[Held at the Seattle Worldcon, August 2025, with Charlie Jane Anders, Isis Asare, Andrea Hairston, Annalee Newitz, and Ada Palmer]

Isis Asare: Thank you for participating in the Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025 panel. You’re amazing. In this session, there will be affirmations. Next, the panelists will do self introductions. Then, I will ask questions. Afterwards, I’ll look at the room and ask for audience questions. In response, so many hands will go up because we’re planting the seeds, and we’ll pick those fruits together.

Affirmations: One, we’re engaging in intersectional feminist content and conversation. If that is not your typical framework, you’re still welcome to stay. Take the opportunity to listen, engage, and learn. We are curious and actively affirm different opinions. We’re open-minded, we’re respectful, and we’re thoughtful about our impact and understand that impact is not the same as intent. I also want to do a short land acknowledgment: I live in Oakland, California, which is stolen Ohlone land. I like to ask the question: “What would it look like if we all paid into a Native American land trust, in much the same way we pay our taxes every year?” 

Now I’ll turn it over to introductions.

Annalee Newitz: Hi. I write science fiction, and I am also a science journalist, which means I write nonfiction too. My books are in both genres. My latest book is Automatic Noodle. It just came out a couple weeks ago. And my most recent nonfiction book is called Stories Are Weapons. It’s a history of psychological warfare in the United States. Most of my nonfiction tends to be focused on science and history. 

Charlie Jane Anders: Hi, I have a new novel called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it’s about a young trans woman who teaches her heartbroken lesbian mom how to be a witch as a way of kind of bringing her mom back to the world. I have a free weekly newsletter at buttondown.com/charliejane.

Ada Palmer: Hi, I write F&SF. I’m also a historian. I work on the history of censorship. I’m also disabled and a disability activist. I teach at the University of Chicago, which through the last four election cycles has had the highest undergraduate voting rate of any college or university in the country, which means I track the rapid turnover of feelings among the generation that is just starting to be politically active, watching their hope and despair cycle at lightning-fast undergrad speed. That has affected my teaching a lot. I’ve been considering ways we can use the classroom to generate hope, regardless of the topic, since I think one of the biggest things we need to be teaching right now is hope.

Andrea Hairston: Hi. I do theater and write poetry and novels–Archangels of Funk is one.

Isis Asare: This question is for all of you. Ursula K. Le Guin argued that “resistance and change often begins in art.” In the face of Project 2025, how can speculative storytellers empower readers to envision freer, more inclusive futures?

Ada: Ten years back when I came to University of Chicago, I asked a colleague in the Creative Writing Department, what percentage of your majors are writing genre fiction? And he said: All but two of them are writing dystopia. All but two in the entire Creative Writing major.

There has been a saturation of dystopian, grim, and post-apocalyptic literature since 2000, so the undergrads coming into my classroom have practically no experience imagining positive futures or futures worth living in. We need to broaden that variety of futures. Because what they’ve been getting gives them practically no models of the future other than The Hunger Games; everything else is as naive to them as The Jetsons. So one of the biggest things we can do as storytellers is describe a variety of possible futures, so it starts feeling to young people as if their actions matter and are choosing among many possible futures.

When Le Guin talks about genre writers as “the realists of a larger reality,” we surrender the power of that when we narrow our work to only depict one type of future. We have great power to restore alternate narratives, to re-broaden the range of imaginable futures.

Andrea: I write “hopepunk," right? I have for the last fifty years as I’m so much older than everyone on this panel. I do remember people telling stories that weren’t just The Hunger Games. 

I’m also a theatre/film professor. I made sure my students got all of the wonderful stories that I had experienced. We watched A Brother from Another Planet from the ’80s and they would go, “Oh my God!” And I’d say, here’s the list. They would just go and watch all of these “hopepunk” films. I taught a class called “The Magic If”, and the point was to get students to come up with alternatives to whatever. So you can have your dystopia, but it’s just one of many stories. 

Charlie Jane: One of the things I really try to do in Lessons in Magic and Disaster is celebrate all the stuff that they’re trying to tear down right now, like arts and the humanities and poetry and just being comfortable not knowing everything. Being comfortable with uncertainty, with things being complicated and confusing and messy and challenging. That’s the thing I keep coming back to my work: that people who want everything to have a simple answer. That’s the thing I keep kind of nibbling at in my fiction and I feel that’s very hopeful in a way—like celebrating like just being comfortable with things being complicated and confusing and poetic and not like prosaic.

I like messiness. I really, really, really like messiness. and I don’t enjoy when people want things to be simple.

Annalee: Yeah, I think that’s such an interesting point because one of the things that comes up a lot around dystopia is this idea that it’s this really simple answer to what’s coming next. I also write things that are accused of being hopepunk, and people will say, “Oh, well, but that’s not realistic.” What’s realistic, they say, is dystopia. 

But dystopia is no more realistic than utopia. It’s taking all of the most horrific possibilities and putting them together into one story in a way that would never actually unfold in real life. Because even when we live in a world that is ruled by authoritarian thugs, we still find moments of joy and freedom.

We still come together in this room and speak critically about the leadership of our country or about the leadership of our communities. So there’s never a perfect dystopia, just like there’s never a perfect utopia. I too love the messiness. I often say that my writing is “topian.”

(laughter)

The other thing I think that we can do in our writing is push back against this narrative that the way we reach truth is through fighting. There’s this real fetishization right now through things like the Jubilee channel on YouTube where they stage these absurd debates. Like a person who believes in women’s right to an abortion will argue with twenty people who disagree with them. And it becomes a game. Everything becomes a debate that we consume for entertainment, not to reach a new understanding of the issues.

It’s like the Monty Python sketch. Politics become “I’d like to have an argument, please.” Except it’s not an argument; it’s just a contradiction. I’m right, you’re wrong. That is not a way of reaching truth or consensus. That’s literally a way of sowing contradictions. It’s what leads to the idea that “debate” is a trans person having an argument with someone who believes that trans people shouldn’t exist. Again, that is not a political debate. That is just a contradiction.

And if we actually want to have productive debate and productive negotiation, I think we need to start telling stories about how we do that. How do we negotiate? How do we form communities instead of how do we divide them? How do we fight in ways that lead to resolution, rather than contradiction? 

And we need to tell stories about what it means to bring a community together and how pleasurable that can be. I think again we’re in a phase in the United States right now where the idea of community and consensus are being demonized and being portrayed as somehow brainwashing. If you want to reach consensus or be part of a community, you’re going to be infected by a mind virus and be mind-controlled. But the fact is that we all live in community and community is a source of joy and it’s a source of productivity and a source of, you know, it’s the place we go to begin rebuilding or to begin building if we want to create an alternate world. And so one of the things that I’ve always strived to do in my fiction is to show why communities are rich and interesting and how people resolve their issues in those communities, even if it means having a lot of boring meetings.

Because that’s where we start. We have a long boring meeting and we figure out what everybody wants and we negotiate about it, which is why my previous novel, The Terraformers, really does have a lot of boring meetings in it. And characters complain a little bit about that. I try to skip over the boring part for the reader, but the fact is that everybody is going to a lot of meetings.

Andrea: Realism is actually just what we’re willing to believe. It is not the unadulterated world. It’s the story we’re telling on the world. “Normal” is the secret weapon of empire. Empire Normal Stories make us think it is “realistic” that there are no Black people, no queer people, only white straight people in the world. Totally realistic, right? 

Empire Normal supposedly covers every story, a mass culture that contains everything. You’re part of the Empire Normal story or you’re not realistic. As an African American who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, I know we had a lot of fun; I know we had no Empire Normal power, and yet we changed the world, despite having “no power.”

Because, of course, we did have power. 

We knew we had power and we used the power they wanted to hide from us, and we changed things. We did not wait for someone to say, you have power now. And we did not all agree. We were a diverse community who had to have those long, boring meetings. To take action we had to be able to not just call each other out but also call each other in.

Paraphrasing Loretta J. Ross, who wrote Calling In, there are people you just won’t be able to call in. But consider the people you agree with 50 percent and instead of shredding each other, you could call each other in. But how to do that? In Calling In, Loretta generalizes from her experiences as a reproductive rights activist. Her point is we need to call people in and grow our community and be able to interact with one another. Those are the kinds of stories we need to tell. So I’m always writing about community.

Annalee: Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah.

Annalee: Archangels of Funk has an incredible community.

Charlie Jane: Oh, my god, yes.

Annalee: I think about it all the time. I want to live there. It’s very messy.

Andrea: It’s messy.

Annalee: But it works. You know, people come together.

Charlie Jane: Hell yeah.

Isis: I love all of this. Charlie Jane, you talked about operating in a way that’s not hierarchical, which aligns with human contradiction that Octavia Butler explores in Dawn. How do you create opportunities, create situations where people are moving non-hierarchically, but it’s also sustainable?

Charlie Jane: Well, I think one of the words that you just said that really jumped out at me was sustainable. I think making things sustainable is really hard, especially communities and especially, like when I think about communities and sustainability, I think about burnout.

I’ve been there, done that, seen it so many times. I’ve seen people who are burned out, who won’t admit they’re burned out, who won’t let go, who are holding on. And I don’t know, that’s been my whole experience, my entire life in queer communities and like any kind of activism. I feel like it’s hard. And I feel like people admitting that they can’t do something is really hard. I think that’s really important. I think not making it all about you,

I’ve been thinking about how to write about burnout a lot more, in fact, and about how I feel like the antidote to burnout is kind of not just going and going and going, but kind of stopping and being curious and paying attention and paying attention to other people and maybe other people actually have ideas that you could have been listening to this whole time instead of just being like, I know how I do this and I’m gonna keep doing it the way I’m doing it.

I feel like that, I feel like listening. I feel like it’s hard to write about listening actually. It’s hard to write about listening because a lot of what drives books is people telling, talking and doing and like acting and reacting, but listening is hard to write.

But I love–one of my favorite things as a writer is to write people who don’t fully see each other clearly at first and they’d learn to see each other clearly. And I think that’s kind of the small-scale version of what I’m talking about, which is at the community level, like more listening, more understanding. I don’t know, that was very rambling. I hope that made sense.

Isis: No, that was awesome.

Annalee: Yeah.

Andrea: Made me think of Momo–the major character’s superpower is that she can listen. That’s how she saves her world. She listens to all these different people and listening to them allows them to speak and her to grow and the world to change.

Annalee: Yeah, and one of the most powerful characters on Star Trek: TNG is Guinan, who is a good listener.

Andrea: Yes, yes, yes!

Annalee: That’s pretty cool.

Isis: I love that, listening as a superpower.

I have individual questions for each of you, and then we’ll go back to questions for all of you. Annalee, in your work Future of Another Timeline, you pit feminist time travelers, the Daughters of Harriet, which I love, against some misogynist “Comstockers.” Drawing from your novel’s vision of coordinated multi-era resistance, what specific strategies can feminist speculative fiction authors use to help readers recognize these threats?

Annalee: Yeah, a big part of Future of Another Timeline is the central fantasy is that feminists from different eras are time travelers, so they can meet each other in person. The idea is that they aren’t just hearing rumors about what feminists from another era were doing. They literally are in community with them.

And that’s a really powerful fantasy. The reason why I wanted to center that was because I do feel like one of the tragic things that happens in activist communities is that our history is taken from us and erased, or it’s malformed. It’s rewritten by other people who hate our history and lie about what’s happened or portray us as demons or as something terrible, whatever it is they’re gonna call us.

What I really wanted to emphasize about feminism in that book is that it is a cross-generational project. And also that it’s about community action. It’s about small actions taken by many people across time. It’s not just about great leaders.

There’s actually a scene in that book that has made a few readers somewhat grumpy, where the characters are dunking on Emma Goldman. Emma was a big egomaniac, and she got into a lot of public debates with other feminists and other anarchists like Lucy Parsons, who she hated. And from all accounts, she was kind of a toxic person. Sometimes she was doing exactly what you were talking about, Charlie, making everything about herself.

And so these characters say: We don’t like what Emma Goldman is doing. We want to be feminists who are inclusive and who bring people in and who don’t turn it into a story about us, but a story about everyone. And in my novel, sex workers and immigrants team up with academic feminists, which to me is the dream. You know, we should be in solidarity with people who are oftentimes marginalized and treated with great cruelty by the state.

That’s the goal, right? By bringing in people from across the timeline, we can remember clearly what our elders have done for us, and also hold that so that we can pass it on to the next generation. But we also share it with all the people around us now, who haven’t been seen or listened to.

One of the really tragic parts of the history of feminism is that it hasn’t been inclusive. White feminism has dominated, and prevented other voices from being heard. Luckily there are these incredible moments when that changes, and we start to see more intersectionality. But then we see backlash, like we are today. Right now we have this very dominant part of feminism which has become TERFy, and is all about excluding trans women from the movement. And once again Black women are being excluded from the movement, and lots of other people too, people who are deemed not acceptable feminists. So fuck that. That’s my advice: Fuck that.

(APPLAUSE)

Ada: If I can add briefly to the very important theme of collective action: I think we have a paucity of collective action narratives and tools for telling collective action narratives, and this has worsened substantially in the last three decades. Before the 1990s, a much larger percentage of bestseller books that became movies didn’t have one protagonist as the structure. It was always a slight majority, but now it’s an overwhelming majority. Think about how in the original Mission Impossible TV series it’s a team, and everybody on the team is coequal. But in the Hollywood more recent Mission Impossible movies, it’s Tom Cruise, and the plot waits for Tom Cruise and only Tom Cruise can make a difference. That is a protagonist structure.

Andrea: One man.

Annalee: It happens in nonfiction too. I’ll be writing about a scientific discovery, and of course science is always done by teams. Like, you never have the one, single person who discovers something. And I’ll say to my editor, well, there are six people in this story. And they say, well, can’t there be a main character in this story? And I’m like, this is journalism? It’s not a fictional story. I can’t create a main character unless I want to lie. So the struggle is real, all across our culture.

Ada: Yeah. We historians are constantly making main characters out of things, but it’s easy to tell the story via a main character. This is exacerbated, certainly in my students’ age group, by the fact that a lot of video games have a structure where only the player can make the plot advance. There are many kinds of videogames, including multiplayer ones, but in many only the PC can change things, whether it’s gentle storytelling or a first-person shooter, it’s the protagonist who moves through space; Link is the only customer at any store in the world. When those videogames are a substantial slice of the narrative people consume, it makes protagonist-focused narratives a bigger slice of how we see the world. I think that cultivate those moments when people discuss a politician asking X can rise to be the leader that we need? rather than asking how can we create the teamwork that actually achieves change? We have a glut of protagonist stories and a famine of collective action stories.

Andrea: In theater, it’s a little less so. I mean, there’s still Tom Cruise kind of stuff happening. But the practice of theater allows for multiple storylines because you have actors. They embody a character and then it’s easier for the audience to follow five different pivotal characters. You also see that in long-form television shows.

But Hollywood is stuck on one man saving the world. A student of mine put together a reel of film trailers featuring “ONE MAN does blah blah blah.” We told her to turn it off before the end. She had so much. There’s a Carol Churchill play, Top Girls, and she has women from different times at a dinner party. Each historical figure is important, a star. You need amazing performers to do each one. The audience experiences them interacting and struggling. Some are like Emma Goldman, big ego characters, but still doing the work together, calling each other out and in.

I don’t write anything but community books. Sometimes people ask: Where’s the (ONE BIG) protagonist and who’s the bad guy? I’m not talking about bad guys. I’m talking about a system, not one bad person/thing. I’m not saying, if we get rid of that bad person/thing then we’ll be fine. That’s one of those false narratives. We have to change the whole system and interact across differences and be non-hierarchical. That’s how we save ourselves. We need all the ants to aerate the soil on the earth. That’s a line in my current novel. We need the ants and they are under siege right now. 

Isis: And what I hear is we talk a lot about a fight, an action, but what I’m also hearing is that there’s a collective mind-set shift.

Andrea: Yes.

Isis: That is also really powerful as we think about envisioning and inviting this future. My next question is: Do you feel like there’s an urgency to write cautionary tales in our current political moment?

Andrea: An urgency.

Ada: It feels like we have too many cautionary tales and what we need are tales of success and progress and at least partial victory. Especially partial victory, since all real victories are partial victories.

Annalee: I agree. I like stories that are about winning a particular fight or having a success, but knowing that it’s contingent on continuing to work. You’re not necessarily continuing to fight, but you’re not going to be able to just rest on your laurels. It’s an ongoing process.

Andrea: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.” Sweet Honey in the Rock. Not the burnout thing, but just because we figured something out doesn’t mean it’s all over. We need ongoing vision. What could the world look like? How could we make a different world? Who do we need to call in so that we can realize our visions? How do we go about doing that? That’s to me visionary, not cautionary.

Charlie Jane: I feel like we’ve been drowning in cautionary tales. I feel like there have been so many cautionary tales, not just recently, but going back decades, about damaging our own natural habitat, about pollution and climate change, about like trusting too much to like big faceless systems that don’t have our best interests at heart, about like the dangers of putting too much power in the hands of the rich and the few, the plutocratic elite. You can see that it’s going back to the ’60s and ’70s. That has been a constant theme in science fiction, a constant theme in pop culture, a constant theme in a lot of the culture that I grew up just mainlining and absorbing. And, unfortunately, people did not watch that flood of cautionary tales. And then there’s that joke about, I created the torment nexus from the novel don’t create the torment nexus. I feel like people do not, for whatever reason, that strategy does not work.

What I always say in answer to questions about optimism or pessimism or hopeful futures or terrible futures is that these things are theories of human nature. They are theories about what human nature is like and whether humans are primarily a selfish species or a very hierarchical species or whether we’re capable of being more generous, more kind, more hopeful, more able to care for each other. And these are, there’s no one, you can’t like say human nature is X, Y, or Z. It’s like, it’s obviously complicated, which gets back to what I said before about messiness. But I do think that rather than cautionary tales, I want to see more stories that advance the theory of human nature that allows us to survive as a species.

Andrea: Survival of the friendliest.

Charlie Jane: For survival of the friendliest, yeah! And that is kind of what hopepunk is, but also just even if it’s not like, I feel like there’s the type of story that we’ve had a lot of, which I love, where it’s like, here’s how we fixed it, here’s how we got together and got our hands dirty and built a better world, here’s how we dealt with climate change, thirty years in the future, here’s how we managed to stop some of the worst problems. I love that kind of story, but I also love any story. And this, I wanted to say earlier, when we were talking about types of stories that are hopeful. I think romance is a very hopeful genre, especially romance where it’s not based around any kind of power dynamic that’s obnoxious or unexamined, romance where it’s about people loving each other and appreciating each other. Like just a really sweet romance is in a way of really, it’s a theory of human nature that shows that we’re loving creatures.

And I feel like anything that showcases human beings, and especially I have to say Cis white men: If I could read a story where I was on a panel a while ago, sorry, I’m rambling. I was on a panel a while ago where there was a dude on the panel who said, “I only write soft boys.” And I was like, “Oh, I love that.” And I feel like I want to see more soft boys. I want to see more cis white dudes who are just nice and friendly and kind and thoughtful. And I feel like the idea that if you are a cis white man, there is something inherent in your nature that forces you or drives you to be a total piece of garbage, is a theory of human nature. It’s a thing that pop culture ramps down our throat. And I feel like anything that presents an alternative to that is actually very powerfully subversive.

Isis: Thank you for that.

And you have [to present?] reframed romance for me.

Charlie Jane: Oh yeah.

(audience laughing)

Ada: And one characteristic of genre romance is that, in addition to finding love, there’s always a transformation in the woman’s life, where she realizes she didn’t like the life she had before, and makes a major change and ends up in a better place, a better job, a new home, changing her circumstances for the better. Which is such a vivid contrast with the genre we refer to as mainstream lit, which is inevitably about somebody being powerless in the giant grinding gears of modernity and with no power except to come to terms with their own despair.

Andrea: And being sliced up while that happens.

Ada: That’s what gets celebrated as realistic lit. Realistic is when we are powerless and can only come to terms with our despair. Whereas fiction where we have the power to actually change the world is fantasy, not realism, while romance, books about changing your personal circumstances for the better, that genre we’re not even going to count Romance in the New York Times bestseller tallies of books, because we never want admit how often it would be the top. Of course my students are despairing.

Isis: Yeah? Yeah. Thank you. 

EDITORIAL NOTE: THE Q&A PART OF THE PANEL BEGINS HERE

Isis: Okay, now is that time. I look at y’all, I look at your beautiful faces, are there any questions from the audience? Yay!

Audience comment: One thing I think that should be emphasized is the ability to suspend judgment, to say: I haven’t made up my mind yet, that there are arguments here and there, and I’m going to wait and seek actions that are solution driven, not just reaction.

Andrea: Charlie was talking about messy.

Charlie Jane: Mm-hmm, that goes with what I was saying earlier. Thank you.

Annalee: A focus more on suspending judgment and not leaping to conclusions and trying to essentially hear each other out, and be messy while we consider what is possible. And listen.

Andrea: Yeah, and listen.

Annalee: Yeah, this is one of the things that drew me to science as a journalist was that science properly understood, not necessarily the way it’s practiced all the time, is all about every truth being provisional. A truth is a hypothesis. It’s a theory. It’s what we agree on through consensus. And we have methods of reaching consensus. We have methods of establishing truth and evidence. And the way that that works well is that we are always willing to throw those out and say, oh, we’ve got new evidence. Now we have a new provisional truth. And I wish that we could have that in more of our discussions and debates.

Audience question: Is it possible to have a society for everyone, progressive and conservative both? Do we need the yin and the yang? 

Ada: What people mean by conservative varies a lot. There is one almost vanished meaning which is valuing the old techniques of doing things and not wanting to unexaminedly change them, valuing tradition and culture and looking at those and wanting to always double check: Is it actually the case that we want to replace this with the newfangled thing? Is the shaving cream in an environment-destroying spray can actually better than the old shaving brush and soap block? We pause to ask whether the old way is actually still better, that’s a kind of conservatism, one that helps and balances innovation as yin with yang. But when I was at Harvard, during my PhD, I was part of a large-scale project searching for patterns in conservative thought over deep history and broad time, from presocratic Greece, ancient Egypt, and early China through medieval to modern, to see, when there are political sides people identified as conservative, what patterns they shared? After looking at hundreds of examples, we concluded that a consistent pattern in conservative movements was the belief that there exists some portion of the population that is better capable of ruling than the rest, and that everyone will be better off if power is concentrated in the hands of that population, not distributed among all.

Sometimes this takes the form of hereditary aristocracy, or oligarchy. Sometimes it takes the form of meritocracy, an exam system to choose who will be the elite elect. But it is profoundly undemocratic, in that it believes that it is not good for power to be distributed among all people, that it is better for power to be concentrated in few hands. It was scary how consistent this was over time and space. That is what conservative has really meant, in hundreds of places over thousands of years. I don’t think there is space for that in the kind of community that we want.  

So, the conservatism of pausing to ask whether the traditional way has value, whether we shouldn’t throw away the brush and block rashly, that thread has value, but it’s rarely what conservatism really is. We’ve seen, for example, how quickly progressive-seeming Silicon Valley figures flipped to the far right because of their dedication to meritocracy. We need to remember that meritocracy is not democracy and is not compatible with democracy, even though it feels fair.

Charlie Jane: It’s seldom really about merit nowadays.

Ada: But even if it were, it would not be democracy.

Andrea: It’s realism, you know? It’s like what you’re willing to believe is that there is this individual who rose from nothing and can do everything—

Ada: And is the protagonist.

Andrea: And should go to Mars and, you know, live there by himself.

(laughing)

Charlie Jane: He really should.

Annalee: I love that.

(laughing)

Ada: Agreed, I just don’t wanna accidentally undermine the point that even if it were real meritocracy, it would still be incompatible with democracy.

Andrea: Right, exactly.

Ada: That these two systems are not the same and we often get lured into thinking that they can be.

Audience question: I’m an activist, and I have a book in my bag called Direct Action and Sabotage; what is the space for disruptive actions in all this, especially in the context and lens of positive futures, communities, inclusive, and complex communities?

Andrea: Well, I’ll take that because in theater—action is where we live. The idea that you are ready for change is essential. If I’m on stage and suddenly everything is falling apart, I have to be able and ready for change. You actually rehearse being ready for something coming out of nowhere. And that’s what it means to play. We all play at things, we rehearse: I’m off guard, and I don’t know what to do. So I think we should disrupt ourselves and ask, do I really need this?  Is this who I should be? Is this what I’m thinking? But if you mean some other kind of violent disruption, I have less sense of that as necessarily constructive. But in terms of improvisation, when I throw something like a wrench in the works, and then we have to figure it out now. That is excellent, because you have to think and be and act, and suddenly you come up with something you wouldn’t have come up with if there hadn’t been that disruption. Anybody else?

Annalee: Sure, I think, I would also emphasize that I don’t think violence is really a great idea ever. It actually just ends up creating more violence. So I’m not talking about that, but I do think that at least right now in the United States, we’re dealing with a lot of entrenched institutions that are failing and that are not actually living up to their own rules and not actually doing what they were built to do. I’m talking about our justice system, many of our federal agencies which have been deprived of money. And so when that’s happening with the system, when you cannot work within the system because the system is being starved or has been captured by meritocracy,

(laughter)

then I think direct action is really, really important. Political organizing, protesting, going on strike, refusing to do the labor of arresting people, refusing to allow people to be arrested. I think that that’s incredibly important. I think at this point, that’s what we have. And we need to be planning for how we’re going to do that. And I want to see it happen in a mutual aid framework, not in a us beating up the dude or shooting the guy who runs a health insurance company or whatever, which—listen, I think we all had that moment of, yeah, I wish we could kill all these bad guys, but it never, it doesn’t work.

Andrea: It doesn’t result.

Annalee: Yeah, that doesn’t fix the system. In fact, it entrenches the system. And so yeah, what we need is collective forms of response. And maybe that means starting a worker owned co-op. Maybe it means starting a collective. Maybe it means organizing, like I said, a strike. But I think we, within our communities, really need to be thinking seriously about how to do that.

And in all of my stories, people do end up having to take direct action because they don’t have a system that will listen to them. And there are ways of doing that, but they’re very, they’re collaborative, they’re about community care. And yeah, let’s not be afraid to think about that.

Charlie Jane: Yeah, I’ll just say really quickly that I think that when you were dealing with a form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, I think sabotage is a really valid tactic I think sabotage, ideally, that doesn’t cause physical harm to people, but puts sand in the gears. Like, just, yeah.

Andrea: A wrench in the system.

Charlie Jane: Put a wrench in the system.

Annalee: Yeah.

Ada: I would add to this a reminder, a statistic, and a simile.

When we differentiate between disruption and destruction, I think we can all agree that disruption is very valuable, but destruction is very risky. We live with much more robust institutions for non-violent solution of large-scale problems than past centuries had. We should be very slow to give up on those structures. They’ve succeeded at pulling back from authoritarianism in many other nations that have modeled their institutions on our own. But in America, we are still running the beta-release software of modern democracy with barely any patches. It makes sense that the hackers are getting at us more than at the more new-release democracies like Australia and Germany that are running more sophisticated software than we are. We are very hackable.

Charlie Jane: Windows 95.

Ada: The statistic is: if you look back over the last sixty years at countries that have had authoritarian swings and then you look at them ten years later, 75 percent of them end up more liberal than they were before the swing because resistance is really working and the tools we have for it are really effective. When you limit that to just the last decade, it’s 85 percent. Our tools are getting better.

Andrea: But the story is that we’re powerless. So there’s a disconnect between fact and narrative. This is the science thing that drives me wild. If you actually have the knowledge, then you have the hope. But since you don’t have the knowledge, which is what we should be sending out, telling stories with, you feel like there’s nothing to do. And so for me hope is an action. What Ada just said, I’ve lived it. That’s the nice thing about being old. I have lived through those shifts. So I keep saying, these (current) people are not going to last. I mean, it’s going to be over. And everyone looks at me like, what’s wrong with you? Can’t you see it’s over for us? But that’s a narrative. That’s their realism.

Ada: To briefly add the simile, I think that small-scale destructive actions, when rhetorical, can be very powerful. Like, burning the bra in the square as a feminist symbol was incredibly rhetorically persuasive. Communication is an ecosystem. Think of when you go on social media: There’s a mix of voices. They’re all talking about the same thing, but some are doing it with lots of profanity and cathartic anger, others with humor, others with ploddingly factual graphs. And sometimes you’re in the mood that you’re really resonating with the anger; sometimes you’re resonating with the humor; sometimes you’re in the mood for the article with graphs. Rhetorical acts of small-scale destruction like setting fire to something in a square, which does not injure anyone, but is incredibly vivid, can be very rhetorically powerful. I think that is a major place that destruction has within our ecosystem of resistance discourse, even while we still trust in our ability to use these the robust systems of peaceful transformation that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worked so hard to create.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s festival drama, right? When you burn your bra, when you do that, it’s powerful theater. There’s a group of women in West Africa—the Igbo people—and what they do is when men are doing stupidness, the women gather together and surround the house of the man whose goats say have been eating all the crops, and the women perform—they chant: Your dick is short, your feet are funky, etc. They won’t stop until the man agrees to get his goats out of the fields. It’s called women’s war. And society knows the rules of women’s war–it’s theater. When the British encountered this, they were confused because they thought war, violence, but it was rhetorical or theatrical violence, a performance: We’re mad at you and we are not going to get off your case until you change. So I think we need to do performative things that will get to people and make them change. The Igbo had perfected this thing and the British were, what? War? And it was known as war because it was effective, a battle for change. Guys would go, oh-oh the women are going to war, so we’re going to stop now. 

Annalee: It’s more effective than war because everybody is alive at the end. 

Andrea: Yes, everyone is alive at the end.

Isis: That was really our last question. Thank you so much. These questions are beautiful and bright. Do you have any pieces you want to read? Quotes from your work? 

Annalee: I’m going to read you just a tiny moment from Automatic Noodle, where four robots have created a community, a restaurant. One robot asks, “But aren’t we making up a community?” And the other robot says, “No, we aren’t making anything up. We are making a place for people who are already here.”

Charlie Jane: I have a quote I think about a lot from my novel, The City in the Middle of the Night: “Joining with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way that we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community.”

Ada: Before my quote, I want to urge everybody to sign up for the Fix the News weekly newsletter digest of global good news: civil rights victories, disease eradications, endangered species restorations etc. Because bad news gets shared one hundred times more than good news, so it’s life-healing to read once a week about global victories. To give a micro-example: Last November there was a big breast cancer study, confirming that breast cancer survival rates over the last decade are up 40 percent. A huge part of that is better detection among younger women, mammograms early. Every single English language newspaper that covered this, covered it with a headline like: Cancer Rates Rising in Young Women! What’s Killing Them? They reported good news as the opposite. That’s the news ecosystem we live in, and Fix the News is the antidote. 

Andrea: Look up the Goldman Prize, given to ordinary people all over the world who do amazing things, particularly for the environment. Every week or so they send something that people are doing: “We’re saving chocolate!” Or, “We won the court case to stop people from drilling off the coast and destroying the sea.” Hope and joy, right? 

Ada: My quote is from Inventing the Renaissance, which culminates with a history of the concept of progress, concluding with this: “Progress is not inevitable, but it is happening. It is not transparent, but it is visible. It is not safe, but it is beneficial. It is not linear, but it is directional. It is not controllable, but it is us. In fact, it is nothing but us.”

Andrea: Mine is from Archangels of Funk, a poem “My Own Sun.”

Dark days

Just a flash, love beyond the run.

I ain’t waitin’ for some freedom to come.

I’ma be my own sun and rise.

I’ma be my own rain and drink.

I’ma be my own poem and think.

Dark days, we know that.

Truth under the gun.

I ain’t waitin’ for some justice to be done.

I’ma be my own light and shine.

I’ma win my own fight.

Surprise!

I’ma be my own sun and rise.

I say, dark days, we got that?

I’m gonna be my own sun and ...

Many voices: Rise!

Isis: So, did you get your sense of hope? Ready? Let’s claim our magic and create our future!

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.