Reinventing Virtual Events

CHAPTER 35The Future of Events in a Socially Distant World

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In every event contract, there's a force majeure that frees up the parties if something like a hurricane, insurrection, flood, or fire happens. We've never seen a more volatile time in human history, so we write this potentially going into a recessionary condition after a pandemic kept boomeranging back. Hybrid, digital, and virtual reality (VR)‐style events will become more and more the norm into the 2030s. We'll probably have to revise this book to account for the many new platforms and enabling technologies for events in the not‐too‐distant multiverse future racing toward us.

Building trust is about building affinity, shared vision, and sparking curiosity. If an event is dull and flat, it will repel even if the content is exceptionally well produced and seemingly high‐quality. How many webinars have you been on that look like a million bucks, but you're so bored you can't help but multitask? Or it's so cringeworthy you spend the entire hour slacking colleagues like Siskel & Ebert, grappling to stay awake. It's like bad ads on the Super Bowl. Sure they cost a king's ransom, but they didn't capture your attention more than your bucket of chicken wings. That's the same miss when you don't ...