Poptech – Beesquared

I recently heard a talk that changed how I think about the world.

The talk was by Kevin Slavin, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, who chronicles the history and future of luck and has a message about the role of chance in our lives and society.

“It’s amazing, the idea that anything that seems to be built out of chance, or instinct or luck can yield to a computational assault, and that this is the essential narrative of our time,” says Slavin. “The myth that we live in is that you don’t just get what you get, you get what you deserve.”

“There’s so little luck left in the world,” he adds.

In the talk, Slavin chronicles how we’ve made chance the enemy despite irrationality’s surrounding us.

Chance has been a part of the games we humans play since the earliest times, according to Slavin, who observes that for most of human history we’ve been playing games, which come from dice.

“The impulse to play games is anything but trivial,” he says. “What we’re doing when we hold dice in our hand is something that’s actually unpredictable.”

Yet as Slavin shows, we inhabit a culture of control and live in an age when the prevailing belief is that life is meritocratic, that problems will yield to analysis of so-called big data and that all we have to do to get ahead is, as one best-selling book advises, to lean in.

Slavin asks what might happen if we praised luck instead of burying it. “There’s a pleasure and a value in not knowing what the future will bring,” he concludes, “and a truth in not pretending and to simply face forward and say, ‘Bring it.’”

On Halloween my girlfriend and I made up our faces to resemble the walking dead and set out for the Tour Eiffel. After walking along the Seine and under the tower we headed to the Champ de Mars, the long green mall that lies immediately to the tower’s southeast.

Someone had removed a section of a black metal fence that cordoned off the green. About 20 people had entered through the opening. Once inside they clustered on the lawn, sitting on blankets in groups of two or three. Someone dribbled a soccer ball. A guy selling wine and champagne by the bottle made the rounds.

We entered, found a soft patch of grass, and unpacked a baguette, some aged Gouda and a bottle of Cotes de Rhone that we had in our backpack. We opened the wine and toasted a lovely night, with the tower looming over our right shoulders, illuminated in amber and flashing thousands of sparkly lights.

About four-fifths of our way through the wine, a police officer approached. At first we thought he was busting us for drinking in public. But we realized he was shooing us off the lawn. Other police had fanned out and were doing the same to the others.

Of course we complied. We gathered our things, headed out and continued to walk along the gravel pathway that lines the green.

Later I realized that together with the other merrymakers we had hacked the city. We conformed a public space to one that accommodated us.

We who use cities confront similar challenges daily. How does your city feel? How would you like to engage with it?

Street skaters hack their environment. Citizens are using publicly available data and computer code to solve challenges relevant to their neighborhoods. Pedestrians forge pathways in parks regardless of whether the park’s planner placed a path in that spot.

At PopTech in October I heard Helen Marriage, co-director of the London-based design firm, Artichoke, talk about the large-scale urban spectacles she produces. “A city isn’t just for toil, trade and traffic, it exists for people,” said Marriage. “The rules of our cities are not somebody else’s rules – they’re our rules, and we can change them, briefly, or forever.”