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Veronica Simpson attends this year’s Future Everything festival of art, design and digital culture, and comes away with mixed feelings.

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Words by Veronica Simpson

I am a self-confessed digital sceptic. I believe that, ultimately, we will lose more in terms of personal freedoms, quality of life and relationships than we will ever gain through our willingness to hand over ever greater chunks of how we live, work, socialise, learn and, most worryingly, evaluate ourselves to machines.

So when it comes to opportunities for deep immersion in the topic - such as that provided by Future Everything's annual festival of art, design and digital culture - my feelings are mixed. There's the hope that I might just come away feeling emboldened by this brave new world, but there's also the risk that I may feel utterly dejected at the massive digital detour we seem to be taking after thousands of years of what seemed to be civic progress. As one formerly pro-digital 20-something confessed to me last year: 'I feel that we, the Facebook generation, have been plunged into a world we have no idea how to navigate, by a generation that didn't have a clue what the implications were.'

Drew Hemment, the festival's founder, is good at rallying the troops. In his opening speech he admitted that some of the 'values of participatory culture are being questioned' (such as governments and online advertisers/ global corporates having decided we have no rights to privacy and it's access all areas in this giant surveillance/direct-marketing fiesta). But, he asserted: 'That doesn't mean we step away from those values. What's needed is a new civics of the internet. It's not simple, it's messy, but this is a space we have to engage in.'

To this end, we had some inspiring examples from Mexico City and Helsinki. Gabriela Gomez-Mont is founder of Mexico City's Laboratory for the City (LFC), billed as 'one of the most celebrated civic innovation projects from around the world'. LFC is one of a family of labs - there are others in Paris and New York. This is the first one on the American continent. Now just over 18 months old, Gomez-Mont's Lab has been busy 'reinventing and reimagining the way government and society come together'. As a city state only recently emerging from a long dictatorship, you can see why she says: 'We think the first technology is conversation.'

Conference goers get to grips with the Dissolve tool

To that end, she and her multidisciplinary team of 19 people have staged 40 'experiments' through the city - hack festivals, art installations, interventions, debates and seminars in their own super-cool rooftop office space - to spark conversations between the people and the politicians. She said: 'We are very interested in citizenship as a creative act. How can you become an active participant and co-creator?' But she provided no evidence of any actual change resulting from all these conversations, leading one to question whether this exercise is a genuine paradigm shift in how governments and people can co-create, or just a seductive PR stunt.

In contrast, Helsinki is already considered a most egalitarian city with a real interest in collective governance. So what did Jarmo Eskelinen, director of the Forum Virium Helsinki, think technology could add to the mix? 'Technology is not the solution [for most cities],' he said. 'You don't solve the problems of Mumbai by embedding lots of smart sensors...The city has to be seen as the enabler: to drive, support and nurture things [citizens] find valuable.' Change only comes when people feel a connection to the underlying cause, he said. 'They need to feel they will get something out of it. That what they do could make a difference.'

A prime example of positive intervention came from Ukrainian software designer Ivan Pasichnyk who, during the recent conflicts, created an app that alerted civilians to where the military were, so they could avoid being killed/captured. Nice one! Except that there is evidence that digital and social media are being expertly manipulated by the Russians in the first place in order to recruit Russian-sympathising Ukrainians and divert this country from its peaceful evolution towards the EU.

There was a fascinating demonstration from some young Russian designers themselves, who had participated last year in the first Future Everything event in Moscow, organised by the British Council. I have to applaud the British Council's foresight in providing the enormous support it does for the UK's digital pioneers. But I also have to question the point of the speculative inventions its Russian protégés came up with: most of them seemed to be trying to compensate for shortcomings in the human experience that digital connectivity has caused in the first place.

One team had invented a tool to help people empathise with others who were not like them (called Empath). Once upon a time, when people hung out in their local neighbourhood encountering a rich mix of other citizens through good old-fashioned face-to-face engagement - at the pub, in the schoolyard, out shopping - they didn't need a digital tool to help them experience what it was like to be someone unlike them (social media of course being a fantastic way of ensuring that you only ever hang out with people - online and physically - who share your interests and most likely your background, age group and other key cultural markers).

Another tool, called Dissolve, provided a way of faking an online presence seemingly by routing all queries and conversations via your Facebook friends, and letting them act as a proxy, relieving you of the time-consuming bother of maintaining your digital life so that you can enjoy more of real life!

Touchback asks for instant feedback on events

The most worrying proposed tool was Touchback, an app which uses Tinder technology (swipe left or right to indicate dating potential) to provide event ratings: you could swipe with your thumb up or down to give live feedback on how much you agreed/ disagreed or liked/disliked the talk, show, film, debate or experience in question. Call me pessimistic, but I can immediately see this tool being snapped up by government bean-counters so that cash-strapped arts organisations (or universities) are bullied into providing compulsory feedback, forcing the gadget on all their audiences, in order to justify their funding. Can you think of anything worse at a gig, opera or theatre performance?

I love live music or theatre in part because I can completely immerse myself in what I'm hearing or seeing. Imagine what a mood-killer it would be to have to disengage and fiddle with some device in order to evaluate each song/soliloquy.

A presentation from Sue Murphy, deputy leader of Manchester City Council, momentarily cheered me up, when I learned that this feisty northern city had just been handed a £22bn budget to run its schools, healthcare and social services as part of a bold devolution away from central government. Digital connectivity and smart citizenship are very much part of this city's message. But then I found out that every advertising billboard in Manchester has a camera that takes people's pictures as they pass to see what reactions the ads are eliciting. Did the people of Manchester sign up for this? Who benefits? Clearly not the Mancunians. So let's chalk up another example of people's privacy being invaded by digital technology so that their reactions can be harvested and commodified by advertisers and service providers.

Which all brings me back to Eskelinen's comment about the point of technology and design being 'to drive, support and nurture things [citizens] find valuable.' I'd say current digital innovations are failing on that front at least nine times out of 10.