Introduction and literature review

It is striking how futurisms, utopias and dystopias abound in popular media and everyday discourses. Now that rumours of the death of history have been revealed to be greatly exaggerated, ‘the future’ is once again a topic of – and a site for – political contestation. Indeed, it could be argued that we are in the midst of a ‘speculative turn’, not just in the academic social sciences, but in Anglophone culture more broadly.

The term ‘speculation’ has multiple meanings; we are concerned primarily with the meaning defined as ‘the activity of guessing possible answers to a question without having enough information to be certain’ (Dictionary. cambridge.org, 2019). This chapter uses the Museum of Carbon Ruins (MCR) to think through some ethical issues that are raised when we speculate about the transition to a post- fossil society. MCR is an immersive exhibition that allows visitors to step into the future. In this world, Sweden reached its target of carbon neutrality by 2045, with the world following suit five years later; the museum opens in 2053, and looks back at the events that brought it into being. MCR displays that which has been left behind, alongside pivotal events, and people and places that came to be significant.

In general terms, the speculative question that MCR grapples with is: assuming a certain set of policies and technological transitions are successfully enacted in a certain location by a certain date in the future, what are the consequences, and how might life look and feel and mean to ordinary people living there? This is a questioning attitude common to science fiction media, but it has a far longer history, and has always – despite periods characterised by claims to the contrary – been an explicitly political form of speculation.