Stop Copaganda

We are seeking original short fiction stories that speak to the following prompt:

Surveillance technologies are increasingly built into our daily lives without our consent—and are championed in mass media for their power to do so-called good. The truth is, surveillance is mostly used to harm and oppress communities—misidentifying people through facial recognition, targeting families for missile strikes, criminalizing people who seek to assert their bodily autonomy, and facilitating scams and stalkers.

Most “positive” uses of surveillance are straight-up copaganda.

Having such powerful systems centralized in the hands of a wealthy few is bad for all of us. As human rights activists, we’ve wanted to say something for a long time about the ways that fictional worlds are used as propaganda to prop up harmful military technologies that are fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights.

With this effort, our goal is to do one better: to curate examples of stories that accurately deal with surveillance tech, policing, and centralized power—and then use them as a foundation for a free, uncensorable toolkit to help all storytellers bring a more just framework to their dealings with technology. Your story doesn’t explicitly have to center cops, but can rather be about alternatives that tear down the narrative that surveillance and centralized power necessarily equals safety.

Country of Publication & Year Established

United States

Established in 2024