Bouquet 001 - Eclipsepunk
What might our stories look like if their protagonists were “we” and not just “I”, what new structures could "we" create for channeling imagination as a force of change?
Good morning!
In today’s Future Belonging digital bouquet, I’d like to visit Ursula Le Guin's thought-provoking Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and expand its invitation to explore a different way to tell science fiction and apply it to decentralized coordination at scale and the web3 movement: through the lens of what has helped us share, rather than conquer.
The bag probably came before the spear
Le Guin offers insight from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, who notes “the first cultural device was probably a recipient,” such as a bag, rather than a weapon, such as a spear. Le Guin riffs off this observation and asks us: What if time were told through the lens of what has helped us share, rather than conquer? What is reshaped if the protagonist of a story is a “we” rather than an “I”? What would shift if you gave the softness of your heart not only to the steps forward, but also to the parts of yourself that cyclically loop, contract, and expand?
In comparison with other theories in science fiction writing, such as the Hero's Journey or Campbellian Monomyth, the Carrier Bag doesn’t focus on heroic characters or individual adventures but rather emphasizes how stories can be used to connect us with each other and help us understand our shared humanity. It emphasizes culture and reality instead of fantasy and idealism, providing a meaningful exploration without relying on conquerous elements.
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on. It's about what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and the tomb of things that were, this unending story.
Time traveling to the present
“People easily entertain time-traveling stories about how small changes to the past can greatly impact the present, but they forget that by changing small things in the present, they can also greatly impact the future.” — Unknown
Almost anything taken to its logical extreme can become depressing. This is especially true when it comes to science fiction, which often takes current trends and amplifies them in order to create a dramatic effect. Extrapolation in sci-fi often leads to futures where human liberty is extinguished or life itself is annihilated.
Because of this, many view sci-fi as escapist or too depressing to read. However, extrapolation is just one part of this genre - far from the entirety of it. Science fiction can also be read as a thought experiment, exploring different themes and variables that spark imagination and creativity. It offers an opportunity to think deeper about the present world and the potential choices and actions for creating new ones.
All fiction is a metaphor, and science fiction is no exception — where the future itself is a metaphor. When reading a novel, we must recognize its absurdity while simultaneously believing every word, and, after finishing it, we may find ourselves changed in some small way.
I don't have to tell you things are bad.
Everybody knows things are bad. It's a post-pandemic recession. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job to immigrants or AIs. Wages are stagnant, banks are going bust, shopkeepers want to 3D print guns to keep under the counter, Nazis are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we bend our necks watching on our phones while some micro-influencer tells us that today we had fifteen mass shootings and sixty-three species going extinct, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad — worse than bad — they're crazy. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
The tragedy of generalized crises
Why can we not choose to inhabit a present that is not a state of frustrated urgency? That is not a nostalgia for an imagined present? That is not understood in terms of an awkwardly prefixed generalized crisis? — Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao argues that normalcy and crisis could both be seen as a type of magical thinking. In cases where a situation fails to cause an immediate response, yet doesn't end up decisively killing us for failing to respond, is crisis really the right term for it? Is urgency the right mood to take on such situations?
He suggests considering the present in terms of imaginaries rather than just realities. Looking back at history or speculating about the future allows for different interpretations, but the present often feels like a bottleneck of possibility – with no room for nostalgia or imagination. Yet, there could well be many presents we could choose to inhabit. So why are we unable to see them?
Many efforts to head off catastrophe, meanwhile, often seem inadequate to the task, embracing status quo politics or hanging their hopes on salvation through technological disruption. What, then, would an anti-catastrophic recipient that takes our myriad catastrophes seriously but does not fall into the trap of crisis thinking look like?
The power of possibility
Imagine a world that is more sustainable, powered by clean and renewable energy sources, with less of an environmental impact. Now imagine humanity under the influence of these changes — this is the premise of Solarpunk. ”A container for ideas” about the future. We use it to imagine routes to a better world. But successful Solarpunk isn’t about expressing hope or optimism toward the future per-say - the point is exploring the hard work, the hard things we need to do. As with all forms of science fiction, it is better seen as a window into the present.
Science fiction is full of stories branded as “hopepunk” or “solarpunk,” many of which tell delightful, positive stories, often without engaging in the realities of why we need that hope in the first place. Rose Eveleth started calling these kinds of calls for positive thinking “hopewashing.” Like greenwashing and pinkwashing, hopewashing offers a way for corporations and people with power to make it seem like they’re making the world a better, more hopeful place, while in reality, they’re doing the opposite.
The counterpart to solarpunk faith is lunarpunk skepticism. Lunarpunks are the solar shadow-self. Lunarpunk has its own unique aesthetic that emphasizes technology for privacy and defense rather than for utopian outreach. They prioritize protecting their community over achieving an idealistic vision of the future; as such, the lunarpunk future is born from a conflict that solarpunks seek to avoid.
Tangible imagination
“Science fiction is a speculative exercise. By speculating on possible futures, sci-fi expands the space of possibilities. Crypto is an extreme kind of sci-fi because as well as offering a vision of the future it also provides the tools to make that future possible.” Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle
In Ethereum, solarpunk hackers are creating transparent infrastructures for funding public goods. The imaginary here is simple: decentralization and transparency will lead to a fairer and more just world. Web 3 is creating a new path for humanity. Meanwhile, lunarpunks are addressing the potential risks of this new path.
To better navigate this dilemma, we need tools that can help us explore the implications of our current actions in the future, and consider how different paths could lead to drastically different outcomes. Design fiction, for example, is a design practice that explores and critiques potential futures by creating speculative scenarios through narrative and tangible objects. By creating stories, products, services, or even entire worlds that don’t exist yet, design fiction can help us think about the implications of our decisions today.
But we don’t need just design fictions. We need business model fictions, engineering feasibility study fictions, interop protocol specification fictions, and investment return fictions. Beware, we already live in a failed solarpunk experiment.
Collective suspension of disbelief
Malka Older, in her piece “What We Believe About Our Institutions” invites us to consider how institutions are shared fictions, dependent on a collective suspension of disbelief to make the structure of modern life possible.
Formal organizations, as well as protocols, processes and procedures, patterns of behavior, and unwritten social mores, allow people to work together in ways that far surpass any individual efforts. They begin as new ideas, and with enough adherents, they become the way things should be done. But they are a means, not an end. We don’t owe them our belief or our allegiance. Institutions, and the societies they delineate, are ours, to make and remake. Like fiction writers, we control the narrative for our institutions. With critical thinking, imagination and collaboration, we can change them.
To achieve this, critical analysis and creativity are both essential components — but collaboration is arguably the most important facet of all. By combining our ideas, perspectives and contributions from different angles, we can truly transform our institutions into something greater than they were before.
Protocols as infrastructure
Thus, the question begging Web3 is not just ‘what is good governance?’ but ‘what is good infrastructure, and how do we build and govern it through the everyday activities of self-infrastructuring?’ — Kelsie Nabben
Coined by Kelsie Nabben, Self-infrastructuring is a powerful practice that enables people to design, operate, govern and maintain their own infrastructure (be it technical or institutional) in order to reach common purposes or goals. Protocols provide the necessary rules and operations required to utilize this infrastructure and are essential in allowing protocols to reach their full potential.
Good protocols are capable of achieving complex patterns of voluntary commitment and decentralized participation despite the presence of free riders, bad actors, and other forms of defection. Powerful protocols often lead to utopian/dystopian imaginaries and critiques built on idealism.
As we continue to build protocols for ever more complex infrastructures based on increasingly complex technologies, like blockchains, machine learning, and climate technologies, the cost of neglecting them increases. Developing and maintaining protocols responsibly can unlock unprecedented civilizational advances. Many believe protocols are critically under-theorized, and under-tinkered-with, and should be first-class concepts, alongside concepts like institutions, platforms, and nations, in structuring how we think about and act in the world.
Self-infrastructuring fiction protocol
Matt Webb believes writing protocols for fictional big systems might be a neat way to unlock the future. But wonders who you would need in the room to author the specifications. What if, instead of handpicking a team, emerged a protocol for inquiring, designing and operating narratives about self-infrastructuring? Maybe such a project shouldn’t be about spearheading, but carrier bags instead.
As elaborated in the threads above, science fiction is an important arena in the struggle for more desirable futures (and presents). The quest for tinkering with protocols, questioning institutions, and self-infrastructuring is blaring, and imagination is their catalyst. While different ways of leveraging this imagination can lead to radically different outcomes, a protocol for participation in infrastructure narrative inquiry is potentially a game changer. Instead of a think-tank, why not a composition of agreements and methodologies allowing almost anyone to be a part of the process?
He also outlines how an enabling is needed: a protocol for cooperation, expansion and layering or composability. And before that, there should be a vision of what kind of system is to be developed, how the network will grow, and what it will be used for. Meanwhile, Venkatesh Rao reminds us about the importance of lore as these stories insiders tell themselves to manage their own psyches. Engaging in intense conversations about shared unknowns helps people get a sense of larger meanings and validates their curiosity. Even if collaboration does not always emerge, trading notes and clues can often lead to helpful discoveries.
Eclipsepunk
“So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.” — Saidiya Hartman
Solarpunk is a movement that imagines bright, fair, sustainable futures where society, technology and nature can coexist. Lunarpunk, on the other hand, understands that while striving for brighter futures is important, we'll never get there if we don't also face the darker aspects of reality. Eclipsepunk as a movement is a third path, the middle ground between the optimism of solarpunk and the skepticism of lunarpunk. Eclipsepunk as a protocol envisions futures where it provides the tools and knowledge to build resilience into our systems, so we can imagine desirable futures again, question, demand and create demand for them, and articulate them in great detail.
Worldbuilding, Inquiry and Memetics are the three stages of Eclipsepunk, a protocol for systemic narrative transformation. In stage one, participants have fun creating an immersive and believable setting with stories from different angles. Stage two uses tools like risk management to understand tensions, pitfalls and patterns within existing narratives. Finally, stage three is about iteration and sharing findings in a way that is inspiring and encourages action.
Eclipsepunk aims to explore the limits of solarpunk narratives by continuously testing them in creative scenarios. This includes collaborative storytelling and worldbuilding tools like Design Fiction, TTRPGs, and other forms of future studies such as art projects or installations with interactive components for exploring potential futures and their pitfalls through creativity. These exercises help us imagine what could happen if we take our ideas too far; there may be negative outcomes that need consideration when designing these imagined realities.
What might our stories look like if their protagonists were “we” and not just “I”, what new structures could "we" create for channeling imagination as a force of change?
If “we” extended the Carrier Bag theory to create new structures for channeling imagination as a force of change, from the bottom of my heart, I believe we could build a protocol for using fiction for self-infrastructuring.
This protocol would be dreamed by many different people and the differences in their visions would clash in arenas of fiction. Its participatory nature would allow for critical mass to build up as its challenges would be worth solving. After all, dreaming of infrastructure is as urgent as the blue sky.
Eclipsepunk, as a practical attempt to imagine this, is just getting started and could use your imagination. What should its aesthetic feel like, which methodologies should be included, and where could we test it?
what do we know;
what must we do;
what do we hope for?