Ahmed Best is an award-winning artist, educator, director, the host of the Afrofuturist podcast, and co-founder of the AfroRithm Futures Group, among other pursuits, including his role as Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode I. Ahmed teaches Dramatic Narrative Design, a course he created for Film and Actor entrepreneurship at USC School of Dramatic Arts. He is also a Senior Fellow at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and a visiting professor at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
If you could witness one event from the distant past or future, what would it be?
Distant future: I would love to see the first thing that we build — and it might not be a vessel — that can travel at the speed of light.
Distant past: The construction of the Pyramids of Giza. The bricks of the pyramids were formed with almost laser-like precision. I want to see how they did that. Was it a laser? Can you imagine the Egyptians harnessing, say, the power of the sun with a big piece of glass to where they could do a laser-cut of a brick of stone? Had not those who wanted to change the narrative of this civilization destroyed so many things, we might have known how they did it. Right now, it’s a mystery. People like to credit aliens, but I align with Neil deGrasse Tyson on this one: just because they were smarter than you doesn’t mean they came from another planet.
What’s one prediction about the future you’d be willing to make for Long Bets, our arena for accountable predictions?
A thousand years from now, we will have learned to move beyond the planet without carrying the problems of the past with us. This will come through a global cultural revolution. We will be ready to travel through to the stars without harm. We’ll be able to respect where we are going for what “where we are going” demands. We’re not going to impose our ideas of what respect is onto wherever we travel to.
If you had to choose a single artifact to represent our time in a far-future archive, what would it be?
To represent our time, I’d choose the smartphone. The idea of a smartphone was inspired by science fiction, but also there's a longer, almost pseudo-spiritual idea of a smartphone that connects the past to our present.
In his book African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (01999), the mathematician Ron Eglash studied the sand diviners of the Bamana people of Mali, who read peoples’ fortunes by drawing symbols in the sand. Eglash found that this system of divination uses a binary-like logic. Variants of this practice spread from Africa to Spain and the rest of Europe during the Islamic Golden Age, where it was known as geomancy. Leibniz was inspired by geomancy when he created a binary system of ones and zeros, which eventually became the foundation for the development of the digital computer — and, ultimately, the smartphone.
The connection I love to draw is that the primary material of smartphones is silicon, which comes from sand. So, in a sense, when we use our smartphones, we are engaging in a modern form of “sand divination,” just like the ancient sand diviners did in actual sand.
What’s the most surprising way history has repeated itself in your field?
What surprises me most is how every generation puts technology — and the monetary gain it brings — above creativity. The creativity of the time creates a technology of the time, and then everybody focuses so much on replicating the technology but not supporting the creativity that got you there in the first place. It’s a cycle that has repeated itself throughout history. You can see it in the history of music, in writing, in social media — in any kind of storytelling that can be replicated and shared.
Today, we’re at an inflection point where we have so much technology that we build it without having any idea what the use for it is. We put it out there and expect that somebody creative can figure out how to monetize it. We keep putting the creative people — who can actually influence culture in a way that moves us forward optimistically towards change — in a box. We don’t give them the resources to move us forward because we got locked into the amount of technology we can make at a mass scale to acquire as much monetary gain as possible.
Changing this cycle would require a shift in what we choose to value. I’m a big Trekkie; everything comes down to Star Trek. Imagine a Star Trek-like future where human experience, expression and exploration are the commodity and not excess and greed. Unfortunately, we might need Vulcans to come down to make that happen.
What are some books you would recommend for inclusion in The Manual For Civilization, our crowd-curated library of 3,500 books of essential civilizational knowledge?
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis(02021) by Amitav Ghosh. This book explores capitalism and imperialism from the point of view of nutmeg, which was the most expensive commodity on the planet in the 14th and 15th centuries. Nutmeg could buy you a house in Europe. Ghosh brilliantly frames the story of colonization — the very notion of which stemmed from this desire for nutmeg — through a small island in the Indian Ocean that was the only place where nutmeg was found at the time.
Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch(02024) by Andrea Freeman. This book examines the history of oppression of peoples through food, and how food was used as a tool for genocide and white supremacy in the Americas and around the world.
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events(02019) by Robert J. Shiller. I use this book in my dramatic narrative design class. It shows how, once the dollar was no longer backed by any precious metal, its movement was based on the stories that popular culture decided to tell. Currency moves through story.
Other recommendations: