Protopian Prize - Online Winners Showcase! 🎉🎉
​What if the future isn't doomed nor perfect, but it's genuinely better? Join us for a live reading and conversation celebrating the inaugural winners of the Protopian Prize Fiction Contest and the futures they dared to imagine.
​About the Protopian Prize
​The Protopian Prize Fiction Contest is a short story contest that ran from May 1 - July 31, 2026 hosted by Metagov and the Public AI Network. The contest invited artists, storytellers, and dreamers to share their vision of people working toward liberatory futures, meeting obstacles, & making real change. "Protopian”—a word coined by Kevin Kelly, one of our contest's judges—means an achievable, optimistic future characterized by continuous, incremental progress rather than revolutionary leaps or a static, perfect state.
​Visit protopianprize.com to learn more.
​About the Session
​This session is a virtual Winners Showcase: excerpts read aloud, writers in conversation with judges, and a room full of people who believe the stories we tell shape the futures we build.
​Participants will experience:
​Readings from the winning stories with attention to the pathways that lead from 2026 into the futures we dream of: the characters, the technologies, the moments where things actually turn.
​Judges perspectives on what made each story stand out as exemplary protopian fiction, and what the judges are still thinking about weeks later. We'll hear from contest judges and advisors  including Gideon Lichfield, a longtime technology journalist and the former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED Magazine, and Ruthanna Emrys, a sci-fi writer and the author of A Half-Built Garden, a protopian novel exploring themes of both technology and collective governance.
​This session is for writers, futurists, technologists, community organizers, and anyone who has ever thought: the story we're being told about the future isn't inevitable - it's actively being co-created by us.
​Note: The Winners of the Protopian Prize will be notified before this event!
​We'll also be celebrating our winners live at Mozilla Festival 2026 in Barcelona October 28-30th! If you'll be there, let us know. Email val@metagov.org. Mozfest Session Link: https://events.mozillafoundation.org/e/mozilla-festival-2026/page/schedule?sessionId=433794