The way most of our tech today is lifted directly from a specific genre of science fiction needs to be studied.
And we urgently need new stories of what sustainable, harmonic, and careful tech futures look like.
Because if these stories are doing prophetic work, we need to change the narrative.
In Nnedi Okorafor’s ZARAH THE WINDSEEKER she writes of Africans who grow computers from seed. The idea was so remarkable that I went in search of biological computational work.
The fictional stories compel us to the fill the gaps (i.e. voids) they create in our realities. That’s what prophesy is.
Stories are powerful, meaning they are full of the ability to create change. And if there is a change you would like to see—like a total destruction of the ableist, white supremacist, patriarchal, anti-black world order—you need to start with story.
This is what I'm observing as the power of a single story, of any story really. The story does #voidwork🌌, creating a gap between what is and what is not, forcing the natural law of the void to kick in and for the material universe try to to fill that void.
Without the stories, we do not know the shape of the voids or the things that we want to fill it with. But someone else with power (read: with the ability to create change) does. They write Project 2025s and Star Treks and Handmaid's Tales and satirical, allium-affiliated periodicals.
And the law of the void works to create those realities, for better and for worse. We can point directly to the origins of the iPad in Star Trek episodes, or the way generative artificial intelligence works in many, many science fiction novels to how we prompt the machines today.
Project 2025 has completed the work its architects set out to do decades ago. There's even a headline from The Onion for every absurd thing this administration does, and laws mirroring the future The Handmaid's Tale laid out are in effect around us.
The good news is we can harness voids and power to create worlds we want to see. But we have to start with stories, which means with our imaginations. And we have to tell those stories to each other, one at a time, until the prophetic has no choice but to burst through the void we created for it.
The stories we tell have power. They have the ability to create change.
But we gotta start telling different stories, or at the very least, stop re-telling the same ones that keep is here.
All it takes is a single story.
And right now, we need a story that takes us off this cliff that Big Tech is driving us off. Big Tech is anti-life, a careless vision of white men's science fiction fantasy that's literally killing humans.
They must be stopped, yes, but that's only a by-product of humans taking back power.
Tell me another story.