In June of 2026, the World Inequality Lab—led by the economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel—released its monumental Global Justice Report, which lays out a pathway toward planetary habitability and global well-being. The report has been described as radical and even “utopian,” but, as we will argue in this panel, it is also strikingly practical. Its utopianism consists not of castles in the air, but rather of sober analysis grounded in the economic and material realities of the present, and recommendations focused on reimagining the infrastructures that have shaped that bad present of economic and ecological crisis. The report is useful and important both for its specific proposals and more generally in how it makes those changes seem possible. This sense of a possible alternative is all the more pressing as the techno-extractivism of Silicon Valley, with its rhetoric of the inevitability of its particular vision of progress, has become ascendant. If Silicon Valley oligarchs offer a future world covered in data centers, the Global Justice Report (GJR) invites us to imagine robust infrastructures of green energy, public health and education, economic equality, and democratic governance.

To put this in familiar Marxist terms, the GJR posits—through an alternative set of infrastructures—a future of human freedom wrested from the ideology and infrastructure of necessity pushed by Silicon Valley and the billionaire class. Building on the practical utopianism of the GJR, the speakers on this panel—in papers of 10-12 minutes each (leaving well over 15 minutes for open discussion)—will consider a range of material infrastructures, literary genres, and other political and aesthetic forms to make the case that we can say no to the claims of inevitability and necessity that have been central to the entrenchment of capitalist modernity, and say yes to infrastructures of actual freedom that are there if we want them.

In alignment with the conference theme, each speaker will develop, through a reading of historical and speculative literary texts and other media, an argument for a specific emancipatory approach to infrastructure: from the construction of bikeable cities to the dismantling of pipelines and the petroleum complex. In the first paper, Jeffrey Insko theorizes the infrastructure of freedom through the long history of movements for abolition, from the writings of Frederick Douglass—whose interest in infrastructure, from the Underground Railroad to the actual ships and trains which carried him to freedom, has been overlooked—to more recent initiatives to eradicate prisons, the death penalty, nuclear weapons, and fossil fuels. Stephanie LeMenager will then turn from abolition to decolonization as a means of mitigating the hazards of climate-induced wildfire. Through the poetry of children who survive devastating fires, the visual art of firefighters, and the cultural expression of fire ecologists, LeMenager identifies an emergent genre of fire which demands both epistemological change and revolutionary policy. From the film and poetry of Maya Khosla (an ecologist), the art of Sasha White (a feminist firefighter) and children’s poetry in the anthology California Fire and Water, this fire culture forges paths of alignment with Indigenous and ecological sciences and calls for a transfer of public lands to Indigenous stewardship and care.

While LeMenager asks us to reimagine the management of public lands, Stacey Balkan and Rebecca Oh invite us to reimagine urban space. As opposed to the compulsory automobility that has taken hold over a century of petroleum’s dominance, Balkan considers speculative visions such as Power Paola’s 2024 graphic memoir All My Bicycles—which imagines more convivial city streets—and Álvaro Muñez’s short film Hombre Eléctrico (Electric Man), which replaces the homicidal speed of petroculture with a portable bicimaquina (bicycle machine) that provides low-carbon pleasures in the lithium-rich Atacama Desert. Both works sketch an infrastructural paradise that moves “at the pace of democracy.” Rebecca Oh concludes the panel by furthering this vision of humane and democratic cities. Building on the Global Justice Report’s call for a paradigm of “sufficiency” as opposed to growth and accumulation, Oh shows how Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tower critiques hegemonic forms of real estate development that reinforce futures of capitalist growth and urban expansion in Mumbai. Instead, Adiga offers a version of the future city that would value ordinary workers and resurrect principles of democratic inclusion and civic solidarity, emphasizing the need for renovating both the material and political infrastructures that govern public and collective life.