American Theatre Magazine does the right thing.

I’m so pleased that American Theatre Magazine has published their September issue, dedicated entirely to #metoo stories.

Here are six brave theatre artists who came forward about abusers Gregory Boyd at Alley Theatre in Houston; Gordon Edelstein at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven; Darrell W. Cox at Profiles Theatre in Chicago; Jason McLean and Josh Peklo at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis; and Michael Halberstam at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, IL.

Here is a journalist’s story about reporting on her own harasser.

Here is a piece on how the Actor’s Equity Association can change to better protect its members.

Here are resources for survivors, including resources specific to the theatre world.

And here is the op-Ed by Editor-in-Chief Rob Weinert-Kendt, explaining how he and the TCG board came to the decision to publish this issue.

I thank him for acknowledging my role in it. It was really hard to do. (For background: here is my first blog piece about my experience of sexual harassment by Raphael Martin—then the Literary Manager at SoHo Rep, now proprietor of The Lit Shop in London—and ATM’s solicitation of the story, and then, their failure to publish it; here is their response to my blog post; and here is why I found that response so unsatisfactory.) But the work was worth doing. I truly hope TCG and ATM continues to take an active role in dismantling the structures of silence and enablement that have allowed so many abusers to abuse for so long in American theatre. We need them. We need all hands on deck to address this problem.

I’d also like to thank Diep Tran, the dedicated and brilliant journalist who saw this story through from beginning to end; my patrons on Patreon who enabled me to take a stand by paying me a salary for the work; the theatre artists who stood up with me to create a petition advocating for ATM to publish these stories; the 1,556 signatories, ranging from undergrads to MacArthur Fellows; and last but not least, again, ATM Editor-in-Chief Rob Weinert-Kendt and TCG Executive Director Teresa Eyring, for listening to our concerns and deciding to do the right thing, even though that necessitated a massive internal shift in institutional structure and funding.

I appreciate it. Survivors appreciate it. And everyone who’s had to struggle against the toxic patriarchal power structures in theatre appreciate it.

This is how we make change, and this is only the beginning.

Thank you.

~

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Blue Nowruz.

Photo: Brownsville, United States, June 28, 2018. EPA-EFE/Larry W. Smith

~

In support of the protests happening this weekend, I’m making freely available my near-future science fiction story, “Blue Nowruz.” Listen to the audiobook if you can, because the story was written to be performed, not read; but the text is there too.

It was commissioned for TED 2015 by Neil Gaiman and Chris Anderson, the only prompt being: it had to occur in the next fifteen years, and it had to offer an optimistic vision of the future. So—having been pro-open borders for as long as I’ve been aware of the concept—I wrote about what a simultaneous, worldwide border protest would look like, and how it would begin to change the world.

I hope we’re getting closer to realizing that vision.

This story was supported entirely by my sustainers on Patreon. If you want to support this work and its free availability to all, regardless of means, please pledge here. Thank you.

~

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Carpenter bee.

Photo: The Nature Geek.

~

It’s finally warming up in North Carolina, which means the carpenter bees are out and about. Dad and I waited until now to publish this poem, one of my favorites of his, and of all time. Read it aloud.

CARPENTER BEE
by Donald E. Byrne Jr.

A fat, black bee
whirls down from its
hole, bored in the
trim of the porch,
to bless me in
my chaise. So close
to the nape of
my neck I thrill,
so near my bare
chest I feel the
breath of its wings,
the quick bee signs

up, down, left, right,
as if to ask:
are you the one?–
up, down, left, right–
are you the one?
Are you the one,
a sweet balm, a
bee balm, the one
who called me with
your flower?
………………..I pray
you, bee, bless me;
black bee, bless me;
bless me, fat bee,
with your sun sign:
up, down, left, right,
up, down, left, right.

~

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My response to TCG and American Theatre Magazine.

American Theatre Magazine wrote a response to my blog post about their enablement of sexual abuse in American theatre. I appreciate their engagement and their apology, and wrote Robert Weinert-Kendt, the editor-in-chief; and Teresa Eyring, Executive Director of TCG, to tell them so. But I felt the response left quite a lot to be desired.

Specifically, they did not list any concrete steps to address the fact that they had solicited and now know the name of serial abusers working in the field, including at their own member theaters, and are now choosing to sit on them indefinitely. Rob writes, “The magazine has never been, and has never represented itself as, an investigative news organization.” I disagree. “Investigative” is an arbitrary label, applied retroactively for convenience’s sake; they brand themselves as is “the nation’s only general-circulation magazine devoted to theatre,” which anyone—including I, as a source—could rightly interpret as including work categorized as “investigative,” especially when they’d authorized their reporter to initiate an investigation. If ATM is in fact a magazine-length glossy ad for their member theaters, they need to put that on their About page instead. If they are or want to be something else, then they have an ethical obligation to act on the information they solicited. From what I understand, they are now refusing to do so on technical and legal—in other words, financial—grounds. This, while publishing pieces like this, wherein Teresa herself writes, “The culture of silence can be profound and entrenched. And what’s required when there are reports of workplace misconduct, sexual and otherwise, is immediate action and transparency on the part of boards and leadership.”

So. Here is my question to Rob, Teresa, and the board of TCG:

Where is your immediate action?

Moreover: what made you think that real change would be safe?

What made you think that real change would not come without social, financial, and legal risk, to your institution and to yourselves?

I’m well-acquainted with these risks. I’ve taken them on several times now, and will again in the future. But it’s time for the burden of those risks to stop falling on individuals. We already did our part by coming forward. We’ve done it over and over and over. Now it’s your turn.

Your two options are to (1) authorize Ms. Tran to publish the stories, and take on the social, legal, and financial risks that comes with that; or (2) partner with a national media outlet that was built to take on such risk, such as Buzzfeed or The Washington Post. In my opinion, not doing so would represent a final and irreparable breach of trust between your organization and the entire field of practice, especially the women and people of color who are disproportionately impacted by your silence.

Now, here is my question for the leadership of all TCG member theaters:

Why so quiet?

I’ve received messages of support from exactly three Artistic Directors of TCG member theaters, out of five hundred and six. Two were already friends.

I’ll grant, it’s given me a sense of just how pervasive the culture of silence is in the field. It’s also helped me understand the role of “niceness”—or, reluctance to confront or offend—in the machinery of enablement. Niceness has been the leadership’s norm on that national nonprofit theatre scene for as long as I’ve been aware of it, but it is in fact anything but niceness. It is cowardice. Niceness means speechifying on Facebook without ever naming names. Niceness means, in Rob’s words, “urging the field as a whole (rather than any specific theaters) to do better,” so that no one ever thinks they’re part of the problem. Niceness means you never acknowledge that you or your friends may be part of the problem. Niceness means that you never have to have difficult conversations with your colleagues. Niceness means you’re terrified of not being liked, or how not being liked could affect your career. Niceness means you’d rather cover up abuse than run the risk of alienating donors. Niceness means you convince yourself that, because you’re a good person with good intentions, you can’t possibly be part of the problem. Niceness means believing that, because an institution has done some good sometimes, that outweighs the abusers who both operate from within it and benefit from its silences. Niceness means you never actually risk anything.

I’ll be as clear as I possibly can: An institution that prioritizes its own continued existence over the safety of the individuals who work there does not deserve to exist.

That applies to American Theatre Magazine. That applies to TCG. And that applies to every single theater that knowingly employs and harbors abusers, or neglects to speak out against their continued enablement, now, in the MeToo era.

Rob, Teresa, and TCG member theaters: you already know the right thing to do. You just have to be brave enough to do it.

~

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How the machinery of enablement works in American theatre.

This is a case study of how the machinery of enablement of sexual harassers and abusers works in American theatre. It involves Raphael Martin, the ex-Director of New Work at Soho Repertory Theatre in New York; and American Theater Magazine and its publisher the Theatre Communications Group (TCG).

I.

In October 2016, I read this piece by poet Annie Finch, an account of sexual harassment in the literary world. Her descriptions reminded me of the sexual harassment I’d experienced from the then-Director of New Work at Soho Rep, Raphael Martin, in 2013; and how that harassment had negatively influenced my career trajectory, and informed my negative feelings toward Soho Rep. Inspired by Finch, I wrote a Facebook post about my experience with Martin. Many people saw it and responded, but apparently none at Soho Rep. I looked at their staff and board list, recognized the name of a Facebook friend, and sent my friend my Facebook post via private message. My friend responded immediately and, with my permission, shared my post on their personal Facebook wall, asking if anyone else had also been sexually harassed by Martin. Apparently many had—all young female theatre artists, like me—and submitted their accounts to my friend. Within a few days, Martin was fired.

At the time, I felt satisfied that Soho Rep had done the right thing. But I was a little confused that none of the leadership at Soho Rep had reached out to me, and that there was no press coverage of the incident; the firing of the Director of New Work at one of New York’s most prestigious independent theatre institutions had apparently gone unnoticed.

Since then, Martin has set up a theatrical consultancy agency in London. In other words, he was free to simply pick up and move shop, with few the wiser. This pattern is a crucial element in every culture of abuse: academia, high school sports, the Catholic priesthood, and so on. So I wrote to Sarah Benson, the Artistic Director of Soho Rep. She responded very kindly and thoughtfully, acknowledged the harm done to myself and the field, and thanked me for coming forward, then and now; but said that, as difficult as it was, the theater was not in a position to revisit the incident in a public way.

I don’t know why. And I wonder if there are reasons I can’t know why.

I wish they’d noticed that Martin seemed to pursue meetings only with young women theatre artists.I wish they’d reached out to check in with me after I came forward. I wish they’d publicly taken responsibility for Martin’s long-term employment and the extensive damage it did to the field. And most especially, I wish they—and all theatrical institutions—would look more closely at their part in the American theatrical community’s culture of scarcity, secrecy, and exclusivity, which deters so many women from coming forward.

I wish Soho Rep knew me as a playwright and not as a whistleblower.

II.

Last fall, a friend sent me a post by a journalist at American Theater Magazine (AT), the nation’s “only general-circulation magazine devoted to theatre.” The journalist was soliciting accounts of sexual harassment in theatre. I was one of approximately a hundred people to get in touch with her, and spent a long time talking to her on the phone about my experiences, which included naming names on the record, including that of Raphael Martin. She was terrific, receptive and compassionate.

Months went by. I tweeted at AT, asking whether they were planning to publish anything from the amounts of information they’d gotten. They sent me link to a published article, here. I hadn’t heard anything about it, and it’s not hard to see why: because though it’s well-written, it says very little except that sexual harassment and abuse is an enormous problem in American theatre, with illustrations thereof, but no names or institutions attached. I didn’t blame the journalist. I gave her names—lots of us did—and she seemed to want to publish them. So I got in touch with her to ask what had happened. She said that the leadership at TCG (the publisher of AT) had overruled her, opting instead to anonymize everything because they didn’t want the legal liability, and that naming names (of people or institutions) was “not in line with their mission.”

III.

This is how the machinery of enablement works.

And this is how it breaks: when individual victims take on the risk of speaking out.

For a variety of reasons, I do, and have before. Those reasons might merit their own blog post one day. But what I want to emphasize now is: this is not a matter of “having a chip on my shoulder.” It’s a matter of sexual harassment and abuse being a major public health and safety issue in all sectors of our society, and wanting to do something about it, especially when the leadership of arts institutions tend to do whatever it takes to preserve themselves first, at the direct cost of the health and safety of the individuals they’re supposed to serve. There is a vacuum of moral leadership in American theatre. This is especially ironic given theatrical institutions’ self-positioning as bastions of progress. Many are not. They merely replicate the same biases, abuses, and failures that exist in larger society, and then brand it as “arts advocacy” to its donors. Adding insult to injury, this “advocacy” is a means by which hundreds of people make a sound living, with health insurance and retirement benefits; meanwhile, actual theatre artists cannot make a living at all.

I wrote to the Editor-in-Chief of ATM, Rob Weinert-Kendt; and the Executive Director of TCG, Teresa Eyring. Both of them wrote me back kindly, but did not reverse their decision. I told them both I appreciated their responses, but did not agree with their decision or their reasoning. I think American Theater Magazine leadership should have empowered and supported its reporter to name the names we gave her. I think American Theater Magazine and its publisher, TCG, should seriously reexamine its mission if its mission does not include protecting the basic health and safety of theatre artists. And I think American Theater Magazine and its publisher, TCG, owe an apology to the entire theatrical community for its complicity in the machinery of enablement.

No matter what, donors to AT and TCG should start asking questions.

IV.

In my opinion, Martin needs serious psychological help, and until he receives it, he should not be in any position where he works with younger women in a theatrical or other context. If Mr. Martin would like to sue me, he’s welcome to try; I have exactly one asset—my car—and $159 to my name. Luckily for me, truth is an absolute defense in defamation cases. Nothing I’ve said in public or in private is untrue.

If any commenters are looking to engage me in “debate,” you should know that I have to approve all comments before they go live, and I’m not interested in debating. I’ve thought about publishing a post like this for months, discussed it with many people I trust, and am at peace with my decision. I will delete your comments.

If any reporters would like to get in touch with me to speak on the record about any of the above, you can contact me through my web site.

Thank you for reading.

~

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My comments to Durham City Council on behalf of independent artists.

Here are my prepared remarks for the Durham City Council public hearing on the budget, March 19th, 2018, on behalf of independent artists in Durham. Thank you, as always, to my sustainers for enabling me to do this work. 

~

My name is Monica Byrne. Twelve years ago, I moved to Durham because of its affordability and its incredibly rich independent arts scene. Today I’m a full-time novelist, playwright, performer, and activist. Independent artists like me have played an essential role in making Durham a place where people love to live. Now, it’s becoming unaffordable for me, and for all the independent artists I know, both as a place to live and a place to make work.

Of course, that’s the case for a lot of Durham residents. I want to stress that artists are no more inherently special than any other kind of worker, but are treated as such, which means there are a few crucial points I’m asking the Council to consider when building a new budget.

(1) That in all private and public sectors, including the City of Durham, because art is treated as a hobby and not as work, artists are vastly under-compensated—to the point of no compensation at all.

(2)  That compensation for artists is an intersectional economic justice issue. Art is something all people, of every age, race, gender, socioeconomic class, nationality, and ethnicity do to make meaning out of their lives. But only some kinds of art are recognized and compensated by our institutions. That art is overwhelmingly made by white men for white audiences.

(3) That the city’s arts funding, as reflected in the current budget, overwhelmingly prioritizes institutional and corporate art at the direct cost of independent artists in Durham.

(4) That the commitments to institutional and corporate art must be balanced by an equal commitment to the independent artists who make our city a place people love to live.

The good news is that it would take very little for the Council to start making meaningful change. I’m asking for three very simple things:

First, treat individual artists and small arts organizations as businesses. That is, offer them the same access to capital and low-interest loans that any other business would have.

Second, set an example by providing for compensation for all artists hired by the city, at least at a living wage. If you have questions, hire artists as consultants at a professional wage.

Third, please do not confuse funding the Durham Arts Council with funding artists. They are not the same thing. The ways in which the leadership and the board of the Durham Arts Council fail to meet the needs of independent artists in Durham would take much longer than three minutes to explain.

If you would like to talk about that more, or anything else I’ve mentioned, please get in touch, and I’d be delighted to.

Thank you.

~

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Murph.

Murph
by Donald E. Byrne Jr.

We thought it was going to be a neat sixties
thing to do: I’d ride a bus to Galena and we’d hike
the river hills in winter, stay in a sleazy
hotel where U. S. Grant once slept, eat the best turtle steaks

on the Mississippi in a plain café,
drink Jack Daniels straight from the bottle, and talk,
talk, talk! He said, “Bring your guitar, you can play
I Keep a Close Watch on this Heart of Mine. Don’t

Think Twice, Rock Island Line, Alberta, and Candy
Man, just like you used to.” Last time we’d seen each other–
the year JFK was shot–I was a randy
seminarian, soon to be ex-, he a deacon, soon ordained,

but we both liked country western, Johnny Cash.
Two years later, how could we know Murph would kill himself
a little before we met? They said he clashed
with Marilyn, jumped off the Key Bridge in January, washed up

near Georgetown’s M Street the 2nd of February
bloated with Potomac sludge. No one had even missed him.
He hadn’t been easy to get close to. But he
was the only one of us who took on the Dominican who taught

canned Thomistic moral theology. Murph convinced
us all that day that love, desire, feeling and imagination
were more our imago Dei than reason, distanced
vision, and abstraction–as the perspiring priest insisted.

We didn’t know then Murph was making a case against
his own stunningly lucid mind, to anchor his passion for
a girl he’d not yet met. We cheered when he fenced
the Dominican in. We knew he was right; it was in the air–

though none of us could quite keep up with how
he followed his logic to its conclusions. The word was
he came on too fast with her and she threw him out
with his pants around his knees. Loughlin treated me to

a turtle steak and said that suicide
was God’s way of saving Murph from opposing Him directly;
I said it wasn’t Murphy’s God who’d tried
to save him by killing him off, but only some church god

too insecure to be more than abstract. I said
Murph freed God up to be beautiful and desirable, the love
we loved in everything we loved. He paid
the bill and we walked some more, breaking trail across

a crunching sheet of snow turning orange and gold
in an afternoon sun that slipped too quickly behind
the bluffs. As long as I could stand the cold
slush in my sneakers, we sat on a limestone barn foundation

and talked about what we or anyone might
have done to help Murph out of the dead end he’d thought
himself into, that desperate January night
when he didn’t know how to come on to a real girl

and couldn’t think where to turn. My feet got numb.
The river ice turned gray, the hills harsh, climbing to
the car. We’d another day, but knew we’d come
to the end. We pulled dumbly on the bottle, riding back.

We took our baths and made a half-hearted stab at
picking up two long-haired river queens in the Levee Lounge.
We left them the rum and cokes we bought, and sat
at the bar with the regulars. I talked about my master’s

thesis in progress, and he about his sermons.
Or parish. Or bishop troubles. I wasn’t listening
at all, I was seeing, over and over, Murph’s
leap of faith, the dark Mississippi he kissed.

~

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I made a handy chart.

My ad-free work is supported entirely by sustainers like you on Patreon. Please go here to pledge, or go here to make a one-time tip. Thank you.

~

My ad-free work is supported entirely by sustainers like you on Patreon. Please go here to pledge, or go here to make a one-time tip. Thank you.

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You must stop reminiscing at every date.

My wonderful father, at age 76, has won a poetry prize.

Here is the winning poem: “You Must Stop Reminiscing at Every Date,” about my mother. By Donald E. Byrne Jr., published in Red Clay Review, November 2017. Posted with permission.

Read it aloud.

~

We do the annual calendar together:
I read from the little datebook you have kept,
you copy laboriously with magic marker
names and years of births, anniversaries, deaths,

under numbers you can barely see. Each year
our children are born, baptized, confirmed, receive
first penance and first holy communion. Each year
my parents are born, and die. Your friend, Marydee,

her husband Frank, and daughter Julie
die each year of carbon monoxide; Lisa survives,
and is married. Carl dies, a suicide.
We move to Pennsylvania again, and buy

this house. I get my Ph.d. You have
the tumor removed from your brain and lose your sight.
I become impatient; this is too slow! After
two hours we are only in June. We come to the night

you meet an old flame for drinks; you tell him I am
your only true love – cruelly, you think. Exasperated,
I say, “I’m glad, but if we’re to finish sometime
soon, you must stop reminiscing at every date!”

You look up, wounded, and zip your lips with your thumb
and finger, like a child admonished in school.
But by the end of July you are born again, and dumb
no more; what happened once, happens again — too

much history, compressed already into a year,
to squeeze into an hour. “There are getting to be
more deaths than births,” you say sadly in September.
You linger for our lives’ sakes; I want to hurry

past the certainty this book of days
will forget the last of our deaths — and then will be more,
and less, than even the children who rise from its pages
can remember, without your blind and patient story.

~

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Instructions for the Age of Emergency.

Note, June 15, 2022: When I gave this talk in 2018, I still had incomplete understandings of both disability and gender. I later hired consultants on both subjects (Dr. Laura Thompson on disability and Katherine Croft, BSN, RN on gender), who transformed my understanding for the better–and the book, The Actual Star. However, please note that the talk below reflects those incomplete understandings, and may be jarring for some. Thank you to Meg Kline for bringing this to my attention. 

~

Halbert W. Hall Speaker’s Series on Science Fiction and Fantasy, Texas A&M University

February 2, 2018

Full Audio

~

Thank you so much to Texas A&M for hosting me, and especially to the Science Fiction Archivist, Jeremy Brett, who invited me and orchestrated everything. He’s been a supporter of my work for years, and I’m so delighted to finally meet him, and to have the chance to address all of you. I’d also like to thank TAMU Libraries, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and its Science Fiction Studies Working Group, the Department of English, the Department of International Studies, and the Department of Visualization. I’m so honored by such an intersectional effort to bring me here. So thank you.

As Jeremy said, I write a lot of things, but when people ask me what I am, the first thing I say is that I’m a science fiction writer. I gave Jeremy a name for this talk before I wrote any of it, because I was still finishing my next novel. It’s called The Actual Star. It’s taken me six years to write. My agent is reading it as we speak. It jumps back and forth from the distant past, during the collapse of ancient Maya civilization; to the present, specifically the year 2012; to the far future, when a new global religion has brought lasting peace to humankind. So I spent a lot of the past year in the year 3012, in my head, imagining what the world will look like a thousand years from now. I want to talk to you about it because, like all science fiction, even though it’s set in the future, it’s a response to our present moment. My talk is called “Instructions for the Age of Emergency,” which is the time period we’re living in right now. In the far future, there are entire fields of study devoted to it, and to the people who lived in it, and what we must have been thinking.

During the last year, I locked myself out of social media for months at a time. I had to concentrate on work and, to be honest, protect my mental health after the election. I only read The Washington Post on my phone in bed in the morning—I still do—and that was enough. Everything I read, I asked myself, “How did we get here? What are the root causes? How can things be different?” And then I would try to answer those questions in the day’s writing.

The possibility I wanted to explore is that things didn’t start going astray after 9/11, or because of Nixon, or with the Industrial Revolution, or even with the invention of race that enabled the Native American genocide and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. I wanted to explore the possibility that humanity lost its way in the Neolithic Era. We regard the Neolithic as the beginning of history, and if we mean written history, maybe. But humans lived for two hundred thousand years before that—before the fall of Troy, before permanent settlements, before the invention of surplus and property and money and agriculture. All of that is only about twelve thousand years old, or, 6% of our history. The fact that we don’t have newspapers from the other 94% of our history doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It also doesn’t make it any less important when thinking about the range of human possibility, and the range of possible human futures.

Much of science fiction deals with imagining dystopia. I’ll talk about why that is later, but I strongly believe that, at this moment in time, we need to remember that one of the highest callings of science fiction is imagining utopia. I don’t mean starry-eyed visions of a fairyland that drops out of the sky. I also don’t mean a static society built on some fundamental irony like panopticon or the suppression of free will. I mean honest, earnest engagement with the question of what a better world looks like.

In the Earthseed trilogy, Octavia Butler’s characters go through hell in their struggle to establish a utopian community. In the Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson’s characters go through several revolutions and constitutions in building a better world than the one they came from (Earth). Ursula K. Le Guin—who died while I was composing this talk—is the leader of us all in this regard. Her work engages the idea of realistic utopia over and over again—through Hain, Anarres, Gethen, Earthsea, and of course, Omelas.

My novel The Actual Star is an attempt to work in that same tradition. The distant past—the collapse of Maya civilization—takes place amid the failure of monarchy. The present—our age, the “Age of Emergency”—takes place amid the failure of capitalism. So, what does the year 3012 look like? I’ll first describe it, and then describe how I got there, extrapolating from this moment in time.

~

In 3012, the world operates by the twin philosophy of accumulation and dispersion. Put as simply as possible, The Law of Accumulation states that accumulation of any human property ultimately leads to human suffering. For example, accumulation of capital leads to inequality. Accumulation of family ties leads to feuds. Accumulation of feuds leads to war. Accumulation of population leads to disease. Accumulation of territory and power leads to war. Not necessarily at first, or even for centuries—but eventually, always.

The antidote is the Law of Dispersion. Put as simply as possible, it states that lasting peace can only result from the constant temporal and spatial dispersion of all human properties. In other words, we build a society that flows with, not against, the entropic nature of the universe.

In 3012, there are no borders. There are no nations. There are no families, aside from the human family. We call every other person “carnala,” a Mexican Spanish term meaning “a blood relation.” The average life expectancy is 130 years. The world population is steady at one billion. We roam the earth as permanent nomads, and, by common agreement, only own as much as we can carry—this is why the system is called Laviaja, a feminized form of “El Viaje,” Spanish for “the journey.” Those of us who cannot move or walk are accommodated so radically by mutual aid, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality that the very concept of disability no longer exists. In fact, many of us choose to have what we think of as disabilities, and call them “gifts,” because they are ways of creating community.

We eat primarily by foraging, a practice now aided by advanced artificial intelligence and augmented reality. No one eats animals, since we began learning their languages. Where there isn’t much to be foraged, our photosynthetic skin takes over. When we want home-cooked food, we go to a wayhouse. Wayhouses are places where we can rest for up to a period of nine days, in exchange for a few hours of work a day. We gather for two daily meals plus, in many areas of the world, teatime. Agribots—farming robots—do the majority of farming and gardening, strictly on a subsistence basis, near wayhouses. In other words, no one goes hungry. Food security is simply not an issue. This is because, at a certain point, around the 23^rd century, all technology was built to serve humankind, not profit.

None of us stay in the same place for more than nine days. None of us even stay with the same people for more than nine days. But whomever we lose, we regain. With whomever we meet on the road, we fall into any number of familiar roles—sister and sister, lover and lover, mother and child, aunt and niece, elder and youth—and one of the greatest joys of life is that dance of discovery, of what each new person is to the other. If we give birth, we gladly give up our baby within nine days; assured that our child will come back to us again and again in the form of other children, throughout our lives.

There is no space travel, since space programs were dependent on capitalism. There are aliens, but they’re so far away that we have to wait a few hundred years every time we want to say anything, so it doesn’t affect our lives very much. There are no weapons; the very idea is strange. Crime is very rare; when it does happen, in the worst cases, the crime is made public and the perpetrator is marked for others to see and avoid if they wish, but the criminal is still allowed free movement in the world. Their exile is social.

There’s no currency or system of money; there’s a worldwide, perpetual gift exchange. Objects have no value beyond their practical use; a plastic bowl is as good as a porcelain bowl. There’s no manufacturing because there’s no need for material goods. Everything is used on a recycled basis.

There are approximately fifteen hundred genders. Anyone who wants to bear a child can do so. No pregnancy is unplanned. There’s no correlation between genitalia and gender. Some of the genders are in fact the descendants of nationalist and ethnic identities, as there have long ceased to be nations or ethnic groups in any meaningful way, given the Law of Dispersion. Identity is completely voluntary and mutable.

The system of government, such as it is, is a worldwide sortition democracy, which is actually a very old form of democracy. A legislature is randomly selected from a pool of all available citizens, from the age of seven years old. This legislature is in session twenty-four hours a day, its members refreshed every hour, on the hour, mostly just to re-ratify a basic Bill of Rights, but also to take up whatever special questions apply on the global scale. As a citizen, you’re called to serve for about one hour every year or two. For local matters, moving clusters of people are governed by algorithms called “umbrellas” that take into account each person’s needs and preferences. An umbrella may govern a single wayhouse, or an area of a hundred square kilometers, depending on the number of people present, which is always changing.

A person can opt out of this system. They aren’t punished. They aren’t banned. They’re never refused food or shelter, care or companionship, wherever they go. The highest law is the rule of the road, which is radical hospitality. As the saying goes, The strangest stranger is your sister.

I’ve described this future to a few friends. About half think it’s a utopia and half think it’s a dystopia. A lot of people can’t imagine not having a permanent home or a set family. I understand that. I love my apartment in Durham. I strongly identify with my family. I love eating meat. I’m a creature of my century. At the same time, I want to explore the possibility that what we take for granted as the foundations of society are not only no more natural than any other state of being, but the ultimate roots of violence in the world. I wanted to see what happened if I pulled up those roots. And this thought experiment proceeded directly from in our current moment in history.

~

So how did I derive this version of the future from today?

To answer that, I need to name a very important book. Rebecca Solnit is probably most famous for Hope in the Dark and Men Explain Things to Me. But the book that felt most relevant to my research was A Paradise Built in Hell, published in 2009. The thesis of the book is that utopian communities of radical mutual aid arise spontaneously in the wake of natural disasters. Again and again, drawing from five case studies and decades of disaster research, Solnit describes spontaneous gathering, joyful presence, a profound euphoria among survivors, and a longing to return to that state.

But oftentimes—and increasingly so, in the modern era—those utopian communities are criminalized and destroyed by forces of so-called “civilization,” especially the state and wealthy elites. This was nowhere more apparent than in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where flood victims seeking help were murdered and penned up because of the lies spread by the media, military, and state. Another example is the brief window of time after 9/11. The world was stunned by how New Yorkers united in radical mutual aid, love, compassion for total strangers—a state of being shattered by the return to “business as usual,” which in that case, meant waging a war that made no sense, and made the world a far worse place.

To paraphrase Solnit, we have it all backwards: the society we currently live in is the catastrophe, and going through a natural disaster gives us the opportunity to wake up from the spell. She argues that these spontaneous utopias are just as natural and native to us as any other way of living, if not more so; and in fact, one we’ve practiced as a species before. Her challenge is: how do we codify those spontaneous utopias into a daily, workable system of government?

My answer is the future world I just described to you.

It’s a world shaped by climate refugees—constantly wandering, practicing radical hospitality, making communities of mutual aid that form and collapse and form again.

And here’s why this specific version of the future matters: we are about to enter a unprecedented period of global natural disasters. In fact, we’re already in it. In the next thirty years, researchers estimate that up to 300 million people worldwide will be displaced because of climate change. As a comparison, the Syrian Civil War “only” displaced 13 million, “only” five million of whom actually left the country. So five million was enough to swing elections to the far right, see the rise of xenophobia, make Great Britain leave the European Union, break whole infrastructures that we took for granted, and has killed thousands of refugees. So now imagine those effects, multiplied by sixty, in the next thirty years.

This is why I predict that the next millennium will be shaped by climate refugees.

In September I attended a conference organized by a think tank based in Brussels. I remember a workshop on the refugee crisis in Europe. A Member of Parliament from a Scandinavian country confessed that she was exasperated by the dominant opinion in the room, namely, that European nations should accommodate the influx of refugees. She said, How do I explain this to my constituents who are about to retire, that the money for the pensions they’ve been expecting their whole lives is being depleted, because it’s going toward social services for people who are just arriving?

Well, the answer is very hard: those pensions existed in the first place because of the ongoing exploitation of the very countries those refugees are fleeing. The Centre for Applied Research published a study last year that estimated the amount of wealth flowing from so-called developing countries to so-called developed countries is twice that of the flow in the opposite direction. To quote anthropologist Jason Hickel, “What this means is that the usual development narrative has it backwards. Aid is effectively flowing in reverse. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.” In other words, our way of life in the United States depends directly on the impoverishment and terrorization of the rest of the world.

But no one can get elected by saying that. No one can get elected by saying the least of it. In my opinion, Hillary Clinton tried. She tried telling the white working class that their manufacturing jobs were simply not coming back, that the winds of the world were blowing in such a way that there was no way to make them come back, but that she had a plan to train them for the new jobs that did and would exist. Instead, as we all know, the white working class overwhelmingly voted for a man who promised to resurrect jobs that no longer exist, and in truth, never had the knowledge, intention, or desire to do so.

The wave of climate refugees is not the only wave that’s about to hit us. Global inequality has tripled since 1960. Oxfam recently reported that eight men hold more wealth than the lowest four billion combined. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030—only twelve years from now—40% of all jobs will be automated. Given any one of these factors, it’s pretty clear to me that the systems in place are about to fall. In our lifetimes. That’s a given.

In my mind, that’s not a bad thing.

Here’s why: because it will give us that break, that window, into a radically other form of living. I try to think of wealthy Western nations really holding back 300 million refugees at their borders and the idea is laughable. Especially when millions of those refugees will be internally displaced, will be you and me. I try to think of police trying to keep people from occupying the thousands of empty apartments in our cities that are just parked there, as investments for the wealthy, and never inhabited. There will be too many of us. And maybe finally, we will realize, as a species, that borders don’t make sense anymore. That nation states don’t make sense anymore. That capitalism doesn’t make sense anymore. That not having a universal basic income doesn’t make sense anymore. To quote Le Guin again: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

And—I will add—the earth acts on human beings. Climate change isn’t just the invisible hand driving us now; it has been, throughout all of history. The Agricultural Revolution was probably the result of climate change. The Levant and Nile Valley were probably settled because of climate change. Ancient Maya civilization rose and fell because of climate change. And now capitalism and the nation state may well fall because of climate change.

I find hope in that. I’m even thrilled by it. I believe we currently live in an age of spectacular barbarism, but that circumstances are colluding to give us a way out. Nowhere is it written that capitalism is natural, that poverty is natural, that war is natural, that patriarchy is natural, that monogamy is natural, that individualism is natural, or that the two-parent two-child family is natural. We made all that up. Hedge funds, corporations, institutions, oligarchies, profit, brands, nation states, borders—we made all that up, too. At the most fundamental level, they are fictions. We can make new fictions in their place.

And we must be very, very careful which fictions to choose.

~

Now I’m going to come back to the idea of dystopia. A lot of popular science fiction is set in post-apocalyptic landscapes, to the extent that a lot of people conflate science fiction with post-apocalyptic stories or with dystopia, as if the only futures available to us are dark. Think of Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I do think Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the greatest films of all time. But I just never bought that vision of the future. I never believed it. Mad Max is a fun fantasy and The Road is bleakness porn, and that’s fine, but as for describing a plausible human future, I don’t think they do, and I don’t think they’re meant to. Nevertheless, they have an incredibly strong influence on popular imagination. As Solnit writes, “Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity…but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.” As goes popular imagination, so goes belief, and so goes behavior. Which fictions we choose to elevate matters.

I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.

We don’t need more dystopian narratives. We already live in a dystopia. Dystopia is the lived reality of billions of people on earth, right now, including in the United States, and it didn’t start with Trump. Ask the people who wake up every day wondering whether this is the day they’ll be executed by the police. Or the people who are under surveillance because of their religion. Or the people who are taking refuge in churches so they aren’t deported back to the country they fled from, where they face torture and death. Or the people who stand on street corners with legs or arms missing, who supposedly fought for “national security” of “the greatest country on earth,” but came back to a system that fails to provide them with the most basic care. Or the hundreds of public servants who are being purged from the government at this moment. We in the U.S. are living through an authoritarian takeover right now. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s not conjecture, and it’s not hyperbole. It’s a textbook case.

Even if we manage to avoid an authoritarian future, even if Trump is impeached tomorrow, I don’t think we’re going to go back to normal. What is normal? I was born in 1981, so my understanding of ‘normal’ is small-town Pennsylvania in the nineties. Not much of world affairs ever touched my hometown, except our weekly copy of Newsweek that arrived on Tuesdays, with the latest headline on Kurt Cobain or Nancy Kerrigan. Because of that upbringing, I’ve always had an expectation of relative stability—that things were going to be the same from one year to the next. That there would always be such things as colleges, banks, hospitals, private land, armed police, publishing companies, coffee shops, or a judicial branch of government.

Now I’m not counting on any of it, even for the privileged. It’s a way of protecting myself, of staying light on my feet. I think those who don’t expect a return to normalcy will be the best positioned to harness the moment for good, to create and choose new stories that will guide us into the future. Stories where technology serves humankind and not profit. Stories unlike the ones we have in The Road or Ex Machina, where we aren’t terrified of each other, aren’t suspicious of each other, don’t enslave each other for profit and pleasure. Stories that reflect the lived reality of disaster research: that humankind is fundamentally kind. We live in a dystopia now. But the Age of Emergency is our best chance to change it.

~

So here are my instructions for the Age of Emergency.

1. Ask yourself what you really need.

Can you move? Do you have food? Do you have shelter? Are you warm enough? Do you have company, of family or friends? Do you have the medicines you need to stay alive? Do you have a voice? Do you have a will? Do you have time?

There may soon come a time when our definitions of what we need will change radically; but if we have them, we’ll have enough. The less you need, the more free you’ll be, and the more you’ll be able to change when the time comes.

2. Ask yourself what you really believe, and why you believe it.

Rebecca Solnit writes: “Any belief that is acted on makes the world in its image.” I would extend that to say: stories are a type of belief. This is why I said we must be very careful when we choose which fictions to elevate in popular culture.

It matters. Because when disaster strikes, will I stay inside to bar the door and make sure no one takes my stuff or eats me, like in The Road? Or will I check on my neighbors to make sure they’re okay, like in Parable of the Sower? I think I’ll do the latter, but I won’t really know until the time comes. I won’t know which stories I’ve really chosen to believe and act on. We have a choice of whether to create and consume positive visions of the future. It worries me that I don’t see many of them right now. Demand them, find them, recommend them, embody them.

3. Follow artists.

We don’t often think of artists as leaders. In fact, we don’t often think of artists as people, but as leprechauns who live beyond daily needs like groceries and toilet paper. I can attest that that’s not the case. We live in a culture saturated with art, everywhere we turn, online and offline, every minute of every day, and it profoundly influences our lives. But we’ve been so trained to devalue it—to expect it to come to us for free—that we are in serious danger of losing the voices we need most, at the time we need them most.

To quote activist Walidah Imarisha*, “All organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality education; a world free of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism; we are talking about a world that doesn’t currently exist. But collectively dreaming up one that does means we can begin building it into existence.”

The ones who do that dreaming in the first place? Are usually artists.

In other words, artists are absolutely leaders, in a way that no one else can be. Politicians have to worry about saying the thing that will get them elected. CEOs have to worry about saying the thing that will increase their profit shares. That’s fine—that’s their job. An artist’s job is just to tell the truth, or come as close to it as she can. And that’s why, to quote Le Guin again, “Resistance and change often begin in art.”

And when I say art, I don’t mean abstract paintings hanging in well-lit galleries. That’s just the 1% of the art world. Not surprisingly, it’s a world of wealthy white elites. Meanwhile, people of every color, of every age, in every country, in every socioeconomic class, make art. Subway dance is art. Church choirs are art. YouTube makeup tutorials are art. Memes are art. Fashion is art. Game of Thrones reaction videos are art. Graffiti is art. Vine videos were art, back when Vine existed—a platform brilliantly realized by brown and black teenagers, until it fell prey to corporate profit motives. We swim in art, the vast majority of it produced by those who are underpaid or not paid at all, who aren’t “seen” by the existing system of financial compensation. We have to be the ones who see them, instead. Find the artists in your life. Find a way to pay them for their work. Then follow them: they’re telling the truth.

~

Last fall, I went to Mexico for two months to learn Spanish. After finishing school in Oaxaca, I went to the coast. I chose a beach where the waves looked the right size and went out with my boogie board. The same thing happened over and over: I’d see a perfect wave curling right toward me, and I’d be in the perfect position to catch it, but as it got close, I saw it was way too big, so with my body half-turned, I’d hesitate and then try to dive into it, and it was too late and I’d wipe out. That happened three times (and I got sand in my sinuses) before I realized these waves were just too big.

I’ve thought about that situation many times since. About the moment of hesitation right before the wave comes down, when you know you’re screwed. When I think about the next fifty years, I have that same feeling: the wave is just too big.

But when talking about the near future, I don’t think it’s useful to say “we’re all doomed” or “the world’s going to end.” It’s a lazy way to disengage. There are eight billion of us. At least some are going to survive even the worst, including a nuclear war, a supervirus, or a methane hydrate burst. When people say “we’re all doomed,” what they really mean is that the status quo is doomed, and that’s potentially an excellent thing. We as a species don’t have the option of leaving this moment in time. Paradoxically, I find tremendous freedom in that. It’s not a matter of whether everything’s about to change. It’s a matter of which story of the future we choose now, so that we’ll be ready when the wave hits.

Let us choose wisely. Thank you.

*Correction: in the audio version, this quotation is incorrectly attributed to activist adrienne maree-brown, instead of to Ms. Imarisha. I apologize for the error.

~

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