The Protopian Prize Fiction Contest

​Folk Tech is a solidarity-based movement among designers, developers, and people in communities who want digital technology that supports their daily life and interdependence without the extraction, exploitation, or surveillance found in most proprietary technology today.

​​In Silicon Valley, people are “consumers” and “users.” We resist a narrative that turns people into subjects of a technocracy. With Folk Tech, we’re all just folks.

​The Protopian Prize is a fiction contest that asks what we can envision as people working toward liberatory futures, meeting obstacles, and making real change. “Protopian”—a word coined by Kevin Kelly, one of the contest's judges—means an achievable, optimistic future characterized by continuous, incremental progress rather than revolutionary leaps or a static, perfect state. Protopian stories imagine a future that is neither flawless nor catastrophic, but instead workably better than today. It’s about plausible progress rather than perfection or collapse.

​Joining us from Protopian Prize will be…