Making the Future Illegal

In this episode of The Intentional Spill, Yvette and Frank confront a growing global pattern: the attempt to defang the future by controlling language. Sparked by an expanding list of government-banned words (from equity and race to climate and identity) the conversation explores what happens when imagination, meaning-making, and collective agency are treated as threats .

This isn’t a U.S.-only issue, and it isn’t just about words. It’s about how dominant systems preserve themselves by narrowing what can be named, imagined, or made possible. Through humor, provocation, and foresight practice, the episode reframes censorship just as an attempt to convey strength, but as a signal of system fragility, and argues that when the future is declared “illegal,” it becomes even more necessary to practice foresight as resistance and activism.

At its core, this Spill is a call to reclaim futures consciousness: the collective, relational capacity to imagine what wants to emerge and to build worlds worth living in, together.

Read banned books.
Use the words.
Imagine anyway.