The Future Starts Here - with John Higgs

20 May 2019| Miranda Ace Hotel Shoreditch, London, UK

Virtual Futures presents John Higgs in conversation on his new book, 'The Future Starts Here: Adventures in the Twenty-First Century' (W&N, 2019).

The idea that our civilisation is doomed is not an established fact, but since the 1980s it has become increasingly popular to imagine the end of our collective existence. From economic collapse, to environmental disaster, and the zombie apocalypse - these stories have become part of popular culture.

Higgs joins us to question whether this bleak outlook might simply be a generational quirk - one that only afflicts those raised in the twentieth century. He asks whether we can look beyond the technological hype and click-bait headlines, to discover alternative outcomes to those predicted by dystopian science fiction. Might it actually be possible to build a better future where nature is not so helpless and where human-purpose will never be automated?

John Higgs is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world.

He is the author of numerous books including, I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds, and Stranger Than We can Imagine - which was described by Alan Moore as, “a breathtakingly lucid and coherent map of the tectonic shifts which drastically reshaped the human psyche, and the human world, within a hundred thrilling, terrifying years [and which] leaves us asking ourselves how we could have missed so much about the wider implications of a time we lived through. An illuminating work of massive insight, I cannot recommend this magnificent work too highly.”

He has written for publications including The Guardian, The Independent and Mojo, and his fiction appears under the name JMR Higgs.