Ollie Rankin

Ollie Rankin is a Kiwi-Canadian creative technology pioneer, award-winning multidisciplinary artist and futurist. He worked at the forefront of the global visual effects industry, from The Lord of the Rings to Alice Through the Looking Glass and is recognized as a pioneer of virtual reality entertainment. Rankin has produced music festivals in the metaverse that were seen by millions, has won accolades for his virtual production and virtual reality films, and has contributed to groundbreaking technological advancements in spatial computing. He’s worked with the creators of Fortnight, been an industry advisor to NASA and has repeatedly been recognized as a top ten thought leader in VR.

But Ollie's true calling is as a champion of human destiny. He is co-founder and director of the United Humans Foundation, a non-profit that advocates for an open source model of collective decision-making based on love, fairness and science. As a philosopher, poet and performer, he challenges the conventional wisdom that exploitation, greed and inequality are inevitable and strives to inspire audiences with the potential for an inclusive, fair and sustainable future.

Ollie currently lives in British Columbia, Canada, where he's writing a Repair Manual For Broken Civilizations. It's an approachable handbook, intended to give any curious reader a set of diagnostic tools to determine whether or not the civilization they find themselves living in is functioning properly. It includes straightforward design principles for a properly-functioning, inclusive, fair and sustainable civilization, a host of ongoing maintenance techniques and—perhaps most importantly—strategies for implementing a properly functioning civilization within the confines of a broken one.