Graeme Webb is an educator and researcher exploring the intersection of technology and society, with an emphasis on how science fiction informs our understanding of the world around us. As a lecturer in the School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia, he teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and technical communication. Webb’s research interests span a range of disciplines, including science fiction and pedagogy, critical cultural studies, and the philosophy of technology.
In late June of 2021, the mostly-Indigenous community of Lytton, British Columbia, set a record of 49.6ºC for the highest temperature ever reported in Canada. In the early evening of June 30, a wildfire caught light and, fanned by strong winds, ripped through the town within minutes, forcing hasty evacuations and bringing to bear, once again, the catastrophic and unfair impact of anthropogenic climate change.
I remember sitting in my air-conditioned apartment a few days afterwards speaking with Max Haiven via Zoom about these events and the Worker as Futurist project he was envisaging. What struck me about the project and the destruction of Lytton were the parallels to the opening chapter of American writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 speculative fiction (SF) novel The Ministry for the Future, which focuses on a small town in India’s Uttar Pradesh during an unprecedented heatwave that leaves millions dead.
We discussed how tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos see the stars as an escape from a world on fire, all while terrestrial places like Lytton pay the price of unfettered capitalism.
A multitude of very concrete, intersecting, and existential problems beset the world today: fascism, racism, poverty, and climate change, to name just a few. However, in this moment of need, society is faced with what Max (2014a) has rightly called a “crisis of the imagination.” Part of the problem is that the social imaginaries that shape how people see the world and imagine the future are bound up in the very structures from which our existential problems emerge.
Furthermore, contemporary politics seem to be caught in a trap. On one hand, fascists and populists mobilize our worst passions. On the other, a politics of reason has devolved to a stultifying politics of pragmatism. In this environment, we need, more than ever, what mid-twentieth century German theorist Ernst Bloch (1996) called an “educated hope,” a dialectic of reason and the imagination.
We must ask and answer the questions: How will we propose radical alternatives to existing social imaginaries? And who will imagine them?
Necessity demands that, like Robinson and other SF authors, we propose alternative futures in response to the dystopian present. In the words of noted science fiction theorist Darko Suvin (1998): it is only by “mobilizing paradise or utopia [that] hell or fascism can be defeated.” SF offers tantalizing opportunities to put the imagination to work. This genre is present in the TV shows that people watch, the books they read, the video games they play, and the advertisements they see; it’s in the media all around them. While mainstream SF is often mobilized to reinforce existing paradigms (imperialism, exceptionalism, or otherness), its ubiquitousness and acceptability presents us an opportunity to challenge the ideological horizons of contemporary life. Invited into people’s homes as a source of enjoyment and fun, SF can be considered an ideological trojan horse by which radical alternatives can arrive wrapped in a package with which the audience is already familiar.
But if a radical imagination is to be fostered, it cannot only be an intellectual project. It must also be informed by material and historical forces. This is what first drew me to the Worker as Futurist project. Who better to imagine future alternatives than those people whom twenty-first century capitalism has unwittingly educated in its punishing workplaces, like those from which Amazon profits? How could we, as researchers and writing facilitators, create and foster spaces where workers’ own expertise and lived experience under capitalism could manifest works of the imagination that push back against existing ideologies?
As the project advanced, I found two aspects particularly rewarding: facilitating skill-building workshops and working with participants during drop-in community-of-practice meetings. One workshop I facilitated revolved around Stuart Candy’s “The Thing from the Future” card game. Here, players generate interesting, funny, or thought-provoking ideas based on imagined everyday objects from a potential future. We often assume we must engage the problems that beset the world in a serious voice, thinking, for example, that to convince people to act in the face of climate change we must bridge an information gap by providing dire facts and arguments. While rational thought has its place, so too does pleasure and the imagination; we should neither forget nor trivialize play because it helps to create spaces where the rules of the world are put on hold and individuals can imagine alternatives to the status quo.
In the first months of the project, in early 2023, the Amazon workers who participated mostly attended informative online workshops and so had little opportunities to engage with one another beyond brief introductions. However, in the “Thing From the Future” workshop, they were placed in small breakout rooms to brainstorm and imagine before returning to the larger group to discuss their ideas. What struck me was the amount of cross-talk between group members and how much fun they were having. Laughing voices bandied about ridiculous and fanciful futures, to the delight of those listening.
Research environments—no matter how well they are framed—are often intimidating for participants and many of the worker-writers in our project were initially reserved and hesitant. As the sessions progressed, some became more outspoken and relaxed. However, the use of play in this particular workshop helped create an environment where participants made connections with one another and also helped to break down barriers to engagement and imaginative thinking.
There were reltively few chances to engage deeply with our participants at an individual level until we introduced bi-monthly community-of-practice sessions. These were optional opportunities for participants to workshop their short stories on the way to their final drafts. Uptake on these sessions was mixed, but we organizers enjoyed and learned a lot from the quality time we spent in those sessions with a few regulars. It was incredibly enriching and rewarding to hear participants read their work aloud and unpacking the ideas they worked to put down on paper, and to learn about their experiences working at Amazon (and more elsewhere) and how this informed their writing. It was gratifying to see their writing skills and confidence develop.
Writing dignifies, and having one’s writing taken seriously and engaged with amplifies this impact. The SF stories written by our participants are not silver bullets that can magically solve issues of inequity and environmental degradation. But the significance of dignity in the fight for workers’ rights should not be underestimated.
My philosophical approach to teaching and my exploration of SF and the radical imagination rests on the concept of hope. To move beyond the nihilism that haunts our present moment, utopian tales must be discovered and shared. Without the fantastic, all we are left with is the “ruthless criticism of all that exists” (to borrow the words of Karl Marx). Though useful, this criticism typically creates less hope and more despair. While some of the works produced by our participants are dystopian, almost all hold glimmers of utopian hope, a sense of what could be if we question power structures, if workers come together to push back against tyranny and oppression. The power of SF and utopian narratives resides not only in the conclusions that the stories may reach but also in what Suvin (1979) calls the process of “verbal construction”: the act of writing is itself a radical and utopian act.
Writing SF is more than a storytelling tool, it can be a process of critique. It is the radical imagination at work. Given the world we occupy, utopia can seem impossible to imagine, let alone achieve. But the process of writing texts like these may help constitute a society that searches beyond its existing cognitive horizons.