Hello everyone  

This is Rachel Coldicutt with your (very!) semi-regular Hopeful Technology update.

If your stock of hope is running low, in this newsletter we’ve got some reading/gaming/watching recommendations to fill your summer months plus news and updates on setting up the Society for Hopeful Technologists.  

Updates updates updates 

The Society is still mostly a couple of very lively Signal groups (drop us an email at society@hopeful.technology if you’d like to join), but our aim is to launch a paid membership in the Autumn, with a programme of advocacy and related content. To make this possible we’ve registered as a co-operative.  

Co-operatives are founded and run by their members, and we are required to have three founding members to manage the organisational set-up. We ran an open process with the current set of volunteers and the three founding members are:

• responsible innovations, data consultant and educator Kathryn Corrick

• former lawyer and policy consultant and current big tech refugee Trevor Callaghan

• and me, technology researcher and strategist, Rachel

We will be responsible for stewarding the organisation, with a lot of help, until our first AGM, where we are required to stand down.

We’re also lucky enough to be working with a design partner on a rebrand. More on that very soon.

Since the last newsletter, I’ve done a couple of Hopeful talks and it was great to open this year’s Camp Digital in Manchester in May with an introduction to the Society. There was laughter! There were tears! 600 people waved their arms around a lot and went home with lovely badges (thanks to Hugh Wallace). You can watch it below and catch-up with the rest of the talks on the Camp Digital website, including Hopeful Technologist Tessa Quinn’s talk on delivering in a crisis for Ukrainian resettlement.

Now we have the admin out of the way, over to Grace Lyn Higdon…

Hopeful Technology Index

Helpful and hopeful things to read, hear, watch, play, and talk about with good company.

Everyone needs to raise their spirits sometimes with imagination, ingenuity, joyfulness and positive energy. We’ve picked some of our favourites and want to hear yours email at (society@hopeful.technology) or on Bluesky.

GAMES
868-BACK Online Strategy Game
I’ve been playing a lot of Michael Brough’s new game, 868-Back which is a puzzle game about hacking corporations and dismantling capitalism. One of those games that’s simple on the face of it but incredibly dense.
Recommended by Rick Smith

Hollow Knight: Silksong
Silksong was recommended by lots of our members (and Rachel’s teenage son). Described as both “wonderful and beautiful” and “fiendishly difficult”, it’s the sequel to Hollow Knight and was released at the end of last year by the South Australian indie games developer Team Cherry.
Read this interview on the development process

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Blue Prince both combine wonderful world building with fiendish puzzles (that often require a notebook and pen to solve)
Recommended by Alex Wrottesley  

FILM and TV

The Congress  
Robin Wright (from House of Cards and Princess Bride) is a past her sell-by-date actress who agrees to sell her entire personality to an entertainment conglomerate to become a new Lara Croft - the snag: she can never act as herself again. After that, this 2013 film goes mildly crazy but loads of ideas here and way ahead of it's time. Watch the trailer on YouTube.
Recommended by Lilian Edwards

Abbott Elementary, Double Date
What’s an episode of a sitcom set in an elementary school doing in a hopeful tech index? This is for everyone who’s ever read a book they particularly love at a particularly terrible book club. The teachers at Abbott discuss Octavia Butler’s classic climate dystopia Parable of the Sower. Perhaps a case of “if you don’t laugh you’ll cry…”
Recommended by Rachel Coldicutt

NOVELS

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future,
This is actually based on a real Welsh law that requires that parliament to take account of the interests of yet to be born generations. Don't worry, it's not about longtermism! Stan uses this as a device to give us an engaging and hopeful only slightly  fictional shopping list of ways science could reverse climate change.
Recommended by Lilian Edwards  

Naomi Alderman, The Future 

What do tech billionaires do at the end of the world? They hole up somewhere no one can touch them. The Future is one of my favourite novels of the last few years – it’s a cautionary tale about technology, faith, belonging and adventure, that takes in several continents, unorthodox online forums, and secret bunkers.  
Recommended by Rachel Coldicutt  

NON-FICTION (All Sorts)

DAIR Institute, Zine Library
We’re huge fans of the work of the DAIR Institute, and their zine library is a treasure trove: the Towards Truly Community Centred Research zine by Dylan Baker and Pauline Wee is an indispensable how to guide, while the Possible Futures series collates draws together poetry, collages, mixed media, and diary entries from workshop attendees. Fantastic for a burst of inspiration.
Recommended by Rachel Coldicutt

James Bridle, Ways of Being
James Bridle is a technologist and artist whose body of work explores the limits of technology. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the ubiquity of AI, this is a great antidote – a contemplation of more-than-human intelligences and ecosystems that includes slime, bees, and migrating trees. This is a great read if you want to escape from your devices for a while and reconnect with the world around you. Recommended by Rachel Coldicutt  

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
First published in 2004 and republished in 2016, this book is a patron saint text for us with a message that has stayed salient for over two decade. Solnit examines how activism has led to social change over the course of many decades. Contrasting hope with despair, Solnit explains:

Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
Recommended by Grace Lyn Higdon

Naomi Klein, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Smattered with dark humour, the book explores many different sets of doppelgängers from our own “digital golems” to a trucker convoy later mirrored by Anti-vaxxers. Klein uses the concept of “diagonalism” to understand coalitions that cut across conventional left—right political axes and argues that we have to understand these doubling and diagonal dynamics to move beyond them. The closing chapter on Unselfing is the book’s most hopeful with a call to collective action that encourages us to become unfamiliar with our individual selves:

becoming unfamiliar to oneself need not be a horrifying experience; I have felt it to be transcendent. When we come together in movements working for the scale of change demanded by our times it changes us, and we become people who are, if not unfamiliar, then certainly unexpected. Braver. More hopeful.

You can also listen to Sean Illing interview Klein on the Vox podcast
Recommended by Grace Lyn Higdon

Rachel Firth and Rose Hall, AI for Beginners
Yes, it is a book for young people (or to hand to a friend who is looking for a crash course in AI basics). The layout and illustrations help click complex concepts into place even for people who have been nodding along for years without quite following your AI heavy conversations. Highlights are the pages explaining ghost work, LLM’s getting it wrong, and how ChatGPT works.
Recommended by Grace Lyn Higdon

Mariana Mazzucato, The Common Good Economy
I read Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics a while ago and have been obsessed by the idea that we need new conceptions of value and growth that break us out of extractive, debilitating economic indenture.  This book is a masterclass in how to take those concepts and credibly, practically, deliver a hopeful future where public funds and technological innovation are deliberately steered toward collective planetary survival rather than unchecked corporate extraction. Mazzucato channels the spirit of Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto, proving that we must first liberate our minds from old economic scripts to engineer a fundamentally different, fairer society.  Accessible to all, and highly recommended.
Recommended by Trevor Callaghan

Global Justice Project, The Global Justice Report
I picked this up due to the press around it at launch and was woefully ignorant of the work that the World Inequality Lab has been doing for some time.  Fortunately the report (for the most part) avoids difficult technical abstractions and creates a clear narrative for non-economists. Rooted in a hopeful and imaginative view of where we could go - if we have the will - it maps an inspiring blueprint for a reconstructed society that leverages structural reforms to drastically reduce global labor hours and fund a massive, equitable energy transition. Alongside Mazzucato's book, this gives me hope that we can move towards something beyond "money printer go brr" as a mantra for the future.
Recommended by Trevor Callaghan

ONE PODCAST

Dreaming Against the Machine - podcast by Adam Becker (of More Everything Forever fame) is explicitly focused on imagining better tech futures
Recommended by Laurence Diver

WEB STUFF (Misc)

Deuxfleurs
Really cool stuff here. I love what Deuxfleurs do - a French cooperative who provide hosting and other services (non big tech) - they provide hosting for Osuny websites (a CMS, run by another French cooperative called Noesya), and from what I have been told the hosting is from servers that were destined for landfill / ewaste, but were repurposed, and now exist in the homes of the people who work at Deuxfleurs! So a very people-powered alternative hosting infrastructure.  
Recommended by Matt Tutt

Mechanical Pencil - An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us
Illustrated breakdowns of everyday objects
Recommended by Tessa Quinn

We hope you enjoy these picks - let us know your thoughts and send in your own recommendations that we can share.

Take care, see you next time, and don’t forget to follow us on Bluesky.

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Images by Gitika Saksena and thanks to all the Hopeful Technologists who contributed to this newsletter.