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by Alex Steffen
by Alex Steffen
by Alex Steffen
by Alex Steffen
A live documentary series about reimagining the world of tomorrow, in order to rebuild the world today.
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San Francisco, CA
Documentary
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San Francisco, CA
Documentary
A live documentary series about reimagining the world of tomorrow, in order to rebuild the world today.
Alex Steffen
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alexsteffen.com
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Hello and welcome! This is the "pre-launch" of this project. We formally launch on Tuesday (2/16).
We're still pulling some of the pieces together here, as you can no doubt tell (and we welcome feedback). We're excited, though, for the big day on February 16th!
Your early support is critical for this project gathering the momentum it needs to succeed. Please back The Heroic Build now, and help the spread the word on Tuesday!
Thank you.
I want to invite you on an adventure.
Our culture is full of dire predictions, disaster scenarios and post-apocalyptic tales. It’s astonishing, though, how few stories we tell about futures where humanity succeeds.
That’s a problem. I believe it’s literally true that we can’t build what we can’t imagine. The fact that we haven’t compellingly imagined a thriving, dynamic, sustainable world is a major reason we don’t already live in one.
Ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw a glimpse of a future that felt both authentic and inspiring? When was the last time a vision of how things could be changed what you see as possible today?
Our challenges are epic. If building a better world seems out of our reach, then we need to become people who can reach farther. We extend that reach by embracing bigger visions. To become people capable of doing heroic things together, we have to imagine a heroic future.
That’s the quest I’m asking you to join me on: imagining that heroic future, and the paths we take to get there.
For the last five years, I've been passionately committed to learning how to do just that: exploring both the kind of world we need to build and the creativity we need to imagine it. Now I’m ready to share what I’ve discovered, and I want to start by inviting you to join me for the filming of a remarkable three-part "live documentary."
Each 90-minute show is centered around a talk, incorporating stage presentation, film and photography, visual design and motion graphics, sound, music and lighting to tell a powerful story of where we are, where we can go, and what it could be like when we get there. I’ll fill them with fascinating stories explaining key concepts, powerful metaphors and memorable take-aways (I’ve given somewhere around 500 public talks in my life, so I have some experience with this).
The series will run three nights, September 20th, 21st and 22nd. Each of these performances will be presented in an intimate venue to a live audience in the Bay Area, and filmed and recorded for those who can’t be there in person. But whether you’re in the room, watching the videos or listening to the recordings, you’ll be part of creating something special and powerful: a new way of looking at the future.
What’s that new way of looking at the future? I call it futurecraft. Futurecraft blends journalism, futurism and storytelling to help us imagine—together—the world we want, and portray it in ways that lead to innovation, change and optimism.
On the first evening, we’ll tell the story of not only where we are (a planet of abundance within limits), but more importantly, when we are (an era of planetary crisis and profound, rapid shifts). We’ll look back at the strange and awesome history of the sustainability movement, then go on an exploration of what it means to live on a planet where the scope, scale and speed of our challenges rapidly makes cherished ideas obsolete. It’ll be a thrilling journey, one that reveals our relationship with our planet in a new light (illuminating the possibility of solving our problems in new ways). We’ll ask ourselves: What must planetary sustainability mean in the 21st century? What does human success mean? Choosing our future is the first step forward.
On the second evening, we’ll leap into the near, on-rushing future to discuss the paradoxical reality that the best way to preserve our planet and the stability of civilization is to engage in headlong transformation. We’ll see that “disruptive sustainability” is now the only kind there is. On the surface, it’s disheartening that the approaches to sustainability and progress we’ve championed over the last decades can no longer work. If we look deeper, though, we find that the need to reinvent the broken systems around us (rather than incrementally improve them) actually opens the door to making the world radically better. I’ll take you on a tour across a growing range of disruptive opportunities, and what they mean to us and our lives. You’ll understand the innovative new forms 21st century sustainability could take, but also why we still need to reimagine the society that can achieve it. Imagination is the bridge between possibility and action.
The third evening will show how we can build that bridge. We’ll look back at how our ancestors used visions of the future to inspire progress. We’ll look around us at the amazing futurecraft tools and skills we now have at our command. We’ll look forward at our growing capacity for creating transformative visions, building future-focused collaborations and launching campaigns and enterprises aimed at strategically nudging the future. We’ll see that working to foresee the world we want is no idle task. Quite the opposite: living facing the future can fill us with wonder and optimism and give us the strength to choose worldchanging lives. We adventure into the future, and what we find there is ourselves.
If you know my past work, it won’t surprise you to learn that we plan to make these evenings the launch of a broader effort to engage the public in futurecraft. There’s no time to waste. In the next year, I want to reach a million people and help them connect with a simple truth: if we can learn to imagine it, we can figure out how to build it... and imagining it is a job for us all.
Your support will make this documentary series available to the public, but we won’t be stopping there. The community we create together through these performances will become a new platform for exploring futurecraft itself. It will open the doors for other opportunities to share ideas and spread this work more broadly including workshops, media appearances and public talks. I’ve also been working on a new book, and these performances will help me finish that. Finally, my hope is that we can help seed or nurture future efforts all over world. Imagine smart, creative people everywhere starting to envision the world we need to build. Your support can help make that a reality.
What is our first stretch goal? If we hit our stretch goal of $100,000, we'll be able to do more with the filming itself. We’ll be able to add more cameras and better lighting, spruce up the stage design, and edit the result into three beautiful videos that are not just compelling, but a true pleasure to watch.
If we hit our super-stretch goal of $150,000, we'll work with talented editors to produce a broadcast-quality feature length documentary, distilling the highlights of the series into a single powerful film for widespread distribution.
I'm Alex Steffen, "one of the world's leading voices on sustainability and the future of the planet” (Vancouver Sun). In 2013-2014, I was Planetary Futurist in Residence at the renowned design and innovation firm IDEO. My acclaimed 2012 book Carbon Zero: Imagining cities that can save the planet is an exploration of the kinds of available design, technological and policy innovations that can transform our cities into low-carbon engines of prosperity. From 2003-2010, I ran the pioneering sustainability and social innovation project Worldchanging, and edited the two best-selling Worldchanging books. I've given over 500 talks at conferences, major universities and leading companies around the world.
You can watch my TED Global talk on the future of cities here.
Having done one successful Kickstarter project before (and run a bunch of other creative projects), I've learned the value in planning carefully and budgeting enough time and money to do a good job. There's always the risk of something technical going awry, or the possibility that forces out of our control require us to reschedule one or more of the evenings. We hope that nothing goes wrong, but if anything does we plan to be fully transparent and problem-solve to make the project great anyway.
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