AfroRithm Futures Group in Flight! Mandalorian Jedi taking a leap to unleash our radical imaginations Ahmed Best @bestahmed and Jade Fabello @jade__fabSome âŠgreat recent memories from the dschool Futures Cantina space at SXSW.edu 2023, especially playing AfroRithms From The Future, seeing colleagues and meeting new ones and meeting the Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona as Jade gave me an AfroRithms card deck and handing it to him after I shook his hand!
Special thanks to @anilyn101 for the Best design for our AfroRithms From The Future Game and Alan Clark for his wonderful logo design that Anilyn so nicely recreated!
Awesome photos from @chloe___bertrand
Thanks always to the @fathomers and the Black Speculative Arts Movement @bsam.la for brilliant minds and caring humans!
#afrofuturism
#afrorithms
#afrorithmsfromthefuture
#blackspeculativeartsmovement
#afrorithmfuturesgroup
#afrofuturistpodcast
Meshell Ndeghecello@SFJazz on 5/2âŠhealing music much neededâŠThanks for this spoken word and lyrically moving close of this performance to witnessâŠ
EMERGENCE AFTER PARTY â DEDICATION
What if we stopped calling ourselves humansâŠ
and remembered we are Earthlings?
Ahmed Best reminds us as he expands this vision with his song The WellâŠ
Earthling culture is sharedâacross species, across systems, across time.
And in that shared culture, every biomeâ
every forest, ocean, microbe, and bodyâ
has a right to its dignity.
Not metaphorically.
Not aspirationally.
In practiceâŠin the futureâŠin the MultiPlanetary GardenâŠMothership styleâŠ
âž»
Tonight, I ground that vision in bloodline.
I dedicate this Emergence After Party
to my fatherâLonny Senior Brooks.
He came to seek his dream from Kansas Cityâ
the original home of @Fathomers â
and carried that energy into Los Angeles,
where he created, imagined, and built. He met another visionary soul my Mom Laurie BrooksâŠ
In the 1970sâbefore there were pathwaysâ
he was already writing futures into existence.
He produced a play:
Soul Alley â a story of the Black experience in Vietnam.
He wrote boldly.
He created relentlessly.
He even self-published a guide to smoking weedâ
because visionaries donât wait for permission.
And in LA, he founded a short-lived foundation
to support struggling Black artistsâ
because he understood something deep:
Dreaming is collective work.
âž»
Letâs be realâ
he didnât âmake itâ by the systemâs standards.
But that was never the real metric.
He planted signal
in a world drowning in noise.
He rehearsed futures
so I could live them louder.
âž»
So tonightâ
This is not just a celebration.
This is a continuation.
Of Earthling culture.
Of biome dignity.
Of impossible dreams that refuse to die.
From him â to me â to us.
We are not studying the future.
We are remembering it. âš
#AfroRithmFutures #Emergence #EarthlingCulture #AncestralIntelligence #Afrofuturism FuturesThinking BlackCreativeLegacy SignalNotNoise @fathomers@bestahmed 2nd video by @rockyourbest_fit
20 today âš
Celebrating our Amiehâindependent, curious, social, and always moving toward knowledge and light. Watching you grow into yourself has been one of the greatest joys of my life. So proud to be your Papa. So lucky to love you.
Hereâs to a beautiful Santa Barbara kind of dayâsun, possibility, and so many paths ready to meet your footsteps đâïž
Yom Huledet Sameach, Amieh đ«
#Amieh20 #ProudPapa #SantaBarbaraDays #Becoming
March 14, 2025 â a moment that stayed with me.
Last March at ASU, I joined the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) futures workshop imagining the library of 2035.
What I didnât expect was to walk directly into that future while it was still alive and breathing.
ASUâs Indigenous library collection stopped me in my tracks. Indigenous Speculative Fiction. Childrenâs books about becoming a good ancestor. Shelves curated with intention, care, and accountability. Books treated not as inventory, but as living carriers of memory.
And I proclaim my own Native Indigenous ancestry proudly from Mexico, likely Mayan as I dug deeperâŠalways knew my nose reflects that special Black Jewish Native mix, lol!
This is what ancestral intelligence looks like when institutions choose to nourish it.
Libraries are not just about access to information.They are about who gets to imagine, remember, and belong.
By the end of the workshop, we learned that IMLSâthe very institution making this kind of equity and futures-oriented work possibleâwas being defunded. Brilliant colleagues, stewards of public knowledge, suddenly pushed away from their lifeâs work. Futures interrupted mid-sentence.
It landed hard.
There was no strategic logic hereâonly a familiar pattern. An attempt to dismantle public access to knowledge, imagination, and ancestral memory.
Libraries threaten power because they teach people how to think, not what to think.They safeguard stories that refuse erasure.They make room for plural futures.
Defunding libraries doesnât save money.It manufactures ignorance.
Looking back now, that March gathering wasnât just a workshopâit was a warning.And a reminder of whatâs worth defending.
âThe aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.ââTo the Living memory of MLKâŠMay Justice roll down like water!
#ForOurLibraries #IMLS #FutureOfLibraries #IndigenousFutures #AncestralIntelligence ASU LibrariesAreLiberation PublicKnowledgeââââââââââââââââ
This is what democratic futures look like now. đš
In January 2025!!!âŠmy peer, mentor and friend and fellow futurist Jason Tester released Insurrection: An American Futureâan immersive scenario imagining a President-elect invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops into U.S. cities. @futuretester
Built on real research.
Real statements.
Real plans.
And suddenlyâreal life.
Jason told me heâs never wished more that heâd been wrong.
But this was only the beginning.
Insurrection is the prequel to his newly launched project:
One Big Beautiful Aftermath â ten near-future dispatches showing how peopleâs everyday lives change after the July 4 signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
One bill. Hundreds of provisions.
Taxes, energy, defense, immigration enforcement, student loans, the social safety net.
Across nonpartisan analysis, the outcome is clear: the wealthy gain, lower-income families lose, and millions face cuts to healthcare and food support.
What Jason is building across these projects is the real future of democratic futures: immersive, persuasive experiences that help us read the present clearlyâand act on behalf of the future intentionally. Not vibes. Not hypotheticals. Civic foresight for now, and for the road to 2076.
Both projects will be central to his upcoming talk at the Commonwealth Club (date coming soon).
đ Explore both:
insurrectionactfuture.org
bigbeautifulaftermath.org
Sit with it.
Share it.
Use it.
Because democracy doesnât survive on optimism alone.
It survives on imagination, literacy, and action.
And fittingly, the January issue of ACM Interactions features Jasonâs work as âdesign as civic preparation.â
In 2026, we could use a lot more of that.
đ ACM article:
/doi/epdf/10.1145/3778025
