Output details

Horizon

This 45 minute radio play was written in late 2007 and early 2008, and explored a world with enough data to recreate one’s ancestors, to look beyond the “horizon” into the future, and suggested that current conditions could enable cyber criminals, or the Antichrist, to bring about financial Armageddon. It addressed three related research questions: 1 What are the implications of increasingly powerful digital data handling both for reconstruction of the past and prediction of the future? 2 What are the implications for financial markets and systems of the "virtualisation" of money? 3 What are the implications of unsustainable debt for future economic stability? The play was recorded on 19th and 20th March 2008, during a week when several of the possibilities postulated in the play started to come about in reality, including the collapse of a major US investment bank (Bear Stearns). I rewrote the ending of the play, making it at least ambiguously optimistic, and thereby a full collapse of the western financial system was averted.