Future_Forecast is a project that includes a live simulation + collective world building game, a CGI film, and a series of characters. In the context of “Digital Earth”, “One Belt One Road Initiative” and the Philippines’ “Build Build Build Initiative”, Future_Forecast presents and predicts the evolution of cloud networked societies in the developing world by looking at the effects of growing Internet-enabled networks and the ecological, geopolitical, and socio-cultural effects of a speculative future ISP and blockchain company in the Philippines.

The Philippines is No.1 globally on both the list of average daily time spent on the Internet (10 hours and 2 minutes) and social media (4 hours 5 minutes) every day. But it has the second slowest Internet speed in the world. In the context of the Philippine’s “Build Build Build” Initiative, a series of Internet infrastructure construction and blockchain applications are taking place: Dito Telecommunity, a telecom company backed by China Telecom, has officially entered the market this year (To break the current duopoly of PLDT and Globe in the Philippines); Alibaba announced in June this year that a new large data center will be built in the Philippines (providing Elastic Compute Service (ECS), database, global network solution, Content Delivery Network (CDN), and storage services); With the support of the Philippine government, Blockchain company CypherOdin, will use its blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technology to clean and repair the ecosystem of the Pasig River, which has been considered “ecologically dead” at the beginning of 2000s. Simultaneously , a series of problems are alerting us to the large amount of conflicts we are about to face: such as the large number of toxic gasses generated by the data center cooling system, ecological destruction, the prosperity of the dark web, panoramic surveillance accelerated by the Internet of Things, and so on.

The project is heavily inspired by Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack – On Software and Sovereignty, which is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. In The Stack, Bratton proposes that different genres of computation – from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure and platform to smart cities, massive universal addressing systems, Internet of Things, algorithms, human and non-human users – can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture.