Drafting the World We’d Rather Inhabit
Created at: August 10, 2025
Write the fragment of the world you would rather see. — Arundhati Roy
An Invitation to Authorship
At the outset, Roy’s sentence is less a slogan than a gentle command: claim authorship. The word fragment matters; it frees us from solving everything and asks us to carry one luminous shard. Fragments are honest about scale and humble about power. They say, begin where your hands can reach, then let coherence emerge as others bring their pieces, too. In this light, writing is not only ink. It is practice, policy, a program, a garden bed. To write a fragment is to draft a prototype of the social reality you prefer—visible enough to invite imitation, modest enough to adapt. The aim is not perfection but a contagious precedent.
Stories That Become Scaffolds
Building on this, stories erect the scaffolding on which institutions later hang. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” (1963) did not pass a law, yet it staged a moral horizon that legislation could approach. Likewise, Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986) reframed narrative as a container for sustenance rather than conquest, subtly redirecting what readers thought progress should look like. Because language can prefigure law, we draft worlds twice: first in imagination, then in masonry. A well-told fragment acts like a blueprint left on a public table—anyone can copy, revise, and build.
The Ethics of Whose Fragment
Crucially, the question follows: who gets to write? Singular utopias often flatten lives. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) warns how tidy schemes erase local knowledge. In response, the Zapatista line—“un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos”—insists on plurality within solidarity. Therefore, authorship must be porous. Co-design processes, community assemblies, and participatory research convert private visions into shared drafts. The fragment you write should hold space for others to annotate, contradict, and extend. Authority expands, paradoxically, when it is shared.
From Page to Prototype
From there, fragments earn credibility through practice. Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting (1989) started as a small civic experiment and became a template many cities adapted. In Bogotá, Mayor Antanas Mockus hired street mimes in the 1990s to model safer traffic behavior; ridicule, not force, taught courtesy, and accidents fell—proof that cultural scripts can be rewritten in public. These pilots show how narrative becomes norm: draft a better behavior, stage it, measure it, then invite replication. Each prototype is a footnote that says, “See: it can be done.”
Small, Fractal Interventions
Meanwhile, scale emerges from pattern. Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017) describes change as fractal—small shapes repeating into larger forms—while Donella Meadows’s “Leverage Points” (1999) shows that shifting mindsets outranks tweaking metrics. Karl Popper’s call for “piecemeal social engineering” (1945) adds a safeguard: iterate toward betterment without utopian coercion. Thus, a fragment should be shaped for replication: simple rules, clear rituals, open source tools. When a practice is easy to copy, its echo grows louder than its origin.
Repair, Memory, and Joy
In turn, fragments mature when they face harm without flinching. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (1996–1998) modeled public reckoning as a civic practice, braiding testimony with the possibility of repair. Memory, well-held, prevents our preferred future from becoming amnesia in disguise. Yet repair needs joy to endure. Community gardens, street festivals, and mutual aid kitchens keep hope embodied. Joy is not a distraction; it is the fuel that makes the next draft possible.
A Practical Pledge
Ultimately, Roy’s imperative becomes a daily vow: write one fragment and place it where others can see. Start a repair café, seed a neighborhood library at the bus stop, redesign a form so it respects people’s time, or publish open data that lets residents solve their own problems. Document the how-to, share the costs, name the mistakes. Begin small, begin kindly, begin now. If your fragment invites another, and then another, the paragraph becomes a page—and, over time, a world we would rather inhabit.