“By poetic technologies I refer to the use of rational and technical means to bring wild fantasies to reality. Poetic technologies, so understood, are as old as civilization.” — David Graeber

We are often told that technology is something objective — the invention of a lone genius or the outcome of a finely tuned machine of production. But in fact, technologies are manifestations of social relations. Which means the crucial question is: what kinds of relations do we actually want to bring into being?

One of the most cited lines from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is:
“Every day we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?”

At what point do we decide to build certain technologies and not others? And can we invent technologies that might allow us to halt the corrosion of the social fabric?

For this issue, we are looking not only for key academic articles, but also for fragments of science fiction that might help us to answer these questions.

We want the journal to be intellectually ambitious, yet accessible.

Background

Technology is always political. So is the imagination. Many technologies begin as imagined possibilities. Other technologies never take root because of how we imagine them, or fail to imagine them. Even when an imaginary technology never becomes real, it can still unsettle our sense of what is possible. 

Actually, all technologies — всегда поэтичные. That’s because they are embedded in narratives about what they are for, who uses them, and what kind of world they presume or promise. 

Then there is the open secret that everything we make, we could make differently.

Some ideas

We want to find texts responding to the theme of ‘poetic technologies.’ Can we imagine technologies that help us do less — not more — of things we don’t like doing? Can we imagine technologies that make us freer, rather than more efficient? If bullshit jobs produce bullshit tools, what kinds of tools might emerge from lives full of meaning and care? Can you imagine a technology that nobody has ever imagined before? If we didn’t have AI, what would we have instead? Should the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) spectrum extend into negative numbers? Could there be an alternative TRL spectrum? 

Are some technologies more reliant on human belief than others, and why? What if some of the most influential technologies are the ones that never worked … do some technologies actually function through never quite being invented? Sometimes the imaginary is a space where conflict plays out so that it doesn’t have to play out in reality (except when it does). Can we imagine what technologies are worth imagining, even if they aren’t worth making?  

What old technologies need to be revived or repurposed? What about technologies based on friendship, or on the small everyday acts of communism within communities and even among strangers — what might they be like? How might the Global South invent technologies that undo rather than redo colonialism? What have been some of the bigger (so far) imaginary technologies of recent years, technologies like commercial nuclear fusion, geoengineering, de-extinction, and how have they arranged relationships among people?

We like writing that is focused on change. We especially like writing that is big, bold, erudite, and accessible. We are thinking about theoretical articles, polemics, manifestos, practical guides, design fiction, aphorisms, convivial or poetic takes on emerging tech phenomena, field notes, speculative prototypes, literary criticism, imaginary readme.txt files or model cards, Africanfuturist and other -futurist interventions, visual essays, science fiction, reuser manuals, diagrams, dialogues, correspondences, or any kind of intervention that helps reimagine technology, re-technologise our imaginations, or arrange things differently.

We are looking for a text about 1,000-6,000 words unless otherwise arranged. Please, advise us.