Was it ever our future? “The Removed Agency” surprised me when I received the invitation to contribute to the Future Threads Programme. A teenage sci-fi fan, who never watched Star Trek or Star Wars, I asked around from my artist, cinephile, and writer friends. Our conversations led to some interesting findings. On the surface, we don’t talk/write/speculate about the future, a few animated fantasies, a few novels dealing with alternative history, and some timeless dystopian theater plays. And soon, I realized I needed to educate myself about video games and comic books. Not only do we write/create our takes on the future, but we are often omitted from having a future in many other scenarios. In some films, the middle-east is consumed/destroyed because of its natural resources and/or appears in some war room’s wall map or flickering dots on a screen during a pandemic outbreak.

The future is blurry; we made countless Macro & Micro mistakes; we know the storm is inevitable; we watch science fiction, or we don’t… The future was never bright as they promised it to be, for some parts of the world are still as non-existent and discriminatory, as if it wasn’t pictured at all and never predicted.

See-through eyes, laser guns, and flying objects became killer drones, 3D Printing both an environmental threat and a cure for ventilator shortage.

The colorful plastic future once was pictured dreamy and chic, but no one told us about the dust to come.