Imagining the Future Human through Design Fiction & Speculative Fiction
Humanities
FMST 195 (Senior Exit - Independent Studies)
This paper has investigated the turn towards speculative fiction as the driver of technology and the solution to imagining/crafting future worlds. Contemporary corporations like Google are turning to speculative design and design fiction to help guide their future technologies and products. Capitalism has warped time to be seen as an opportunity to maximize every minute for profit – the height of being human is to constantly work. I especially want to call attention to how technology has become so imbedded into our flesh, minds, bodies, politics, consciousness and life that the transfer of agency, humanity and responsibility to technology, particularly AI, becomes incredibly seamless and understood as desirable. As articulated by Simone Browne, technologies typically uphold existing inequalities, and because of that it is crucial to critique this transfer of agency as well as the welcoming of further surveillance technologies. My analysis focused on Google’s internal video Selfish Ledger because it gets to the heart of questions of personal data, futurity and the human. Corporations taking up design fiction is an interesting intervention into conversations of the ethics behind AI, surveillance technologies, as well as the archiving of personal, bodily data. I argue that while speculative fiction and design fiction are being co-opted by large companies, there must remain a critical attentiveness to how this imaginative and mental leap will redesign the human. Material effects that can be seen in Google’s existing technologies that produce a homogenized global culture and human. I argue for a critique of design fiction being taken up by companies because it is an explicitly political practice of world-making headed by capitalist media conglomerates - what world are they imagining and what technologies are they creating to bring their vision of the future to reality? How does this change what it means to be human in a digitalized era? How is the human being imagined in design fiction? I argue that speculative fiction can also be powerful, subversive and radical by challenging and moving beyond gender, race, class and sexuality domination. Speculative fiction can be used as a form of visionary activism that importantly asks: who is the future being designed for? How can liberation be achieved in the present and future through collective imagination and community-oriented activism? In tension with Big Design and techno-utopic imaginaries are activists using visionary fiction, the speculative, and Afrofuturism to help subvert white hetero-patriarchal capitalist reality in order to help build new realities where liberation is possible. Technologies that are being thought up currently are posited as already existing, but it is important to realize capitalist liberal fantasies of the future are not inevitable. They can be critiqued, or all together left behind in Afrofuturist and visionary fiction imaginings. As articulated by Weeks, capitalism and capitalist structures are understood as forms of domination that can be tinkered with but never fully escaped. Too often radical activism becomes subsumed by the neoliberal process whereby differences enfold in sameness—into a shared space and time (Atanasoski and Vora 16). With that being said, perhaps the tinkering must take place in Afrofuturist and visionary fictions so that there can actually be a world without capitalism, prisons, hunger, racism, and heteropatriarchy – a space and time not shared. As questioned by Sylvia Wynter, what comes after Man? Arguably, technocratic imaginaries are thinking to life a Man3. Importantly, what becomes possible when Wynter’s question is asked within visionary fictions and Afrofuturist imaginaries?
