Our panel is made up of three of the UK film industry’s brightest minds – Mark Herbert, MD of Warp Films; Liz Rosenthal, founder of Power to the Pixel; and Marc Price, director of ‘£45 zombie film’ Colin. They, we, and you the audience will discuss how to make film in the 21st century, taking into account funding opportunities, digital marketplaces, crowdsourcing, affordable kit, filesharing, social networks and more. As usual there will be our infamous big-screen Twitter feed, wireless microphones so you can join in, and mild post-work boozing.

It’s from 7-9.30pm at The Book Club on Wednesday November 10. You can get more information here, and buy tickets here. Hope you can make it!

Rather than merely say what a nasty man Tony Hayward is, we want to create a constructive look at how energy is changing, how it’ll impact upon our lives, and how the UK government, private industry, and ordinary people can ease our passing into a post-oil world. As well as being politically awkward and practically daunting, it’s also a very exciting time full of opportunity. With that in mind, we have three guests on hand to give us a realistic and maybe even inspiring look at where we’re all going to end up when the oil runs out.

- Jeremy Leggett is a campaigner, writer and businessman focusing on post-oil energy. He is the founder of Solarcentury, the UK’s largest independent solar energy company, as well as its sister charity SolarAid; has written the books Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, and The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era; and is a founding director at New Energies Invest AG, the world’s first private equity fund for renewable energy.

- Mark Stevenson is a comedian and author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, a survey of a world heading towards nanotechnology, space flight and a new era of energy. He is also co-founder and COO of Flow Associates, a consultancy focusing on cultural education and digital engagement; and also works at ReAgency, a science communications consultancy.

- Shaun Chamberlin is the author of The Transition Timeline, which outlines a potential roadmap for the UK becoming a sustainable post-oil society. He is also the co-founder of Transition Town Kingston, aiming to change Kingston-upon-Thames’s energy use to help combat climate change and reduce reliance on oil; is working towards implementing energy rationing system Tradable Energy Quotas; and blogs at darkoptimism.org.

There’s more information here, and once again tickets are available here. We’ll hopefully see you there! Also, thanks to everyone who made suggestions for guests for this event – given the global nature of the problem, many were jetting all over the place on business and sent their apologies for not being able to make it. Sorry if the guest you suggested isn’t on the lineup. We’re confident though that we’ve got three giants of post-oil discussion, and it should be an excellent night.

From the Blackbeards of the 18th century to the BitTorrent Babies of the 21st, pirates have never had the best rep. But historically they have been tremendous innovators and exploiters of untapped markets. Whether it’s the ‘pirate code’ of the Caribbean seas, which pioneered democratic governance long before it was popular in Western society, or Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning popularising mp3 downloads long before the launch of iTunes in the twentieth century, pirates have always been ahead of the game.

Perhaps the hackers and marauders terrorising the creative industries actually hold the key to their renaissance? On August 11, The Piracy Panacea will take a long second look at modern piracy, and give insight into the tremendous innovation and cultural change it is unleashing. From the utopian anarchism of idealists and technologists to post-piracy economies such as China and Brazil, Future Human will give insight into how new, illicit technologies will shape the long-term future of British society and commerce.

Helping us to probe these issues will be a panel of special guests all embedded in the realities of piracy in the UK’s digital and creative economies.

- Graham Linehan is the creator, writer and director of comedy series Father Ted and The IT Crowd, and has also had a hand in other shows from Black Books to The Fast Show and I’m Alan Partridge. He is also an outspoken critic of current models of ownership and piracy legislation.

- Wendy Grossman is one of the UK’s most experienced tech writers, with 20 years contributing to the likes of Wired, The Telegraph, The Guardian and Scientific American. She is also on the advisory board of the Open Rights Group, a campaign network for digital rights, who are currently campaigning against (amongst other things) the anti-piracy legislation in the Digital Economy Bill.

- Jamie King is the director of Steal This Film, which looks at global filesharing culture and copyright enforcement, particularly the notorious Swedish torrent site The Pirate Bay. The film and its sequel were deliberately distributed across filesharing networks, and funded via online donations.

- Thierry Rayna PhD is a senior lecturer in Industrial and Business Economics at London Metropolitan Business School. His research focuses on ‘the economic consequences of the nature and characteristics of digital goods and services’; looking at piracy, distribution, and innovation in the digital economy.

And unlike conventional lectures and talk events, you the audience will be able to contribute throughout the evening, via wireless microphones and our infamous big-screen Twitter feed.

So join us at the Book Club on August 11 for a night of ideas, discussion and booze, as we investigate The Piracy Panacea.

Here’s some nice things that people have been saying about Future Human thus far:

‘A blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century’ - The Sunday Times

‘Hurrah! We get to pretend to be sophisticated members of the intelligentsia’ - Grazia

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events - The Evening Standard

‘The new salon for hip intellectuals… book early, tickets sell like (calorie free) hot cakes’ – Time Out

‘Clever thoughts, pretty people, and strong booze: could anything be better?’ - Spoonfed

‘Be there or we’ll say nasty things about you behind your back’ – Kultureflash

‘Having attended more than our share’s worth of debates, this magnificent series is the only one for which we’d join a Twitter support campaign’ – Londonist

We’ll hopefully see you there!

Details:

FUTURE HUMAN: THE PIRACY PANACEA

Wednesday August 11, 2010

Main event is 7.00 pm to 9.30 pm, DJs until late

@ The Book Club, Leonard Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH (map)

Tickets are strictly limited and advance purchase is advised. They can be bought HERE.

PLEASE NOTE THAT ONCE PURCHASED, TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE DOOR UNDER YOUR NAME (I.E. THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED AHEAD OF THE EVENT)

Contact info(at)badidea.co.uk if you have an enquiry.

Poster by Oscar and Ewan.

Avatar raised the bar on what audiences expect from movie blockbusters – now we want to be truly surrounded by other worlds and to be taken on dizzying ‘rides’ from the comfort of multiplex auditoria. But James Cameron’s space opera is merely the most high profile example of a wider paradigm shift in 21st century storytelling.

Videogames with thousands of potential narrative strands played on consoles more powerful than home computers; theatre productions with the audience as performers; online soap operas starring social networking profiles – these are just some of the possibilities being explored by modern storytellers. And with the general population flocking to purchase ‘always on’ smartphones and GPS-enabled mobile Internet devices, the potential for creating entirely new categories of narrative entertainment is huge.

Join us at The Book Club for a look at how this is happening, and how dramatic storytelling is breaking free of celluloid, stage and paper to innovate new forms that place you at the heart of the action. Unlike many lecture and talk events, you’ll be able to contribute throughout, both with your own questions and via our live Twitter feed.

Our guests are Dan Hon, co-founder of award-winning multi-platform storytellers Six To Start, who have made everything from treasure hunts for the band Muse to Channel 4’s social networking game/cautionary tale Smokescreen; Jade Tidy, producer of episodic murder-mystery PS3 game Blue Toad Murder Files; and Tim Jones, producer at interactive theatre troupe Coney, who created the ‘play without actors’ A Small Town Anywhere as well as the forthcoming 3D-audio game Papa Sangre.

Head over here to buy tickets, and we look forward to seeing you for a night of questions, answers, thoughts, random tangents, and medium-to-hard drinking…

Joining us were Zoe Margolis, aka the Girl With A One-Track Mind; Laura Tyler of law firm Schillings; Shane Richmond from Telegraph.co.uk; and novelist and Times journo Robert Collins. Scroll down for some photos from the night, taken by Nell Block; we’ll be back next month for Immersion Drama, more details to follow early next week…

Our panel (l-r): Oliver Beatty, Zoe Margolis, Laura Tyler, Shane Richmond

The estimable Robert Collins

If you haven’t been before, Future Human is a reinvention of the intellectual salon for the 21st century. Rather than a dry lecture series, we discuss the game-changing ideas of the day with you the audience (plus some expert guests), over a bottle of wine with a straw in it.

So what’s ‘Tweet Justice’? Today, whether you’re a celebrity or a ‘civilian’, modern information sharing technologies can instantly make you notorious worldwide. Maybe you were exiting a Lamborghini in a less than ladylike manner, drunkenly ranting at a newspaper columnist, or perhaps a vengeful ex turned your sexual peccadilloes into a viral Internet sensation.

But what if you became infamous for something you didn’t do? What if you were falsely slandered on Twitter or defamed on Facebook? And what if someone you don’t know compromised your online anonymity, and you lost your job as a result? The British legal system, with its antiquated practises and swingeing media privacy laws, seems ill-equipped to cope with a modern culture in which social networks transform idle banter into a ‘news feed’, anyone can become a live media ‘broadcaster’, and mob rules apply. But if, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims, we now live in a world where ‘privacy is no longer a social norm’, where does this leave our justice system?

Join us at the Book Club on Wednesday May 12, where we will be discussing exactly how modern digital privacy habits are upturning British law. Our guests will include Telegraph.co.uk tech-media guru Shane Richmond, and Zoe Margolis, the bestselling ‘Girl With a One-Track Mind’ whose frank blogging has seen her publicly vilified and hounded…

This is our fourth Future Human event – here’s what the press having been saying thus far:

‘A blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century’ – The Sunday Times

‘Hurrah! We get to pretend to be sophisticated members of the intelligentsia’ – Grazia

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events – The Evening Standard

Tickets are available HERE. From 9pm onwards, the evening turns into a networking event for guests, who are invited to stay for cocktails and DJs.

Details:

FUTURE HUMAN: TWEET JUSTICE

Wednesday May 12, 2010

Main event is 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm, DJs until late

@ The Book Club, Leonard Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH (map)

Tickets are strictly limited & advance purchase is advised

PLEASE NOTE THAT ONCE PURCHASED, TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE DOOR UNDER YOUR NAME (I.E. THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED AHEAD OF THE EVENT)

Contact info(at)badidea.co.uk if you have an enquiry.

Join us next month for Tweet Justice, where we’ll be looking at how the UK justice system is coping (or not) with the new threats to privacy and reputation that blogging and social networking bring. Guests include Zoe Margolis (aka The Girl With the One Track Mind), and Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk’s chief tech writer. There’ll be more details in the coming days; in the meantime here’s a bunch of photos from last night.

Our able guide to industrial automation, Sam Jordison

Our live Twitter feed, which was superb last night. Big thanks to the Twitterati!

Our panel (l-r): Jannis Kallinikos (LSE), Carsten Sorensen (LSE), Victor Henning (Mendeley), Peter Kirwan (Wired; Fullrun), and our chair Oliver Beatty

(l-r) Victor Henning, Peter Kirwan, Oliver Beatty

Carsten Sorensen

Jannis Kallinikos (l) and Carsten Sorensen

Jannis Kallinikos

Victor Henning

If you haven’t been before, Future Human is a reinvention of the intellectual salon for the 21st century. Rather than a dry lecture series, we discuss the game-changing ideas of the day with you the audience (plus some expert guests), over a bottle of wine with a straw in it. This time round we’re looking at ‘The Automated Nation’: how software is making highly skilled, middle class jobs redundant. Can any of us sleep easy?

In the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was the British working class who fell victim to the mechanisation of industry. But in the Information Revolution of the 21st century, industrial productivity is increasingly driven by software algorithms and the exponential rise of computer processing power.

Accountancy, publishing, finance, travel and leisure, marketing, property, stockbroking and finance, insurance, medicine, and retail… these industries and others are being transformed by powerful technologies that improve economic efficiency tenfold while eradicating the need for human labour.

How is this great transition reshaping British industry and our economy? Who will benefit, who will lose out, and who is responsible? And what will the human consequences be?   Joining us to explore these questions (and your own) are Peter Kirwan, Wired magazine’s chief media futurist; Victor Henning, founder of Mendeley, which uses algorithm technology to organise academic research from all over the world; Carsten Sorensen, an expert in business automation working at the London School of Economics; and also from LSE, Jannis Kallinikos, who specialises in the cultural and behavioural effects of ubiquitous information and software. Popular author and sci-fi expert Sam Jordison will be your guide for the evening.

Here’s what the press have had to say about our first couple of events:

‘A blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century’ – The Sunday Times

‘Hurrah! We get to pretend to be sophisticated members of the intelligentsia’ – Grazia

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events – The Evening Standard

Tickets are available HERE. Thereafter, the evening turns into a networking event for guests, who are invited to stay for cocktails and DJs. On April 14 we will reconvene for ‘Tweet Justice’ – more details to come at the end of this week.

It launched last week with ‘Revenant Forms: the Meaning of Hauntology’. Hauntology is a term coined by Derrida but reinterpreted for experimental music by critic Simon Reynolds, to describe music which evokes a forgotten yet emotionally redolent past era. It’s ripe for discussion, particularly given the increasingly complex nostalgia of some of the underground’s “hypnagogic” new school, and exploring the ideas were Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), Adam Harper (aka Rouge’s Foam), and the Wire’s hauntologist-in-chief Joseph Stannard, with the whole thing led by the magazine’s editor, Tony Herrington.

The complexity of this music was established early on – rather than being blandly backwards-turning, it actually pines for a “lost future”, as Fisher put it. This is music that has nostalgia for past anticipation, and its power comes from the disconnect between the earlier imagined future and the realities of today. Examples include releases on the Ghost Box label, including ones from The Focus Group and Belbury Poly – their blend of vintage synths, echoing and plastic forms, and creepy sampling, creates a rich, evocative and tangibly English music. Perhaps the thing most ardently longed for in this music is the comfy paternalism of the 1970s, with its public information films, Open University, and well-meaning housing projects – this music dredges up this past by playing back this ephemera within its tracks, and in its ghostly new incarnation, can be seen to comment on the relative failure of such ideals. This, for me, is socialist music, animating a spectre of a previous political ideal for an age of individualism.

Fisher perceptively noted how hauntological dubstep producer Burial is – with his murky, sub-aquatic sound, Burial seems to long for a pre-Criminal Justice Bill time of unfettered raving that seeps back from the past into his productions. Fisher also made the elegant point that hauntological music has “the medium of listening to music written into it; we’re listening to listening”. In other words, as listeners, we’re listening to nostalgia, rather than being nostalgic. Fisher put this complex position next to Franz Ferdinand, who he saw as blandly reanimating past forms without anything new. Here, as sometimes happens in the Wire magazine, everything got a bit joyless – Franz Ferdinand may not be reinventing the wheel, but they make great songs that everyone likes dancing to. It’s a weakness in ’serious’ music criticism, this resistance to acknowledge melody as being just as transformatively powerful as rhythm or mood. There can be gloriousness in pastiche, it just needs a good tune.

Similarly, Harper was in love with Ariel Pink’s lo-fi rendering of shiny pop – but how might he react to Pink’s newfound gloss? Not well, I’d imagine. While artists like Oneohtrix Point Never wholeheartedly find the beauty and brilliance in cheesy 80s music (as in his ecstatic looping of Chris de Burgh below), there was a sense that these critics couldn’t quite bring themselves to agree, and still regard this music with an irony that they profess to hate in others. Herrington saw that things were veering off topic and steered back, but unfortunately a tone of very weak hipster-bashing continued to reappear throughout. This, and the constant recourse to I’ve-been-to-university language (“problematise”, “obfuscate”, “discourse” et al), were the weak points in what was otherwise a really enjoyable brain workout.

There were a couple of points of discussion that should be explored further. Stannard pointed out the “malevolence” of some of this music, and this was backed up by the films of Ghost Box founder Julian House which were screened afterwards – creepy snatches of schoolchildren and countryside, alongside geometric shapes, buried under scratches, foliage and opaque forms. But as Ian Hodgson, aka Moon Wiring Club (another hauntologist) said to me afterwards: why isn’t anyone pointing out the fun? There’s a lot of humour in this music, with its odd juxtapositions, overly sincere and schlocky dread, and laughable contemporary fashions. It’s the simultaneous blend of the light and shade that makes this music so compelling, and to reduce it to mere spookiness is to greatly underestimate it. Moon Wiring Club’s performance, with choice moments including chopped-and-screwed Mike Reid vocal samples accompanied by video of low-budget 70s costume drama, evoked hauntology in all its scary/hilarious glory.

Ultimately, there is the sense that no matter how complex the nostalgia, it is still nostalgia, and I can’t help but think we’re lacking a truly innovative strain of new music, one that takes the very fabric of our society – overloaded with digital information and self-empowerment – and renders it in a completely fresh way, just as, say, PiL did in the late 70s. But hauntology is nevertheless one of the most sophisticated and compelling strains of modern music, and this event series promises to be one of the most exciting places to discuss sophisticated and compelling music. Its next event features dubstep producer Kode 9 talking about his new book, an analysis of how sound used in warfare – we’ll see you there.

‘A blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century’ – The Sunday Times

‘Hurrah! We get to pretend to be sophisticated members of the intelligentsia’ – Grazia

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events – The Evening Standard

After the sell-out success of our first two events, Future Human, London’s theatre of new ideas, is back on Wednesday April 14th with ‘The Automated Nation’. Tickets can be bought here.

Middle-class industries from accountancy to marketing, tourism to the stock market, are being transformed by powerful software and technologies that improve economic efficiency tenfold, while eradicating the need for human labour. How is this great transition reshaping British industry and our economy? Who will benefit, who will lose out, and who is responsible? And what will the human consequences be?

Joining us to discuss these issues over a cocktail or five are Peter Kirwan, Wired magazine’s chief media futurist; Victor Henning, founder of Mendeley, which uses algorithm technology to organise academic research from all over the world; popular author and sci-fi expert Sam Jordison; and other special guests.

Future Human: The Automated Nation runs from 7-9pm on Wednesday April 14 at The Book Club, Shoreditch, London (click here for a map). Tickets are available here – advance purchase is recommended as numbers are limited. We hope you can join us!

Full details, including our lineup of special guests, are here. There are still a few tickets available – you can buy online here until 5pm today or try your luck on the door. We’ll have a limited number available, but would advise getting down early to avoid disappointment.