A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  There is some evidence that her earlier works were based on anecdotes she or others experienced. We were walking in the rain is a famous example, in which she details a long debate with friends both physically and virtually present. She is also considered one of the pioneers of what will be referred to as Jardines,*4 long threads with multiple, sometimes interlacing branches. As she grew into her voice, she began to combine narrative, essay, harangue, photo-manipulation, memeography, lyric and musical appropriation, and other forms of art to create narratives that pointed the way to a more collective future and that contributed fundamentally to the aspirations of this future people of the no-longer United States.

  […] In effect, “civil society” will become, in the absence of strong political institutions, just “society,” while without coherent corporations “social media” will become just “media.” While we can describe these transitions, from a distance, as neutral changes or even positive outcomes of creative destruction, it is important to remember that for people living in that time, such drastic shifts are disorienting and frightening.

  One of the ways that the future society of the post–United States deals with this uncertainty and fear will be through non-contiguous activist collectives, sometimes called NACs and on occasion knacks.*5 These groups will consciously seek to form communities that are not aligned with physical location. While part of the reasoning will be practical, given the increased difficulties of interstate travel during this period, many of the NACs will also elaborate theoretical frameworks embracing non-contiguity as a powerful rebuke to the concept of bubbles, the fragmentation of political groups, and even to the (at that point foundering) nation-state itself […].

  While the NACs and other activist groupings will start in defiantly unstructured ways—often, for example, refusing to identify leaders or define a hierarchy—the ones that survive do eventually create governance structures. These vary widely, but while a few develop personality cults, almost all of the long-running NACs will base their decision-making on some form of democracy […]. One popular model will give additional participation capital, which translates roughly to votes, to those who engage more with the collective, although the way engagement is defined becomes critical here.*6

  Many futurist histories of this era focus on the statements and (occasionally) actions of celebrities who attached themselves to these groups or self-appointed leaders, but it is important to note that @zengo and other founding activists in these groups were largely from one or more marginalized groups […].

  While the storyteller function is important and will be perhaps better remembered, NACs will also be instrumental in combining virtual and IRL resistance into something new and uniquely powerful. @zengo’s Gente Invisible NAC will be one of the primary proponents of what is usually known as Costopia, in which members conduct themselves as if they belong to the government they want to have. In one of the most extreme cases, the Costopia run by the Monde Inversé will hold trials and impose fines based on their invented legal system […]. Costopias will also provide a way to expand the new versions of democracy practiced by the NACs into populations beyond their membership. The theory promoted by @zengo and her colleagues, especially @neopericles, is that if enough people consistently act on the basis of an agreed code, that code would be as legitimate as the “official” government.

  Gamification, which will be initially popularized by the artist and activist Michelle Wickramsinghe, will allow people to play and replay scenes and interactions from their lives. The Burn It Down collective will further develop this idea into a way to build speculative futures in immersive, massively multiplayer game play.*7 This is taken even further by the company Digital Alternatives, which will allow people to live inside virtual-reality approximations of happier political systems and all their effects. However, whether because of the involvement of a for-profit company or because of discomfort with the technology, this will lead to a backlash that splits the activist community. The Digital Alternatives followers will be accused of hiding in their customized playgrounds while the world burns around them. Supporters of Digital Alternativists will defend their right to live fuller and more engaged lives than they could manage in reality. The players themselves rarely surface long enough to get involved in this discussion.

  Gente Invisible and certain other NACs will defend Digital Alternatives and, more generally, the gamification phenomenon on the grounds that by imagining and engineering false but hopeful futures, they make those futures plausible and therefore possible. During the devastated realpolitik fragmentation of the immediate post-national period, many of @zengo’s colleagues will work to make those futures available to politicians and others in power, believing that this will tilt policy (such as it is, in that unstable time) in favorable directions. @zengo, as far as we can tell, will continue to focus rather on her “constituency” of followers and mutuals, preferring to strengthen cohesion and engagement among the masses. Other Gente Invisible members, however, will put a lot of effort into trying to connect their work with elites, and for a while this will seem like a conduit for reunification and progress. In the longer term such activities will become normalized, reducing their impact […].

  What we have discussed so far in this chapter are future incidents and changes in the real world. There is, however, another genre of histories that will be written about the stories of those alternate histories that took place within Costopias, games, or VR. Many of the collectives will assign dedicated historians to document their activities, on the principle that as much could be learned from these experiments as from what is considered IRL history. In addition to narratives, they create textbooks, monuments, conferences, criticism, and a wide range of historical fictions. For example, in 2043 the digital architect and artist Shulammite Kurucz will create a memorial to the women harassed from the digital world, while the Otherworldly collective will establish an entire digital museum dedicated to artifacts of the digital experience. In 2051 Harvard will appoint the first Kavita Sawyer Professor of Virtual History.

  […] importance of storytelling in the future. We remember that while @zengo is famous for her activism, it is with storytelling that she built the audience she needed to become effective […].

  Some scholars argue that the people in these collectives, who will hold together the principles of democracy, grassroots activism, and even a kind of dispersed federalism, will be able to do so because of their experience on the margins of United States society. Not belonging, according to this school of thought, will be the key indicator for productive engagement when nobody belongs and, eventually, constructing something new with greater inclusivity that will later be recognized as having new and different requirements for belonging. A relatively new area of research concerns the relationships between those actively excluded by society and those who self-identify as not fitting in […].

  […] however, by this time the territory once belonging to the United States of America will, it is generally agreed, have moved on to a new phase: sustainability.

  MALKA OLDER is a writer, aid worker, and PhD candidate. Her science fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, and The Washington Post. She is also the author of the sequels, Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), as well as of short fiction appearing in Wired, Twelve Tomorrows, Reservoir, Fireside Fiction, Tor.com, and others. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development. Her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) explores the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments, using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the Japan tsunami of 2011.

  *1. See, for example, Irepani Zitlal, “How Many Voices? Textual and Network Analysis of Resistance Icons,” Journal of F
uture Activism 18, no. 2 (2029): 64–78.

  *2. It is also possible, of course, that @zengo will be a man masquerading most of the time as a woman, but statistical analysis shows this is unlikely to occur with such consistency over such a long timeframe. See Van Aalst and Pavletic, 2034.

  *3. See Opal Þórirsson, “What’s in a Name? Handles, Pseudonyms, Avatars, and Scholarship of the Online Future,” Virtual Sociology 23, no. 1 (2035): 23–40.

  *4. While proof has not been found that this terminology will be created by @zengo, there is ample evidence that she will use it. The word is a reference to Borges’s “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (1941).

  *5. It’s not clear whether the confusion with the English word will be deliberate or if it will be a result of the proliferation of non-text-based audio platforms during this period.

  *6. There will be extensive ideological battles on whether reading other people’s posts counts as engagement and, if so, whether it is lesser than expressing one’s own opinion. Gente Invisible, for example, will come to the conclusion that even if expression requires more active engagement than lurking, it is unwise to incentivize opinionating. Some futurists believe this episode is the source of the name Gente Invisible and that it refers to lurkers, but Branimir (2030) has shown persuasively that the name will be used before that controversy arises and therefore is a more general evocation of voicelessness.

  *7. Many scholars trace the emergence of future history as a field to this technology.

  IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, I GUESS THAT MAKES IT ALL RIGHT

  SAM J. MILLER

  Wanting Sid was a second skeleton, a sharp hard permanent-feeling foreign presence in my body. Stupid, stupid to have fallen in love with yet another straight boy, especially one I worked with, and therefore couldn’t play my only straight-boy-conquest card, which was to get us both super drunk and make a pass and ignore the person forever if it failed. We drove the six hours to Albany and I felt it growing inside me, the need making my throat hurt and my limbs heavy, our windows rolled up as we passed through patches of wet weather, the smell of him filling up the cab of the truck as the day got hotter.

  And at the end of it all was Albany, which meant no relief, just the god-awful sunset lonely feel of a big sprawling nothing city, smelling like river muck and tar and cherry-flavored cigarette smoke. We came to a stop in the shadow of those tall fancy empty buildings that fill up state capitals, where municipal employees once worked, before all their tasks got sourced to bots and freelancers. They made me shiver, the shadows they cast and the wind that whistled through them after being in that hot man-stinking truck for so long.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, when he put the big truck in park. “I timed this expertly. Got us in late enough that we can’t start working but early enough that we get some time to relax.”

  Sid’s not a handsome guy. His mouth has a weird shape to it, and he wears clothes that are way too big, and without a beard his face looks fat. But he does have the sense to let the beard grow out, mostly. And something about his deep voice and ancient baseball cap and sad easy laugh made me lose my fucking mind. He’s only five years older than me, but somewhere in those five years he got a surveillance engineering degree, one of the first classes to graduate with it, and that’s why he was my supervisor, driving us all over upstate New York to install phone cloners on every corner. Our truck held nine hundred of them.

  “You hungry?” he asked. “I could go for a burger.”

  “No, I need to stretch my legs. Gonna go for a walk.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Call me if you want to meet up after.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Men watched us from sagging plastic seats at the edge of the parking lot. Sour-faced in that way only the unemployed or the forcibly freelanced were.

  “We should turn in around ten,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  At night we sleep in the truck. Company rules; the privatized police forces didn’t want any unnecessary hotel expenses. The back of the cab had a space for sleeping. Long after midnight I’d wake up to find that he’d scooched his sleeping bag closer to mine and had spooned in behind me. It’d be the same way when the nights were hot and we both slept above the sleeping bags, but that was much worse because then I could feel his hard-on pressing against my backside and he’d whimper sweetly in his sleep and I would know for certain that the universe was a cruel and vicious fucking thing, mocking me with a nightmare pastiche of what I wanted most.

  So of course I had to stretch my legs. Of course I had to get as far from Sid as possible. Of course I had to find a safe sexual outlet, even if there was really no such thing.

  But as soon as I walked away from him, I felt the fear. Sid kept me safe. His manliness was obvious to absolutely everyone. He oozed heterosexuality, spread it like a protective bubble around the both of us. On my own, walking the streets of a strange city, following the slope that would take me to the riverside, I felt a hundred pairs of eyes on me. A hundred fiendish plans forming.

  I’d checked the stats before we came to town. I always did. Albany had had eighteen homophobic hate killings in the previous calendar year. Better than Buffalo, but, then again, Buffalo had a 57 percent unemployment rate.

  Butch up, I told myself, making my spine straighten and my shoulders roll back, aping Sid’s effortless swagger, the one that implied, I am weighed down by the terrific amount of testosterone contained in my testicles.

  My phone stutter-sighed. Visual-overlay alerts. They were everywhere, built by braver souls than me, elaborate digital landscapes that brought forward buried history or highlighted secret spaces. I knew all about them. Maps of the homes of militia leaders and queer cruising grounds and memorials for martyrs we were forbidden to mourn or even mention. How to find everything I wanted from this world—but I was too afraid to use the overlays. Most people who accessed them did a factory reboot immediately, but some municipal networks were programmed to respond to reboots by doing a quick clone cap and sending it to the grid.

  Signs said: CLEAN ALBANY. A statement and a command. Signs like that were in every city we went to. CLEAN BINGHAMTON. CLEAN CANAJOHARIE.

  I walked beneath the southbound exit ramp of I-787. Splotches of paint where tag drones had covered up graffiti. I could still smell the turpentine stink of that toxic background-matching paint. Most were unrecognizable, but one looked like the outline of some massive vertical corpse. They’d left other glyphs, equally illegal but politically more palatable to the good people of Albany: the black cross superimposed over a red R, emblem of the Revival. Ominous ’88s. Tall triangles with two circles for eyes at the bottom. Visual overlays for my enemies.

  Where was I going? How did I know where to find it, when I refused to look at the map? Some primal instinct; the gay boy’s internal dowsing rod. My nose never failed to point me in the direction of the spot where men went for discreet dangerous intimate encounters.

  The day got darker the closer I came to the river. The smell of muck grew stronger. A huge chunk of downtown Albany was below the new waterline, which meant that at high tide the streets were semi-submerged and mostly deserted. I climbed up onto the median strip and kept on going. Eyes were on me, even if I couldn’t see them. Human eyes, and camera eyes. And camera eyes with human eyes watching through them, waiting for someone this stupid.

  Above me, a gorgeously fat woman pushed a shopping cart along the abandoned portion of 787. She stopped to stare. Was I that obvious, that doomed?

  Stupid. Stupid to have come here. To be unable to stop.

  There were apps for this. I could have gone to the McDonald’s and bought a cup of coffee and trolled for random hookups in safer places. Except that I of all people knew not to fuck with the phone cloners, or any of the other weird invasive ubiquitous tech that could access your phone effortlessly thanks to the state-mandated backdoor Bluetooth
channel. I knew, because I got paid minimum wage to help install that tech. The odds were on your side, in the short term—they wouldn’t catch you right away—but in the long term the house always won.

  And then I was at the river’s edge, between tall cement pillars holding up the highway. And it was almost all the way dark. The sun was gone from the sky, but the river surface still reflected light. Cigarette smoke hung in the close wet air. Someone whistled tunelessly. My heart pistoned against its new double rib cage.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. This is how you get yourself killed.

  “Hey,” a gruff voice said, from the shadows at my feet. A shadow in the shape of a man. Then it sucked air into a cigarette, whose invigorated glow lit up a striking bearded face, and my knees weakened. I squatted and leapt down from the median strip into the ankle-deep water.

  The man chuckled at my wetness. I could smell him now: musky and mammalian beneath the cigarette smoke. Something off too, like the cool mildew air from a basement.

  “Hey,” I said, when he didn’t say anything.

  “Hey,” he said. He sounded smug, and that sounded sexy.

  “I’m Caul,” I said, because I’d always been bad at this.

  “Tom,” he said. “Tom Minniq.”

  And something about that set me at ease—his last name, so out of place in the perfunctory preflight social checklist of the anonymous fuck. I stepped closer. I put my hand on his hip.

  “You a cocksucker?” he asked, raising one bushy eyebrow, and alarm bells went off, dimly and at a great distance, Oh no, you made a mistake, you misread him, now he’s going to kill you….