The fate of the world depends on the stories we tell, and how well we tell them.

“If our ability to act powerfully is rooted in our ability to see powerfully, then it should not surprise us that our enemies are very interested in limiting our vision."
- Ricardo Levins Morales, 2010

“Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment through different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible…. Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us.”
- Ruha Benjamin, 2018
"I once thought I was wrong to fear the future. I was not. Time has brought me so many tragedies. Yet we can embrace that which we fear - embrace it and mold it - or else it will be molded for us. The journalist Al McFarlane has said, 'if we do not tell our own stories, we become victims to the imagination of others.' I have no interest in falling victim to others' imaginations. At the Institute for Manufactured Futures, we live by this. We will not become victims - rather, we will tell our own stories; we will tell them again and again, until they become indisputable truths. Until they become the world we live in."
- Jordan Lee Thompson, 2031


The Institute for Manufactured Futures (and later, the Institute for Manufacturing New Pasts and Futures) is a storytelling enterprise dedicated to predicting the future. This is not a practice of reading oracles, nor manifesting a future through sheer willpower - we leave that kind of future-telling to other professions. Specifically, the Institute for Manufactured Futures creates roadmaps for possible futures that we may build and inhabit. Through collaborative storytelling processes, the Institute crafts these roadmaps, evolving and modeling a practice to re-write our collective futures, determining pathways so that we can gain a sense on how to navigate through - or around - them.
Of course, maps become irrelevant. Whether due to the changing of arbitrary and ephemeral borders, the construction or abandoning of infrastructure, or the desertification of forests and the shifting of tectonic plates, all maps will become irrelevant. But in their moment they are indispensable. They provide us a sense of direction and destination, without which we would wander aimlessly, only hoping to find our way through simple luck or determination. The Institute strives to envision roadmaps to better futures as a foundation on which to build those futures.
There are, of course, futures in which the Institute for Manufactured Futures ultimately fails its own vision, becoming fascist and authoritarian, insisting on futures that seek survival for some at the expense of the rest, or that seek vengeance for those who deserve justice instead. However, there are significantly more futures in which the Institute for Manufactured Futures succeeds. In these stories the Institute provides pathways forward through uncertain times. These pathways are not easy, they are not perfect, but they insist wholeheartedly in a world full of joy - a collective liberation acknowledging that every life deserves dignity. Your future could fall into either category, could be more nuanced than that, could be too personal to consider the collective - that is for you to decide. These are, afterall, only stories.