A Manifesto for a New Movement

While I was at Chicon 8, I went to the Hopepunk panel. Among the things mentioned was Noble/Bright, as opposed to grim/dark, but the panel said that it tended to be a hero who saves everyone.

In contrast, in hopepunk, hackers/punks get together, and maybe make things better for a least some few people.

But if you step back, these are both responses to the last nearly forty years of dystopias that grew as a theme, or movement, from cyberpunk. Back then, it was a warning. Now… it’s the world we live in, and not one I signed up for. Look at the world of Neuromancer, for example. Run by the ultrawealthy, and the crime syndicates, with little that governments or individuals who are not among the rich, can do, other than try to ameliorate some small amount of the worst abuses.

Now look at the US under the Former Guy, who could be described as a billionaire, or a mob boss, or both, with a certain amount of control by a far wealthier foreign leader, Putin.

Ransomware, shutting down hospitals. NDAs and non-compete clauses. Training your replacements for jobs moving elsewhere. Ultrawealthy and companies paying little-to-no-taxes. Is that not literally the world of cyberpunk?

Look at the award winners in science fiction – social collapse is everywhere, and if there is a replacement, none of us wants to live in it.

But the world and science fiction wasn’t always this way. SF used to be, in general, a literature of hope. In a way, it was the last gasp of the 1920’s, where people in general hoped that science would lead to a better future, as they had seen it do in their lifetimes. We can make changes that affect everyone, not just the lucky few. Sometimes, even you or I could be at the right place at the right time, and your choice or mine could change it all. Star Trek was the universe we saw ahead back then – what is there now?

We need to offer hope again. People speak of needing to stop doomscrolling… and we need to give them something to hope for, something that could happen, to say that it doesn’t need to be this way. But George Washington didn’t make the American Revolution by himself, nor did one or two leaders make the French Revolution, nor Lenin the Russian Revolution. It was everyone else who made it happen, just as no business happens without the underpaid and overworked that make it work.

While the right has used the warnings of Orwell and Margaret Atwood as playbooks instead of things to fear, we need to offer our own playbooks, visions of hope for the future.

Now all we need is a name to cover it all, and I have one.

Many years ago, I read in a book of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, the characters discussing grammar. If you’ve read Pogo, you can imagine how that went. Years later, with that in mind, I realized I had a favorite grammatical tense (yes, of course I made it up, just as the characters in Pogo mangled what you learned in school).

And so, I proclaim a name for this movement, the Future Perfectable.

Laugh about it if you want… but think about what it means.