts a dent in Apocalypse as an experiential scenario. To the extent that people doubt the authenticity of the deception, so to speak, to that extent the exercise is not quite working.

So much for questions of plausibility, ambiguity and fakery. Now I want to come at this from another angle.

Here's what Brown says about the motivation for staging an apocalypse for his victim. "In an effort to help Steven realise the value of the things he has, like his family, home and friends, I took them all away from him by creating the end of the world, through a deadly meteor strike."

But of course, there's a simpler way to end the world.

By sheer coincidence, just hours after viewing Apocalypse and then having a big group of friends over for dinner, I was revisiting the 1999 classic Fight Club, a testosterone- and irony-fuelled film essentially about living to the full. I hadn't watched it for maybe ten years. (If you haven't seen it, please do; but there are no spoilers below.)

A sequence about halfway through exemplifies the perversely life-affirming spirit of the movie, when the two lead actors, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, conduct what they call a "human sacrifice", whereby the life of a Korean convenience-store owner is threatened, as an existential goodwill intervention. At gunpoint, the hapless shopkeeper is told, "Raymond, you're going to die". He's asked what he wanted to be in life before settling for quik-e-mart drudgery. The answer: a vet. Holding a gun to the poor man's head, Pitt takes his drivers' licence away, telling him, "I know where you live. If you're not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead." They let him go.  What was the point of that, demands an exasperated Norton. Replies Pitt: "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted."

Here again, almost word for word, is the question behind Apocalypse (quoted at the top). There's a climactic confrontation later on between the two leads, when Pitt's trickster says to Norton's sceptic: "If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life?"

My point is simply this -- and thanks, Fight Club, for the reminder: the whole planet need not be jeopardised in order for a person to experience a revelation about their life. If a single moment of staring into the abyss can be used to reactivate a sense of purpose and direction, there's more than one way to get at it.

I'm not for a moment suggesting (however compelling a TV show it might have made) that Derren Brown could or should have made a program based on directly threatening the life of a subject. But from an experience design standpoint, there's a curious quality of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in Apocalypse. Of course the grandiosity of the simulated experience is all by itself a large part of the point, in terms of televisual entertainment.

But in fact, what I think Brown and his team are doing most effectively here, with this complex exercise in forcing suspension of disbelief, is to dramatise vividly the fact and extent of the constructedness of mediated reality, or  -- if this makes it any clearer -- the mediatedness of our experience of wider systemic realities. Few of us are in a position to register first-hand most big-picture world news stuff, be it economic crisis or volcanic eruption or political upheaval. Almost all comes to us second-hand, through a handful of vectors (devices, sources, individuals) cross-cutting our sensorium. No, this isn't a new thought. But the show is a kind of masterclass in the partiality and manipulability of the tiny straw through which we get to receive only a fraction of a far bigger reality. 

And recognition of the excessiveness inherent in making widespread crisis, rather than personal mortality, the focal point for a "revaluing life" experiment also led to something else I'd sensed was missing from the show. The serendipitous encounter with Fight Club's counterexample helped clarify for me what that something was. 

Brown apparently went to the trouble of spending a couple of months convincing a listless but suggestible young man that his world could end, then went ahead and made that subjective experience "happen". Apart from Brown's skill and showmanship, the other reason to watch this specific program is this: apocalyptic anxiety is a real phenomenon. Not only is there a mounting array of planetary threats - climate change, loss of biodiversity, the ascent of superbugs, the ever-present nuclear spectre, etc - at the time this show was broadcast, the Mayan calendar transition was looming just weeks away at the end of 02012. (It passed by without incident the week before I caught the show on YouTube.)

In the same way that the potency of Orson Welles's radio show, a year before World War II began, channeled and amplified a generalised anxiety in the zeitgeist, Derren Brown: Apocalypse attracted record numbers of viewers because, I think, there was (is) actual and, at some level, valid worry about apocalyptic scenarios. Such power as it had, then, both at the audience (TV-viewership-of-millions) level and at the subject (sucking-Steven-into-the-story) level, draws on real, existential issues and concerns animating our culture at the moment. However, this potent cultural energy is skilfully marshaled only to be squandered; it's used to augment the Oz-like mastermind/puppeteer persona of Brown, but as an engagement with actual and worthwhile issues, either for the audience or for the one-man eye of the storm, it's hard to think of how it could possibly have been more superficial. (In case you've forgotten: zombies.)

So there's a sadly missed opportunity to address a worthy value, a counterpart at the wider social scale to the value of an individual life fully lived. If it were just a matter of making someone appreciate their parents more, or go back to school to become a veterinarian, then a bit of clear and present danger -- say, a few seconds at gunpoint, or even just a good talking to -- may be all that's needed.

By the way, I suspect the two problems I've tried to puzzle out above are related; the implausibility of the scenario in watching it, and its failure to engage in the real issues that bring resonance to apocalypse. They seem to be two sides of the same coin. 

Maybe I'm overthinking a work of pure entertainment. But then I think about the fact that entertainers have a capacity - and to that extent at least a potential obligation - to inform and enlighten, just as those who primarily inform and enlighten ought also to find ways to entertain and engage while they're at it. The mutual exclusivity of those modes is stupid.

There's an unfortunately missed opportunity here, is all.

When I mulled over this stuff around the ethics of deception in experiential scenarios for my PhD a few years ago, I wrote (p. 270), "when it comes to human intentions and perceptions, paradoxically, there are some issues you may not be able to get a clear look at without an element of deliberate, carefully engineered misdirection." After looking into it I ended up saying (p. 286):

[T]he value of enabling someone genuinely to contemplate a compelling alternative future universe -- if perhaps only for a moment or two -- may be profound. Everyone can recount instances in their own life where sudden, contingent insights have led to momentous changes in direction. The value of these interventions and futures perspectives should not necessarily be sought in their enabling a particular or permanent future orientation (although those are conceivable outcomes). Even small glimpses of other worlds may make the effort worthwhile. It is not usually necessary to go to the lengths suggested here, but ontologically pointed strategies are available, and are sometimes needed. As Whitehead reminds us, it is the business of the future to be dangerous -- which makes it our business to be able, at certain times, to conjure with that danger in order to navigate it more wisely.

The point was (and I still believe this) that deception can be a useful tool in enabling certain types of  experiential learning that may be hard or even impossible to get at in other ways. But it's to be used judiciously; downsides and upsides weighed against one another. Serious learning can come from a comparatively minor deception, but a trivial lesson from a major shock (or risk) isn't defensible.

Consider that audience outrage would surely have been universal had the show been about simply threatening Steven's own life personally to cause him to value it more highly (although that's presumably a worthy cause), and yet by contrast the excess of appearing to end the world just for him probably seems okay, even though the selected narrative mechanisms (meteors and zombies) studiously avoid saying anything about the terrifyingly genuine and varied prospects of anthropogenic apocalypse.

Intriguing ethical calculus.

Don't get me wrong. Derren Brown: Apocalypse is a hell of a show, and it plays on ontologically and ethically unstable ground that's often a hallmark of truly interesting art. In his recent (fantastic, highly recommended) book on art forgery, Jonathon Keats writes:

The far side of legitimacy is not necessarily illicit. To act on our anxieties, art must break mores. In some cases, those mores may be enforced by law, yet the full range of human behavior is beyond the imagination of legislators and judges, whose work is essentially reactive. Artists can experiment with possibilities outside our current reality.

Keats is writing on forged artwork, but the parallel's instructive: Brown's experiment with a simulated truth is in principle precisely what makes possible the expansion of layabout Steve's reality. Perhaps, zombies aside, this is the kind of experiential wakeup call that could benefit a great many more of us.

Related posts:

> Refugee Run

> If you want to live you will obey

> Death of a President

> Posthuman New York