I read the most amazing introduction to visionary fiction last night after the first (internal) presentation of the #DeafSafeAI report.... for one thing, this essay provides the clearest explanation I've come across for the concept of "prefiguration."

Imarisha writes:

"When we focus on collective action, mutual aid, self-determination, and centering the leadership of the marginalized, we live the change we want and defy linear time. We pull those liberated futures into the present " (Practicing New Worlds, 2023, p. 62 by AK Press).

Her context is abolition; our context is interpreting among the vast expanse of human languages. The principles of emergent strategy seem to me to apply just as well in this case: "imagination is a practice" (p. 62) because "we have lived all of our lives within systems that tell us radical change is an impossibility" (p. 57).

Because "cultural shifts are key to real systemic transformational change" (p. 61), we have "to be unrealistic in our visions of the future because all real, substantive social change has been considered to be unrealistic at the time people fought for it - until those people changed the world to make it happen" (p. 56).