The last really prophetic world's fair was New York, 1939. That's famous for GM's vision of the future of 1960, the original "Futurerama" . Freeways everywhere. RCA had television. AT&T let you make free long distance calls. All that stuff happened.
The 1964 World's Fair had another GM exhibit. Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened.
What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead? Colonization of Mars? Mars sucks as real estate. There may be research bases there someday, but as a self-sufficient area, it would be tougher than Antarctica or a continental shelf. Robots may some day be a thing, but they still don't work well in unstructured environments.
My mom went to the ‘64 worlds fair almost every day (according to her, she had an uncle that worked there.) She told us stories about various exhibits when we were kids, but the thing she remembered the most was the video phone- that she should see as well here someone across the planet.
Fast forward to 2020 and she is spending hours every day on video calls with her grandchildren.
We might have missed on some of our dreams from 1964, but not all of them. We’ll miss more in the future if we don’t articulate them.
> What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead?
I want a roboticized home that cleans itself, that is able to do autorepairs, rooms reconfiguration. I want an auto-laundry and an auto-kitchen. I want it smart enough to manage air flow, temperature and humidity efficiently. I want all that to be voice activated. Please make it offline to not depend on some cloud thingies.
I want a powerwall and solar panels, I want an automated herbs garden. I want things to be upgradable and fixable without destroying walls.
If you give me room on the exhibit, I'll throw in an automated greenhouse to produce a lot of the food and maybe an automated workshop that would be able to produce/repair small items.
That's doable, that's not here yet, but we have most of the tech.
The next frontier is not space, it is automation. I would go to a World's Fair that showed a future where we would have less work to do.
We have a lot of environmental challenges ahead of us. A forward-thinking World's Fair could paint a picture of how we get from here to a carbon-negative economy: solar & wind, battery tech, autonomous cars and less car-oriented cities, better telepresence, carbon sequestering, architecture, etc.
> What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead?
With a few more years of AI, I want software that can automate engineering - so, I can say “figure out a factorio layout that makes 1 rocket per minute”. Then “play factorio from scratch to liftoff”.
Translated into the real world, I want to a robot that can build a brick wall, and an AI that can design and manufacture the brick wall building robot. I think this is structurally the same problem as “play factorio” - the only difference being a few orders of magnitude of complexity.
Ultimately I want to be able to take a few minimal pieces of robotics and drones and stuff into the wilderness (or Mars) and say “build me a house like this with working solar panels and plumbing”, and it can gather resources, design and assemble intermediate machines (Eg sawmills) and bootstrap the manufacturing needed to arrange atoms in any specifically described way.
This is both a utopian and dystopian technology. At scale the same technology could be used to both clean up the great pacific garbage patch, and convert the Amazon rainforest into a massive industrial wasteland. I don’t think this is as far away from our current technology as we imagine it to be. (Decades not centuries)
I would attribute the prediction failure of the 1964 World's Fair to the pace of change. It seems reasonable that predictability decreases as the pace of societal and technological change increase. The changes from 1939 to 1964 (25 years) pale in comparison to the changes from 1964 to 1989 (gene sequencing in 72, Vietnam war protests and ambiguous end in 73, mass-market cell phones in 73, Internet in 74, PCs in 77, disillusionment with nuclear energy in the 70s, the fall of the soviet union, and much more).
I think the pace of change is such that we can't predict what will be with much certainty, but we can imagine and capture the public's imagination. That may help drive change toward what we want to see, and I think that in itself might be a good reason for a World's Fair - not to predict a future, but to collectively imagine the future we want so that we have a more clear cut vision to strive for.
Seems like computers were woven into many of the exhibits (Search a date and get what happened on that day for example). Also the picturephone was just one part of the bell exhibit which envisioned expansive high speed data networks. I think looking back, it may be easy to overlook these, but the certainly seem pretty significant.
GM was at least a little bit right. Their moon base had a moon car and some sort of silvery structure. Five years after the exhibition, we had some guys walking around on the moon and returning to a silvery structure, and two years after that, we had a lunar rover.
> Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened.
Moon missions had been suspended until last year or so. If NASA had kept at it, I'm sure some level of colonization, at least rotating manned missions a la ISS would have happened by now.
In 2021, We are tired of cars, freeways, traffic, sitting in the car for long hours. Same goes for internet. Same applies to mobile phones. People are looking for less technology, more time with nature, family, friends etc.
Build a dome over New Orleans or York; Call it the New Palace. Or to be more optimistic a nuclear plant, maybe Governor's island? or recommission Indian Point, along with district heating.
I admire the optimism and motivational tone of the article, but fairs and expos are a thing of the past. We don't need to build elaborate, carefully constructed single-use cities to showcase the scientific advances of the world. Those showcases happen day by day on the internet and mass media.
I don't think the argument is valid because it can be applied to nearly every event where people come together, including sporting events and concerts. But like with the Olympic Games, the World's Fair can serve as a catalyst for urban development projects.
Also, the "science showcase" is a thing of the past, the BIE switched to "individual country showcase" a couple of years ago, which makes the whole thing a lot less appealing IMHO, but that's another issue.
Yes and no. I do agree that probably nobody's going to build another Eiffel tower or Crystal Palace any time soon,but we need spaces to explore science, innovation,and simply have for people to do something more interesting than just mindlessly walking through shopping malls.
Fairs and expos inspire. I still remember going to a tech expo as a teenager and seeing all these latest gadgets and thinking: I want to be part of it! Now imagine going to one of these in the middle of last century and seeing rockets, nuclear car prototypes and things like that. You almost instantly want to sign up or at least show it to your kids.
Why bother showing up at the Olympics in person? We can just watch it on TV right? :p
But to refute more directly, the unplanned interactions with other visitors, being able to talk directly with makers who built the things you’re seeing, the viral sense of wonder; all are good reasons to have it in-person.
Yet international art fairs and specialty conventions had been taking off for the 20 years before the pandemic. People still like to travel and come together under well organized events. The issue is the wisdom of a city or region pouring in billions of billions for a week-long event. Maybe there's a new model to be invented.
The annual CES convention is still popular. I see it as the modern equivalent of the world's fair, even if it is not quite the same and missing some aspects.
Who remembers the Millenium Dome? It was a self-conscious emulation of the 1951s Festival of Britain, that ended up being characteristically Blairite bland.
I am also very Cold War revival. We should be launching competitive science wars with each other, not unlike the Olympics. Set objectives, set time periods, when the time and objective expire all knowledge gained is pooled and published for the world, for free. National or International propaganda campaigns to recruit for teams. Spies, espionage, moles. Not just a science fair, but something a bit more dirty and fun.
I do a lot of double/triple clicking to highlight text as I read online (fidgeting, but also helps keep track of where I am). On your site, triple clicking unintentionally hits the twitter share button, which opens a new, unwanted window. Bit annoying.
Medium does something similar, but they offset the button so you have to move cursor in between clicks to actually trigger the button.
I’m fascinated by that phenomenon. I don’t even notice I’m doing it most of the time, and I’m shocked by how many other people do it.
Specific, common, digital tics. Another one is control-s after a single line changed. Something immensely satisfying about selecting that perfect block of text and making that “altered document” asterisk go away.
There are a handful of sites I've encountered that do this and I hate it. Feels like a violation when I can't select text the way I normally do, for some reason.
No mention of Expo 2010, which had representation from 65 different countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2010_pavilions. I didn't go, but the photos of the architecture from the different countries were beautiful.
> After the six-month run, the Expo had attracted well over 70 million visitors. The Expo 2010 is also the most expensive fair in the history of World's Fair, with more than 45 billion US dollars invested from the Chinese Government
> I didn't go, but the photos of the architecture from the different countries were beautiful.
Apparently, the American pavilion was not among them:
Now that the US Pavilion has been open for several days, its reviews, to be generous, are mixed. Visitors, after a two-hour wait, enjoy the upbeat attitude of the student “ambassadors” who greet them in Mandarin — but few are impressed by the three films that constitute the US Pavilion’s content. (One reporter noted that the price for the three shorts, about $23 million, is more than the production costs of the Oscar-winning film, The Hurt Locker.) The “American people’s” sole walk-on are brief vignettes that flicker on the screen and then are gone. Chinese visitors are reported to have remarked, especially after the hype and long wait, “We expected more from America.” Visitors exit the theater into a large hall dedicated to fawning over the 60-odd corporate sponsors whose names and brands are the only aspects of American life and culture to which the pavilion accords recognition.
The pavilions were truly incredible (from what I remember, Saudi Arabia comes to mind, just look at that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2010_pavilions#Saudi_Arab...) but like the article says, it felt more like each country's branding exercise rather than any unified vision of the future.
Was very surprised to not see any mention of Expo2020, which has been hailed as a "World's Fair for the 21st Century". UAE and Dubai put tons of resources and capital into it but obviously had to deal with the issue of in person events in 2020. As I understand it has been rescheduled for the end of 2021...
> Today, World's Fairs have been rebranded as "International Expositions" that occur every 5 years, and are a hollow shell of their former glory. They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism.
I don't know enough about Expo2020 to agree or disagree, but I assumed the author's assessment above was in reference to the series of which the Dubai exhibition is a part.
I really don't think Expo2020 counts. Rooting the future in the UAE seems like a losing battle, and it seems like the amount of entities that would choose not to participate would outweigh those that would.
Expo 2020 is shaping up to be an incredible project, however I'm still expecting it to fall victim to the same challenge that all Fairs since 1970 have had: a lack of a unifying vision. Since every country presents their own narrative, it's hard to guarantee alignment.
I'm heading out there next month and will hopefully find something inspiring to help shape our efforts.
It’s not exactly the same, but Burning Man comes pretty close in a lot of ways.
If you haven’t been, there are thousands of art projects at a grand scale, things that take up blocks of space a piece, and they are built by artists from around the world, giving everyone a global perspective of what is possible.
I also love the idea of showcasing what is possible for a society. There is a true sense of community, immediacy, and collaboration where everyone there is an active participant.
There are dozens of smaller events with similar properties, likely one nearby.
> They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism
I kind of feel that these were the exact goals of the original world fairs too.
This is true, and the reason for why they are no longer a thing is the same reason why companies don't sponsor theme park rides anymore. They simply don't need to. With the ability to reach more people more quickly with less money over our mass media networks, there's no real reason to sponsor an attraction of any kind.
...wait eagerly for Jessica Watkins to take the first step on Mars
There's an unfortunate name collision, I didn't know who Jessica Watkins was so Googled her, and the top results are for a Jessica Watkins who participated in the attack on the USA Capitol... I spent a moment pondering what her link to Mars was.. but farther down the results list is NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins.
It's a shame that the astronaut has her search results cluttered by the insurrectionist. Back when I was doing online dating, I shared a name (and similar age and nearby city) with the brother of a recently convicted serial killer, searching for my name brought up articles about him... I warned potential dates that if they looked me up online, I'm not that guy (which, I suppose, is exactly what the brother of a serial killer would say).
Yes, a bit unfortunant, and I did the same thing. Being a non-american I thought she was a congresswoman as well. But it's such a minor detail and in the end no less, that it shouldn't detere from the main point of the article
The US already has established air travel. And mass transit via trains is not a technological problem, it is a political and a marketing problem. Hyperloop has the potential to solve the political and marketing problems.
The 1963-64 world's fair shaped my entire life. My earliest clear memories were from that fair, and ever since I've been fascinated by "futurism", technology, computers, space, architecture, etc.
Every school and career choice I've made was based on some inspirational spark that hit me there.
The post starts to share a vision for a new fair. Are they proposing that the new fair should actually contain all those elements? Or is it just an example? How were the visions in the previous (successful) fairs agreed upon? Did space go to the highest bidders? Furthermore, was the space divvied up so that NASA had a section (for example) and Ford had their own space? Or was it all intermingled?
Great question. We're planning to compile the most compelling vision of the future that we can. We'll shape the content to suit the technologies available, but also need to ensure we paint a picture of where we can go.
Most Fairs struggle with this because the organizing body has no control over the content of most of the Pavilions. By privately organizing and operating it, the new World's Fair will function more like Epcot where we craft the experience pulling in corporations, countries, and ngo's as we see fit.
Lastly, the Fairgrounds are generally split up into themes with each of the companies/countries hosting their own Pavilion. The map from the 1964 New York World's Fair is a pretty good example of this: http://www.nywf64.com/maps01.shtml
I'm not sure we can ever get back to the techno-optimism that characterized much of America in the past. This article seems to suggest that we as a country can become optimistic about the future again by having a World's Fair. That by doing so we'll recapture a shared vision of the future and a shared cultural purpose that we had until it started to fall apart in the 90s. It's a quaint idea, but it doesn't seem likely to succeed in bridging the widening gaps between various tribes. Much of this cultural disintegration was caused by technology.
Yes! Success for most Fairs depends on the timeline you're looking at. Even the 1984 World's Fair in New Orleans (which I know I call out in the essay), was considered a failure at the time. Now 30+ years later, New Orleans has a thriving waterfront district that wouldn't have been developed without the Fair.
>over a hundred years later, Chicago is still making money from the economic, social, and infrastructure benefits of its fairs.
Because of the way the economy works, this can be said of absolutely any expenditure anywhere anytime for any reason. If even one project laborer buys a cup of coffee on the job, at least $4 of value then gets sent out into circulation in a way that has been plausibly colored by the construction of the Big Money Pit of 1849.
I really think the closest thing we have these days is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas every winter.
At some point in the last twenty years or so, it became less about companies demoing next year’s products and more about really grand visions of the future (of course, where the company in question was the centerpiece of this grand vision). I believe it was Panasonic in 2020 who had a huge booth showing off a flying car concept, accompanied by a wall-to-wall LED display showing a video of families in the future taking it to work/school/etc.
Once I realized that CES is less of a marketing event and more of a modern World’s Fair, I really started to enjoy it a lot more. Even with the corporatism. Can’t wait to (hopefully) go again next year!
It's amazing to me that the World's Fair gave us so many iconic and wonderful structures, all of which are probably too impractical to build otherwise: the Eiffel Tower, Space Needle, Unisphere, Palace of Fine Arts, etc. It's unrealistic, but it's worth having a new world's fair just for an excuse to build another one of these!
As stated in the essay, they now operate as "International Exhibitions", not "World's Fairs." There's some nuance to this, but the problem is still the same. These events are national branding exercises & architecture competitions, not a place where the future becomes real.
A World’s Fair now would be like The Olympics, a ridiculously expensive, corruption-laden affair that would cost many countries more than they could ever recoup, benefiting only a few rich 1st-world countries and/or multi-national companies. While the average person would see “marvels”, they’d be the corporate-approved, mass-market-acceptable marvels that were cleared through legal before being shown to the public.
You can see more innovation in an afternoon spent on blogs than you would ever see in a 6-month long, static display of corporate bullshit.
Talk to the U, Hk, and B people in Asia, ... sorry but “collective vision” is the problem. NASA does not dominate but individual. Collective is evil and commonness is a crime. Let individual be individual. You do not need this for a steve job to thrive. But any joint ignoring individual rights ... it would be 1984 coming today, as it has and coming to a lot of human beings.
We have been told that technology is the solution to problems we face. But, many problems we face are created by technology itself. May be it is time to look at technology not as a solution. Technology may provide solutions at some times for specific cases. but we need to be very selective and careful about that technology.
> Unfortunately, this all started to change after the U.S. put a man on the moon. While this was certainly a "giant leap for mankind," we lacked an understanding of what our next step would be.
Is there supporting evidence of these assertions? There are some interesting ideas in here, but I’m not seeing anything to back them up.
Maybe what we could do in a much more short term is another "Mother of all Demos" [1], focused on more than just the future of computing technology?
Have calls to action/RFPs, and have a conference of some sort - the goal is to have one cohesive demo per track. Distribute this thinking across the world, like Pioneer.app does instead of consolidating it in one country or geographical area.
I’m imagining a future where you can get idempotently vaccinated w/ legit antibodies for any in person event you attend for near instant immunity to illness.
I feel the article is, at best, a nostalgic take to a Post-War time between 1945 and 1970. And, at worst, merely an itch to indulge in consuming modern technology.
Both takes are missing the mark about what a World Fair is about. Here's why.
The 3 decades after 1945 were a time when economies of formerly allied nations were booming. In France, these years äre known as the "Trente Glorieuses". Many more countries had their own "economic miracle" during this time. Even West-Germany and Austria had their own "Wirtschaftwunder" as their economies bounced back.
Many parts of the world were still formal colonies to Western nations, or their economies hadn't fully modernized yet to a point where a sizable middle-class has access to democratized /commoditized comforts of a Western lifestyle e.g. aviation, healthcare, education, even sanitation, access to media and so on.
Not to mention the spectre of the Cold War that loomed over these decades.
Against this historic backdrop, the fair is notable because it was a showcase of mid-20th century American culture and technology. That shouldn't really come as a surprise since it was firmly organized within the sphere of influence of America's hegemony.
Such were the times in 1965. And they are incomparable to 2021. The organization of a World Fair in 1965 happened in a vastly different context, with vastly different incentives, interests and motives then it does in 2021.
The author misses that completely and marches blindly onward hence:
> Today, World's Fairs have been rebranded as "International Expositions" that occur every 5 years, and are a hollow shell of their former glory. They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism. If anything, they're the perfect representation of our current vision for the future: unfocused and uninspiring.
> But it doesn't have to be this way; we can't afford for it to be this way.
> The world has changed dramatically since 1984. We now live in the most incredible time in human history. The internet has brought billions of people together and tech companies have given us supercomputers in our pockets. We're starting to build hyperloops and supersonic jets. We're on the cusp of incredible breakthroughs in genetics, biology, medicine, food science, energy, transportation, manufacturing, computing, and robotics. We're finally going back to the moon and then on to Mars. We've once again seen the power of a collective vision with the record-breaking development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The World's Fair is a reflection of the World in 2021 and the future. With the complexity of representing 7.8 billion people, an array of sovereign nations which didn't exist in 1965. It's an event which competes with against the complexity of a exploding plethora of modern mass media, new stakeholders, emerging markets, and so on fueled by globalisation, digitization and automatisation.
A Fair isn't just an marketing event, it's a global forum that aims beyond other events that present themselves as global fora or gatherings. It's an opportunity for nations and peoples to present a showcase to the world. It gives them the chance to put a message out. In that regard, the World Fair is akin to that other global event where the world gathers: The Olympics.
The organization of the World Fair is no longer rooted in the political or economical global hegemony of a handful of "first-world" (for lack a better term) nations showing off their industrial might and international prowess, such as it was during the latter half of the 20th century.
The Fair is now also home to many new nations and upcoming economies or regional powers who are making their entrance to the World's stage, and to whom the importance isn't plain "technological innovation" but above all showing themselves to the world, what they have to offer to the world, what their aspirations are, what they hope for the futre, and taking part in the global forum.
In that regard, the vision for World Fair extends far beyond technology per the offical website:
For sure, there's going to the Moon or Mars, and there are hyperloops and driverless cars, or there's even developing a COVID vaccine. These are wonderful developments. But are they really the developments that need to be put front and center at World's Fair at the expense of everything else? Are these the only developments that should matter to 7.8 billion people in 2021?
The second part from this article seems to voice a want for the World's Fair to limit itself to showcasing technology, engineering and media. To me, it sounds like not much more then a want for being able to indulge in advertising when visiting the Fair. And that comes across as, well, rather tone deaf.
A World Fair isn't about merely basking in the marvels of technology or innovation. It's about the humans and humanity that are represented, visit and meet at a Fair.
Technology and engineering are universal achievements, and a main part of how society as a whole progresses. A sociology focused world fair would just be the words most hated and divisive fair ever, exactly the opposite of what it should set out to achieve.
Yeah no, we should use this money to fund energy research. Trying to woo idiots is a stupid game already won by youtube, online advertising and TikTok.
We as a species gave up trying to solve difficult problems and now we're only concerned with inflating asset prices to feel "wealthy". Smart engineers are working for HFT firms instead of NASA. We've equated "wealth" with "progress" and we're now discovering how hollow all these fake numbers are.
> We as a species gave up trying to solve difficult problems
We live in an era of constant fascinating biological and cosmological discoveries. In the past 3 years we have entered the era of gene therapy healthcare with several genetic treatments recieving approval by he FDA. We are on the cusp of break even if not effective fusion energy.
I cannot deny that the financialization of everything has diminished the moral imperative of some of these efforts but to act as if no one is attacking big problems is silly.
I’m a pretty smart guy, or at least I keep getting told that, and I work near HFTs in the finance world. I am also a huge space nerd thanks to a love for things like Star Trek and Star Wars in the 70’s 80’s. I would take a significant pay cut to work for NASA because that work would feel amazing compared to the grind I’ve been in.
I am 100% confident I would not be hirable by NASA, confident enough in that assertion to shut down without trying. I think you may have some bias from your media bubble coloring your perception if you truly believe what you wrote is true.
Animats|5 years ago
The 1964 World's Fair had another GM exhibit. Colonization of the Moon. Underwater cities. None of that happened.
What could we have in a World's Fair now that looks ahead? Colonization of Mars? Mars sucks as real estate. There may be research bases there someday, but as a self-sufficient area, it would be tougher than Antarctica or a continental shelf. Robots may some day be a thing, but they still don't work well in unstructured environments.
topkai22|5 years ago
Fast forward to 2020 and she is spending hours every day on video calls with her grandchildren.
We might have missed on some of our dreams from 1964, but not all of them. We’ll miss more in the future if we don’t articulate them.
Iv|5 years ago
I want a roboticized home that cleans itself, that is able to do autorepairs, rooms reconfiguration. I want an auto-laundry and an auto-kitchen. I want it smart enough to manage air flow, temperature and humidity efficiently. I want all that to be voice activated. Please make it offline to not depend on some cloud thingies.
I want a powerwall and solar panels, I want an automated herbs garden. I want things to be upgradable and fixable without destroying walls.
If you give me room on the exhibit, I'll throw in an automated greenhouse to produce a lot of the food and maybe an automated workshop that would be able to produce/repair small items.
That's doable, that's not here yet, but we have most of the tech.
The next frontier is not space, it is automation. I would go to a World's Fair that showed a future where we would have less work to do.
spankalee|5 years ago
musicale|5 years ago
Mars has something of a CO2 atmosphere, and might have more accessible water. The soil may be more usable as well.
terse_malvolio|5 years ago
josephg|5 years ago
With a few more years of AI, I want software that can automate engineering - so, I can say “figure out a factorio layout that makes 1 rocket per minute”. Then “play factorio from scratch to liftoff”.
Translated into the real world, I want to a robot that can build a brick wall, and an AI that can design and manufacture the brick wall building robot. I think this is structurally the same problem as “play factorio” - the only difference being a few orders of magnitude of complexity.
Ultimately I want to be able to take a few minimal pieces of robotics and drones and stuff into the wilderness (or Mars) and say “build me a house like this with working solar panels and plumbing”, and it can gather resources, design and assemble intermediate machines (Eg sawmills) and bootstrap the manufacturing needed to arrange atoms in any specifically described way.
This is both a utopian and dystopian technology. At scale the same technology could be used to both clean up the great pacific garbage patch, and convert the Amazon rainforest into a massive industrial wasteland. I don’t think this is as far away from our current technology as we imagine it to be. (Decades not centuries)
Communitivity|5 years ago
I think the pace of change is such that we can't predict what will be with much certainty, but we can imagine and capture the public's imagination. That may help drive change toward what we want to see, and I think that in itself might be a good reason for a World's Fair - not to predict a future, but to collectively imagine the future we want so that we have a more clear cut vision to strive for.
XenophileJKO|5 years ago
CobrastanJorji|5 years ago
sedatk|5 years ago
Moon missions had been suspended until last year or so. If NASA had kept at it, I'm sure some level of colonization, at least rotating manned missions a la ISS would have happened by now.
snambi|5 years ago
potiuper|5 years ago
TomSwirly|5 years ago
A world without war, where laws were enforced equally on the mighty and the weak alike?
Cthulhu_|5 years ago
crooked-v|5 years ago
Well, to start with, the massive restructuring of industry and everyday life needed to mitigate or begin reversing the effects of climate change.
neals|5 years ago
poisonborz|5 years ago
kratom_sandwich|5 years ago
Also, the "science showcase" is a thing of the past, the BIE switched to "individual country showcase" a couple of years ago, which makes the whole thing a lot less appealing IMHO, but that's another issue.
cosmodisk|5 years ago
nelsondev|5 years ago
But to refute more directly, the unplanned interactions with other visitors, being able to talk directly with makers who built the things you’re seeing, the viral sense of wonder; all are good reasons to have it in-person.
foateaca|5 years ago
TedDoesntTalk|5 years ago
pjc50|5 years ago
basch|5 years ago
But
I am also very Cold War revival. We should be launching competitive science wars with each other, not unlike the Olympics. Set objectives, set time periods, when the time and objective expire all knowledge gained is pooled and published for the world, for free. National or International propaganda campaigns to recruit for teams. Spies, espionage, moles. Not just a science fair, but something a bit more dirty and fun.
postalrat|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
lswainemoore|5 years ago
I do a lot of double/triple clicking to highlight text as I read online (fidgeting, but also helps keep track of where I am). On your site, triple clicking unintentionally hits the twitter share button, which opens a new, unwanted window. Bit annoying.
Medium does something similar, but they offset the button so you have to move cursor in between clicks to actually trigger the button.
ksm1717|5 years ago
Specific, common, digital tics. Another one is control-s after a single line changed. Something immensely satisfying about selecting that perfect block of text and making that “altered document” asterisk go away.
namrog84|5 years ago
camwiese|5 years ago
ghostpepper|5 years ago
ipsum2|5 years ago
> After the six-month run, the Expo had attracted well over 70 million visitors. The Expo 2010 is also the most expensive fair in the history of World's Fair, with more than 45 billion US dollars invested from the Chinese Government
klenwell|5 years ago
Apparently, the American pavilion was not among them:
Now that the US Pavilion has been open for several days, its reviews, to be generous, are mixed. Visitors, after a two-hour wait, enjoy the upbeat attitude of the student “ambassadors” who greet them in Mandarin — but few are impressed by the three films that constitute the US Pavilion’s content. (One reporter noted that the price for the three shorts, about $23 million, is more than the production costs of the Oscar-winning film, The Hurt Locker.) The “American people’s” sole walk-on are brief vignettes that flicker on the screen and then are gone. Chinese visitors are reported to have remarked, especially after the hype and long wait, “We expected more from America.” Visitors exit the theater into a large hall dedicated to fawning over the 60-odd corporate sponsors whose names and brands are the only aspects of American life and culture to which the pavilion accords recognition.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/an-epic-failure-of-planni_b_5...
beckingz|5 years ago
The architecture was pretty good in a few instances, but the cultural elements were about as good as I'd expect from a board of tourism.
jhu247|5 years ago
grillvogel|5 years ago
canadianfella|5 years ago
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jonathannat|5 years ago
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git_configured|5 years ago
https://expo2020dubai.ae/en/
mortenjorck|5 years ago
I don't know enough about Expo2020 to agree or disagree, but I assumed the author's assessment above was in reference to the series of which the Dubai exhibition is a part.
caslon|5 years ago
adfm|5 years ago
[1]: https://www.bie-paris.org/
camwiese|5 years ago
I'm heading out there next month and will hopefully find something inspiring to help shape our efforts.
alex_young|5 years ago
If you haven’t been, there are thousands of art projects at a grand scale, things that take up blocks of space a piece, and they are built by artists from around the world, giving everyone a global perspective of what is possible.
I also love the idea of showcasing what is possible for a society. There is a true sense of community, immediacy, and collaboration where everyone there is an active participant.
There are dozens of smaller events with similar properties, likely one nearby.
unknown|5 years ago
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Aeolun|5 years ago
I kind of feel that these were the exact goals of the original world fairs too.
tomphoolery|5 years ago
At any rate, World's Fairs are still happening, just not in the US... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_fair
_joel|5 years ago
Johnny555|5 years ago
...wait eagerly for Jessica Watkins to take the first step on Mars
There's an unfortunate name collision, I didn't know who Jessica Watkins was so Googled her, and the top results are for a Jessica Watkins who participated in the attack on the USA Capitol... I spent a moment pondering what her link to Mars was.. but farther down the results list is NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins.
It's a shame that the astronaut has her search results cluttered by the insurrectionist. Back when I was doing online dating, I shared a name (and similar age and nearby city) with the brother of a recently convicted serial killer, searching for my name brought up articles about him... I warned potential dates that if they looked me up online, I'm not that guy (which, I suppose, is exactly what the brother of a serial killer would say).
DoctorBonkus|5 years ago
darig|5 years ago
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dgellow|5 years ago
You lost me at “Hyperloop”. How is that a vision of the future when we know for a fact that the idea doesn’t make practical sense?
Scene_Cast2|5 years ago
saalweachter|5 years ago
temp0826|5 years ago
fortran77|5 years ago
Every school and career choice I've made was based on some inspirational spark that hit me there.
camwiese|5 years ago
Bearsilber|5 years ago
I'm a little younger, and Tomorrowland at Disney was that for me.
kaycebasques|5 years ago
camwiese|5 years ago
Most Fairs struggle with this because the organizing body has no control over the content of most of the Pavilions. By privately organizing and operating it, the new World's Fair will function more like Epcot where we craft the experience pulling in corporations, countries, and ngo's as we see fit.
Lastly, the Fairgrounds are generally split up into themes with each of the companies/countries hosting their own Pavilion. The map from the 1964 New York World's Fair is a pretty good example of this: http://www.nywf64.com/maps01.shtml
UncleOxidant|5 years ago
reaperducer|5 years ago
For example, over a hundred years later, Chicago is still making money from the economic, social, and infrastructure benefits of its fairs.
camwiese|5 years ago
whatshisface|5 years ago
Because of the way the economy works, this can be said of absolutely any expenditure anywhere anytime for any reason. If even one project laborer buys a cup of coffee on the job, at least $4 of value then gets sent out into circulation in a way that has been plausibly colored by the construction of the Big Money Pit of 1849.
buzzert|5 years ago
At some point in the last twenty years or so, it became less about companies demoing next year’s products and more about really grand visions of the future (of course, where the company in question was the centerpiece of this grand vision). I believe it was Panasonic in 2020 who had a huge booth showing off a flying car concept, accompanied by a wall-to-wall LED display showing a video of families in the future taking it to work/school/etc.
Once I realized that CES is less of a marketing event and more of a modern World’s Fair, I really started to enjoy it a lot more. Even with the corporatism. Can’t wait to (hopefully) go again next year!
musicale|5 years ago
jhu247|5 years ago
mattowen_uk|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition
albertTJames|5 years ago
u678u|5 years ago
camwiese|5 years ago
colecut|5 years ago
But Burning Man to me seems like a bit of a World's Fair. I met some people who brought a massive insect-inspired art car from Australia..
reactspa|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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drivingmenuts|5 years ago
You can see more innovation in an afternoon spent on blogs than you would ever see in a 6-month long, static display of corporate bullshit.
markdown|5 years ago
hyko|5 years ago
They had an exhibit called “MoneyZone” which included a tunnel made out of £1 million in crisp fifties.
Good times.
xwdv|5 years ago
jiofih|5 years ago
ngcc_hk|5 years ago
snambi|5 years ago
harles|5 years ago
Is there supporting evidence of these assertions? There are some interesting ideas in here, but I’m not seeing anything to back them up.
unknown|5 years ago
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unixhero|5 years ago
viksit|5 years ago
Have calls to action/RFPs, and have a conference of some sort - the goal is to have one cohesive demo per track. Distribute this thinking across the world, like Pioneer.app does instead of consolidating it in one country or geographical area.
And live cast it to everyone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
zestyping|5 years ago
devoutsalsa|5 years ago
CaptArmchair|5 years ago
Both takes are missing the mark about what a World Fair is about. Here's why.
The 3 decades after 1945 were a time when economies of formerly allied nations were booming. In France, these years äre known as the "Trente Glorieuses". Many more countries had their own "economic miracle" during this time. Even West-Germany and Austria had their own "Wirtschaftwunder" as their economies bounced back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...
Many parts of the world were still formal colonies to Western nations, or their economies hadn't fully modernized yet to a point where a sizable middle-class has access to democratized /commoditized comforts of a Western lifestyle e.g. aviation, healthcare, education, even sanitation, access to media and so on.
Not to mention the spectre of the Cold War that loomed over these decades.
Against this historic backdrop, the fair is notable because it was a showcase of mid-20th century American culture and technology. That shouldn't really come as a surprise since it was firmly organized within the sphere of influence of America's hegemony.
Such were the times in 1965. And they are incomparable to 2021. The organization of a World Fair in 1965 happened in a vastly different context, with vastly different incentives, interests and motives then it does in 2021.
The author misses that completely and marches blindly onward hence:
> Today, World's Fairs have been rebranded as "International Expositions" that occur every 5 years, and are a hollow shell of their former glory. They no longer showcase the promise of the future or celebrate achievement. Instead, they serve as national branding exercises, infrastructure development projects masquerading as innovation, architecture competitions, and an opportunity to promote tourism. If anything, they're the perfect representation of our current vision for the future: unfocused and uninspiring.
> But it doesn't have to be this way; we can't afford for it to be this way.
> The world has changed dramatically since 1984. We now live in the most incredible time in human history. The internet has brought billions of people together and tech companies have given us supercomputers in our pockets. We're starting to build hyperloops and supersonic jets. We're on the cusp of incredible breakthroughs in genetics, biology, medicine, food science, energy, transportation, manufacturing, computing, and robotics. We're finally going back to the moon and then on to Mars. We've once again seen the power of a collective vision with the record-breaking development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The World's Fair is a reflection of the World in 2021 and the future. With the complexity of representing 7.8 billion people, an array of sovereign nations which didn't exist in 1965. It's an event which competes with against the complexity of a exploding plethora of modern mass media, new stakeholders, emerging markets, and so on fueled by globalisation, digitization and automatisation.
A Fair isn't just an marketing event, it's a global forum that aims beyond other events that present themselves as global fora or gatherings. It's an opportunity for nations and peoples to present a showcase to the world. It gives them the chance to put a message out. In that regard, the World Fair is akin to that other global event where the world gathers: The Olympics.
The organization of the World Fair is no longer rooted in the political or economical global hegemony of a handful of "first-world" (for lack a better term) nations showing off their industrial might and international prowess, such as it was during the latter half of the 20th century.
The Fair is now also home to many new nations and upcoming economies or regional powers who are making their entrance to the World's stage, and to whom the importance isn't plain "technological innovation" but above all showing themselves to the world, what they have to offer to the world, what their aspirations are, what they hope for the futre, and taking part in the global forum.
In that regard, the vision for World Fair extends far beyond technology per the offical website:
https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/what-is-an-expo
For sure, there's going to the Moon or Mars, and there are hyperloops and driverless cars, or there's even developing a COVID vaccine. These are wonderful developments. But are they really the developments that need to be put front and center at World's Fair at the expense of everything else? Are these the only developments that should matter to 7.8 billion people in 2021?
The second part from this article seems to voice a want for the World's Fair to limit itself to showcasing technology, engineering and media. To me, it sounds like not much more then a want for being able to indulge in advertising when visiting the Fair. And that comes across as, well, rather tone deaf.
A World Fair isn't about merely basking in the marvels of technology or innovation. It's about the humans and humanity that are represented, visit and meet at a Fair.
jiofih|5 years ago
neon_me|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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koolk3ychain|5 years ago
minikites|5 years ago
DubiousPusher|5 years ago
We live in an era of constant fascinating biological and cosmological discoveries. In the past 3 years we have entered the era of gene therapy healthcare with several genetic treatments recieving approval by he FDA. We are on the cusp of break even if not effective fusion energy.
I cannot deny that the financialization of everything has diminished the moral imperative of some of these efforts but to act as if no one is attacking big problems is silly.
purple-again|5 years ago
I am 100% confident I would not be hirable by NASA, confident enough in that assertion to shut down without trying. I think you may have some bias from your media bubble coloring your perception if you truly believe what you wrote is true.