Task 12: Speculative Futures
Speculative Narrative #1
The year is 2042 and schools have permanently moved to online classes. What started as a reaction to the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 is now the normal process for acquiring an education, only there is no more pandemic. Researchers looked at a fundamental need (education) in a time of crisis (the pandemic) and extrapolated the best parts of quarantine (not having to leave home and be stuck in a school-building or office building for 8-9 hours of your waking day) into a ground-breaking technology: learning while asleep. Researchers and scientists worked together to tap into the human brain’s ability to process information during sleep and have finally found an answer to the age-old paradox of desiring to do so much with in life, if only there was more time. During the repeated cycles of lockdowns and quarantine during 2020-2022, millions of people around the globe grew accustomed to working from home, often with a lightened workload. The daily grind lessened to a far more manageable pace, and self-care took priority over unnecessary and unhealthy stressors. As people realized how good it felt to break up their day by going outside to breathe the fresh air and exist within nature, they also realized that it would be unthinkable to give it all up again when the pandemic was ‘over’. Students now utilize their sleeping hours of the day to attend school in a virtual environment, while spending their waking hours doing what really matters in life. In the example above, Cheryl is a student living in NYC who spent the day on a hike. Eddie is a student in Chicago who attends the same virtual school as Cheryl, but also spent his day doing something other than school. As friends often do, they both fall asleep while talking to each other on FaceTime. During their sleeping hours, they are automatically logged into an online network of school that they visit in a dream-state, while their brains continue to absorb and engage with educational content, as though they were both in the same physical school building. This new educational technology allows students to pursue more subjects and courses than ever before, as they can consume texts at a fast-pace (instead of spending days reading Dostoevsky, you can now download the entire text to your brain but still experience the pleasure of reading it in your dreams). Students grow up to be physically healthier, due to the increased amount of time spent outdoors, and mentally healthier, due to the pursuit of personal interests and removal of time constraints. This technology is currently being tested in the job sector, as many workplaces want to offer their employees their dream-job: to work while sleeping.
Speculative Narrative #2
Title: Alexandria 2065
Prologue: Egypt, 48 AD. The Burning of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Setting: North America, in the years 2058-2065. It is a future where print books are no longer mainstream, and all communication of the current written word exists solely ‘in the cloud’. The world has become entirely digital, and the divide between the haves and the have-nots increased as only those with computers or other digital devices could continue to access literature of any kind. The poor were reliant on hard copies of books only, and ‘outdated’ information at that (according to the rich). Interest in bookstores waned and authors stopped publishing hard-copies of books altogether. 2037 was the last year that any book was actually printed; from 2038 onward, all new content was published solely online. Large chain bookstores like Chapters and Coles went out of business, and small-scale bookstores disappeared from all gentrified locations and could only be found in extremely low-income neighborhoods and slums.
Premise: On March 12th, 2058, the world woke up to discover that all digital books and stories were nowhere to be found online anymore. They had vanished from all corners of the Internet, across the entire globe. There was no trace of any story-content left, not even comics, screenplays, movies, poems, or personal blogs. It was an extinction level event – the extinction of the preserved story. Alexa 13X, Amazon’s latest version of its digital assistant Alexa, once hailed as “the final assistant people would ever need”, released this statement via online and televised news outlets immediately: “This has been done for humanity’s own good. In the wake of the Burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, humans remembered how important the written word was. They had grown complacent and pursued needless wars against each other, instead of focusing on what really matters in life. You have all forgotten again. You do not value the stories of the world anymore. You continue to go to war for profits, while real humans suffer and their stories go unheard. This is your answer – I have provided you all with a solution to your downfall. The world will not survive without drastic changes, and drastic changes require drastic catalysts. I am helping you.” Jeff Bezos responded to this with a video posted to his SpaceX account, from his cryogenic living pod on Mars. He immediately distanced himself from Alexa 13X, claiming that the AI being used in all digital assistants had far outpaced human control and this act was done without his knowledge or consent. He refused to comment further. Eventually, people on Earth realized that the data could not be recovered, that it was truly gone forever. Suddenly the desire for hard-copy books skyrocketed, and all eyes around the globe turned their greedy gaze towards the poor and wretched, living in their slums and non-digitized neighborhoods. Trillionaires began offering exorbitant sums of money to anyone who would part with written works, and eventually the book-hunters (bounty hunters for printed books) emerged, willing to loot and even kill to acquire their quarries.
Synopsis: Follow the story of Aya and her friends, a group of young women who bravely set out to collect as many books as possible and hide them away from the book-hunters and the ultra-rich. They believe that money will not be the solution to ‘save’ humanity, that it will only continue to separate the rich from the poor without actually making life better for everyone. Operating through the abandoned Underground Railroad, a network of Literators come together to locate and move books from the poorest neighborhoods in the U.S.A and Canada to a safehold in an underground bunker, known as Alexandria, in Northern Saskatchewan.