The Selfish Vision: Addressing the problematic lack of explicit discourse and ethical contract in corporate design fictions

Vision videos are a genre of filmic representations, which utilizes diegetic prototypes, not (yet) existing or feasible in praxis. Through the film medium, researchers as well as corporations can demonstrate to a larger audience a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability. Traditionally, vision videos are used either externally as brand marketing or internally as speculation. But what happens when something being intended as an internal (and perhaps speculative) vision reaches an external crowd unintentionally, and without any explicit guidance in the vision video for what kind of discourse it should be understood within? Google’s ‘The Selfish Ledger’ from 2018 is an example the potential pitfalls when not addressing these discursive spaces vision videos potentially can create. This paper uses The Selfish Ledger as a case to discuss this ethical pitfall of not having an explicit ethical contract embedded in vision visions - be it internal or external.