Technofuturism, inspiration, and FOMO at ?redev

By Christie Warwick (Wilson)

I was a speaker at ?redev 2023, but there were so many amazing things to take in that I still have major FOMO. From the moment I took my first steps onto the conference floor, stepping through a shifting piece of artwork, I knew this conference was special.?

The sessions were an inspiring and heady mix of software, art, philosophy, and futurist thinking. Aspects of it reminded me of Defcon, but with an intersectional feminist flare. It offered an optimistic taste of a future where software developers are more playful, creative, and self-aware.

I have to admit that the set of writers, thinkers, and technologists I look up to is woefully dominated by cis white men, so it was refreshing to be introduced to techno futurists who blew me away with their ideas, and bonus: also happened to be women!

Monika Bielskyte’s radically hopeful vision of protopia shook me to my bones. She tore down the idea of utopia: a destination idolized in science fiction, which has in turn shaped our ideas of where technology needs to go next.?

Utopias are, unfortunately, almost always formed at the expense and exploitation of someone else. Utopia is a future that amplifies today’s inequities by elevating some groups to heavenly levels of luxury and comfort while sending others spiraling into dystopia.

Perhaps science fiction has reached a plateau in being able to forecast and shape the future. Even William Gibson, whose sci-fi coined words we now use every day, is these days working in fiction strongly grounded in the present, and has stated that “the future is already here ”, and “science fiction, as a genre, might be yellowing with age .”?

(It’s not all bad news for science fiction! Authors like Rebecca Roanhorse, Nnedi Okorafor, and Charlie Jane Anders - just to name a few - are bringing the fresh new perspectives the genre needs.)

We, developers, have been creating technologies from the mindset that we, as people, are fundamentally separate and apart from the world we live in. Even from each other, because, as David Byrne said,

“Human interaction is often perceived, from an engineer’s mind-set, as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something ‘frictionless’ is getting the human part out of the way.”

But there is hope! Bielskyte outlined actionable principles that underpin protopia, including recognizing that humans exist among and in relationship with all life on the planet, as opposed to humans alone being at the center of everything.

In a protopia, we don’t design only for ourselves, we design for all of the life we coexist with.

In such a world, what kinds of traits would be undesirable?

I think it could be like Cory Doctorow’s character said in Walkaway,

“a world where greed is a perversion…You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”?

Greed being, according to Miriam-Webster:

a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed        

How much of anything really is needed? How much money does an individual person, or corporation, really need?

If we want to make protopia a reality and push back on greed, we have to slow down. As software developers, just shipping as quickly as possible at all costs is not acceptable. We have to carefully think about the impacts of our technologies, intended and otherwise.

And we have to do things differently than we did before. We’d do well to remember this as we put so much responsibility for logic and reasoning into the hands of large language models.?

We need to remember that these models are trained on what we have already done: they repeat and amplify ideas that we’ve already had, and not just any ideas, but the loudest, most pervasive ones. The very ideas that have been shaped in the systems we need to be reevaluating and dismantling: the systems that have caused so much harm.

Moving a little more slowly can give us the space we need to make better choices. It can give us the space we need to work sustainability, without burning out. It can free us up to come up with different and better ways of building everything, including software. It can give us the time we need to spend a couple of sprints building the CI/CD automation that we need, and the time we need to shave all the yaks required to maintain it.

It’s a funny thing, because I say all this, and of course, I want to move just as quickly as everyone else! It feels like there are so many exciting things just waiting to be built, and I don’t want to miss the opportunities.?

I don’t want even more FOMO!

In response to Bielskyte’s talk, I want to say the same thing one of my audience members at ?redev said to me,

"I see myself in your talk, and it feels uncomfortable."

My talk was about intentionally and regularly making the time to build and maintain continuous delivery systems, but I hope my response to her is relevant in the larger context of protopia as well:

the ideas may seem daunting, but all you really need to do is make a few intentional improvements, and these small adjustments will compound over time into big changes.?        

?redev has left me feeling optimistic that I can bring these big ideas with me into my life, make small adjustments where I can, and hopefully be one of many contributing to protopian futures.?

So stay positive, keep making those tiny shifts in the right direction, and I'll see you next time. The small changes of today will become big steps toward the future faster than you think.