Seminar: Protopian Prize Fiction Contest Launch
This will be the official launch of the The Protopian Prize Fiction Contest!
The Protopian Prize is a fiction contest inviting writers, storytellers, and dreamers to share their vision of people working toward liberatory futures, meeting obstacles, and 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. 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.
In 2026, our inaugural year, we will present prizes in two categories: 1) Public AI Prize and 2) Democratic Futures Prize.
• Public AI Prize is a call for writers to submit their original short fiction that helps imagine a positive future for humanity that foregrounds the potential of Public AI—and actionable steps to get us there. We're looking for stories that explore questions like: How can we restructure AI development and deployment to serve rather than exploit human creativity? How can AI systems support human adaptability and climate resilience rather than enabling surveillance and control? What laws, institutions, or incentives are needed to ensure AI is used to augment human capabilities instead of taking away human jobs?
• Democratic Futures Prize is a call for writers to submit their original short fiction that helps imagine a positive future for humanity that foregrounds the potential of collective self-governance —and actionable steps to get us there. We're looking for stories that explore questions like: How can new technologies enable greater collective participation in governance? What needs to happen to give society as a whole, rather than a few powerful players, the deciding voice on what kinds of new technologies get developed and how they’re used? What new rights do we need to articulate and protect in the face of new surveillance and control tools?
On this seminar, we will be introducing the contest and hearing from stewards including Ruthanna Emrys (sci fi writer), Gideon Lichfield (journalist), and Liz Barry (democracy technologist) as well as potential guest speakers from a prestigious science fiction and fantasy literary awards and magazine! We hope you'll join us.
More about Metagov Seminar: The Metagov Seminar invites individuals working in online governance to present their work to a community of other researchers and practitioners. Seminar topics include, but are not limited to, computational tools for governance, governance incidents and case studies from online communities, topics in cryptoeconomics, and the design of digital constitutions.
The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public. Note that the discussion is moderated.