“…Do you dream, Selver?”

“Seldom now,” Selver answered, obedient to the catechism, his scarred, feverish face bowed.

“Do you dream well, Selver?”

“Not well.”

“Do you hold the dream in your hands?”

“Yes.”

“Do you weave and shape, direct and follow, start and cease at will?”

“Sometimes, not always.”

“Can you walk the road your dream goes?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to.”

Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, page 42

In Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, the Athsheans are dreamers. Indigenous to a world that the “yumens” are now attempting to colonize, they do not sleep or dream the way their would-be conquerers do. Rather, throughout the night and day, they slip between wakefulness and a kind of creative slumber, their dreams crossing the boundary between sleep and waking as if it were but a little stream one could step over, less a barricade than an invitation to wander. They dream together, each dream collecting and merging with the dreams of others, the dreams become a gathering, a movement, a world.

In their language, the word for dream is the same as the word for root. A tree grows from the root, a forest from the trees. The dreams of the Athsheans are the root of the world.

The novel is a story of colonialism, of ecological extraction and destruction. It is also a story of the Vietnam War. The colonists wield flame throwers, toss bombs into the forest from their helicopters, enslave the Athsheans, rape their women, speak of them in disgusting, dehumanizing terms. Selver gathers his people to fight the yumens—not by issuing orders or prescribing strategies—but simply by dreaming. He dreams, and his dream calls to his people who join and weave the dream together in the world. They fight until the few surviving yumens agree to leave the forest and to never return. But like all victories, this one contains a great and terrible grief: it is from the yumens that the Athsheans learn the concept of murder.

Fascism, Aimé Césaire teaches, is colonialism turned inward. In much the same way, psychological warfare was once a tool used to pacify enemies abroad but is now a weapon we have turned upon ourselves. In Stories Are Weapons, Annalee Newitz tells of Edward Bernays, an advertising executive and sometimes secret consultant to the US government, who drew principles from military psyops to develop campaigns at home, including a very successful effort to persuade women to smoke Lucky Strikes. Writes Newitz:

Bernays’ work was strongly influenced by progressive journalist Walter Lippman, founder of the New Republic magazine, who worked in the US propaganda office during World War I. After his wartime experiences, Lippman published a polemic called Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy was being eroded by media manipulation and propaganda. Bernays’ book Crystallizing Public Opinion was a sardonic tip of the hat to Lippman’s, whose ideas he cited while drawing the opposite conclusions. Bernays was thrilled by the power of media, and explained in step-by-step detail how intrepid public relations managers could use it effectively for advertising, corporate messaging, and political persuasion. Bernays described PR work as the “engineering of consent,” and called it a new form of free speech.

Newitz, Stories Are Weapons, page 6

To engineer is to design or construct something. To engineer consent is to both subvert the agency necessary for consent to exist and to make plain that the person being engineered is seen as a device or a product, a thing to be manipulated or arranged. In that, engineering consent bears relation to what Ursula Franklin warned of with the proliferation of prescriptive technologies—technologies in which autonomy and judgment are suppressed in favor of following instructions—which is that such technologies pave the way for the programming of people. To use advertising—or propaganda, which is the same thing—to engineer consent is to program people to accept a message. (In a perhaps unconscious bit of association on Bernays’ part, an older use of the word engineer has that it also meant to bombard.)

How does one counter this bombardment? Perhaps by reimagining how such messages are distributed. Newitz talks to Ruth Emrys Gordon, a disinformation researcher, who, under the name Ruthanna Emrys, wrote A Half-Built Garden. The novel imagines a future in which communications networks have been refashioned in order to support slower, more thoughtful and equitable engagement. Gordon’s “dandelion networks” are fiercely and judiciously moderated, employ algorithms to surface diverse opinions, and are structurally oriented towards building consensus. That is, the networks in A Half-Built Garden are governed, and that government is local as well as directly democratic. The presence of democratic governance—and its dependence on consent, rather than the subversion of it—gestures towards the models being experimented with today in the context of the Fediverse and other distributed, decentralized, and cooperative digital commons.

In other words, one way to disarm the fascists and colonialists of their psychological weapons is to fix the fucking networks. But this is only part of the challenge. A better network gives us the means to dream together. Of what will we dream?

In 1930s Germany, Charlotte Beradt, a Jew and friend of Hannah Arendt, started having nightmares every night. Curious, she inquired of others if they were suffering the same, and soon found herself in possession of a collection of dreams—the dreams of ordinary people, and the dreams of a terrible time. Zadie Smith writes of the book that followed:

How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? These are questions Beradt’s dreaming people daren’t ask themselves in the cold light of day, but the queries reappear under cover of night.

The dreams that Beradt records are plain in their meaning, as if the answers to such a question could only be obvious: the walls of a home vanish, a dreamer is compelled to perform an act of meaningless obeisance, a list appears in which people are categorized into “reputable” and “disreputable” categories. The dreams speak of totalizing surveillance, anticipatory conformity, and a terrifying dehumanization—all stories programmed in the waking dreamers via radio, posters, and megaphones. Of course, Smith notes, many of the same stories are at work today, but the mechanics of their programming are several orders of magnitude more powerful. In the propaganda arms race, social networks are swift long range missiles to the previous generations’ lumbering cannons.

Or, perhaps not. Today’s propaganda mediums depend entirely on our attention. It is this thought that Smith has in mind when she addresses a group of teenagers, who when invited to ask questions about fiction, inquire instead about social media. Smith replies:

I began as follows: in a hypercapitalist economy—one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself—we are the product. Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds. But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance? Think about it (I said, to the fourteen-year-olds). With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated. To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known. To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so. But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away. And thus give a new meaning to the word woke.

But to look away is also to look to something else. It is, in some way, to dream. And not merely to receive a dream, but to hold the dream in our hands, to start and cease it at will, to shape it and weave it. To walk the road the dream goes. To dream awake, with all the movement and intention and direction that awakening entails.

Newitz calls out to the idea of “applied” science fiction—that is, science fiction whose intention is to provide pathways to better futures that we, in the present, can follow. But is this not what all stories attempt to do? Whether or not the author intends such an agenda, every story is a world, every story points the way to worlds alike and unlike our own. It is we who choose which stories to follow—with our attention, of course, but also with our feet and hearts and hands.

When at last Selver corners the captain of the yumens, he says to him:

“You give me a gift, the killing of one’s kind, murder. Now, as well as I can, I give you my people’s gift, which is not killing. I think we each find each other’s gift heavy to carry.”

Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, page 180

Selver does not merely avert his gaze. He does not lead his people away from the colonists. He does not dream of hiding in the forests, of turning his back on the land where the trees have been felled and the ground turned to dust. Neither does he dream of revenge. Rather, he dreams of a forest regrown, of his people’s freedom. He dreams of an ending that is also a beginning, of new roots taking hold in the dry land. He dreams of killing, but also of mercy. And with his people, the dream becomes a gathering, a movement, a world. A future.