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.

As ever, you can continue the discussion on our Facebook group, where you can also share all sorts of interesting nuggets of innovation and general human endeavour.

And we’ll be announcing details of our next event, The End of the Oil Age, over the next week or so. We’ve taken a number of suggestions for guests that you made, and sent out invitations to them – hopefully we’ll have our first crowdsourced discussion panel together very soon!

It’s a fascinating, multifaceted topic, with a huge variety of opinion circulating around it. So we want to know who you think should appear on our three person panel for the event. Here’s Future Human Club president Nell Block with more:

So leave your suggestions in the comments below, on the comments field of the Vimeo page, on Future Human Club, or by tweeting at us. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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