Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Exponential Minds’ The Future of Dark Futures we celebrate the 4th edition of DARK FUTURES, being held on December 4th in Vancouver, BC, with some heavy articles of what is going wrong in the world plus Nikolas badminton’s recent keynote presentation – ‘Darkness, the Future of Freedom’.

Grab tickets to DARK FUTURES 4.0 here.

OK, let’s go!

Something is wrong on the internet

James Bridle lays it down (as always).

Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.

To begin: Kid’s YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I’ve been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That’s it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.

Read more at Medium

Unpaid Labourers are ‘slipping pleas of help into Zara Clothes’

Shoppers at fashion retailer Zara have found unusual notes in their clothes from workers claiming they have not been paid for making the merchandise.
Worth an estimated £8.6 billion and with more than 2,200 stores worldwide, Zara might be one of the world’s most successful fashion brands, but, once again, the retailer finds itself embroiled in controversy.
According to customers in Istanbul, cries for help in the form of handwritten notes from Turkish workers have been found in the pockets of in-store garments asking shoppers to back their campaign for better labour standards and pressure Zara into paying them the wages they say they are owed, the Associated Press reports.
Read more at The Independent

A Year Without a President – Robert Reich

Black Market Bodies: How Legalizing the Sale of Human Organs Could Save Lives

When a failing heart, liver, or other vital organ proves resistant to all available forms of treatment, a dying patient’s only shot at survival may be an organ transplant. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough donor organs to save all the patients who need one. Feeling desperate with precious time running out, some patients may attempt to purchase an organ illegally. In fact, thousands of sales or purchases of black market organs take place every year, according to the World Health Organization.
In the 1980s, Iran had both a shortage of legally donated kidneys and subpar dialysis equipment to treat the growing segment of the population with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). It did have highly trained surgeons capable of performing organ transplants, though. So in 1988, the nation decided on a bold (and somewhat controversial) new strategy to eliminate the dangers that come with procuring or receiving an organ illegally: they made it legal for a living person to sell their kidney.
Read more at Futurism

Grab tickets to DARK FUTURES 4.0 here.