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Intelligence Squared

The Extreme Present: An Evening of Self-Help for Planet Earth

Intelligence Squared

Intelligence Squared

News, Society & Culture, Arts, News Commentary

4.21.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2015

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Shumon Basar, writer, thinker and cultural critic, Douglas Coupland, the renowned author of 'Generation X', and Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the world’s best-known curators, joined forces for a special event with Intelligence Squared to explore the challenges that the planet faces in the Extreme Present. Ours is an era so unfamiliar that in their book, 'The Age of Earthquakes' – their 21st-century update of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal 1967 book 'The Medium Is the Massage' – Basar, Coupland and Obrist have developed a new ‘Glossarium’ to describe the unsettling experiences of the always-on, networked age. Do you suffer from ‘monophobia’ (the fear of feeling like an individual) or from ‘connectopathy’ (a range of irregular behaviours triggered by the rewiring of our brains)? Do you spend more and more of your time ‘deselfing’ (willingly diluting your sense of self by plastering the internet with as much information as possible) or, as technology makes you ever smarter yet leaves you feeling ever more stupid... Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Thank you for downloading this Intelligence Square podcast.

0:03.3

For more information on our debates, talks and discussions,

0:06.5

visit intelligence squared.com and sign up to the newsletter.

0:09.9

We are thrilled to have three very exciting speakers this evening.

0:14.9

I'm going to introduce them sitting in the middle

0:16.5

of Schuman Bassar, the writer and critic.

0:19.2

Douglas Copland, the novelist,

0:21.6

and the co-director of the Serpentine Gallery's Hans Ulrich Obrest.

0:25.0

We're going to start off with the three authors talking about the age of the extreme present,

0:29.0

a term that comes up in the book in which they will explain to you.

0:32.0

I will be giving them a nod when to finish. They have brief a lot of times. When they are done, they will then introduce one by one our four expert witnesses. We have the geologist Mike Ellis, neuroscientist

0:44.8

Dr. Dan Glazer, technologist Ben Hammersley and the artist and filmmaker

0:49.4

Sophia Al Maria. It now gives me great pleasure to hand over to Schuman Bassar, Douglas Copeland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Okay, so that clip was shot and released literally just a few weeks ago.

1:14.2

That is a shark biting through Google's Pacific Internet cable.

1:27.0

That cable basically keeps the global internet working. And they've discovered that sharks increasingly are gnawing away at these cables all across the planet.

1:37.0

Sharks can actually see or sense electricity and so for them it's quite delicious looking at.

1:43.0

So what Google have had to do and other other companies is you saw the cable that they've had to now encase it in nine inch thick Kevlar,

1:57.2

which will probably survive the end of the universe.

2:01.6

But anyway, this is this kind of this is this is this is this is extraordinary.

2:07.0

It's the cut it's the stuff of science fiction and it's happening right now at the bottom of the ocean and any minute perhaps this

2:15.1

evening we may find ourselves completely disconnected from the internet and we

2:19.2

will know why. So to get things going I'm going to introduce our dear friend and colleague

...

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