Monika Bielskyte wants futures-thinking and SF to push towards “Protopia” - that is, not escaping from the injustices of the present
Monica Bielskyte, “Protopian Futures” (click this for link to YouTube)
We are always on the look-out for inclusive visions of the future - and here is an amazing prospectus.
Above is a presentation from South African futures researcher and designer Monica Bielskyte, made at the Inter:Active symposium this year. She’s challenging the dystopias in our cultural lives:
Dystopian Futures are generally depicted as desolate beyond repair, and consequently mostly futile to be engaged with or salvaged. Whatever action happens in such a setting looks pretty much like cyberpunk dancing on the deck of the Titanic.
But she’s also challenging utopias too:
Utopian Futures are generally envisaged as so “perfect” that they can only exist by prodigiously leapfrogging all of the most urgent inequities of the present. Consequently, they are mostly closed to critical inquiry. Utopian imaginings pertain to communicating a peaceful and magically post-austerity world, yet somehow the peace of such a future is always peace without justice.
Monica proposes instead a “protopia”, or protopian visions. The slide below states their principles:
— but the concept was fully explored in this Medium essay earlier this year. An extract:
WHY PROTOPIA?
The critical setting of context is vital so we can at least attempt not to fall back into common future stereotypes. BUT! Just saying NO is not enough. Protopia is our framework for shared YES VISIONS of the future, intended to inspire and support us in making the hardest choices of the decades to come.
The word “Protopia” was coined in a 2011 blog post by Wired’s founding editor Kevin Kelly. Kelly’s initial idea of the concept came from “pronoia,” (the opposite of “paranoia”): an exuberant feeling that the entire world is rooting for you.
At the time, however, it captured only a niche audience, being so early in the futures conversation, but possibly also for being very much an extension of Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand’s techno-utopian thought.
At @protopiafutures, we have taken a significant departure from the original framing of “better futures” (via the route of incremental technological innovation).
Our Protopias are the proactive prototyping of radically inclusive futures. Ones that shift the gaze from technological panaceas to focus on future cultural values and ethics.
We believe that technological innovation without humanitarian evolution always leads to Dystopian Futures. We consider humanity, rather than the abstract notions of “technology/science” (as featured in Kelly’s 2010 book What Technology Wants), to be the drivers for said evolution.
We must boldly address past and present injustice and exploitative frameworks. In doing so, we replace them with regenerative and equitable alternatives. Rather than merely patching things up with inevitably temporary, disposable, technological solutions.
Superficially, one could perceive Protopian Futures as situated “between” Dystopia and Utopia. Yet they are not particularly indebted to either.
Dystopias/Utopias are monologues moored in the gaze of privilege, inevitably tied to boundaries of thought established via patriarchal settler colonialism.
Protopia is a continuous dialogue, more a verb than a noun, a process rather than a destination, never finite, always iterative, meant to be questioned, adjusted, and expanded.
Our goal is always to centre previously marginalized perspectives - especially those at the intersection of Indigeneity, Queerness, and Disability. Above all, Protopia explores visions of embodied HOPE. Futures wherein we have come together, as imperfect as our condition is.
Protopian futuring is NOT to be solely bound to the realm of theoretical imagination. It is also very much about the methodology of creating (and recovering) blueprints for action.
Our goal is to challenge the inevitability of imposed futures. We hope to create spaces of active imagining, resourcing in the present and moving towards collaborative visions of liberation (*Tiana Garoogian).
Unlike most SciFi which features distant time periods and fantastical locations (i.e. space colonialism, alien invasions, singularity/simulation projections, etc.), we want our speculative futures to explore time horizons no more than 30 years into the future and to take place primarily on Earth.
We deem the narratives of life on our home planet the most urgent and compelling, and we critique the neocolonial approaches to space expansion.