Think-tank Fiction

Reading the intro to what turned out to be Gardner Dozois’ final SF anthology (RIP – his collections were my favourite by a country mile. In memory and thanks, I finally took his beseechings to heart and renewed subscriptions to a couple of SF magazines), I discovered there’s a name for a thing we’ve started to see a lot of and which I’ve also started doing in the last year or so; think-tank fiction.

Apparently, Jonathan Strahan coined the phrase to describe what Dozois said are ‘Futurology anthologies, many of them with corporate or government sponsors”. Henry wrote a nice piece on Philip K. Dick for the Boston Review dystopia one. Wired is at it, Slate, too. MIT, and various tech firms. I’ve even had a chat with the BBC about one. Let’s see what happens.

In a much smaller way, I wrote a bunch of 500-word future newspaper articles on the theme of ‘the Internet in 10 years’ for a report by the Internet Society, last year. The idea was to do three per report theme, I think, and they’d go with those sections, but in the end they were all bundled into a section of their own. I’m writing some again this year, but now the brief is for 1000 – 1500 words, and just three or four of them. So, by way of writing long as I don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to write smart, some observations:

People LOVE story-time. I mean, they just love it. I asked Henry at Christmas how he manages to be so productive, and he said ‘make everything you do work for you at least twice’. What I took from it was ‘if you write a piece for this magazine/platform, re-cycle it in some teaching over there, or a talk for someone else’.

(Slight digression; I still somehow, irrationally, think it is cheating to not come up with something entirely new even when just giving a talk, even for cost only, or even as a freebie. But I’m working on that. Further digression; I have never yet gotten paying work from a talk. Exposure is bullshit. I now do a lot fewer talks than I used to, and zero writing freebies. Weirdly, I occasionally get paying work via Twitter where my professional persona is, eh, a little intemperate, betimes.)

Anyway, story-time. Taking Henry’s advice to heart, and having put enough time between writing those semi-stories and the slightly smoothened form they ended up being published in, I took a couple of them on the road. Instead of giving my usual tech policy / futures / human rights type talk at an innovation quango called NESTA, I read out three stories instead. And at a keynote for a marketing conference in Tallinn, I intermixed stories with the usual stuff I have to say about platforms, choice, surveillance, etc. That second talk was a lot of fun because they had the whole Madonna headset thing, a vast stage and display (and only moderately full auditorium), and a catwalk thing to bring you out into the audience, which I used to establish intimacy and pacing – walking out, walking back – around the story bits. Ah, theatre!

And, not blowing smoke up my ass because I give plenty of mediocre talks, but I also know a bit about live audiences (having learnt the ‘art’ of public speaking on the Canadian/US student debating circuit and at UCD’s gladiatorial L&H where they would throw things – just paper, tbh – if you sucked egregiously enough), but holy moley, the quality of atmosphere when I read out a story instead of giving a tech talk… I would start off and there would be that uncomfortable, pre-cringe atmosphere of ‘this is going to be embarrassing, ugh, feelings’, which would give way a little unwillingly to just plain focus and listening, and then erupt into that kind of high-density, sustained applause for ‘oh, this was actually an unusually good experience, thank you’. The chats with people afterwards were quite intense, in a good way, and I was relieved and gratified to be told by a Senegalese woman that the names and details in a story set in Labone were right.

What I took from it was, first; people at all-day tech events are really, really glad to just relax and have stories told to them. News flash. And actual stories, with, hopefully, meanings heading off on different trajectories, not TED anecdotes driving to One Big Lesson. Two, that the guys at ISOC were right when they had the bright idea to hire someone to try and put emotions around and an unconscious underneath some of the research findings and general hopes and concerns they have about where the world is going. Stories really do communicate meaning and feeling better than any other vector humans have. I’m still meeting people (in my very narrow field, mind you) who latched onto a particular character or setting that stuck with them, and they get what we were trying to say on a level mere think-tank prose, itself a sub-genre, but rightly unloved, could never achieve.

What else? More broadly from writing these things and now doing it again, a year on, some other thoughts;
– The main part of my year’s nonfiction writing work was a commissioned series for Medium called ‘how to cope with the end of the world’, which was inspired by my sister Elli’s response to the vaguely viral life of this piece on the emotional fallout of Brexit, when she said ‘Yes, I get it, nicely put, etc. etc. but what about the duty of hope?’ So a lot of the Medium series was about the indulgence of political despair and how we have to come up with stories about the future that are 1, honest, and 2, bearable or even inspiring. Along the climate trajectory, these things are clearly incompatible, and yet.

– Dystopia basically writes itself. Utopia, aka imagining just and liveable futures, is harder and far more essential. Weird that so little of current SF/mainstream crossover gets this. So far.

– It’s weird what just seems a category error one moment is near zeitgeist the next, and you can sense at the time it’s at least partly because people (a particular sub-set of people at a particular moment) aren’t quite ready for an idea. One of the pieces that just didn’t work for the client was about a small, progressive country jumping ahead of the competition + data protection + fiscal regulatory pincer movement now ever-so—slowly starting to grasp the big tech platforms, and imagining what it would look like if, instead, the local ‘alcohol, tobacco and firearms’ agency led the charge instead. i.e. what if we looked on the platforms primarily as a public health issue-cluster and re-framed their lobbying as what the tobacco lobbyists used to say when they knew the research showed the opposite? Not mind-bending stuff, the client kind of liked it but just couldn’t see it, so we dropped it and came up with something better. (oh, also what sweet release is that feeling of ‘oh, I thought it was good, but you know what, plenty more fish in the sea, and off it floats’. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Execution is hard. Deadlines are a gift.)

– It is nice, especially as a freelance who basically takes whatever comes in the door, to feel the year’s work has an arc and an objective it is bending toward. At one point I thought I should get a book proposal together, but that, too, has floated away. For now. But there is definitely something to be said about how we imagine the future + what strategic and policy options are congenial to it + how SF populates our imagination in ways we can work with. Oh, and how capitalism (at least as we know it) is completely fucked.

– Also, it’s been a wretched year, health-wise, so it’s especially nice to feel my efforts have some kind of theme to them, even if their outcomes are fewer and sparser than I would wish. But very occasionally, often in the midst of a migraine cluster – which now seem to last a month at a time – I’ll get this soft and clear state of feeling and potential that’s like an open window ideas just float through, and that morning is bright like the first of all mornings.

There are more observations about think-tank fiction. One along the lines of market and business model interactions with tech development often seeming to people to have happened already, when they’re still just buzzy feature articles, and how our imagined near-future is often further away than we tend to think, while last decade’s shiny futures are having unexpected effects driven just by their adoption at scale. Quantity and quality are differently related. Oh, and how what I’m writing are not actual stories, but more like scenarios that could never walk unaided, and how I’ll never write real science fiction. Uptown problems like that.

But now to stop musing about all the lovely potentials and knock out some story-like things, and also the bread and butter writing and editing that makes up 80% of my income.