Cover: Possible Futures
Top: VOL 001
Bottom: DAIR Logo, A community zine
Illustration: Five scribbled figures holding hands, over a light purple background and a scribble with various pieces from the zine collaged inside.
Page 1-2
THE FOLLOWING PIECES WERE CREATED DURING A WORKSHOP HELD VIRTUALLY ON APRIL 11, 2025.
CREATIVE COMMONS CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
WE ASKED PARTICIPANTS:
TELL US ABOUT YOUR IMAGINED TECHNO-FUTURES
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: Sarah Kiden, Research Fellow at the University of Southampton
In my ideal future...
an AI model launched years ago fully replaced further improved instruction problem solving, and conversational flow
multimodal capabilities, allowing them to understand both images and text -- the first for a widely deployed OpenAI model.
a faster and cheaper model.
copyright . data consent.
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Work description: Poetry
Credit: Anonymous
A brick in the wall Or a cog in the machine Is this what we teach for?
Transact, don’t think Craft a prompt, not a poem You are your metrics
No, we can’t afford To stop, to think, or to doubt We’re a university
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Work description: Haiku
Credit: Rasagy Sharma
Code writes itself, Jobs fade like old photographs, Human touch, a distant dream.
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Work description: T-Shirt with blackout poetry
Credit: Angelos from Joint Frontiers
Dear Future, It's hard to bring you into existence
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Work description: Poetry on image of a bench alongside a river and greenery
Credit: Laura Carter
together everywhere no borders no passports "Grandma, what was a visa?"
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Work description: Prose with images of a home with greenery on the roof, a grandmother on the phone, people planting and working on reforestation, and a table with materials for repairing electronics
Credit: Ramla Anshur, linkedin.com/in/ramlaanshur/
In my technofuture, we have embraced rewilding There is no separation of 'humans' vs 'nature', and it's not a hobbyist activity but the community lifeline Technology is a joyous tool used as and when needed We repair, reuse, and share our community tech
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Work description: Left is a collage of various images including greenery, green infrastructure, and fungi. Right is blackout poetry
Credit: Siobhan O'Flynn, University of Toronto, Instagram: @sioflynn, @sioflynn.bsky.social
young science marshaled medicine shaped climate
progress is happening, vulnerable
response to environmental justice investigation
Excellence.
Text Source: grist.org/grist-25th
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Work description: Poetry
Credit: Anonymous
My little world in 2050
In 2050 my kids will be grown up, maybe there’ll even be grandchildren. We meet every Sunday for lunch, everyone takes turns to prepare it.
In the summer, we sit outside in the garden, in wintertime it’s cozy inside.
On Monday my kids will return to friends, hobbies, studies and work. My partner and me will return to our daily routines and look forward to the future that lies ahead of our children.
The role of technology in the big world out there: To support our all daily lives, our communities and our environment.
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Work description: Haiku on illustration / collage of various sea creatures, flora, fauna, jellyfish overlaid and interlinked with blue, orange, green, and yellow tones
Credit: Katherine Olvera
unhomogenized a world with distinct texture strange and rich and real
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Work description: Black and white pen illustration of various figures, patterns, creatures including fish, crabs, sharks, seaweed, people, jellyfish, and other abstractions like stars, eyes, spirals, and flowers
Credit: Eliana Vaca
HABITAR EL CUERPO lo qie importa es la contencion
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Work description: 2 Haikus
Credit: Chris Weiland, @chriswei@mastodon.online
in dystopia we seek human connection a pathway opens
the latest smartphone a powerful piece of tech attention captured
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Work description: Haiku in yellow serif text on image of a gray bridge with a large tree across.
Credit: Chris Weiland, @chriswei@mastodon.online
the present is here who will decide our future? we must lead the way
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: Natasha Samantha Godwin
Progress means slowing down, solutionism and divided highways
Text Source: Progress happens because solutions create new problems to solve by Jason Crawford for Freethink
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: Jolene Armstrong
the raw, foundational presence, life, actuality take you to the experience of actuality,
Every trick the flashback, of being there. shatter and become
Text Source: The cinematograph, the “noematograph,” and the future of AI art by Ken Liu for Big Think
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: E.J. Pavy, Ph.D.
the world's discovered moderation
there's excitement to do better because growth is based
In others
Text Source: ChatGPT became the most downloaded app globally in March by Sarah Perez for TechCrunch
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Work description: Pencil drawing on lined notebook
Credit: Anonymous
stratight lines do not exist
In my Utopia
software does not exist. things aren't coded.
we can finally BREATHE
we can move freely
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Work description: T-shirt design with capitalized block text and orange pentagon, blue and orange arrow
Credit: Girlbandgeek
ROBOT FISH IS REPAIRING YOUR PHONE
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Work description: Poetry
Credit: Cynthia Feeny
Art is made by people And so freely given. No media is locked, Kept from those who desire.
Knowledge is shared amongst peers, strangers, and enemies. For which would hurt us more? Fortresses or bridges.
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Work description: Blackout Poetry
Credit: Yan Basque
The CEO is a system crash go rogue
Text Source: If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born by Steven Levy for Wired Magazine
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Work description: Poetry
Credit: Asma Hussein
In the name of efficiency and accuracy We lost all the rest, called it ‘bias’ — then progress Who cares for what’s lost in the cracks? We got our general super machines Who know everything in sweeps But nothing specific about you or me
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Work description: Hand-drawn text on image of blue wall of house
Credit: MARA
NO! MIS DATOS!
Image source: Almost blank wall, Paignton by Derek Harper, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Work description: Text on image of grandmother calling on cellphone
Credit: Anonymous
Slow Caring Warmth Joyful The knowledge of elders
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Work description: Cryptic Crossword
Credit:
This is a cryptic crossword. Each clue is a little puzzle. The number of parentheses is the number of letters in each word of the answer.
For example:
"Sorcerers come I and a country the source of creative vision (11)11 -> IMAGINATION (I-MAGI-NATION)
CROSSWORD:
- Ed, you charged particle for learning (9)
- Neither's partner, headless lush as the ideal learning speed (2,4)
DOWN 2. Model United Nations inside a mutually-beneficial national association -- it's where learning should happen (9) 3. Jumbled onrush as the ideal learning speech (2,4)
ANSWERS:
- Education
- No rush
- Community
- No rush
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: Co
replace the judgment, connections between people creates greater potential for trust recognition integration it enables people
Text Source: The worries about AI in Trump’s social media surveillance by Alfred Ng for Politico
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Work description: Poetry
Credit: Anonymous
Calmness in the middle of the fog. Clearing, opening, embracing wide. Open. We go.
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Work description: Text on image of glass building with assymetrical design and greenery pouring out of windows and balconies
Credit: Darcy Christianson
Fruits of labor. harvested
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Work description: Poem
Credit: Tatjana
Prompt: Write a poem with exactly 205 characters about the year 2050.
Now that we have stopped scrolling left the breaking news cycle fill the calm with chatter face to face everyone is housed There is so much cuddling Only sometimes the children asleep we tell each other stories about that time we almost lost our way
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Work description: T-Shirt design with sun, smile, and heart scribble
Credit: Elisa Abuin, Experience Design Manager. Madrid, Spain.
Let'ss de-computerise ourse1ves today
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Work description: Prose
Credit: Michelle Hughes, @MegaMichelle@a2mi.social
A Data Spill
AdTargetr dealt in a special kind of information: If you were a business and you wanted to know the habits of your customers, they would correlate email addresses to location data, and tell you the types of places your customers frequented. Now you could advertise in those places, hoping that the other people in those areas were also potential customers.
This was extremely illegal, of course. That's why AdTargetr only dealt on the Dark Web.
If the Data Protection Agency ever found out who ran AdTargetr, they were going to be in big trouble.
But there were only a few places that the location data could have come from, so it was easy to track down the company that provided it. A map startup.
The Data Protection Agency investigated, and found that their users' data was gathered intentionally -- already a major violation. They also found that the data was sold intentionally -- the worst violation.
The map startup was seized and brought to an auction of groups wishing to run it as a worker collective.
The money seized from the map startup could only go part way toward compensating the victims of the leak. That's why, like all information technology companies, they had been paying into the government's "Data Leak Cleanup Fund". That money went to helping individuals whose data had been leaked -- relocation was offered. New identity documents, new accounts on their platforms. The data ombudsperson would help with all that.
This program helped clean up data spills. It did some to reduce them at the source, by reducing the amount of data that companies stored. But more could be done: A society could be created based more on person-to-person relationships, where data didn't have the dangerous power it had over people.
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: Anonymous
So, what happens when We are ready to share
Text Source: The Cybernetic Teammate by Ethan Mollick for the One Useful Thing Substack
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Work description: Prose
Credit: Asmita Mehta, Futures Researcher, Royal College of Art
We never learn.
We always build massive infrastructures without considering alternative futures. It happened with highways in the petroleum age, and again with data centers in the Al age.
In the 2020s, the Al boom led to an explosion of data center construction. Governments and corporations rushed to expand computational capacity, prioritizing scale over sustainability. Localized and edge computing existed, but policymakers were blind to alternative models. Centralized infrastructure was seen as the only way forward. The signals were there. Heatwaves had already forced data centers offline. In the summer of 2024, a facility in the UK had to shut down when its cooling systems failed under extreme temperatures.
Climate experts warned that these energy-hungry infrastructures weren't built for a warming world. Advocates pushed for localized Al, energy-efficient edge computing, and smaller-scale infrastructure. But governments saw centralized Al as key to data sovereignty, while tech giants resisted decentralization to maintain control over computational economies. They couldn't imagine an Al future without massive structures.
By the 2050s, as energy grids strained and cooling systems failed en masse, these structures were slowly decommissioned. Now, in 2100, these once-powerful data centers lie abandoned- monuments to an era of reckless digital expansion. Their structures are crumbling, their servers silent. Archaeologists and historians explore their ruins, unearthing the remnants of a society that believed in infinite computation.
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Work description: Images (red and purple-lit party with glowsticks, cartoon world with people around it) with text
Credit: Anonymous
photo by kennedy ryann
In my ideal technofuture, you can tune a personalized AR system to reformat incoming speech to align with a healthy culture that works for you - your culture - while preserving the statement's best intent. harmful stereotypes and beliefs would be automatically processed to phase them out. this would be normalized, so we'd live in a hyper≠ compatible culture over an ethical, nonjudgemental, compassionate baseline
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Work description:
Credit:
What's a problem that bothers you about technology?
Problem: Tech is a one-sized-fits-all approach. The status quo of localization is the same tech shipped everywhere, only some copies have crappy translations.
In an ideal world, how would we design tech?
For emphasis: Communities are given the rights and support to develop an iteration - especially the first - of whatever tech they want and need.
Hard and Fast Rules:
No underQaid and exQloited shadow workers allowed! People are credited fairly for their work.
Funding and support shall not be bureaucratic! What shall be bureaucratic is the paper trail that demonstrates that all components and work that contributed to the tech abides by fair practices.
No stealing of natural resources allowed!
An objective of the tech shall be to have a small environmental footprint.
Time for the real imagination... What would a world look like where the problem identified is unimaginable?
People would have tech that they don't have to fight with, that is ethical, useful and intuitive, engaging and even delightful that helps them to achieve their creative vision for the world.
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Work description: Blackout poetry
Credit: Anonymous
access to live, uncensored images of conflict, poverty and disaster worldwide.
raw videos of people grieving rubble destruction
glued to our screens
distress. overwhelmed
'what's the point of all of this?' live your life.
ANONYMOUS Text Source: Muslim Youth Helpline Digital Distress Guide https://myh.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Digital-Distress-Guide.pdf
Back Cover:
Squiggle illustration from front continues with pictures of works from the zine. Purple touches on top and bottom. DAIR logo and dair-institute.org on far lower left corner.
Word cloud of words:
emancipatory communicative organic just enough technology humanistic breathable non-colonial breathtaking worldsense nature-centric anti-celebrity culture selflessness beautiful solarpunk attentive prefigurative diverse interdependent multilingual healing hope transformative nurturing disabled quilt philosphical heartwarming respectful children love schools purposeful densely intertwined hopeful pleasurable empathic revived food abundance independant tolerant evolving human-centered inspired effective inspiring regenerative playful expansive empathetic human truth co-created cozy sharing garden community joy equitable loving slow non-narcissistic anarchist longer tables accessibility preventative medicine cherished brave reimagine no-genocide handcrafted cooperation Indigenous humane courageous relaxting accepting fearless safety oracle trusting tender affirming embodied connecting low tech validation intentional balance liberatory serenety slow growth renewable empowering possible wise elders intelligence privacy nature-based enough liberation humanizing hopepunk holistic pluriversal anarchy productless abundant accountable united optimistic analog small kincentric respect low-tech reliable pleasure careful in touch thoughtful openess opensource communal open social silly together nature sustainable liberated solidarity coexistence justice just resilient joyful peaceful trust accessible queer equl local narure storyteller close restful flexible cute safe liberty love dignity connectiveness collaboration fundamental rights natural multimodal non judgemental kind-centric harmony no toxic echo chambers calm Било blackness symbiotic equity gentle care creative liberating deliberate 8feeling unbiased affordable authentic care full ethical empowered relevant co-creating abundance connected wise unburdened linux lo-tek empathy caring green compassionate relaxing inclusive responsible collective connections supportive Joinb understanding wildlife expanse interconnected distributed power biodiversity relaxed constellated friendly peace equal kind happy kindness imaginative collective responsibility integrated equality heart-centered open science freedom decolonized centered non-judgemental artful joyous cooperative thriving reflective healthy borderless non-exploitative emboldening decentralized slower-paced rewilded edifying victorious humanity common multilateral care no profit for big tech balanced Bupuno6 generous connection more rights flourishing utopian human-scale economic
