Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. On our first episode, host Malka Older talks to Steven Gonzalez, an anthropologist of technology who researches the human labor behind data centers. 

Gonzalez is also a speculative fiction writer under the byline E. G. Condé. He is one of the creators of Taínofuturism, which incorporates Indigenous Caribbean traditions to imagine futures from a radically different perspective. His novella, Sordidez, explores how survivors’ efforts to rebuild after a hurricane intersects with oppression and conflict in a future Caribbean. 

In this episode, Gonzalez compares these different types of disasters: the dramatic and immediate impacts of the hurricane, and the slower, steadier, and often overlooked disasters of environmental destruction, resource depletion, and exploitation of human labor associated with our internet infrastructure. 

Resources: 

Visit Steven Gonzalez’s website to learn more about the impacts of cloud computing. 

Find Gonzalez’s fiction under the byline E.G. Condé. Check out his novella, Sordidez, winner of the Indie Ink Award for "Writing the Future We Need: Latinx/Latine Representation by a Latinx/Latine author." 

This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project. Read all Future Tense Fiction stories here.