Task 12: What if…?

With this being the final 540 task, I decided it was a go-big-or-go-home moment and so I dived fully into speculations of dystopias and utopias, circling back to our first task by taking a somewhat archaeological slant on the media.

They’re meant to be seen as parallel text from two different version of the future, with the media/medium/modality all signifying aspects of the text and technologies of the time. It was strange writing them, as I realised just how much media, text, and technology systems are intertwined with specific socio-political contexts. For example, my ‘Good Place’ speculation fits best into q socialist/libertarian/humanist landscape, whereas the ‘Darkest Timeline’ aligns with a more communist/Orwellian/Randian world. That really stood out to me, and I struggled with it when writing either way because I was anxious about this being perceived as standing for either paradigm depending on the context this media would be consumed in. I don’t quite know how that ties into this task or course, but it was interesting to realise. So, here we go, narratives from speculative futures below.

The Darkest Timeline: Automated Codification

The Good Place: Humans need not apply

If you’d like to download this image so you can zoom into it for a more comfortable read, click here.