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…

- Newswire evolutions
- Canine robots
- Crowdfunded moon Nazis
- Geotagging atlases
-  Horrible Facebook marketing, plus the usual Facebook privacy beefs
- Extreme wheelchairing
- Touchy-feely tech
- Augmented-reality history tours

And a whole lot more. Join now, share your ideas and exciting things you’ve found! Also hold tight for news of our next Future Human event, to be announced on Tuesday next week. It’ll be on Wednesday June 16, entitled Immersion Drama – we’ll be looking at new forms of narrative and storytelling in a socially networked world full of powerful consoles and interactive theatre. Keep the diary free!

Some of the things people have been posting include:

- World Cup predictions via dubious mathematical models
- “Beautiful Woman Clock”, a chauvinistic time-telling device from Japan
- Harley Davidson designs from 2020, masculinity crutch still included
- Crowdfunded theatre productions, one pound at a time
- Discussions about entrepreneurial journalism and “upstreaming” your job
- Furniture made of lasers
- The future of speech recognition

And tons more: well over 100 stories have been posted in the last five days, going from 0 to 430 fans in the same amount of time. Join up now to the most vibrant, informative and discursive new group on Facebook!

Over the last four months, our Future Human event has become London’s premier destination for discussion of today’s game-changing ideas – we’ve covered neuroscience in the advertising industry, the impact of digital technology on the fashion industry and the way we dress, algorithms and software potentially replacing middle-class jobs, and how social networking and online privacy is disrupting the justice system.

But unless you live in London, you’re unlikely to make it to one of our events. Plus there’s only so many topics we can cover, and only so much time to cover them each month. So we decided we wanted to let the conversation continue in an open, online space, which is where Future Human Club comes in.

It’s a Facebook group where anyone can share new ideas, inspiring trends and information about the upstart people and projects that are re-shaping our future. It could be a greentech startup that won its next round of funding; a new 3D TV; an eyeball-shaking music video; a dataset on the UK advertising industry; the latest news on the future of the FSA; a discussion being continued from one of our events; something lolerific/roflcopter-worthy – pretty much anything that excites you, and you think will excite others. Interpret that in a broadly SFW way…

Over this weekend, we’ll be setting the wheels in motion with some of the most intriguing content that we can find. Feel free to contribute with anything at any time, and we look forward to seeing you hanging around the Future Human Club in the coming weeks and months!

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

So Radio 4’s Today was full of Frank Bruno being mental and miniature documentaries from Skegness, while Women’s Hour focused on bunions (insert your own Osborne joke here). There’s a wonderfully awkward pretense that hmm, nothing much seems to be happening today, which explodes into deranged swingometer-led musings the minute the polls close.

But this election is different. It was the first where social networking was used in campaigning, and the failures of big hubs like Labourspace (six grassroots campaigns in the whole of 2009!) were somewhat balanced out by candidates getting on Twitter and directly engaging with voters. In terms of election day reporting, social networking has created an even bigger change: where once your election day discussions were only passed around your immediate circle, now they’re on the Internet in a manner that completely rips up all the traditional rules on what’s allowed to be broadcast today. And on a day when vast swathes of the electorate still seem undecided, the cacophony from Twitter and Facebook could potentially change a lot of minds.

With the traditional broadcast media temporarily gagged, we’re also getting a glimpse into the future of news. Since the arrival of the RSS feed and the Twitter list, people can increasingly tailor the news they get to create a hyper-personal stream of information that’s relevant to them. Opinion from friends and trusted sources, augmented by a variety of cameraphone photos, Flip vids, and other democratic reporting techniques, is increasingly the future of news, or at least the news that people are increasingly preferring. We’ve touched on the dangers of this before, the way that people can seal themselves in an echo chamber, and looking at the comments section of any newspaper is testament to the calcified opinions of the internet age. Equally though, one look across the retweeting and 25+ comment Facebook status updates today suggests that there is a genuine discursiveness that top-down old media could never provide.

Today, election news is being made and shared by the people, with the popular stories getting traction because people are engaged with them, rather than a single editorial decision. And perhaps one day all news will be this way. It depends on whether you believe a news organisation can be truly impartial; if you don’t, then there’s little point in bothering with them over your own tailored news feed, but if you do, then it becomes the only place you can trust in a sea of subjectivity. For today, just tune into social networks and see if you’re ready for that version of the future.

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.