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Founder @protopiafutures — Science-anchored foresight for life-centric innovation & strategic resilience.
Fmr first Futurist in Residence, Nike.

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Back in Asia for the second time in 2 months, doing the opening keynote at Tech Gala in Nagoya 🇯🇵 tomorrow.

Here are some of the images from my talk “Embodied Futures: Innovating Experience” for @fortunemag and @mgm.mo 🇲🇴 where I got to speak on how whatever future that we are to have will be biologically and culturally anchored.

What strikes me every time I work in this side of the world is just how organizers go an extra mile to make the experience as smooth and memorable as it can be — both to me as a speaker and the audience. Professionalism, hospitality and curiosity make me want to come back as often as I get the chance.

Above all, what I appreciate is that despite language barriers (both my Japanese and Mandarin have gone rusty, and sadly I never got the chance to learn Cantonese) there is however more of a 2-way communication, instead of just coming and delivering whatever I have to say, it expands into a conversation and a learning process for me as well. Getting exposed to deeper cultural nuances, local contexts, opportunities and challenges because people here take the time to share with me too.

As child born behind the Iron curtain — or even as a nerdy teenager who spent a whole chunk of my time memorizing things from encyclopedias (geography, history, mythology ones, you name it) — I could have never dared to imagine that this is what my life is going to be.

With every passing day as geopolitical instability grows, I just feel really grateful to have been born into this window of a historical opportunity for someone like me to be doing a job that requires constant, continuous learning. And, as I journey across the planet, and meet so many amazing folks.. Beyond the enriching professional experience, genuine friendships also develop over time — hopefully transcending much of the artificial borders that are drawn to divide us.

My biggest wish for our future is that genuine curiosity and inquisitiveness, rather than fear, would be most instrumental in shaping the world we get to inhabit. And I believe that the more we are within our bodies, and less within our ideological constructs, the more we’d be able to do that. by @monikabielskyte

Future is always a vision first. But not everything that seems futuristic, actually is.

Do we want to inhabit somebody else's outdated fantasy, or do we want a FUTURE that is actually inhabitable?

#Futurism #Utopia #Protopia #Dystopia #Foresight by @monikabielskyte

The opening of my @theconfmalmo keynote feat the @protopiafutures x #skyanycolour @wrk_grp short film collab from 2020 by @reuben, Daniel B & myself. Thank you so much for giving us access to such welcoming space+audience @hildrethengland 🌕💙 by @monikabielskyte

For a century, futurism sold one creed: escape. Up to the stars, out of the flesh, beyond needing anyone. It is carelessness by design - you don't look after a home you plan to leave. Tomorrow at TEDxJohannesburg, futurist Monika Bielskyte makes the case for futures that start from interdependence. Not as a moral plea, but as strategy, grounded in the science of how life actually works.

Join us for ideas and conversations about the people, relationships and systems that sustain life.

Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital, Johannesburg
29 October 2026 | 09:00–15:00

Link to tickets in our bio.

#TEDxJohannesburg #TheCareEconomy #MonikaBielskyte by @monikabielskyte

Who benefits from your despair? Apathy isn’t neutral. It’s a resource, and someone is always harvesting it.

Beyond bombs and gulags, Soviet intelligence refined demoralization into an instrument: the systematic manufacturing of hopelessness. Its target was not only political opposition. It was imagination itself. Fascist propaganda used the same tool. Today authoritarian states, extremist movements on every side and influence-for-hire firms trade in it. Disinformation now mass-produces it, pushing us to withdraw, or toward rash, desperate acts that seem to prove nothing reasonable can be done. This is a lie.

Every wave of unrest, from Paris to wherever comes next, is fought over twice: once in the streets, and again over what people come to believe is still possible.

Hope is not a strategy, but hope is strategic. Every plan that works depends on people who have not been talked out of the future.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” – Václav Havel

Informed hope is not optimism. It doesn’t engage in wishful thinking that somehow, somewhere, someone — a caped hero — will swoop in and save the future. It is realistic: deliberate and stubborn, it grasps the full scope of a problem and stays with it. It celebrates learning over being right, because lasting change runs on curiosity and desire as much as discipline. And it begins the moment a future stops feeling like someone else’s script and turns into something you interrogate, design and learn your way into.

The future is not fixed. It will be shaped by whoever shows up to write it.

#Futurist #StrategicForesight #ParisIsBurning #HybridWarfare #Protopia by @monikabielskyte

Tomorrow, 10:20, Chris Seabrooke Music Hall. Monika Bielskyte, Disobedient Edges. The futurist behind Protopia Futures opens Future Engines with a keynote. ByLwansta is on at 10:00. Be early.

https://fakugesi.co.za/tickets.html

#Fakugesi2026 #AfricanImaginaries by @monikabielskyte

One person can start a war; no one person can make a peace hold.

The movements that make peace last are leaderful: carried by so many people able to lead that losing any one of them does not end the effort.

Its success is invisible. Maintenance gets dismissed as boring because its victories are non-events: the attack prevented, the grievance addressed before it becomes recruitment material, the agreement revised before it breaks down. No one livestreams the war that never started.

It is ultimately decided outside the negotiating room. Governments sign ceasefires; populations decide whether they hold. Those who want the fighting back cultivate the belief that peace itself is a humiliation.

Countries, companies and families that have been torn apart know this too: one decision can break trust. Regrowing it takes more than tolerance: curiosity about the people on the other side, and the will to engage with reality as it is. Consistency with the facts is neither neutrality nor equivalence: it holds every side, our own included, to the same standard of evidence, and names what each has done. Repair demands hard trade-offs. What it cannot do is write off whole groups of people. Every future worth tending depends on it.

Peace has no finish line. We cannot promise those who come after us a world without conflict. We can leave them more ways to resolve it without destroying one another.

Recorded in 2024 at @futuredays.io Future Days Conference.

These ideas, first worked through with my friend and collaborator Jenka Gurfinkel, have since grown into my substack essay Peace Is Not a Utopian Destination: find on my substack.

#Futurist #StrategicForesight #FuturesThinking #Peacebuilding #WorldBuilding by @monikabielskyte

The majority is not marginal.

The futures on sale say otherwise: leave the planet, engineer away the body, automate reasoning. Monika Bielskyte’s keynote separates the evidence from the hype passed off as inevitability, then argues for different choices about what we teach, fund and create.

What do you design when you design for the world as it actually is?
Disobedient Edges

Fri 16 Oct · 10:20 · Chris Seabrooke Music Hall

Buy tickets using link in BIO

#Fakugesi2026 #FakugesiEarlyBird #africanimaginaries by @monikabielskyte

The Cornell 7 news took me back to when an “iconic” figure in the futures field s*xually harassed me. It was also when my doubts about whether I had what it takes to become a futurist turned into ironclad determination.

The unfolding case has prompted women to share accounts of s*xual assault across my feed: abuse treated as casual in classrooms and early careers. We were made to question our worth in the very places we went to develop our abilities. This is how talent gets driven out. The systemic dehumanization of women impoverishes what all of us can be, know and create.

It was the 2010s, before #MeToo went global. I was young, with little financial security. I was offered what seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. What followed were ungodly hours, uncredited work and degradation. Theft of our talent and dignity was how we were “included.” He sold a narrow cultural worldview, built on exploitation, as a universal blueprint for humanity’s future. Nobody blinked.

He never imagined we’d end up as peers, scheduled for the same events and juries. I was too vulnerable to get justice then; I don’t know whether I could now. But what I knew then, I feel even more strongly now: people like him should not retain a monopoly on defining tomorrow for the rest of us.

Cat Bohannon’s Eve exposes what science missed by treating male biology as the human default. The uterine lining repairs itself without scarring after menstruation, a clue for wound healing. The bodies dismissed as complications contain mechanisms we are still trying to engineer.

Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs traces how male dominance was constructed, imposed and contested. Today’s campaigns to control reproduction sell that history as the natural order.

Frederick Joseph’s Patriarchy Blues explores what men lose too. Ivy League fraternity hazing is a brutal illustration: endure humiliation, then earn the right to inflict it.

Mainstream sci-fi imagines spacecraft crossing galaxies more readily than societies free of structural misogyny. It’s time to measure innovation by how we live, not by our gadgets.

Those who control the fantasy, control the future.

#Cornell #WomenInScience #Futurism by @monikabielskyte

40 today. If I’m honest I never thought I’d make it this far. Last year, on my 39th, for the absolute first time in my life I finally felt like everything was coming together — and that maybe just maybe on my 40th I would feel like I finally “got it”.

The best bday gift in my life was my friend Aura’s CT scans — a miracle-like reversal to her impossible cancer journey. We had this plan that once she’s good enough to travel she’s finally coming to visit South Africa and it suddenly felt like a real possibility come January or February. Instead, in December she started feeling unwell, and suddenly passed while I was in Japan early this year. The ground slid from under my feet and I’ve been trying to stand up ever since. And when it rains it pours so it’s been slippery af and it feels like I’ve been holding onto straws for much of this year, sometimes barely at all.

Not much else went according to the plan either. But I’m here, alive, mostly healthy, appreciating the small things, and so grateful to friends, colleagues, peers and strangers who have been kind through these rollercoaster 4 decades. Warmth, care, affection really is all that we got when sh!t really gets real for real.

On my 30th Aura took me to swim in the lake, and it was one of the best birthdays I had (birthdays like Xmas and other occasions tend to send me to a bit of a tailspin unfortunately). I wish we could go for a swim today.

Somehow, we keep keeping on. One foot ahead of another. Sometimes barely crawling. But if I’ve learnt anything from my friend and just how much she valued every single moment despite what seemed like unbearable treatment side effects… life is a gift and gifts are not to be squandered.

A selection of precious moments in life from this year & 2 memories too. by @monikabielskyte

$What if the account making you furious shares a payroll with the account cheering you on? The argument looks spontaneous. The outrage was commissioned. Soviet intelligence called its covert influence operations “active measures”: forged documents, planted stories and front organizations designed to fracture adversaries from within. Conversion was optional. Cynicism, nihilism and demoralization did the work. In Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible Peter Pomerantsev described how Putin’s strategist Vladislav Surkov funded nationalist groups and liberal organizations, blurring power and opposition. Competing explanations made establishing reality exhausting and acting on it futile. Steve Bannon called it “flood the zone with shit.” It is cheaper to bury a fact than to disprove it. GenAI compresses this content machinery into a prompt: research, translation, personas and messaging tailored to different identities and grievances. The recipients — us, humans — are made into meat proxies disseminating algorithmically crafted, personalized poison. Who even needs Novichok! Governments and corporations hire private influence firms that recruit contractors and paid influencers across borders. For precarious workers in low-wage economies, disinformation can be a digital lifeline. The tearing apart of the social tissue is someone’s day job. Platforms rank and monetize whatever keeps conflict alive, consuming the shared reality they depend on. We run toward whichever extreme offers the most intoxicating certainty, or withdraw altogether. Cognitive warfare turns a society’s defenses against its own people — a weaponized autoimmune response. A population fighting itself need not be invaded. It can surrender its interests from within, convinced every choice was its own. It’s nearly impossible to privately outlearn a market industrializing confusion. When people recover the ability to know what is happening, they recover the ability to change what happens next. Lifelong education and information literacy are undervalued forms of civil defense. Filmed at @dubaifuture Forum, 2024 #CognitiveWarfare #MeatProxy #StrategicForesight #HybridWarfare by @monikabielskyte$

What if the most “futuristic” thing you’re being sold is the most passé? Sci-fi trained us to imagine the future as escape — but what we’re so hell-bent on escaping might be where the real answers are.

Before anything gets built — someone first has to picture it. Creativity is the root of all transformation; it lets us see something before it exists. Science then tests those visions, overturns some, and reveals what’s actually there. Discoveries become technologies, and those technologies hand science new tools to explore with. It’s a feedback loop.

What our collective imagination prioritises narrows the futures we can pursue. We keep looking for greater intelligence in gods, in aliens, in machines — everywhere except the living world that made us, reducing it to background scenery, something to transcend.

In parts of tech culture, science-fiction narratives now function less like speculation and more like articles of faith (see: TESCREAL). Once you’re trained to accept fantasy as foresight, you lose the ability to tell real science from science fiction. And that’s what men like Musk exploit — selling us dreams of “Planet B” while their recklessness makes life here more volatile by the day.

We are destroying this world faster than we can learn from it. And it has SO MUCH to teach us:

On the deep seafloor, oxygen appears to be produced in total darkness — an oxygen source on our own planet we never knew existed.

An octopus arm contains extensive neural circuitry supporting local sensing, reflexes and movement. This is already informing soft robotics.

Birds orient themselves by reading Earth’s magnetic field through quantum effects inside their own eyes — the kind of quantum coherence our instruments generally hold only in carefully engineered, isolated conditions.

To borrow Ed Yong’s title, we live in An Immense World — and it is this one, right here. The most futuristic technology on this planet isn’t being engineered. It’s being ignored.

Filmed at @global.tech.weekend.tbilisi

#Futurism #Foresight #Protopia #WorldBuilding #InnovationStrategy by @monikabielskyte

monika bielskyte

@monikabielskyte