Speculative Fiction:
Participant Work

How might we envision better engagements with digital identity/identification in the future? In this track, participants used speculative fiction to explore engagements across multiple possible futures. But first, what is speculative fiction? Speculative fiction is a broad category of writing that encompasses science fiction and fantasy as well as their various subgenres and kin, such as alternate history, magical realism, weird fiction, etc. Fundamentally, speculative fiction focuses on imagining otherwise—other possible worlds, realities, selves. But as with all fiction, we write speculative fiction in the present; thus it also reflects where we are now and who we are now. 

For this sprint, participants focused on speculative fiction with strong positive elements, but recognition of negative elements as well. The aim isn’t utopian fiction, but rather hopepunk. Hopepunk, so named by Alexandra Rowland in 2017, aligns with longer traditions of optimistic science fiction and visionary speculative fiction; it prioritizes care and community and recognizes the mess involved in building better (more just, more equitable, more joyous) societies—and that building better societies is an ongoing process rather than a static endpoint. Speculative fiction broadly—and hopepunk in particular—helps us take big sociotechnical issues like digital identity/identification and break them down into scales that we, as individuals and communities, can envision, investigate, and act upon.