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Short abstract

The first 21 cards of the tarot deck can give us material to interrogate the terrible, boring stories being told about the future by authoritarians and the tech industry. This talk outlines what these terrible and boring stories are and experiments with telling other ones.

Long abstract

The systems are broken, we hear. Work is precarious, politics polarised, and even the weather feels like a threat. Uncertainty reigns, and to resolve it, we turn to reassuring stories about futures where ‘numbers go up’ and everything is as it was before, only faster, and maybe with more AI. Creating this faster, more productive, machine-enabled future involves a series of bargains: giving away attention and intimate information to apps, sacrificing water and energy for the data centres that power them. An even bigger bargain comes in losing the ability to imagine different futures. This intervention describes the current narrative modes employed by the tech industry to address cultural experiences of uncertainty. These include linear narrative forms, putting 'technology' as a main character, and recourse to a mythic pattern of a 'hero's journey' that allows authoritarian strongmen to advance their own interests. Using the first 21 cards of the tarot deck, this talk investigates how we could tell other stories about the future, and how these stories might spark different action towards social, ecological or technological change.