How global events are changing: politics, technology and communications
“Architecture is a political act”, said Richard Meyer, the American champion of modernism that combines tradition and innovation, when inaugurating the contemporary enclave of the Ara Pacis Augustea in Rome in 2006. Words that echo the time when, for the 1889 EXPO in Paris, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated, contested at the time by a large part of French public opinion, a symbol of the connection between old and new for a global event that would mark an epochal passage of continuity and dialogue between memory and future in history.
Today, when that passage of continuity seems impossible due to the geopolitical crisis and the end of multilateralism, one has to wonder whether the global events – Expos, Olympics and Para-Olympics, G20, COPs devoted to the environment, World Water Forum on the world water crisis, International Festivals of Mind and Culture, Art and Architecture Biennales and (why not?) the Jubilee in Italy or the Maha Kumbh Mela in India – can still be “mutagenic” agents capable of fostering multi-disciplinary, inter-generational, inter-religious evolutionary processes by intercepting culture, engineering, biology, human and data sciences, political sciences, showing their near and distant visitors a winning cooperative model on the problems of environmental, economic and social sustainability.
Or rather, we need to ask which countries will bid to host these major events and what curatorial concepts and themes will be proposed to indicate a collaborative vision between nations and participating organizations, between visitors and practitioners in the field.
Says Ursula von der Leyen: “The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not become a reality and we have entered a new era of tough geostrategic competition”. But will this stop the push towards global events? Romano Prodi thinks not: “True, everything that is international solidarity will be destroyed, but not the EXPOs and the Olympics because competition and superiority prevail in them. The USA will be pushed to make the most impressive pavilion and take as many medals as possible”.
One thing is certain. For those who will host major global events in the future, the ability to shape their narratives, to make them so attractive as to cover the growing organizational costs by attracting tens of millions of visitors in person or remotely, will no longer be an option, a luxury, but a necessity.
Global events will no longer be a “space”, a “where”, but a “how”, connecting natural, artificial and collective intelligence, as defined by Carlo Ratti, curator of the next Architecture Biennale in Venice and architect-designer of the Italian Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai.
Major events will increasingly require the construction of a shared reality by controlling the narratives that precede them already in the bidding campaigns to host them. Narrative supremacy as defined by Matteo Flora, professor of Open Source Intelligence, requires a profound rethinking of the communicative approach to events.
Flora says that building the new meaning of these events will require re-founding the relationships between host countries, participating nations and organizations with visitors from every continent, including unconventional partnerships with content creators, artists and even gaming and virtual reality platforms, where media and influencers can help generate, and consolidate, public trust.
The technologies that will change the course of major events do not portend to be neutral but, on the contrary, social and cultural constructs that will reflect the priorities and values of those who design and develop them, financing them immensely, producing important consequences and a paradigm shift in terms of organization, backstage, and vis a vis or virtual interaction with the public.
Interaction not only with live events and shows, but with security, control and privacy systems as these events will also be used, and increasingly so, for a growing analysis of the data and behavior of their audiences. Even to the extent of giving visitors the possibility to choose the scenography of pavilions at Universal Expositions tapping their apps as well as at festivals and fairs to discover the behind the scenes of art and science, as well as in stadiums to assess in real time the performance of athletes.
In large global events, the collective intelligence of participants is in this sense a still largely untapped potential.
These logics, political and technological, have existed for some time but have now come out into the open, establishing a new format of events that have become platforms, increasingly interactive models in which participants and visitors will not only be taking part in an experience, but will be the experience itself.
Major events are now in a thematic and narrative fog because of what is happening in international politics, trade, business, climate change, civil society under “Trumpism” and Artificial Intelligence.
So much so that, something that has never happened before, many countries (Argentina, Mexico, Estonia, El Salvador, South Africa, Greece, Iran, Egypt) have decided at the last minute to withdraw from Expo Osaka 2025 and others (India, Brazil, Turkey, Angola) have preferred to give up their national pavilions to be hosted instead, semi-hidden, in collective pavilions.
This news, still almost unknown, follows the withdrawal of the USA from next years’ COP, and probably also from the water summits organized by the World Water Council under the aegis of the OECD. In contrast, we saw the first enthusiastic participation of an incumbent US President (Trump) in the Super Bowl as this event well defines American culture.
Scenarios of the future. We wonder if at the Expo of 2030, or even earlier at COPs 30 and 31, we will have a new version of the Crypto.com Arena, financed by the well-known Trumpian cryptocurrency exchange, dominating the Los Angeles Convention Center. Or whether at the upcoming Olympics athletes and fans will have sprawling pavilions equipped by China’s Riot Games, which developed League of Legends, one of the world’s most popular e-sports titles, or by Epic Games creator of Fortnite, a titan with 400 million players worldwide. And, finally, whether the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia will go down in history for the “Mohammed Bin Salman Stadium” that will revolutionize the way soccer matches are viewed by creating a multifunctional arena with retractable grass pitches and LED lines on the playing rectangle, a true metaverse of sport that will decree the entry of football into augmented reality.
Scenarios closer than we think. China’s new soft power will appear as early as this year at Expo Osaka, in a super high-tech pavilion that will present the country not only as a rising power but also as a vibrant cultural and diplomatic leader of the future.
At Expo Osaka, China will show how it intends to take the place of the USA in climate negotiations. It will do so with a Pavilion – “Weaving the Future in Harmony” – dedicated, with Artificial Intelligence guiding the narrative, to the ecological culture of its own history, to the 5,000 years of a civilization inspired by respect for nature and to the green development of China in the modern era.
China will give every visitor to its Pavilion a QR code with which, on leaving, they can shape their society of the future. Visitors to the Chinese Pavilion will hear the voices, see the faces of the protagonists of Chinese mythology, and be able to converse with them, activating connections that will make them the true creators of the sustainable future.
It is not difficult to imagine that a rising nationalistic wave of geostrategic event competition, increasingly aggressive on the diplomatic and technological level, may contribute to progressively shifting the gravitational center of global events towards the Indo-Pacific and the Global South where 85% of the world’s youth live. Events that will affirm the primary role of New Delhi, Dakar, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, and Santiago de Chile as the new “champions” of the forthcoming Expos, G20s, and COPs (especially after the US pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement) because they are front-runners in alternative energies, rare earths, and digital literacy.
What will the Western powers decide to do?
Many remember when, in 2001, George Bush’s USA left the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), the governing body of Universal Expositions, leaving their participation in Expo Milano 2015 to be financed entirely by private sponsors, only to rejoin the BIE with Barack Obama in 2017, but still far from the true spirit of Universal Expositions. Already under Joe Biden the US was very lukewarm towards Expo Dubai 2020 and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktum secretly had to write a cheque for $20 million for the US pavilion to be built on the Expo site.
Does anyone remember the strong reservations expressed by Giorgia Meloni, when she was in opposition, about the usefulness of Italy’s participation in Expo 2020 Dubai. And now for Expo Osaka?
In sport, the first American threats to the International Olympic Committee over the Berlin Games date back to 1934, threats that in the 50 years that followed – from Moscow in 1980 to the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 – not even Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and, later, Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden never completely denied, between outright boycotts and unofficial participation without flying the star-spangled banner the stars and stripes flag.
Today, the BIE model itself, in the hands of diplomatically appointed officials, is fragile and likely to succumb. But not only that. For the new leadership of the International Olympic Committee, and the National Olympic Committees, starting with CONI, uncertain times are looming. The 2024 Olympics were awarded to Paris and the 2028 Olympics were entrusted to Los Angeles only because there were no other committed candidates. After Dubai with the first really “popular” COP – over 50,000 active visitors – after Baku in 2024 practically deserted and this year Rio de Janeiro without the USA at the table, who will ever organize COP31?
Major Global Events are Politics. Increasingly they will be a “how” and no longer a “where”. If so, these events can defeat the catastrophism of today.
Indeed, the political-technological algorithm will be able to make the forthcoming global events processing machines of the present time to think of the future, vectors of a rediscovered diplomatic, commercial, educational collaboration between countries. This will be possible if their themes, values and contents expressed by each participating country, while strongly reaffirming their national identity, will generate opportunities for collaboration and sharing. Thus, they will build collective intelligence by leveraging individual and technological intelligence.
(*) A version of this article was originally published on Firstonline.info
