Wired’s NextFest 2004
In Euclidean space, it’s a provable fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Unfortunately, the organizers of Wired’s NextFest ignored certain practical restrictions of two-dimensional space when they directed attendees to drive directly through the path of San Francisco’s famous Bay to Breakers cross-city race. Now, there’s a caveat you never see in a mathematical theorem: “The shortest distance between two points is a line – unless the two points lie on opposite sides of the course of a 12K race, in which case the shortest distance is a circular path the folds back on itself and takes three times as long to traverse.
It was the largest hiccup in the day, but it wasn’t the last.
The only reason I really wanted to go to NextFest was to see Asimo, Honda’s walking robot. Despite leaving Mountain View at 8:30 in the morning (on a Sunday, no less), we managed to miss the 10:00 show. By an hour. No problem – there was a 1:00 show. According to the event usher, we should line up at 12:30 to get tickets. Tickets? Yes, tickets. Apparently NextFest is like Disneyland – you line up for tickets to…line up for tickets.
And yet, still, we didn’t get to see Asimo – or any other show at the Main Theatre for that matter. Despite arriving at the Main Theatre at 12:15, tickets were gone. What a load of crap. Hint to Wired: if you’re going to host a conference and promise kick-ass visions of the not-too-distant future, people might actually expect to see the kick-ass visions of the not-too-distant future. Or not have to wade through people at every exhibit. In short: learn something about facilities planning.
Wired‘s misunderstanding of space and time notwithstanding, the event was only mildly interesting. Though I know Wired is a tech-centric magazine, what annoyed me the event’s gadget-centric vision of the future. It’s as if our vision of the future is limited to technology manifesting itself in silicon devices, hermetically-sealed pods of injection molded plastic created by a Scandinavian designer whose name includes an umlaut. It seemed like a lot of geeky navel-gazing.
Example: hydrogen-fueled cars. While the prospect of non-polluting cars is exciting, the practical limitations of fuel production, distribution, and social inertia mean this technology is a long way away. And yet politicians and technology innovators alike seem to be focused on a future which they never really have to deliver. Although useful innovations are the result of pure research, it still seemed that much of the technology at NextFest was internally-focused – a lot of intellectual wanking designed to produce “cool” devices, but not necessarily useful technologies with a definable road to market and real social change. But maybe that was its purpose – not to educate, but to entertain.