Speculative fictions and futures serve as creative tools for investigating and imagining our own futures. These links explore how these creative methodologies revolving around fiction and futures help with the envisioning of liberatory futures for marginalized experiences. To see how speculative futures relate to reselling, check out week 3 of The Immersion.
Afrofuturism
A cultural and artistic movement that imagines futures through the lens of Black experiences, emphasizing resilience and innovation in the face of oppression. In the context of reselling, Afrofuturism might inspire alternative visions for secondhand economies where marginalized communities create new, equitable market systems.
Design Fiction
A method that uses fictional narratives or speculative designs to explore how future technologies or systems could shape society. For reselling, design fiction can be a tool to reimagine platform dynamics, fairer market practices, or the integration of emerging AI tools in a way that benefits marginalized workers.
Infrastructural Fictions
Related to Design and Speculative fictions, infrastructural fictions focuse more on the underlying systems (like logistics, platforms, and supply chains) that structure society, challenging us to rethink who designs, maintains, and benefits from these complex networks. By making these invisible infrastructures visible, this narrative approach critiques how they shape power dynamics and daily life.
Prefigurative Politics
The practice of enacting the change you want to see in the world through current actions and systems. For resellers, this might involve building more cooperative or equitable business models within the existing constraints of platforms, using their practices to critique or subvert the dominant capitalist system.
Platform Co-operatives
Platform co-ops are digital platforms owned and governed by the workers or users who rely on them, rather than by private corporations or external shareholders. Rooted in principles of cooperative economics and solidarity, platform co-ops aim to distribute profits more equitably and give members direct control over platform policies and practices. Examples include worker-owned delivery services, freelance marketplaces, and artisan selling platforms. Platform co-ops face challenges such as securing funding without compromising cooperative principles, scaling governance effectively, competing with well-funded corporate platforms, and ensuring members have the technical and managerial skills needed to sustain operations.
Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction is a genre encompassing works that imagine alternative realities, exploring "what if" scenarios that challenge existing social, political, and technological norms. It tends to focus on specific ‘artifacts’ or scenarios, and includes science fiction, fantasy, and other genres. By suspending the constraints of current reality, speculative fiction allows readers and creators to explore new possibilities and question the status quo with compelling visuals and stories.