When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community?

Over the past quarter-century, Best — first as an actor, musician, and performer, and later as an Afrofuturist scholar and lecturer — has worked to answer that question. Drawing on his experiences as a cast member on the award-winning percussion performance Stomp, as Jar-Jar Binks, the ground-breaking first major CGI character actor in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and as a lecturer at the Stanford d.school and one of the leaders of the AfroRithms Futures Group.

By bringing people together through electrifying performance and thought-provoking conversation, Best’s work has been able to make the future not just an abstract, intellectual consideration but something that can be felt in collective experience.

The core of Ahmed’s argument? Feeling is a form of communication in itself, beyond words — and only by taking action and sharing our feelings of the future with each other in our communities can we create the futures we want for ourselves. Using a diverse range of creative and imaginative tactics, Best incorporates play and motion in order to help audiences Feel The Future.

This talk was presented February 14, 02025 at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. 

Episode notes: https://longnow.org/ideas/feel-the-future/   

To learn more about the AfroRithms Futures Group’s work, visit https://www.afrorithms.com/ 

This Talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight — our community of 12,000 strong across 65 countries over our first quarter century. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible. Will you join us?  https://longnow.org/join

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Ahmed Best - Feel The Future: A Valentine's Evening

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.