What comes after white supremacy? How do we build toward that future while managing the chaos of its decline? How do we protect people during the violent thrashing of a dying system? How do we ensure that what replaces white supremacy is actually liberatory rather than just a new form of hierarchy?

I joined Marion Atieno Osieyo on Black Earth Podcast to talk about futures work, climate justice, and what happens when Black women lead the work of imagining what comes next.

Afrofuturism's future-past reveals something that transforms all futures work. The futures we need have been here. They were built by people surviving conditions that required inventing new worlds. They were prototyped by communities that had no choice but to speculate, to imagine, to create alternatives because the present offered nothing.

These five books share an understanding that futures work is never neutral. We need different imaginations. Different questions. Different people leading the conversations about what comes next.

Traditional foresight asks: "What's most likely to happen?" Experiential Futures asks: "What needs to become possible?"

I was recently profiled in Mother Jones about how Octavia Butler's work shapes my approach to futures thinking and narrative strategy. The piece explores what it means to build speculative practices from Butler's understanding that all organizing is science fiction, and how that lens transforms the work of imagining what comes next.

Specialists in unreality are trained to hold contradiction. To sit with the absurd until it becomes coherent. To move between timescales without losing the thread. These are survival skills when the center cannot hold.

Most futures work begins with the assumption that tomorrow is available to us. That with enough strategy, creativity, or capital, we can build something better than what came before. What if your intellectual lineage doesn't include optimism? What if you were trained to see power as persistent, systems as durable, and change as the exception rather than the rule?

Uranus takes 84 years to cycle the zodiac. When it shows up, it arrives with force. It sparks flashpoints, tech leaps, and social ruptures. The planetary movements operate as a kind of temporal metronome, marking periods when certain kinds of change become possible, even inevitable.

In August 1985, Ebony magazine published a special issue called "Blacks and the Future: Where Will We Be in the Year 2000?" It invited Black Americans to look fifteen years ahead. What landed on newsstands was part forecast, part fantasy, part survival manual.

I'm speaking at LA Design Festival about how Octavia Butler saw fires, climate collapse, and social fracture long before anyone gave her credit. The talk explores Butler's methods as futures practice and why Black women keep seeing what's coming first.

Silicon Valley's elite build more than products. They build realities. Behind their inventions sit belief systems: warped, fervent, wildly resourced. Thanks to computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres, we have language for this tangled worldview: TESCREAL, a cluster of ideologies quietly guiding tech's most powerful decisions. I'm grateful to them for the language, and the lens.

America is stuck in a loop of its own making, frantically rebooting the same stories while the world moves on. The future is still alive, growing in ways the American imagination can no longer contain or commodify.

This is what Ryan Coogler's Sinners shows us: time doesn't follow a straight line. It folds. It layers. It loops back on itself and plays everything at once.

The futures cone wasn't built for this.

The truth is: if we had listened to Black women earlier, we might not be here. If we had listened to water protectors. To disabled organizers. To trans organizers. To undocumented storytellers. To aunties with go bags. We might have planned for this moment instead of reacting to it.

Who has been seeing the future all along, and why weren't we listening?

In March 2025, I had the honor of moderating a panel at SXSW called "Octavia Knew: How Black Women Are Predicting the Future." The panel was well attended, the energy was electric, and the conversation confirmed something I've long known: Black women have been doing futures work all along.

What if the most transformative futures aren't the ones moving at the speed of capital, but the ones unfolding in deep time? What if slow is a direction, not a delay?

In boardrooms across the world, futurists help companies anticipate market shifts and emerging technologies. But what about the organizations doing our society's most vital work - defending democracy, addressing climate change, dismantling systemic racism, and caring for vulnerable communities? The truth is, they need futures thinking even more urgently. Here's why.

Silicon Valley has monopolized our imagination about the future. Their version is seductive in its simplicity: every problem can be solved with enough technology, data, and "disruption." But this narrow vision of innovation isn't just limiting – it's actively harmful.

As a design studio focused on transformative futures, we spend our days imagining how things could be different. Not just slight improvements or iterative fixes, but fundamental reimaginings of the systems and spaces that shape our daily lives. We're not interested in making broken systems slightly less broken. We're interested in asking: What if we started over? What if we designed these systems for the world we actually want to live in?