 I think we are finally going to get started. Thank you so much for bearing with us, everybody. My name is Tori Bosch, and I'm the editor of Future Tense, which is a partnership of Slate Magazine, Arizona State University, and New America. We look at emerging technology, science, and public policy in society. So you're joining us today for one of our social distancing socials, which we're doing in lieu of our normal live events for obvious reasons. And I'm here today with Ed Finn, who's the director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State. So, Ed, thank you for being here. Hi, thanks for having me. Of course. So we're here today to talk about the imagination in times of crisis. Obviously, there's a lot of discussion about long term what this means for all sorts of things in our society. I think I've seen a lot of people tweeting about whether now is the perfect time or the worst time to write a novel. So I'm going to guess my first question, Ed, are you working on a novel at the moment? I am not. I am trying to help my wife, home, school, or kids, and figure out how to live and compress all of the things that we used to do in our lives into the space of our home. And figure out, like, there's still a tremendous amount of imagination work that's going on. Unfortunately, it's not writing the Great American Novel, but it's like, what does it mean to socialize? What does it mean for kids to socialize? What does it mean for us as parents to do social things together and with other people? And of course, we're not alone. Everybody is figuring out different configurations of this and asking very fundamental questions like what is the division between the work week and the weekend when you don't go anywhere? How do we do life under these new conditions? New conditions that it's hard to sustain yourself in an emergency bearing for so long. So if we're sort of settling in now for this to last six weeks, eight weeks, God knows. I mean, I guess, Howard, you sort of thinking about how to transition from an acute period of footing to a time when we can sort of start to implement creative thinking maybe in a more sustainable way rather than, oh my god, what am I going to do with my kids in 20 minutes kind of way? Well, I think it's really important and it's hard because one of the features of a crisis is that you tend to focus on the short term. You tend to focus on what problem do I need to solve right now, what do I need to be worried about now, and our horizon narrows to deal with this immediate present. But this is an unusual crisis because it also has built in a lot of downtime and space for contemplation. So while we are still anxiously reading the news and watching what's happening, we're all thinking about this longer term, and we have to come up with those rhythms for making this sustainable because you can't live in crisis mode forever and you have to come to terms with reality. And so I've been talking a little bit with my students because I'm teaching online as well about how they're doing things. And one of them was talking today about how he addressed all these problems with he couldn't get any work done in his room at home. And so he had six different things that he'd done. Put a plant on his desk. He moved a plant from the kitchen to his desk and he opened the windows and he had all these different things. He had food and drinks in there so that he could make lemonade, make the space work for him. And that's a very concrete example. But I think it's useful. We all have to recognize what the problems we're having are in the solvable ones and figure out what we can do about them, so whether that's creating time for socializing with your friends or having a meal out that you wouldn't normally have thinking about how you do birthdays and celebrations and stuff like that. We have to figure all of this stuff out to contend with the longer range and certainty of not knowing how long this is all going to go on. And so when we were talking earlier, you mentioned a great point, which is that a lot of great art has come out of people being in some form of isolation, whether sort of voluntary or thrust upon them. So could you maybe talk a little bit about that legacy? Yeah, so I was thinking about that. I'm not writing a great novel. But probably there are some people doing that. And this is actually, these are ideal conditions for a certain kind of creative work. And if you think about art, it always has to come out of some kind of isolation, because you have to create a space that is uniquely your own in order to make something beautiful, whether that's just hiding yourself in the shed or Thoreau going to Walden Pond and very dramatically cutting himself off from most society. We have to create the space to do creative work. That's like the first creative act, actually, is to decide how you're going to make your own space, your own workspace, your mise en place. And then you come back, you bring your work back to society and it becomes a way for you to communicate with others. And a lot of great art comes out of a certain kind of isolation. Sometimes it's not individual. Maybe it's like a group of people who decide they're going to hang out together. But that distancing is really important, because one of the other things you have to do with a work of art is find a new perspective, find a different point of view. And it's much harder to do that when you're swimming in the school with all the other fish. You have to find a way to change your own life in a way that will make that different point of view possible. What are some of your favorite examples of wonderful art created under such circumstances? So I mean, I do think actually every work of art kind of comes out of something like this, but some examples are more dramatic than others. I've always been fascinated by Thomas Pinchon, who is this very reclusive writer. But he's kind of figured out how to have his cake and eat it, too, because he, at least I'm not sure this is, at least I don't know if he's still writing or what he's up to. But at least when he was in his writing life, he just lived in New York in Manhattan. And people knew who he was. He had friends who would hang out with other writers. But he managed to keep himself completely out of the public eye and avoid all of the entanglements that writers have, especially writers now in the social media era. And I remember he once famously appeared as a curator on The Symptons with a paper bag over his head. And that was like as far as he would go out into the limelight. But sometimes the isolation is not by choice, right? There are a lot of writers who feel ostracized or feel like outsiders, sometimes because they really are. So another one of my favorite examples is Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. And so there's an immediate form of isolation because she was trapped in a summer house on Lake Geneva with these other writers. And the weather was terrible. And so they were stuck. And the story began as this little game they were playing to tell ghost stories. And her idea for a ghost story turned into this novel. But there were lots of other pressures in isolation. So she was a rebel for her era. And she had broken all of these social norms and did all these things that women were not supposed to do. And she was ostracized for that. And she had a really hard life. She didn't have any money. She was constantly stressed out. She was in love with this insane poet, Percy Shelley, who dragged her all over Europe. And so there's all this suffering that came out of different forms of isolation and ostracism that got baked into her novel, which is also itself a story about a creature who is unloved and is ostracized. So a lot of our great art comes out of these moments of separation. Because we need artists to be a little weird and go off in some direction. And sometimes it's self-imposed. Sometimes it's imposed by others. And not everybody responds with a great novel or a painting. But it's a way you can respond. And one of the lenses to think about art is this response reaction to different kinds of suffering and different kinds of experience. I'm so glad you mentioned Mary Shelley because it gives me an opportunity to plug one of my favorite works of biography of all time, Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, the dual biography of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, which suggests to me that Mary Shelley was both a genius and a pain in the ass as a teenager. And she would make for a great CW show, for instance. Yes, lots of genius coming from lots of isolation thrust upon her. It's such an amazing book. And those two incredibly iconoclastic and creative and intelligent and ambitious women and just being destroyed in different ways by their epochs, well, by their time, but rising above, like rising out of the ashes like in the phoenix. They're just awesome. Their life stories are incredible. And just the terrible things that happened to them and the ways in which they persevered through those terrible things. It's really amazing. Another thing that occurs to me with Frankenstein, too, is that part of the moral of that story is also the danger of isolation, of creating an isolation. So I think we've seen some really interesting early attempts at collaborating through the pandemic. So I'm thinking of people who are creating music at a distance together or co-writing together. I mean, do you have any thoughts on how we might see this isolation turned into group creativity? Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting to look at the difference between certain groups of people who can basically keep doing everything they were doing before. And this has not changed very much. And other people who have had to completely reinvent what they're doing and what it means to do their work. And I do think that it's good for us to recognize that a lot of things we thought could only happen in a room or together really can be done in different ways. And it's another way to unlock our own imagination about what we do and how we do it. So I hope that this will come back from this crisis with a much more open kind of collective societal mind about things like teleworking and flexible schedules and basically trusting people to do work on their own and not feeling like you have to put them cubicle, maze, penopticon and spy on them to make sure that they're working. So I hope that that's true. I think that it presents a new set of constraints, right? But all creativity comes out of constraint, whether the constraint is you're trying to write a short story and the magazine has a rule about how long your short story has to be. Or your creative constraint is that you need to make money to pay your rent and you've decided that the way you're gonna make money is by making art instead of by going to work at a restaurant or something. So different kinds of constraint, again, can be self-imposed or imposed by forces outside of our control. But the ways in which we collaborate, I think we're getting better at all of the tools and having more options available. We now have 20 years, people have been obsessing about collaboration on the web ever since they created it. And we've now got 20 years of different layers of tools and it's so funny to think about 10 years ago, everybody was talking about Skype and now we're talking about Zoom. They're all these different technologies but they have gradually gotten better and better. And there's enough internet basically, there's enough pipe to afford a lot of these kinds of collaboration that weren't possible before. Again, to quote William Gibson, the future is not evenly distributed. And so that's maybe true here or true in parts of the United States but not necessarily true in other parts of the world. But I think that the forms of collaboration can also evolve based on the things that we have, right? Just as before, you make do with the tools that you're disposal. And hopefully we'll see some really cool new kinds of art and collaboration coming out of this. I'm excited to see, there have been, people have done this sort of music collaboration remotely in the past. I know we had a publisher and a graphic novel and comic book author came out to visit our Center for Science and Imagination a few years ago. And he talked about this elaborate like five way collaboration he built with his brother and a couple of different artists where they were making a graphic novel entirely online, never seen each other face to face. So they had this whole production workflow. If you think about most of the things complicated media we produce like magazines, websites, we already have a lot of these tools. So I think that we'll see maybe some more opening up around how we do these different kinds of work. I mean, also it occurs to me too that some of these things that maybe seemed a little bit gimmicky perhaps in the past, like collaborating at a distance just to prove that you could do it, feel somehow different from collaborating at a distance because a plague has meant that you're not allowed to see each other, right? I mean, there's something that feels maybe a little bit more organic about that kind of creativity rather than perhaps forced, which might be unfair of me to say, does that make sense at all? Well, yeah, I think my take on it is that one of the silver linings to this whole disaster has been that it's forced us to start imagining other people, thinking about other people more and making choices that will benefit strangers who we will never meet. And I think we could all use a little bit more of that. And that kind of collective consciousness is not just through things like shelter in place or quarantine type of orders. It's also suddenly seeing your student or your colleague in their space, in their home, in their living room or wherever they are and starting to recognize that everybody has this context. Everybody has these like things going on and they have their pets and they have their relatives and their kids and starting, I'm hoping that that builds towards a little bit more generosity, right? To sort of understand, oh, well, maybe there's some reason why this person is doing this remotely and it's like slightly more annoying for me, but there's perhaps some reason and so I could be more accommodating about this than I might be, or just more charitable, just take it with a better spirit than might have otherwise. So I think that kind of generosity and collective consciousness or broader social awareness is really, really important. And I think that we are being forced to sort of flex these imagination muscles in all these different ways and that's one of the really important ones. So we've talked about kind of the pandemic helping or hindering imagination as the case might be, but I've been also thinking a great deal as I know you have about the times that we previously imagined such a crisis. So pandemic literature is something that I've come back to repeatedly, whether it's station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel, to put a plug-in, Future Tense Fiction. Emily wrote an author to the short story for our Future Tense Fiction project not too long ago, so highly recommend reading that. Oh, also before I forget, please, we're gonna open this up for questions in the next five or 10 minutes, so please use the Q and A function on Zoom to submit a question for Ed. So pandemic literature, my favorite thing in the world. Station 11 is being brought up constantly, I think Oryx and Craig and the rest of the Mad Adam trilogy, Severance by Ling Ma, which is one of my favorite novels of the past couple of years. I mean, I'm curious as someone who sort of work is all about how fiction can inspire us to aspire to our best future, how do pandemic novels play a role in helping us live through a present that is maybe not as wonderful as we might have desired? So I think that there are a few different really important roles that these stories play, and one of them is just helping us explore the possibility space. So we're really bad at math, but we're pretty good at stories that are these parts of our brain that are deeply, you know, deep parts of the brain that are focused on storytelling and we're constantly sort of narrow devising our experience, which involves, by the way, like throwing out most of the data, just picking a few things that we've decided are important and telling the story around them. So it's good to have stories that explore what things might be like, because that reminds us that things are not gonna always continue on as they have been, right? And that this little story I'm telling myself about my world might not be the right one and it might not anticipate what happens if all of a sudden, you know, this disease emerges that is contagious before people have symptoms. Oh, you know, that's gonna be different. So stories are really important in that sense, not just for the how, but also for the basically the emotional responses and the imaginary responses. So, you know, thinking through what might happen in terms of plot, but also thinking about characters, because ultimately what draws us into stories are the humans who are dealing with these challenges, whatever they might be. So seeing how characters in these novels or these movies, you know, experience these changes, deal with these traumas, they adapt or they don't adapt, they succeed or they fail. You know, that's really helpful for us too, because it also opens us up to the sort of, the different nuances of what might happen and helps us project ourselves into that future, think about how we might feel about it. So I think all of that's really valuable. And then in some cases, it can help hopefully prompt us to make better choices to avoid the bad outcomes, right? Before they happen, announce prevention. Not sure that's really worked here, but maybe next time, right? So, you know, stories can be helpful in that regard. And also they can be, the other interesting thing I've noticed, especially about pandemic stories is how quickly the disease ends up becoming like a metaphor for something else. Somehow the diseases themselves are too, I don't know, they're too straightforward or something. So I've been teaching Oryx and Craig right now in my class. And this is a point that another one of my students brought up, you know, looking at the ways in which we, that sort of imaginary space around disease and pandemics, they always end up being this metaphor for other things, you know, and it's the disease is less interesting and it's more like, oh, what does this tell us about humanity or how do we, who do we wanna become in this post-apocalyptic future? So we're narcissists, right? It always ends up being about us. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit of a shame that some of our, that all of our most famous pandemic, modern pandemic novels seem to be about society being ground to a complete halt rather than a society, a pandemic that is devastating but allows society to recover because in some ways it feels like we don't have the same bird map for stories that allow us to see what comes next that we might have under other circumstances. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. And in part, it's because we wanna make, we wanna go bigger, right? So it's more fun to imagine the end of the world than just to imagine this like chronic lingering crisis. But in another sense, I think it becomes kind of a systems story, right? It becomes a narrative about how we adapt to crisis and we adapt to challenge because ultimately this is not, this is really sort of a self-inflicted catastrophe and in a lot of ways, it was a medical crisis. It was a disaster, you could say, but not like a global economy destroying awfulness. And for all sorts of different reasons, we failed to, we had a collective failure of imagination, right? We did not really anticipate what was gonna happen. We wasted precious time. We didn't do the things that we should have done. And now we're living in this weird sort of stumbling long, long fall, right? The slow, slow stumble. And it's gonna take us a while to come out of that, but it's not, clearly we're gonna make it through we're gonna all, not all of it, but society, civilization is not gonna collapse. We're gonna proceed on, we're gonna hopefully come back stronger from this. But it's sort of, it's gonna be hard and it's hard in part because it's this weird intermediary zone, as you were saying. It's not like Contagion or some movie where you're like, oh, this is, yeah, we're all doomed. And so it takes a little bit more imaginative work to remind yourself, oh, even though everything looks fine and everybody, I know it seems healthy, I still need to do these things and make these choices to prevent this bad thing from happening. Yeah, one novel that, you know, so Station 11 and Severance and Orcs and Crank, I think come up a lot of novel. I wish people might read or talk about a little bit more as Salvation City by Sigurd Nunez, which is told before and after a flu pandemic. And it's sort of nice to see a world that's slightly changed, which is not a spoiler. It's clear from the beginning, but that's changed by a pandemic, but not utterly destroyed in a way that feels a little bit more familiar. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna add to that, that I think one thing I've noticed, teaching Orcs and Crank this time in conjunction with William Gibson's novel, The Peripheral, is that these are two stories that have two timelines or they have sort of a near future and a farther future. And it's a really effective narrative trick, I think, for both of the novels, but it's also a really good sort of thought experiment or a mental practice we need to develop, which is like actually thinking about the farther future and its connection back to the near future or to our present. Because there are things that the future can tell us, right? You know, we wanna know how it's all gonna turn out and we wanna get whatever advanced technology is gonna save us. But the farther future wants the sort of the, to know about people who have these values and choices that they're making now, because in the far future, it's all over. You know, all of the choices, all the cards have been played, everything's happened, that's gonna happen. And there's not nearly the same kind of agency or sort of moral choice, but we have all of that. We have to make these choices now. And our big problem is that we ignore it. We pretend that we're not making moral choices. We sort of ignore our responsibility toward the future and pretend that it's like somebody else's problem. But we are just ignoring it or pretending that it's not there is a choice too. So, you know, we're voting either way. And if we take on some more of that responsibility and feel a sense of agency for ourselves about how we can shift work towards better futures, I think we'll be forging a much better path for ourselves. So thinking about better futures and the choices we all have to make opens up really well to my next question, which was I know that the Center for Science The Imagination is doing a lot of work to think about how we might capitalize on this moment or use it as an opportunity to challenge the way we imagine the future. So could you talk a little bit about what you all have planned? Yeah, so we have spent a lot of time thinking about this and, you know, confronting as so many people have this question, well, we can't do all the things we were planning to do before. We have to change our plans. And we're not just going to sort of mindlessly do online versions of what we would have done offline. We need to respond and we need to try to help in a way that's actually productive. And so we quickly decided that the way we were gonna help was not gonna be about commissioning a bunch of pandemic science fiction and just terrifying people with more, you know, stories about how everything could go wrong. And instead we wanted to focus on really this theme that you and I are talking about, how can we harness our imagination to navigate this crisis and maybe to come back from it in a better way? So one thing we're doing is we're gonna start a new series of very short fiction that will release weekly starting next week. I think next Friday will be the first one. We're gonna call it Us and Flux and it's gonna be stories about this ideas of resilience of communities working together of imagination and grappling with these challenges. And I think that COVID-19 will be sort of a in the background of some of these stories, but it's not about the crisis. It's about how we get out of the crisis. It's about how we move forward. So there'll be short stories of 1500 words or less and we'll have online conversations between the authors and different experts. So we're excited about that. We're thinking about starting a few other new projects but we're still sort of incubating them and again, trying to do things that will be helpful and open up this bigger conversation about imagination and resilience that I think was already really pressing before because all of our other problems are still there on the back burner waiting for us when we come back. But it's even more pressing now and there are a lot of people right now who are really in emergency situations and or who are on the cusp of that or watching maybe feeling helpless about these emergency situations. And so we have to harness our imaginations to try to help in the immediate and the short term and also the long term. And so people can check out us and flux at csi.asu.edu, I assume. That's right, yeah. We'll put it down on the website. So we're putting it all together now. We'll be announcing it on social media too. But that's a great place to start always and forever. All right, so I think it's time for us to open it up to questions. So we've got some great ones coming in. Let's see, where to start? So Eric Larson asks how long do we need to separate ourselves from an event to appreciate it? That's a great question. And I think that really depends not just on the event but on the individual too. I mean, if you think about authors like Primo Levy who wrote about the Holocaust or people who wrote about personal traumas in their own lives. Sometimes I think writing or responding as an artist is something you do immediately and becomes a kind of part of a therapeutic process maybe or a self-preservation process. Sometimes I think it takes years or decades like you can't even start talking about it until time has passed and you've created some form of distance. So I think it really depends but I think what we're going through right now is interesting because it's such a massive and abrupt social change that I think it's gonna have these shockwaves that will ripple out for a long time. I think about how we will talk about and remember this period with our kids and they're always gonna remember this and being someone who's lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapsed at the Soviet Union and September 11th I think this is probably a bigger a more powerful cultural shock right now that we're living through. And so maybe another better answer is sort of all the time. Some people are working on this right now and trying to grapple with it and other people it might take a really long time for some creative response to manifest. It's really interesting. So Stephen Weiner asks, despite decades of knowing and telling stories about the possibility of a pandemic like this one, it seems like even the most enlightened governments were unprepared. What do you think signals this signals about the ability for storytellers, futurists, profits, et cetera, to influence governance? That's a great question. So I think that the role of storytellers is paramount because stories are the way always that we grapple with this. We always tell stories. We can't help but tell stories about these things. And so even though it may seem like storytelling is not working or the people are not hearing these lessons, I think that it's really important to keep doing it because otherwise less useful stories will get told like people will still tell stories about what might happen but they might just be really badly informed and poorly thought through or we're just clinging to the same old sort of safety blanket that is not actually grounded in any kind of reality. So I think though to take your point, Steven, this is maybe, it all makes me think back to Kurt Vonnegut's argument that we needed to secretary to the future, that we do need to build in more of this longer range thinking and planning. One of the ways in which we're really, or one of the consequences of being really bad at math is that we're really bad at assessing risk and we're really bad at dealing with the long shot risks and figuring out how worried we should be about an asteroid hitting Earth or pandemic. And because the odds of it happening in any given year or any given administration or political election cycle are so small, people just think, yeah, instead of spending the relatively small amount of money that would protect us from this, I'm gonna spend $0 on it and just let somebody else worry about it in the future. So I think that the answer is that one of the fundamental things stories do is they encourage us to have a longer horizon for long-term thinking, right? To think farther ahead and to cultivate the imaginative power of empathy to care about other people, other people who live now but also other people who will live in the future. There's some research in Japan where people have asked communities making choices about climate change and sustainability to have somebody in the deliberation actually speak for the future and just be this voice of these future generations and just a simple change like that has a dramatic impact on how forward-thinking the group is because it's much harder to sort of really shaft future generations when you have to actually look somebody in the face and tell them that you don't matter because you're not really here. So these simple tricks are ways of using our own mind storytelling machinery to help us make better choices. Sarah Spencer asks something that I've been thinking about a little bit too which is what's your advice for helping people wade through the data to find the good future stories or harness one's own imagination that we can focus on? It feels like there's so many premises out there. So how do you recognize something that feels worth exploring more deeply? That's another really good question. I think one thing you have to do is read widely, right? None of these stories is an irregular text that's gonna unveil exactly what's going to happen in the future and any science fiction writer you ask will tell you that they did not predict anything and the one thing that they happen to get right is accompanied by lots of other things that they didn't get right. So the best way to sort of inoculate yourself against getting surprised by the future is to explore lots of different possible futures, right? Build up your imaginative immune system. This has turned into a whole thing here. So having said that, I think it's also worth for me the ultimate goal. So and, you know, it seems like I should I'm professionally obligated to say that you should check out the Center for Science and Imaginations work as we've been trying to do this for a while and we have a whole range of different stories. So find sources that you trust as curatorial sources or authors or other people. But what we try to do in all of our work is not predict the future or even just give people technically granted futures that they'll be interested in hearing about. Ultimately, our goal is to inspire you the individual reader or the audience member to do this for yourself, to imagine your own futures, to think about what you want life to be like for yourself in 20 years that you want your kid's lives to be like. So, you know, that requires again this kind of diversity of content and exploring lots of different possibilities. And as you do more of that, you get a better sense of what you think is believable or laudable or not, you know? And I think that's ultimately the way to do it. There's no one size fits all future. One of the big problems we have with society right now is that very, very small minority of people have gotten to dictate what the future is gonna look like for everybody else and feel enabled and empowered to imagine the future. And we need to get a much more diverse and a much larger base of people who feel empowered to think about, talk about, build out these futures so that we're not stuck in, you know, and somebody else's utopia which will turn out to be our dystopia. Yeah, absolutely. Dara Steikman asks, do you have any ideas for unleashing our own creativity at home? So many ideas because I'm trapped here with two small children and we're trying to figure out all these things ourselves. So, I think that there's sort of the fundamental first step is to think about the time and the space you have as a blank canvas. Instead of thinking about it as this problem or, you know, something that causes anxiety or something that should only be filled with reading more coronavirus news, I think you have to think about it as a kind of opportunity and every crisis presents its opportunities and to, you know, basically give yourself permission to try things and the most important artistic process is the process of failure and learning from your failure. So give yourself permission to try something and let it not work out and then try again. You know, we've been watching Mo Willems do drawing and I really like the way he talks about drawing and editing and, you know, failure and success and that's not a bad place to start, right? Like the thing you decide to be creative about doesn't have to be writing a great novel. It could be doodling or it could be cooking or it could be like fixing, cleaning your garage out, you know, like it, whatever. The key thing is to feel like you have this agency to do things and to take it step by step to identify little goals. I think that a lot of people get hung up on sort of mystifying the creative process or doing some kind of art. And actually when you look at what people do, it's, you know, they're successful. People like Toni Morrison talk about writing under constraint, you know, she got up at four a.m. every morning to do this as a single mother with a demanding day job. You know, it wasn't mystical. It was like she was gonna, you know, it was more akin to like repairing a car or, you know, making a cake. You know, first you're gonna do this, then you're gonna do this, then you're gonna do this and it's just sticking with it or into a totally different direction. I think it's Seinfeld's who had this like post-it method where he just put a, he had a calendar. I mean, it wasn't posted, it was a calendar. You would cross off every day and he, whatever the goal was, I think it was writing for, writing 10 minutes of comedy or stand-up or something like that. You know, it was the consistency, persistence is the method in Albert Camus. So you have to start small, you have to give yourself permission at fail but you have to keep going. It's really disappointing that discipline is the answer that there's not some external motivation that will inspire me. I will be the one who actually has to write the next 20 pages of the novel still sitting on my desktop. This is why the constraints are really important. It's why people lock themselves into rooms and put their phones inside a box and do all these things. So, you know, part of the opportunity here might be that these constraints are imposed, but again, it's all about, you know, how do you make lemonade? You know, how do you make something good out of a bad situation? And then, you know, to think of this not as a, even though it feels very exceptional and weird, to think about it as just a spectrum on, it's sort of a spot on the spectrum of all the hard situations that we're in all the time, right, and that life is always a response, or art, excuse me, art is always a response to life. That leads really well into this next question from Alexander Zwisler, it's a really fun name to say when I say it correctly, I hope, who asks, can you imagine a scenario where this crisis rewires the collective consciousness to think about risk and the future differently? I hope so. And by the way, it's nice to see so many familiar names on this, so I feel like I've got a few friends in the audience. So, unless this is just other people impersonating my friends, which I guess is possible too. So, I think that the consciousness is already getting rewired because we're doing, we've now proven to ourselves that we can do all these things that everybody said was impossible. Like we've reinvented education at the drop of a hat. We're, carbon emissions are way down. The air in Beijing and London and other places is much cleaner than it was a few weeks ago. The governor of California is talking about housing, all of the homeless people in California. All these things that we thought were impossible, it turns out are not impossible, right? It's just that sometimes the solution is not an incremental 1% or 5% or 10% engineering efficiency increase. It's like, oh, well, if we all stopped going to work, then there's like a 90% efficiency increase. So, I think we've already proven to ourselves that we can change the world in these really dramatic ways. I didn't want to say like, there's been a tremendous amount of suffering involved in this too. And we're going to continue to grapple with all of these economic repercussions. But we've shown ourselves what we can do if we just make these collective decisions to do it. And I think the really interesting question is, how do we harness that going forward? And how do we build a new narrative? I think that the first step is to create a new narrative about how we reinvent ourselves and what, I think sometimes call it stranger care, this idea of caring about other people you don't know, or sort of social consciousness. How do we start making that part of our regular, like a regular piece of furniture in the room that we feel comfortable with talking about and using? So, we're building out from that to say, okay, well, how do we come back from this in a different way in terms of climate change and carbon emissions? How do we come back in a different way in terms of sick leave and help the healthcare system, right? There are all these things that because we've changed so dramatically, we can examine everything with fresh eyes and say like, well, does this need to go back to the way it was before or should we change it? And I think we have to seize that opportunity. And on the flip side of that, Deena Gould says, during a crisis, people often become more conservative, more compliant and less tolerant of creativity and eccentricity. How can we mitigate this? I think it's a really interesting mix. People become conservative in some ways. I think that's absolutely true, but they also become very sort of unfettered in other ways and maybe it is idiosyncratic and weird and sort of a beautiful way. Whether that's just like putting a weird zoom background on while you're talking to people or all those Italians singing off their balconies. Actually, I think that the crisis imposes certain kinds of conformity, like we're not gonna go outside anymore. We're not gonna have the same set of choices around our activities and our entertainment. And that external conformity kind of pushes us to be more individualistic in other ways. So I think what you're saying, Deena is absolutely true and that there are lots of impositions on us, but those create inevitably become creative constraints. So sometimes in class, I use this exercise I stole from a poet named Kenny Goldsmith and I have students transcribe a little audio file like a snippet of a radio interview and I have them all transcribe it which seems like a really boring rote thing, but it turns out that they all transcribe it differently. People make all these different choices and you can, so this Goldsmith thing is uncreated writing. So even in this very conformist moment, people can't help but expressing their own interpretive choices. And I think that the more constrained life becomes the more important it is for people to find these ways to individualize it. And to, it's a way to push back. It's a way to create your own space. So I think we have time for two more quick questions. The second to last question comes from somebody who's anonymous who says, you anticipate that creatives will have new ways of making art, what will that look like and are there existing disciplines that may become obsolete? Good question. So I think funny thing about art is that it always involves reinvention and recombinations of existing things, right? So it's hard to point to, there aren't that many sort of genuinely new modes of art and even things that are technically new like photography spend a lot of time sort of throw clearing and basically copying the old modes before they figure out what the new mode can actually be used for that's distinctive and different. So I think that we'll see new kinds of sort of networks shared presence activities. So children's games that you can play together over Zoom or live performances that are physically distributed or there's this sort of bear hunt thing going on that where people put teddy bears in their windows. So when families go out walking in their neighborhoods the kids will have this activity and it becomes a way to convey a shared kind of solidarity, a shared presence. So these are very simple examples but I think we'll see things like that. I think if this goes on for a long time we're gonna see other interesting stuff. Like I'm kind of intrigued. I like seeing Jimmy Fallon doing his TV show from his living room with his children crawling on top of his head. That's a totally different way of presenting that work that feels authentic and true to the thing that Jimmy Fallon does but is also totally different as well. So I think we'll see a lot of stuff like that. Terms of disciplines going obsolete. I don't know, another funny thing about the future is that it looks so much like the past and nothing ever really goes away. Sometimes it just gets buried under layers of other stuff. Just like you can send letters right now or we're milling all kinds of letters from our house, right? Which is something you could have done in 1918 during that Spanish flu epidemic or you could have done in the 14th century when Boccaccio was writing the Decameron. So the past never really goes away. I think that I have a hard time thinking that anything that this crisis is necessarily gonna disappear anything but I think that a lot of the things we do now, a lot of the things that we took for granted even a month ago will never be the same again. Going to Disneyland will probably never be exactly the same as it was before. Get in an airplane might not be the same. And some kinds of, I don't know what this will mean. Like we'll think about going to big concert arena, rock shows or big stadiums. Will those things feel different? I'm not sure. I think that our notion of live shared presence will have a different tenor to it. Now our last question is one I always love to ask to end a panel. So I appreciate that Victor Purton asked it, which is what makes you optimistic right now? I'm optimistic about all of the things people are doing to help one another on a really small scale like looking out for neighbors and friends and colleagues and not just the people you're really close to in real life but people that you're, I've seen a lot of instances of people using their imaginations to try to think about somebody who might be in their more distant network who might need some kind of help and saying like, are you okay? Do you need help? Mutual aid societies and people making masks and sort of on all these different levels. So from the very small grassroots level to like big, I don't know like Ralph Lauren, I think out some of these big fashion companies are throwing their production lines into making medical equipment. So I think that kind of collaboration and adaptation gives me hope. And I think that the sort of thinking about the longer term, which this is again forcing us to do because this isn't going to be over next week or two weeks from now, this is going to be months long, really years long process when we think about all of the different things that are coming. I think that it also gives me hope even though there's going to be a lot of challenge and suffering ahead that we are raising our sights and we're looking farther. That fundamentally is a really important thing to do even if what you see ahead or challenges just looking ahead farther is improves our collective odds of survival as a species. Great note to end it on. So thank you so much, Ed. This was really fun. Any parting words? Thank you so much. This was awesome. Thanks for all the great questions and keep hope alive. Yes, thank you all so much for joining us and for asking the great questions. We'll be doing more social distancing socials in the coming weeks. You can find them at newamerica.org or at slate.com slash live. And please subscribe to the newsletter from Center for Science and the Imagination to find out more about us in flux in the coming weeks. Thanks, everybody.