Applied Science Fiction

Applied Science Fiction is a project about political imagination. It starts from a problem that now shapes how technology is talked about in public: most future narratives give us the same dead choice. Either technology will save everything, usually according to the people already profiting from the mess, or it will destroy everything, and all we can do is brace ourselves.

Applied Science Fiction rejects both stories.

Instead, it asks how we can build other narratives about the future: ones grounded in the realities of oppression, but also in the real possibility of resistance, invention, and collective change. The project looks at how alternative futures are imagined, who gets to imagine them, and what happens when those narratives move out of books, lectures, and branding decks and into public life.

It draws from science fiction, political thought, historical experiments, and contemporary technological practice to open up futures that are neither naïve utopias nor fatalistic dystopias.

Applied Science Fiction works through research, interviews, workshops, and prototypes.

The project studies past experiments that tried to organise technology and society differently, from Cybersyn in 1970s Chile to other large-scale technological visions that carried political ambition. It also draws on science fiction, speculative design, and critical theory to examine how futures are narrated and what those narratives make possible.

Alongside this research, the project develops practical methods for public engagement: workshops, conversations, publications, filmed interviews, and speculative prototypes that turn ideas into something people can test, question, and build on. The point is not just to analyse stories about the future, but to make new ones usable.

This includes work with interviewees, writers, researchers, and practitioners, as well as experiments that ask very direct questions: what would communication look like without the internet? What would a radically open publishing infrastructure look like? How can technologies be built from political imagination rather than market inevitability?

The future is never just waiting for us. It is constantly being narrated into shape.

Right now, too many of those narratives are doing ideological work for the present. Tech utopias tell us to trust the people building extractive systems. Tech dystopias tell us those systems are too powerful to resist. Either way, the message is the same: the future belongs to someone else.

Applied Science Fiction exists to break that trap. It matters because imagination is not decoration. It is infrastructure. The stories a society can tell about technology shape what people believe is possible, what they are willing to fight for, and what kinds of systems they are prepared to accept.

This is especially urgent now, when anti-democratic and hyper-elitist visions of technology are moving from the fringe into mainstream culture. If we do not build stronger public narratives about collective, liberatory, and materially grounded futures, those reactionary visions will keep filling the gap.

Applied Science Fiction is about making that gap smaller. It creates tools, stories, and shared references that help people think beyond the binary, reclaim the future as a political space, and imagine technologies worth actually wanting.