Imagining a World Without Nuclear Weapons: Jenny Johnston on Protopian Storytelling
The Long Now Foundation
In this five-minute Ignite talk for the Long Now Foundation, Jenny Johnston argues that protopian stories, which imagine better but not perfect futures, are a tool for getting past the dread that surrounds humanity's hardest problems. Johnston illustrates the idea with a project on one of the most difficult existential threats, nuclear weapons, and asks whether a better future can only be reached by first doing the work of imagining it.
What a Protopian Story Is, and Why Now
Johnston begins by observing that protopian stories are "having a moment" and appear everywhere. They define a protopia as neither utopia nor dystopia. Protopian stories imagine futures that are better but not perfect, and they embrace "a kind of messy progress."
Johnston attributes the current surge to humanity being "in a weird place." We face a tangle of existential threats that we struggle to see past, let alone find a way through. We know huge change is coming and that our current ways of acting and thinking won't carry us forward, but what we are moving toward is hard to make out. In that situation, Johnston says, we are very good at telling ourselves stories that terrify us about the future. Protopian stories do the opposite. They reorient people around hope and possibility instead of dystopian dread.
The Push-Pull Problem in Nuclear Disarmament
To show what this looks like in practice, Johnston describes a project launched the morning of the talk. They call it possibly the first concerted effort to apply protopian storytelling to nuclear weapons.
Johnston says ridding the world of nuclear weapons is daunting for many reasons, and one of them is vision. They frame this as a "push-pull problem." Most disarmament efforts focus on the push: pushing for risk reduction, for disarmament, for policy change. Johnston calls all of that necessary work. What is notably missing, in their view, is any attention to the pull. The field knows what it is trying to move the world away from, but not what it is moving toward. The goal is framed as an absence, in this case the absence of 13,000 weapons. Johnston asks what the corresponding presence would be and says this is "almost completely unexplored terrain."
The 2095 Prompt and the Creative Team
Johnston's organization, Horizon 2045, worked with Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination to write what they call a provocative protopian prompt: The year is 2095, 50 years after the last nuclear weapon has been disarmed. What does that world look like?
They assembled a team of creatives to respond to it, including:
- some of today's leading science fiction writers
- a leading nuclear anthropologist
- a thinker who leads innovation projects for the United Nations
- an award-winning slam poet
- a composer to imagine what 2095 sounds like
- a Brazilian illustrator to render the world visually
Johnston calls this "a creative full court press." One by one, the contributors went "into the darkness" to explore what future becomes possible once nuclear weapons have been removed from the human story.
The World the Stories Envision
Johnston describes the future that emerged from the contributors' work. It still has problems, plenty of them, including new ones. It is messy. But recurring themes appear across many of the stories:
- Resources now tied up in nuclear weapons are redeployed for better purposes.
- Nuclear weapons facilities become environmental revivification centers.
- Protocols exist for retiring technologies capable of mass harm, even when some of those technologies could also do some good.
- People remember their responsibility to one another and to all species on the planet.
- People start acting on behalf of future generations, not only themselves.
- New forms of collaboration and coordination blossom at planetary scale.
Johnston describes all of this as deep change coming from the pull side. Their broader point is about how thinking works. When we start from constraints, our thinking stays blinkered. When we lead with possibility, the range of what seems possible changes.
"You Can Do Hard Things"
To explain why this matters, Johnston shows a bracelet they gave their daughter as a toddler. It reads "beautiful girl, you can do hard things," and Johnston wore it for the talk. Protopian stories, they say, remind us that individuals and humanity can do hard things, that humanity now must do hard things, and that we can come out the other side better for having done that work.
Johnston closes by saying that our darkest thinking is not our only thinking, and certainly not our best. We need our best thinking now to lift us out of our problems and toward a more secure and flourishing future. They end with an open question: what if we can only reach that better future by doing the advance work of imagining it?
[Music]
Protopian stories are having a moment right now. They're everywhere. And if you don't know what a protopian story is, think of it as not utopia and not dystopia. Protopian stories imagine better futures, but not perfect futures. They embrace a kind of messy progress.
The reason we're seeing this protopian surge right now is because humanity is in a weird place. We have this tangle of existential threats in front of us that we're having hard times seeing past, and certainly our way through. We know that huge change is coming and that our ways of acting and thinking are not going to carry us forward, but the thing that we're moving towards is hard to see in the distance. So we're really good at telling stories to ourselves that just terrify us about the future, and protopian stories do the opposite. They're powerful tools for reorienting us around hope and possibility, and not dystopian dread.
I'm going to illustrate this with an example, because just this morning there was a launch of what might be the first ever concerted effort to bring protopian storytelling to one of the most difficult existential threats we have, which is nuclear weapons.
Now, ridding the world of nuclear weapons is daunting for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them has to do with vision. Think of it as the push-pull problem. So many efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons focus on the push: it's pushing for risk reduction, pushing for disarmament, pushing for policy change. It's push, push, push to make progress, and that's all really necessary work. But what's notably absent from this space is any focus on the pull. We know what we're trying to move the world away from, but what are we moving it towards? There's so much focus on creating an absence, in this case an absence of 13,000 weapons, but what is the presence? What is the thing that we're moving towards? It turns out this is almost completely unexplored terrain.
So here's what we did. My organization, Horizon 2045, and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination cooked up this provocative protopian prompt: the year is 2095, 50 years after the last nuclear weapon has been disarmed. What does that world look like?
So then we got this amazing team of creatives to help us: some of the best science fiction writers of our time, a leading nuclear anthropologist, a brilliant thinker who leads innovation projects for the United Nations, an award-winning slam poet, a composer who could help us imagine what 2095 sounds like, a Brazilian illustrator to bring the whole thing to life visually. It was like a creative full-court press. And then they started, one by one, to go into the darkness and imagine what that future could be, asking what future becomes possible when nuclear weapons have been removed from the human story.
So based on what they came up with, let me tell you a little bit about that world they're envisioning. We still have problems, plenty of them, and new ones. It's messy. But in so many of these stories, we see the resources that are tied up right now in nuclear weapons redeployed for better purposes. We see nuclear weapons facilities turned into environmental revivification centers, for example. We have protocols in place for retiring technologies that can do mass harm, even if some of them can do some good. We remember who we are and that we have a responsibility to one another and to all species on the planet. We start acting on behalf of future generations and not just ourselves. We see a blossoming of new forms of collaboration and coordination at planet scale.
Now, all of this is deep change coming from the pull side. The thing is, when we start to think about the future and we start with constraints, our thinking stays blinkered. But when we lead with possibility, what becomes possible becomes different.
So why does all this matter? This is a bracelet that I gave to my daughter when she was still a toddler, and it says, "Beautiful girl, you can do hard things." I'm wearing it tonight. Protopian stories remind us that we can all do hard things, and that humanity can do hard things, and humanity must now do hard things, and that we can come out the other side better for having done that hard work.
Our darkest thinking is not our only thinking, and it is certainly not our best thinking. And we need our best thinking now to lift us up and out of our problems and into a more secure and more flourishing future. What if we can only get to that better future by doing the advanced work of imagining it? Thank you.
[Applause]
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