{"id":40279,"date":"2022-08-18T12:08:48","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T09:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smex.org\/?p=27857"},"modified":"2022-08-18T12:08:48","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T09:08:48","slug":"breadnet-fiction-prize-digital-utopias-and-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/breadandnet.org\/ar\/breadnet-fiction-prize-digital-utopias-and-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"Bread&Net Fiction Prize: Digital Utopias and Futures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: The deadline is Sunday, September 18.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There is no doubt that today\u2019s digital spaces are mainly ruled by a handful of profit-hungry technology megacorporations. Their practices benefit society\u2019s most powerful and exclude marginalized groups and individuals. From social media platforms to search engines to our GPS technologies, the internet is not as free as we\u2019d like to believe. But can it be otherwise? How can the internet operate in ways that uplift peoples, democracies, and the globe, rather than further harm the disadvantaged?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We’re seeking stories that imagine digital futures where online communities succeed in propelling the values of openness, tolerance, the free exchange of knowledge, and collective efforts for social justice and transborder liberation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although this was the initial \u201cutopian\u201d promise of digital technology\u2014and the internet in particular\u2014 tech companies under capitalism did quite the opposite. They made it easier to surveil, control, profile, and profit from our data, bodies, and behaviors, often in ways obscure to us. This lack of transparency made it almost impossible to challenge and change their policies and practices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Governments, in compliance with tech companies, have repeatedly abused the internet and communications technologies to spread political disinformation, identify and prosecute rightful dissent, muzzle free speech online, and incite senseless violence. We have also seen how artificial intelligence and machine learning often inherit, replicate and amplify social, racial, and gender bias and prejudice, threatening the wellbeing and livelihood of minority groups and entire peoples.<\/span><\/p>\n

At <\/span>Bread&Net 2022<\/span><\/a>, we are opening the space for creative writers with lived experience of marginalization and\/or from grassroots social justice movements to imagine how the world would look if technologies had been used to truly free, protect, and advance humanity and the planet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Writers will be given creative freedom as long as the main principles of the story are met which include:<\/span><\/p>\n