A meme is a poem, a thing made, a little machine, a technology for remembering. It records what the living do.

It gives us grammar to express our internal dialogues.

It investigates the human condition,

and encapsulates the tone of the times.

A meme can make the ordinary surprising,

upend our whole understanding of reality,

or reveal to us one of life’s hidden secrets.

Internet memes catalogue our everyday emotions (that feeling when…).

They present us to ourselves, accurately mirroring our imperfections.

A meme is a precise way of invoking a particular experience.

It communicates simply in the real language of men.

In an arrangement that feels inevitable, it says what we can’t otherwise.

A meme is a thought caught fresh in the act of dawning.

It is made to be shared.

It is shared so when it happens to us we’re not alone.

A group of major investors demanded that Travis Kalanick step down from Uber last month. But the source of the pressure compelling the company to change its leadership and improve its model originates from users. To many of Uber’s riders and drivers, it was glaringly apparent that Kalanick — CEO of the engine-idling, less-than-minimum-wage-paying, no-tips-allowed, amateur chauffeur racket — was driving without a moral GPS.

The #DeleteUber campaign went viral back in January when it looked like Uber was capitalizing on the New York Taxi Workers Alliance’s airport strike in protest of Trump’s #MuslimBan. Uber essentially crossed the picket line. As accounts dwindled, Uber offered a string of ill-conceived explanations followed by weak concessions. Then came a series of unrelated but similarly disconcerting allegations about the company’s misogynistic culture. In a matter of days, it was reported that over 200,000 users had deleted their accounts.

Reminding a platform how quickly it can become the next Myspace is critical to keeping companies accountable. Indeed, a recent letter announcing Uber’s plan to improve the way it does business opens with the heading, “you asked and we’re answering.” Changes include the addition of in-app tipping, the end of unpaid wait times, and the introduction of insurance to protect drivers in the event of injury. Uber also released the findings of an internal investigation into its cultural shortcomings, and committed to adopting all of the report’s 47 recommendations.

Consumer activism — the collection of tactics used to shift power from sellers to buyers — is a proven but under-utilized force for influencing the moral standards and behaviours of major companies and industries. #DeleteUber is one instance of a campaign where users, threatening mass migration over to the competition, affected real change. Several other emerging signals suggest that in our present high-stakes socio-political environment, economic activism may be on the rise.

#BankingBlack

Banking black, that is depositing money into an account at a black-owned bank, is a growing movement tied to BLM’s campaign against racial inequality. Blackoutcoalition.org provides a map of black-owned banks and credit unions in the United States. OneUnited, America’s largest black-owned bank, teamed up with Black Lives Matter to create the Amir card, as an initiative to redirect $1.2 trillion in African-American spending power. I am not aware of any black-owned banks in Canada.

#DeFundDAPL

Pressured by activists, Seattle’s City Council voted unanimously to divest more than $3 billion in annual cash flow from Wells Fargo in protest of its role in funding the Dakota Pipeline. Mayor Ed Murray said Seattle, “will not stand by as tribal citizens are treated as second class communities.” TD, Scotiabank, and RBC are all funding the pipeline. You can bank First Nations in Canada.

#GrabYourWallet

Shannon Coulter’s #GrabYourWallet boycotts of so many Trump-affiliated brands have seriously inconvenienced Ivanka’s fashion and furniture empire. Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Sears, and Kmart all stopped selling her products. Boycotts cut both ways of course, which is why many brands would rather stay out of politics.

#DeleteShopify

The ecommerce giant, Shopify is Canada’s digital darling, known for its employer branding and active community engagement, both of which explicitly champion diversity. When it got out that the alt-right online publication, Breitbart, ran its online store on Shopify, employees urged leadership to cut all ties. When that didn’t happen, #DeleteShopify emerged.

On a Medium post, Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke argues that commerce is a form of free speech, which is, weirdly, kind of my whole thesis here. So we agree on that much.

“To kick off a merchant,” Tobias says, is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce.” Tobias’s policy keeps Shopify a politically and morally diverse ecosystem.

But it feels a lot like he’s trying to have it both ways. Shopify’s software-as-a-service may be as politically bland and morally neutral as a point-of-sale debit machine. But the brand and company culture has more of a purpose-as-a-purpose, social enterprise vibe, and that seems to have deceived a lot of people, particularly its own employees. I imagine this is where Tobias would tell me, “the world is a complicated and nuanced place.”

One nuance I’ve been thinking about is Tobias’s particular brand of cop-out, what I call a platform defense. It’s a very simple argument whose logic goes: 1. Shopify is a platform designed to make commerce better for everyone. 2. Shopify is only responsible for maintaining the integrity of the platform. 3. Shopify is therefore not responsible for who uses the platform, what they stand for, or what they sell. 4. If Shopify imposes its own moral code, by kicking someone off the platform, Shopify risks sliding into some sort of totalitarian regime.

It’s coincidentally the same argument that Breitbart uses to urge Facebook not to delete racist and anti-immigrant posts.

The logic seems sound. If a platform is merely uninterested infrastructure, then it should be there for everyone to use, like a sidewalk. But Shopify is not like a sidewalk. Shopify is in business with Breitbart. If commerce is a powerful act of expression, why should transactions between Shopify and Breitbart be exempt from moral scrutiny?

If as Tobias says, every purchase is a vote, what does it mean to be engaged in continuous exchange, through a subscription model? Shopify and Breitbart subscribe to each other. They are partners, making money together. No one is a platform.

Markets are only self-correcting because markets are people. Markets get morally corrected when people demand the right thing. Since the Shopify x Breitbart scandal, employees have resigned; consumers have protested with their credit cards; and the #DeleteShopify hash tag has sent merchants looking for a new solution.

So yeah, “commerce is a powerful, underestimated form of expression.” There are consequences associated with the things we trade and people we trade with. As consumers, users, subscribers, employees, and businesses, we should consider what kind of statement we’re making with every transaction.

At Idea Couture, we’re usually working on strategic foresight projects for clients in industries like food, financial services, or consumer electronics. Making IMPACT was a unique opportunity to think about how technology could change society as a whole, rather than just looking at the implications for a specific industry.

Through our Kickstarter campaign, we’re making IMPACT widely available, to get more people thinking deliberately about creating the world they want to live in.

PROJECT BRIEF AND PROTOTYPES

In 2015, we were approached by Policy Horizons Canada, an innovation lab within the Government of Canada. Policy Horizons does some excellent foresight studies, which you can download on their website. They wanted to create a serious game that teaches foresight. IMPACT’s content is based on one of their reports, MetaScan3. From start to finish, we worked very collaboratively with Horizons. We kicked-off with a one-day game design hackathon at their space in Ottawa. Working from ideas generated at that workshop, we presented three game concepts in a rough prototype form. They selected IMPACT, and we proceeded to build it together. The game is currently used within the Government of Canada as a tool to teach foresight thinking and engage public servants in foresight research.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

You could say IMPACT was designed backwards! We started with the desired outcomes. When people finished playing, we wanted them to be thinking more deliberately, critically, and creatively about what kind of future they would prefer for themselves, their community, and society. So we asked: what techniques, narratives, mechanics and dynamics can we put in our game to achieve that end?

We created an inventory of board game mechanics that required players to use styles of thinking that we use frequently in strategic foresight. For example, “wind-tunneling” is a technique we use all the time. Just as an aerospace engineer tests an aircraft by running it through a wind tunnel, mimicking the physical conditions of flight, we’ll run a strategy through various possible scenarios to ensure it maintains its integrity under the pressure of uncontrollable external forces. It turns out that “wind-tunneling” pretty closely resembles games like Boss Monster and Galaxy Trucker where players’ strategies are tested against variable factors. One of our strategists, John Wither, who is also board game aficionado, did an incredible job putting this resource together. He drew the connections and correspondences between foresight principles and game mechanics. Then we started thinking about how we could configure the various game mechanics effectively to create a game that would get people thinking deeply about the future.

VISUAL AESTHETICS

I developed a mood board that sort of mashes Swiss design with a 1970–80s Canadiana feel. We wanted it to be playful but not in the style of your typical board game that’s super busy with tiny text and detailed illustrations. This was to be a serious game after all.

The whole game, including all of the graphical icons and character illustrations, was designed by Jemuel Datiles. We were going for simplicity and derived the colours from a CMYK model, which has its own kind of retro-futurist feel. Jemuel says the characters were inspired by Canada’s diversity but that he avoided using archetypal visual cues for each character’s role.

PLAYTESTING

We play-tested a lot in our office and via telepresence with Policy Horizons Canada. When the game was about 90% complete, we staged an all night play-test during Nuit Blanche — a 12 hour art event in Toronto. We must’ve played the game with nearly a hundred people that night. It was crucial in working out the final kinks and identifying any points of confusion that we needed to clear up.

RESULTS

The feedback from pretty much everyone we’ve played the game with has been positive. We’ve played it a lot, with foresight professionals, policymakers, and citizens of all ages. People have a lot of fun and get pretty engaged — emotionally and politically — with the narrative and content. We’re always really pleased with the conversations people have over the course of the game and after. It works! People start discussing the risks and benefits of emerging technologies, and how they’d prefer these new things to exist in their lives or not exist at all. I love seeing that.

A bunch of futurists, strategists, and designers just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of a board game that teaches you to think critically and imaginatively about the future. We call it IMPACT: A Foresight Game. And it explores how emerging technologies may influence society. When you play IMPACT, you’re practicing foresight skills — including cross-impact analysis, synthesis, systems thinking, and wind tunnelling — all of which help with understanding change and preparing for uncertainty. Our mission is to make learning these skills more accessible, and to encourage more people to participate in deliberate futures thinking.

Here are three reasons why it’s important that humanity collectively gets better at thinking about the future:

1. Technology is winning against humanity.

Frequently, I hear people reporting the feeling that change is occurring too rapidly. Tomorrow is here before we’ve made sense of today. New technologies progress faster than humanity’s collective ability to consider how they should exist in the world. As our systems of ethics struggle to keep pace with change, it is the job of everyone, not just those inventing and advancing technology, and certainly not just those in positions of privilege and power, to determine how new things and ideas weave into an evolving sense of what it means to be human. The policies that regulate emerging tech should reflect the views and concerns of a well-informed public. If we’re to effectively manage the risks and opportunities associated with technological change, we need to get faster at understanding and analyzing new stuff. It’s about looking at the extreme present, taking inventory of the recently possible, and considering what information available today can tell us about the world of tomorrow. As Stewart Brand has said, “technologies may be self-accelerating but they are not self-determining.” That part is up to people.

2. Foresight makes you morally better.

One thing I’ve learned practicing foresight in the private sector is that organizations tend to behave more rationally — making better decisions in support of their long-term profit goals — when they plan on a longer time horizon. They also behave morally better. Acts that seem both profitable and permissible in the short term often turn out to be neither in the long term. It’s too easy to ignore long term social and environmental consequences when decisions are being made under the pressures of quarterly projections. On a longer timescale, it becomes obvious that the future existence, spending power, and disposition of markets depends on social and environmental factors (because markets consists of people, who are alive, and who are willing and able to do commerce with you). A shortsighted view usually pits strategies for social impact in opposition to strategies for capital gain. With a longterm lens, the two kinds of strategies often merge, tending together along their way toward a shared future vision.

The perils of quarterly capitalism are well documented and there is a growing body of evidence for the virtues of “long-term greed.”

3. Whitey is on the moon.

The future has a white guy problem. If the conferences I’ve attended are any measure, the vast majority of professional futurists are white and male. Recently, at a futures conference in Washington D.C., the keynote speech was given by a space entrepreneur called Bob who endeavours to mine the moon for precious resources. During the Q&A portion, Bob explained that no person, nation, or corporation is allowed to own the moon, but you can own what you obtain on the moon. Bob likened this to fishing. Another apt simile might have compared it to colonialism. And while the moon doesn’t have native inhabitants, it’s clear who stands to gain economically from its exploits. I thought of Gil Scott Heron’s poem, Whitey on the Moon.

The most visible narratives about the future are told by certain groups — large corporations, Hollywood, Silicon Valley entrepreneur types — mostly white guys, visionaries, who describe it as though it’s already fixed. Of course, the future is not fixed, nor is it a concern limited to white males. BLM has reinterpreted February as Black Futures Month. MISC (a journal published by Idea Couture, where I work) recently published an extensive feature called, “The Future According To Women.” Both of these platforms exist as responses to the status quo BOGSATs (Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around A Table) where dominant views of the future are established. It is a problem, one that our game is not going to solve.

Making the tools and frameworks of critical foresight thinking more available will hopefully (if only in the longterm) lead to a wider, more diverse group of voices at the table, and in turn, to more inclusive, deliberate, and ethical visions of the future.