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Comment by camwiese | Hacker News Reader

Expo 2020 is shaping up to be an incredible project, however I'm still expecting it to fall victim to the same challenge that all Fairs since 1970 have had: a lack of a unifying vision. Since every country presents their own narrative, it's hard to guarantee alignment.

I'm heading out there next month and will hopefully find something inspiring to help shape our efforts.

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I'm not sure how you could have a unifying vision for something as broad and diverse as "the future," or "the good parts of the future," without projecting it down into a simplistic, synthesized work of very fictional storytelling where all resemblance to reality (and consequently all authority) has been sacrificed in favor of comprehensibility and persuasiveness.

In other words, the clearest route to getting people excited about a World Fair involves sacrificing the reason you'd want people excited about a World Fair.

To clarify. There's no unifying vision because most of the Pavilions are developed by large government committees where everyone wants to show off a little bit of everything. As a result, their Pavilions end up being a watered down version of their vision for the future.

For better or worse, the future itself is to a large extent developed by large government committees - or at least the funding allocation for the cutting-edge research projects that show up at World Fairs are.

Have you ever seen the photos from Expo 1937 in Paris? Or read about it?

The organizers put the USSR and Nazi Germany directly across from each other... talk about "unifying vision" ...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/09/21/when-paris-invited...

missed a chance to place Poland in the middle

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