Multiplying Utopias Session 1

It is always easier to say what you don’t want than saying what you do want. We have seen plenty of dystopian visions shared since the Industrial Revolution. While intended perhaps to serve as warnings, at times it seems these narratives have instead provided roadmaps hurling us further towards those visions. Storytelling needs drama, but does the drama in the stories we tell need to be all about warnings of potential injustices in the systems we create? Maybe fiction can help unlock our moral imaginations and help us reveal new perspectives to overcoming obstacles confronted in the real world. Earth2030 and The Scheme of Things are two projects that ask about the world we could have, or would prefer to have, as expressed through fiction. They have been running independent workshops leading up to the conference that have culminated in a number of stories and scenarios of desirable worlds. During the conference they are collaborating across two workshop sessions with the hopes of weaving together a broad range of imagined worlds that have been contributed by experts bringing specific knowledge of particular fields and technologies, with the imaginative and philosophical expressions of artists and world-builders.

SPEAKERS Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, with a particular focus on blockchain technologies. She is investigating the new opportunities for these technologies to enable new governance models and participatory decision-making through the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).

Tony Lai unleashes collective potential at a human and a systems level. He is a lawyer, researcher, and technology entrepreneur, advising and working with companies, government agencies, law firms, and nonprofits to build the future of trust, transactions, and dispute resolution. He is an Entrepreneurial Fellow and Founder of the Blockchain Group at CodeX, Stanford’s Center for Legal Informatics. Tony founded the company, Legal.io, to deploy technology to scale legal access worldwide, and serves on the boards of various companies and non-profit organizations working on improving data governance and legal inter-operability. He consults on collaboration design with DSIL Global and learnt design thinking at Stanford’s d.school. He helped design and research the first legal technology course at Stanford Law School, and was on the founding team of StartX, the Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator. He advises government agencies, startups, enterprises, and legal service organizations at the intersection of computational law, smart legal contracts, digital identity, and service technologies and protocols. Prior to his work at Stanford, Tony clocked 10,000 hours’ experience as a lawyer advising companies, public sector bodies and charities on regulatory, transactional and IP issues in Europe, Asia and Africa. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford University, and a Master of Laws degree in Law, Science and Technology from Stanford. Specialties: Legal informatics; blockchain governance; smart contracts; entrepreneurship and social innovation; design thinking; intellectual property, privacy, data protection, internet, technology, licensing, outsourcing, general corporate, commercial, emerging companies, and M&A law.

Jennifer Lyn Morone is the CEO of RadicalxChange and a multi-disciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience in relation to technology, economics, politics, and identity and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as the Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer.