EdTech Imaginaries

I wrote my MA thesis on dystopias (you can read two essays based on that research here and here – it’s weirdly my most impactful piece of literary scholarship). I had always loved science fiction, thanks to my dad. We used to religiously watch Start Trek: TNG every Saturday night. I voraciously read the Star Wars expanded universe novels. I don’t remember when I first discovered dystopias – I was probably assigned 1984 in one of my CEGEP classes. I know I was assigned The Handmaid’s Tale in one of my Canadian literature classes in university. But it was 1984 that pushed me to read We, Player Piano, and Brave New World. It was an off-handed comment from someone (I wish I could remember) who told me, if I was interested in dystopias, to read Brown Girl in the Ring.

I had all of these futures swirling around in my imagination: the utopia Star Trek presented, the post-Rebellion civilization-making world of the Star Wars expanded universe, and the soul-crushing dystopian futures filled with surveillance, automation, repression, and censorship. It was also the mid-1990s, when young singers and artists were dying, and we became obsessed with the parallels to the artists of the 1960s who died too young. There was so little art or creativity in any of the future worlds I consumed. Sure, Picard would quote Shakespeare and Riker would occasionally play trombone, while Data desperately tried to connect with creativity as a plot point now and then, but mostly everyone was too busy doing their jobs to enjoy much more than a drink and a desert at 10-Forward. In Star Wars, the business of rebuilding a galactic government (which, is that really a great idea?) and defeating those who still believed in the Empire (shout-out to the villain so great he had to be re-canonized, Thrawn!), besides music at Mos Eisely and in Jabba’s palace, there wasn’t any art to be seen. Never mind the dystopias that outright banned anything creative or any artistic endeavor.

I wrote as voraciously as I read. I had a journal that I kept and wrote it when I couldn’t sleep (which was pretty much every night). I had notebooks filled with poems and fragments of stories that I carried with me and wrote in during class when I was bored (which was pretty much every class). I wrote Star Trek: TNG fan-fic on sleepovers at a friend’s house on her family’s Macintosh in my early teens, but by the time I was finishing high school, I was writing my own science fiction stories, which was almost all bad, but one stuck with me. It was a dystopian story I wrote in one of my first semesters at university, built from all of these futures, from all of these other imaginaries that I had internalized.

It was a future world where being an artist would get you committed, for your own safety, since artists were clearly mentally unstable, and thus had to be locked away. “Art” was thus created by machine (today we would say AI), and the art was optimized for a desired effect, be it calming, welcoming, to help you focus, etc. You could only dress in certain colors and certain styles. There were banned words, not as draconian as 1984, but everyone’s vocabulary was nonetheless limited. There was, as there almost always is, a small ruling class that presided over the population who were largely happy with the level of freedom and prosperity they had. And, as there always always is, there was an underclass of people who were unhappy with the status quo, the persecution of artists, and the attempts to wipe away human artistic creativity.

The main character was a young woman who was the daughter of an artist, a painter (my grandmother painted). She was still young when the artists were first rounded up and imprisoned, and was put in a boarding school for potentially troubled children, with the belief that artistic talent/drive was hereditary. The purpose of the school was to direct any sort of creativity towards more…economically productive uses, or to discipline the drive right out of them. The school sought to create “good citizens” which artists were clearly not. There, the main character is roommates with the daughter of one of the elites who has a rebellious streak, and thus placed at the boarding school, and they become best friends, with the one using her privilege to protect the other who is always in danger of being labeled an undesirable and sent away for good.

The narrative itself takes place in the present, with flashbacks to scenes at the boarding school and broken memories of the main character’s time with her mother. The main character is now a psychologist who is allowed to study artists, a rare feat for someone who was the child of an artists and thus potentially unstable themselves. Her best friend has ascended into the privileged world of the ruling class, but uses it to sneak out and participate in illegal gatherings and activities (think, again this was the 1990s, going to raves). As is always the case, the illegal and hypocritical (but relatively harmless) behavior of the ruling class is overlooked, but our main character knows better and stays away. She treasures her role as a psychologist, an observer, too much to throw it away on a party. Partly, she is motivated by wanting to understand her mother, partly because she has bought into the idea that artists are sick, and partly because she herself isn’t creative at all and wants to understand the drive, the impetus to not just make art but to make meaningful art.

The artists are all kept in the equivalent of rubber rooms with a two-way mirror where they can be observed. They are also cameras in their rooms at different angles. Forgive the morbid imagination of someone in their late teens/very early twenties, but the main interest of study was how long these artists could survive without being able to create anything before they would kill themselves. There were lots of scenes describing in cold, neutral language about what each of the patients would do to pass the time, how they would behave, and how they (eventually) ended their lives. There is (of course) one patient who is about the same age as the main character, a musician, that she is drawn to, as he has lasted longer than most. She doesn’t know it, but he spends his days conducting an imaginary orchestra, composing in his mind, and then playing notes on the cup of water he gets with his meals, a different one every day.

The narrative shifts perspectives as well, between the main character’s, her best friend, her best friend’s father (who has a strange interest in the main character, and through his perspective, you see just how much surveillance there is and the rot in the ruling class, although he is a true believer), and her mom’s perspective. I played with the “patients'” perspectives, and couldn’t decide if I wanted to keep them or not.

Anyway, the plot. Our main character seeks out the “underworld” in a quest, for her own justification, to better understand her patients, and perhaps develop an alternative way to “treat” them. She’s also looking for answers about her mother and who her father might be. Long story short, she finds out that her best friend’s dad raped her mom as “nature or nurture” experiment with the his two daughters (who were half-sisters) as the subjects. She also realizes that her mom never cared that she wasn’t naturally gifted as an artist but wanted her to just to play and be creative. She tries on last time, feels like she failed, kills herself, which radicalizes her best friend into joining the underclass for good. The patient…well, in one ending he dies of a broken heart because the main character dies, and in another, he stays alive because he believes that someday he’ll be free and there will be symphonies to write again.

I probably have…500+ hand-written pages of this manuscript (yes, I still have most of it, because I am a hoarder of words). I never finished it, losing confidence in my narrative that was too derivative and not original enough. But, as you can see, the narrative, that one imagined future, has stayed with me for almost 30 years. The story…it doesn’t haunt me, but it still lives in my imaginary, sometimes still wanting to be written, to be created. It’s an odd sensation, which I can’t tell if it’s because I’m ADHD or because I’m a writer (is this what it’s like for other writers, with stories that are fighting to get out?) or both. But, as I said on the front page of this site, I’m tired, well, weary is probably a better word, of dystopian imaginaries.

Audrey Watters, among other people, has always emphasizes the importance of storytelling when it comes to shaping our imaginary, especially when it comes to ed-tech, or technology more generally. Big Tech is really good at telling the stories that maximize their profits. I wish…I wish I had a better imagination, was a better storyteller, so that there may be more positive imaginaries out there for people to draw inspiration from. So this is what this site is for. Because, although I didn’t realize it, I have already been doing the work. And so have others. Now, it’s bringing the work into conversation with each other, and crafting a story from it all. Or lots of stories. Lots of possible futures filled with art and flourishing and creativity and justice and…

I don’t know what the right imaginary is for our future. No one does, no matter what they tell you (and if they are telling you, it is probably because it directly benefits them and people exactly like them). But I want options. I want a choice. I want lots of choices.

So that’s what this site is about. I’m collecting possible futures, different imaginaries.