The windows are wide open, it’s dark outside, entangled voices carry across the street. I’m sitting here, burning the midnight oil, drafting the interview questions for Tracee. A moth flies in brrzziing quietly, disoriented to suddenly be inside something she doesn’t know. It was dark, now it’s bright, she was outside and now suddenly inside.

I’m reading Tracee’s website “Radical imagination is the capacity to go to the root of things — to imagine different underlying structures, different foundational premises, different relationships between people and resources and power. We need it now because our current problems are root problems.” The moth is circling my laptop, confused. Tracee goes on “Incremental fixes to systems built on extractive logic produce more extraction. Reforms that don’t touch underlying power structures leave that power in place.” I look at the moth. I know I’m inside a story I haven’t written.

Tracee Worley · Radical Futures · LinkedIn · Seneca Falls Convention 2048

Tracee Worley is one of the people I'm building this club around. “Sometime we gotta touch the future to make it real.” While Tracee has been focusing on future as destination, I’ve been zooming in on the how-do-we-get-there. Her work made me realise that it’s much harder to figure out why we’re stuck if we don’t share a collective sense of direction. Tracee is sharing the coordinates.

Serena: The word you use is midwifing, not building or inventing. Why that word? What does it claim that "building the future" doesn't?

Tracee: I was inspired by the author Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. She writes about hospicing modernity, sitting with what's dying and giving it a good death instead of pretending it'll live forever. Midwifing is the other half of that. You hospice the thing that's leaving and you midwife the thing that wants to be born.

I think "building" and "inventing" belong to the era that's on its way out. They're modernity's favorite verbs, the ones that assume humans are the smartest thing in the room and the future is some kind of engineering problem. We have plenty of that already. What we're short on is people willing to sit with the dying and catch what's coming.

Serena: You don't argue women are the majority and therefore in charge. You argue matriarchy is a governing logic and envision a society run by women on matriarchal wisdom. Can you tell us how you got here?

Tracee: It started with my own increasing rage at men behaving badly. The last decade feels like a cycle of the same stories: abortion bans, the manosphere going mainstream, billionaires racing to destroy the planet. At some point it stopped looking like a pile of separate problems and started looking like a system in its final act. I began to suspect we are living through late-stage patriarchy, and that most of what we're calling the polycrisis is one operating logic hitting the wall all at once.

If patriarchal logic is what's failing, then women's leadership and women's imagination are the way through. This goes deeper than feminism. Feminism has gotten women a better seat at a table that is currently on fire. I want a different table, run on a different logic, because patriarchy is not just a bug you can patch. It's the architecture of our reality.

And matriarchy is not a fantasy I made up. Matriarchies exist right now, and the ones we have are some of the most egalitarian, least hierarchical societies on record. The Haudenosaunee are the oldest living participatory democracy in the world, organized around Clan Mother authority, and they're right here in the United States, the country I live in. Men lead in matriarchies too. They just lead under a logic that doesn't run on domination. People often hear the word matriarchy and picture the same patriarchal pyramid with a woman installed at the top. But matriarchy is actually a different shape - a circle, and what sits at the center is care. Children. Life. The actual work of keeping each other alive. Everything else organizes around that.

Serena: You grew up inside a lineage of people who "imagined freedom before they could touch it." Who taught you to do that, and did they know that's what they were teaching?

Tracee: I come out of a Black radical imagination tradition, and specifically a Black feminist one, where imagining freedom was survival. Harriet Tubman saw a way to freedom before she had any proof one was possible, and then she walked it again and again with other people's lives in her hands. Octavia Butler wrote whole worlds so we could practice the ones we hadn't reached. Black women have been doing this work forever, long before anybody called it "futurism".

And American slavery itself was a sort of science fiction story. Human beings were kidnapped across an ocean and legally turned into property, dropped into a reality so cruel that no person survives it on logic alone. We had to imagine our way out of a nightmare somebody else dreamed up for us. Freedom had to be invented in the mind before a single body could run toward it. So when I imagine a matriarchy that hasn't arrived yet, I'm reaching for the oldest tool my people own. We've always had to see it first.

Serena: For people who didn't practice imagination the way you did, who grew up being repeatedly told to be realistic, how can we start using our imagination as a tool?

Tracee: Let me push back on the premise a bit. I didn't escape the "be realistic" training. I got the same download as everybody, and those voices still run in my head on a loop, usually right before I'm about to make something good! I still hear them. I just stopped letting them have the final word.

So step one is noticing you were programmed. "Be realistic" is not magic wisdom handed down from a mountain. It's a default setting and the world keeps rewarding you for doing it. You get the gold star for being "practical" and the raise for being "reasonable." Challenging that means being willing to lose a little approval.

Step two is excavation. Most of what we call imagination is borrowed, and most of what we call "natural" is just an old imagination that hardened into fact. Money, the work week, who cleans the house, what a family is allowed to look like, somebody dreamed all of that up a long time ago and we inherited it as the weather. So go digging! Take the thing you're certain is "just how it is" and ask who first imagined it, and who it was built to serve. Nine times out of ten it wasn't you!

Serena: You argue that recent political backlash against women’s autonomy is a reaction to deeper, largely irreversible structural shifts that are increasing women’s power. What are the signals you’ve been mapping?

Tracee: The backlash itself is the tell. You don't get the Dobbs decision, the manosphere, tradwife cosplay, and the pronatalism panic when patriarchy is comfortable. You get that when it's scared. Here's what's scaring it: Women are on track to hold most of the wealth in this country by 2030, partly because we out-educated men a while ago. Birth rates are falling because women are looking at the deal and declining. Gen Z is the least gender-obedient generation ever measured. Women already vote more than men and are taking over statehouses. And men are in genuine crisis, lonely and unmoored, because the system that promised them the top of the pyramid scheme stopped paying out. Every one of those is structural. None of them reverses through legislation. I believe this is patriarchy in its death throes, and death throes are loud and nasty.

Serena: I'm building a school for people done giving up; you're prototyping a country run on care. We're both refusing the "be realistic" instruction. What do you think that instruction is actually protecting?

Tracee: Whoever's winning right now. "Be realistic" is political. It never means be honest about what's possible. It means shrink your expectations to the size of what already exists. Mark Fisher called it "capitalist realism," the sense that capitalism is just the weather and you might as well dress for it. "Be realistic" protects the arrangement by making the arrangement look like physics. The second you can imagine the thing ending, it stops being weather and becomes a choice somebody is making.

Serena: Which question did I not ask that you wish I had?

Tracee: Maybe what I do on the days my faith in a different future falters. Because those days come. I make worlds for a living and some mornings the world I'm actually in feels like it has the upper hand.

What gets me back is making an artifact from the future. The future stops being a fantasy when it becomes an object you can hold. So on the bad days I go into my studio and I make a thing. And then usually I'm fine. 

How did Tracee do this? She didn't write an essay arguing matriarchy is possible. She built a door (a website for the 200th anniversary of a convention in 2048, a program, a guest list, artifacts you can hold) and held it open. She trusted you to walk through and realize it yourself. She didn't build the house. She shipped the furniture.

Your turn: What is the issue that you keep arguing about and losing? Stop arguing. Imagine a better version of it as if it already exists. Then describe it to one person as if it's real. Not “wouldn't it be nice if” → make it present tense, like you're reporting back from inside it. If you can make it feel real enough to say out loud, someone else can walk in too.

And the moth? I switched off the lights, closed my laptop and sat in silence until the moth brrrzzzed back out of the building and into the tropical, urban air. Back to the streetlight. Stillness orients me the most. The moth is just following light. In the city, at night, artificial is the only offer. The moon is out of sight.

It’s the invisible option.

Which light are you following? And who switched it on?

Stay curious. Stay courageous.

Written by a human. Unpolished. On purpose.