Tarot for tech futures
A hands-on workshop to dream up the tech and futures we want.
Tech and tarot might seem like polar opposites — the rational vs the spiritual, the logical vs emotional, yet Silicon Valley has been predicting futures for a long time now (and even when some of those futures aren’t physically possible, a la Theranos!). Silicon Valley’s power lies in its ability to storytell and give shape to the future through creating visual language, vocabulary and archetypes. We see ourselves as many of the archetypes that Silicon Valley creates — the charming CEO to the introverted engineer.
Tarot functions similarly. For example, the entrepreneur as The Magician tarot card giving VCs a performance to remember, or delving into the power hungry world of the The Devil card. As a tool, tarot is a powerful mixture of myth, story, ideology and possibility. In this workshop we’ll create and shape the visual language of the future we want to see, outside Big Tech, together, using tarot.
Tarot for Tech Futures at TED 2024
format
Hands on activity, creating new tarot cards that reflect the tools and ideologies of the tech we want to see in the world. Attendees will use the provided materials to make their own tarot cards either in small groups or individually.
We’ll start off by talking about tarot, what tarot is, and how tarot can be thought of expansively.
We’ll go over the goals of the workshop: to create a collaborative tarot deck that reflects the tools + tech we want to see in the world. We’ll talk about the hands on activity and break out into small groups
We’ll do a few readings as a group and debrief on what we learned.
