David Pescovitz & Brad Wieners

Writers / Post-Futurists

A reality check on Reality Check

opening sounds were by Vordo

Both before and after Session #29 we got some nice press!
Plus jetpacks are in the news!

Brad and David's guests included:

John Alderman author of Sonic Boom spoke about the digital music revolution
Erik Davis, expert on many things, spoke of smart drugs and other human chemical alterations--along these lines check out his article Take the Red Pill
Eric Paulos spoke about his robotics project PRoP (early blimps and his most recent PRoP2)
Tom Eich from IDEO talked about future design.

Vann Hall talked SEX present and future

If there's one thing David Pescovitz and Brad Wieners heard over and over when they came out with their 1996 timeline of the future, Reality Check (Wired Books), it's that their predictions for pop culture tech--robots! jet packs! orgasmatrons!--were far too bullish. Five years later, however, it looks this pair of accidental futurists wasn't bold enough: Everything they predicted--based on expert sources they're happy to blame--is happening sooner--much sooner--than expected! On Jan 20, join them as they tour the recent future and examine why certain inventions took off, while others were built (but nobody came).

The book Reality Check was based on David Pescovitz's long-running futurist column in Wired magazine where he is a contributing writer. He is also the Writer-in-Residence for UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, a contributing editor to Artbyte, and the San Francisco editor for I.D., the international design magazine. Pescovitz has also written about technology, science, art, and culture for the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Salon, Spin, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, and many others. His explorations of fringe culture are featured in the Happy Mutant Handbook (Riverhead, 1996) and The 'Zine Reader (Holt, 1997). Pescovitz holds a Master's in Journalism from UC-Berkeley and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Electronic Media from the University of Cincinnati. He lives in San Francisco.

Brad Wieners is a freelance reporter and magazine editor living in New York. Wieners was most recently senior editor at Outside, a 25 year-old monthly devoted to adventure travel, Americana, wilderness recreation, and wilderness protection. Prior to Outside, he served as senior editor at Wired, the sourcebook of the digital revolution. While at Wired, he cowrote Reality Check, a book about the future, which appeared in several foreign editions, and cocreated Burning Man, a photo book with commentaries on the "Woodstock of the '90s." On the strength of Reality Check, he appeared on CNN, FOXTV, NPR, CBS, and the BBC. In addition to Outside and Wired, Wieners' journalism has appeared in Salon.com, Business 2.0, and the San Francisco Examiner. A former oarsman, he holds a degree in English Literature from UCLA.

dj vordo proprietor of the abstrakt zone spends most of his time screwing up other people's music in front of a computer and occasionally he does it in real time.