NEW INC Y11 Creative Science: Tidelands 2100: Visions of Civic Protopia

Abstract

The concept of protopia, coined by Kevin Kelly, was introduced as an alternative to utopian and dystopian thinking, framing progress as incremental improvement rather than an idealized end state (Kelly 2016). In The Inevitable, Kelly describes protopia as a condition of continual becoming—futures that are “better today than yesterday”— emerging largely through cumulative technological development. More recent reinterpretations, including those advanced by Monika Bielskyte and the Protopian Futures collective, have expanded protopia beyond technological emergence toward pluralistic, ethical, and culturally grounded imaginaries (Bielskyte 2021). This work productively recenters values, inclusion, and alternative worldviews, while often operating upstream of technical specification, leaving open questions about how such imaginaries interface with concrete scientific research trajectories, deployment constraints, and governance mechanisms.