Finding quiet spaces
A chat with Maria Farrell on imagining tech futures and living with a chronic illness
I was 11 when I met Maria. She was working with my mum in Brussels and I can remember her coming over to our apartment one night, Mum telling me it was time for bed, and me complaining that it was only 8:30, that I wasn’t a baby, and that I wanted to stay up longer to chat with Maria. To which Maria simply said, “I wish I could go to bed at 8:30.”
Since then, I’m glad to say, I’ve developed quite a taste for an early bedtime, and Maria is no longer just in the “Mum’s Friend” category, but more and more firmly in the “My Friend” one too.
She is a writer and speaker whose work imagines technological futures that are joyful and safe and inclusive of everyone — not just the tech bros that take up so much damn space these days. As well as being a brilliant mind and a generally wonderful person, Maria has lived with chronic fatigue since she was 26, presenting both excruciating challenges and unexpected superpowers along the way.
So, sitting at her kitchen table on a gloomy London afternoon, we talk a bit about both of these things and much, much more — the trouble with labels, the importance of science fiction and fiction in general, and the fact that when looking to the future, we should all be listening to the voices that are so often neglected.
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The best place to start is probably for you to introduce yourself and tell everyone a bit about what you do and who you are.
So, I am Maria Farrell, I am a writer and a speaker. I’m 51 and I’ve been working since the late 90’s. I’ve worked in tech policy for 20+ years and I always struggle with the question “What do you do?” when I meet people at professional events. I’m not sure what the block is with describing what I do, but I write words and I give speeches for money.
There it is! I have the same problem of not knowing how to label myself. I was speaking to Mum this morning and she was saying that I should just claim the title of writer and stop faffing around about it. I always call myself a copywriter which is a little bit different to a writer. So you’re not alone in that struggle.
People want a label. They need a handle for where you fit and what you do, and I think you should definitely embrace “writer” because you do write. It took me too long to embrace it and no one is ever going to come and give you a medal or a little plaque that says “Annabel, you are a writer,” so you should claim it. You write for a living. You are a writer.
It just sounds lofty and a bit cerebral and fluffy, whereas “copywriter” sounds employed, professional…
… Steady, in the right box doing things in the expected way. Claiming the title of writer is also claiming a social position of, I will write words and people will read them because they are worthwhile and because I’ve got something to say. Oftentimes, women in particular struggle with standing up and making that claim. Claiming attention and authority.
I’ve written down a few things that I’ve noticed that you talk about in your own work — speculative tech futures, cyberfeminism, politics, and life. I wanted to focus on the speculative tech futures part because I was being a real nerd the other day, reading Jung, and in the first few lines of his book The Undiscovered Self he writes, “It is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn with anxious hope to the future and when anticipations, utopias, and apocalyptic visions multiply.”
So much of my work is with futures research agencies, foresight people, people looking to the future to build a way forward and out of this situation that we seem to find ourselves in, and because you write so beautifully about it, I thought we could talk about that and the lens that you approach it from.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I can give a really definite answer on this one. I come out of science fiction — my literary and spiritual homeland is science fiction, I’ve been reading it since I was a child or a teenager. Science fiction uses speculative storytelling to comment on the present, but it also gives us ways to imagine different futures. One of the main writers who is my touchstone for so much in life is Ursula K. Le Guin, and she has just meant so much to so many people. She has some great one-liners about the future that I can’t dredge up from my brain now but which I will try to find and you can slot them in. Basically, she sees future-casting or future imagining as a profoundly political act because science fiction is not just commenting on the present, it is giving people ways to look and feel and think about the future.
"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. . . ." Ursula Le Guin, 'Words are My Matter'
If you look at society and culture right now, who is given the space to talk about the future, right? It’s a bunch of fucking white tech bros, excuse my language. It’s the Elon Musks and all of those gross right-wing surveillance capitalism guys. That’s who is taking up all the space and all the oxygen of future thinking and it’s just crazy and wrong. So I guess a lot of my work about speculative future writing is about seizing back that space and saying, no, we get to imagine our futures too. We don’t have to be on a train going straight into this, frankly, dystopian future that the Elon Musks and the Peter Thiels and the AI accelerationist tech bros have imagined for us. That’s just nonsense.
For me, it’s all about politics and power, and asking who’s got the power to imagine futures. And Ursula Le Guin is so big on this — if you can’t imagine a different future to the one you’re being told is inevitable, you’re never going to be able to build one. It’s not just about sketching out a blueprint for how we will live in the future, it’s about creating an emotional and imaginative space that people can occupy and build their own futures.
As a species, how do we do that? Well, we tell stories, and stories are how we think about our past and also how we imagine our future and transmit really important information. Stories boil and whittle down a lot of wisdom that people have collectively learnt, and that’s why telling stories about our futures that centre power and politics is really important.
Honestly, where I really part company with most futurists is, first of all demographically, they are a very small group — it’s a bunch of middle-class white guys with their own weird little cult — and secondly, they always present this shiny corporate future, where “we”— and they always talk about “we”, and you have to think about who is in that “we” and who is not — will be having more automation and where “we” will be using AI, and “we” will be empowered and have lots of consumer choice. And you kind of go, OK, in that shiny future of yours, where is the politics? Who loses out in your future and who is present in deciding how that future is shaped?
It’s so interesting what you say about the importance of story. During COVID I was reading a lot, more than usual because I had so much time, and I had this conversation with Andy about why he didn’t read fiction and he said, “I just feel like fiction’s not really aimed at me.”
So, I went on Instagram because I wanted to discover a bit more and I did this whole series of posts asking whether guys read fiction and if they’re not reading fiction, then why not? Such an overwhelming response was that they didn’t feel like they were going to learn anything from it. I think that in the context of futures, there is so much to be learnt from fictional stories that don’t provide hard facts, but that give you another way of think. And then the overwhelming power in this area is the guys, but the guys don’t want to read any sort of alternative option and it’s just interesting that masculine attitude to “fact” over story.
Today a Twitter acquaintance tweeted something about the Penguin Books top 35 books to give a guy this Christmas, and guess what? There are two women in the top 35 and they are all non-fiction and all the others are by men. Firstly it’s a lack of curiosity, a lack of imagination, a lack of empathy, but it’s this attitude to reading that says, I need to learn facts and if I’m not learning facts then it’s not worth my time.
But also facts according to whom?
Yeah exactly. It also means, intellectually, you’re consigning yourself to a life of serfdom if you think you just need to learn more facts about the world and don’t need to learn how to do things differently. You’re kind of going, I’m on this little step of the ladder and I’m never going to go higher because I’m never going to do things differently, I’m always going to be accepting the status quo. And like, dude, if that’s all you want in life, fine. But some of us want a little bit more.
A few years ago I got a fantastic writing gig with the Internet Society which is based in Geneva and Washington. They were doing their annual report and a fantastic guy called Matthew Shears was doing it for them and he got in touch with me and asked if I could edit the report, but he also said, “Can you write us a bunch of “vignettes” about what the internet might look like in 25 years?”
His thinking was that we have had 25 years of the internet so what will it look like in another 25 years to different people around the world? So, I had to write twenty-five, 600-word stories and it was the most amazing commission because it said to me that people will pay to have this stuff imagined for them and that they just want to have these little spaces to sit in as a little pocket world. The thing that I was really trying to get across was, how will technology affect people’s life paths and what is that going to feel like?
There were all sorts of characters but one that stuck with me and that I used in speeches for a while was about this white American male journalist interviewing a Ghanaian woman who had invented a real-time AI chatbot assistant that is also a data-broker. She lives on your phone and she negotiates with all the websites you visit and companies that you deal with to say how much of your data you share and on what terms. She’s basically the person that’s on your side, rather than your phone being a data-extractive device. She’s an AI that is loyal to you and is trying to move through the world for you.
It’s this weird little vignette where this guy clearly fancies her, the woman who has invented the thing, and she’s coming from a completely different cultural environment and saying, we in the Global South still have this sense of delight in technology, which you in the Global North have lost because you’re too busy surveilling and extracting everything. So from that point of view, it was really obvious for me to create something that was on the side of individuals rather than extracting data from them. Then he asks her, “Well, why would people trust your thing?” And she says, “Well, nobody likes Big Brother, but Big Sister is a whole different emotional and social dynamic”. If you have a Big Sister who’s on your side you feel very differently about tech.
Anyway, it was this nice story and the guys loved it, and I obviously quite like it because I’m still talking about it. I guess the objective that this one met was that it was trying to give people a space where you don’t just have this tech guy saying, “We’re going to have this wizz bang technology and it’s gonna make it easier for you to order food from people being paid below minimum wage!” But more like — here’s what it would feel like if our devices were on our side and wouldn’t that be awesome?
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that storytelling allows you to make extrapolations that help guide things so that people can be like, ‘Oh yeah, one of those would be great.” But it also tries to create a space, like a bubble, where you can think and feel, because that’s what stories do in unison — allow thinking and feeling together.
Have you been to the Barbican Re/Sisters exhibition? I didn’t love love it because I thought that some of the pieces were a bit too conceptual and a bit hard for the layperson to understand, but the general message behind it is that women, gender non-conforming, indigenous, basically side-lined communities, have always been the ones to resist and push for a new reality. I guess I see that feminist lens reflected in your work. It’s this very clear understanding and vision of how the present is right now and how it could be in the future if we did things a little bit differently.
Yeah, because we have to. Because it’s not an indulgence or a luxury, it’s a necessity of survival to be able to present alternatives to fairly oppressive and shitty presents. If you look at AI or tech more generally, asking, hang on a second, let’s look at how this is harming people and other ways we can do it, it’s all women and people of colour and non-binary people trying to find solutions. One, because we’re the people who are most vulnerable to harms from, not the technologies as such, but the business models in which they are embedded. And two, because alternative future imagining is a strategy for survival. How on earth do you think people overcame slavery or got the vote for women? For Black people in America to be free, or for women here in the UK to have the vote, those were science fictional concepts. They were so far out and we got them because people had to come up with them.
Careful Trouble, a fantastic tech non-profit here in the UK, produced this report that showed that the most accurate predictions of how technology will be used are made by women, non-binary people, people of colour, and people from social classes outside of the middle class — which both you and I are but hey ho. It’s a fantastic report that shows that if you want to know what’s really going to happen and get away from the hype BS, listen to so-called marginalised voices because they accurately predict it every time. It’s extraordinary.
Those are the voices that we need to hear. I feel like you’re in quite a unique position because you’re obviously working in this very high speed environment and there’s always so much work going on and you give these talks all over the world with the UN, the European Union, you’ve just done a PhD and written a book. You do so many things, but then you are also sort of limited by this container of chronic fatigue. I would love to talk to you about how you manage that and how you have found ways to deal with it.
You actually said in one of your really beautiful pieces about it, Settling in for the long haul. You said, you were “repeatedly floored by disappointment while slowly realising that I was no longer, really, a person in the world.” That line puts a dagger to the heart because you have so much to say and I know you as this very energetic person but I feel like there is this other side of things that isn’t as it all seems from the outside.
So, context first — I’ve been chronically ill since I was 26. I’ve got chronic fatigue, or ME, which is very similar to long-COVID. It’s a post-viral syndrome of brain fog and fatigue. Fatigue that is not relieved by rest. I got glandular fever, I just picked it up when I was working a crazy job in film production and someone came into the office with a horrible bug, we all got the horrible bug because we were all working 18-hour days, 6- and 7-day weeks, and I couldn’t take any time off because if you took any time off you were sacked immediately.
I was so destroyed by fatigue that I would be sitting in that office on those crazy long days keeping my fluid intake really low so that I wouldn’t have to walk to the bathroom because I couldn’t walk. So I’d just sit at the desk for 8, 10, 12 hours. I was so tired I couldn’t even go pee and if I took any sick leave I’d lose my job. So, yeah — hello Capitalism! When I finished that job, I went home to my parents’ house, they lived in the countryside in Ireland, and I just basically collapsed and I’ve never been well again. Sorry, I always get a bit emotional talking about this.
Oh, I’m sorry!
No, it’s really ok. I’m really glad that I’m finally talking about it. I’ve only told one of my employers, ever, because I would have been unemployable. I got approached for quite a high-profile job a few years ago and I went back to them and said, I am a chronically ill person, can we do this as a three- or four-day week, and they said absolutely not.
Getting back to “not being a person in the world” — when you get really ill, you become very small and very quiet because you don’t have the energy to do things and also, we live in a very punitive economic climate where you’re not allowed to rest and convalesce and get well. There’s no way to do it, there’s nowhere to go, and the social welfare systems are very punitive. So that’s the context of it all.
I did manage to do a reasonably high-profile career for quite a long time, and I did it by only working. I basically didn’t have a social life for a couple of decades, I only ever socialised with people from work, and very little. I did not have romantic relationships, or barely at all, and I made it so that I would show up in an office for five days and unless I had a work thing to do, I would just go and crash, and then on Friday evenings, I would go home to wherever I was living, because I lived in a bunch of different countries, and I would just not see anybody until Monday morning. I remember this aching loneliness of those Friday evenings and thinking that this is what I have to do to be able to work and present as normal. So it was really lonely and I feel quite sad thinking about it.
Yeah, and as someone who has such a spark and such a light inside them, I feel like it must be so hard to not be living that “full” life that you expected for yourself.
Yeah, totally, and to be a bit crass about it, with the abilities that I had, I might have expected to be running something reasonably large-sized and making a big impact on the world to improve it somewhat. To do what Ed, my husband, and I call a BFJ — Big Fucking Job — that requires a 60-hour week, you have to always be on, so one of the ways I managed to do something approaching a BFJ for a while when I was working at ICANN with your mum, weirdly, was that you find these little pockets of darkness and silence and you occupy them. That sounds very allegorical. I’ll tell you very practically what I mean.
When I was travelling all the time for work, in an organisation where everybody is travelling all the time for work, we kind of had this unofficial thing where people would go dark for a few days and you would go from one office to the other office and there would just be a couple of days in between where no one would notice that you weren’t there. Also where you could be jetlagged but also plea jetlagged. You’re allowed to be jetlagged, but you’re not allowed to be chronically ill, so weirdly enough, working for an organisation with loads of high-profile travel presented loads of little pockets where I could just be invisible for a couple of days at a time and quite often. So weirdnesses like that is how I did it.
And it’s funny to me that you say you could have had quite a big career because I feel like you really have been able to carve out quite a big career for yourself.
I’ve done some stuff.
But I guess there’s that sense of disappointment that you haven’t been able to achieve more. I wonder if that’s a capitalistic brain thing that we’re all socialised to believe — I always could have done more! When actually you’ve done lots of amazing things.
I have and I’ve been incredibly lucky as well. I suppose the reason I’m self-employed now is that as soon as I met somebody I wanted to be with — so, Ed — I remember moving in with him and within 6 weeks, professionally, the wheels just came completely off the bus. I could not be present for another person, literally just staying awake like a person would expect you to, and doing a job. It’s really amazing to me that in less than two months of me wanting to have something that wasn’t just work — and by this stage I was about 38 — it became completely impossible to hold down a job. It was wild.
Also, I hate to say and think this, but I think that if I had not been so ill for so much of my adult life, I would not be a writer. Historically, lots of people who are writers were sick in childhood. It’s a classic pathway for lots and lots of writers, especially in pre-modern medicine times, in that they had to spend a lot of time on their own, going into the imaginative world of books when they were in those formative years.
The benefits of polio, eh? You can just think for a really long time, all by yourself.
You just imagine and build worlds and then occupy them. So no, I’ve gotten to do really good things, and having all of those years grafting in tech policy means that now I have a good network and a certain amount of expertise and I just know how to do things.
And you could have come out of that with quite a cynical view of the world but one thing that you talk about a lot in your writing is hope and I just think that’s a very positive light to shine on things rather than this very dire and horrible view that a lot of people have, so I wonder if you might be able to talk about that as well.
I guess the headline is that sick people always believe that they are going to get well, even when science and experience tell you that you’re not. So, it’s amazing what you can cope with, and not just what you can tolerate and deal with — the spaces you can find in situations that objectively you would have thought would be soul-crushing where you can actually build things and do things. I think probably the hopefulness stuff comes from the entirely unrealistic and unscientifically founded belief that at some point in the future, things will not be well, but they will be better.
Also, I think being ill puts you on the side of people who are not at the centre of things. You’ve got more time to think and observe, obviously, but you’re also no longer at the front of the cohort. And you can go two ways with that — and this is not a conscious choice, so I claim no moral authority, I think it’s just a question of temperament. You’ve got a choice between either feeling really shitty and staying at home and never going out again, or you can allow it to crack you open and realise that so many people are dealing with illness or are carers while trying to work or are immigrants in a country that despises immigrants. When you actually look at it, most people are on the outside, objectively and numerically, most people are not the centre or thinking that things are great and people are listening to them and their life is fine.
I think that whatever the thing is, be it a disability or a chronic illness or whatever it is that puts you on the outside, it can crack you open to noticing who you’re with. Who else is on the team? So, I think that’s kind of where I went with that.
And I feel like even though it doesn’t always feel good like you said before, the people on the outside are the people who can see what the future holds, so maybe it’s quite a privileged position in some ways.
It’s a bit of a superpower, actually. And it’s part of why, as a woman, I do not get people who are trans-exclusionary, as a segue, and here’s why — there are so many different ways to woman, and nobody objectively would choose this in a society that is systematically harmful to women and non-binary people. Nobody who was born in a male body would put up their hand and go, oh, you see that team over there, that team that’s getting the shit kicked out of it, I want to join them. So when I think about trans women, I kind of think, wow, we’re all on this crazy, colourful, multi-bodied team together and it’s awesome.
It’s not that they want to be on our team, it’s that they need to be, and they just are.
We’re just all in this together and that’s why I don’t get the whole, let’s bring down the barriers against our sisters. I don’t get it. So I think if chronic illness does anything for me, it shows me that 90% of us are on the outside and solidarity is the way that we, not just get through it and build coalitions and do political things, but it’s where we get joy from. I think maybe when I’m talking about hope, what I’m really talking about is joy and the different flavours it comes in and different places it pops up, and mostly it comes through other people, from finding common cause and common joy with others.
You can read more of Maria’s amazing work here and in her own newsletter which you can subscribe to here. And below, in paywall territory, there is some recommended reading that she generously sent through after our conversation:
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