Ahmed Best: Feel The Future

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. In his Long Now Talk, Best is joined on stage in conversation with Long Now Board Member Lisa Kay Solomon. As a Futurist in Residence at the Stanford d.school, Solomon teaches classes like “Inventing the future” and “View from the future,” to help leaders and learners learn skills to anticipate and adapt to increasingly complex futures. Lisa recently joined the board of the Long Now Foundation, and is passionate about helping infusing futures thinking and practices into both classrooms and board rooms. This talk was presented February 14, 02025 at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Episode notes: https://longnow.org/ideas/feel-the-future/