Use Me at Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline by Anuradha Vikram takes place in 2046, a near future where both automation and climate collapse are more advanced. In five provocative sections, Use Me at Your Own Risk confronts the ethical challenges inherent in our unprecedented shift to automation. Vikram sets the stage for these imagined futures in vivid detail, describing environments, complex characters, and events in disparate locations from New Delhi to Los Angeles. Described by Vikram as an activist art project, this speculative novel asks us to question our role in the destruction of our environment, the impact of automation on society, and heightened inequity across class, race, and gender.

Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) contributed to a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. They have written for art periodicals and publications from Paper Monument, Heyday Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA, and faculty in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.

Artist, designer, and independent curator Margaret Tedesco has collaborated with artists, writers, choreographers, and filmmakers for over three decades. In 2007, she established 2nd Floor Projects, an artist-run exhibition and publishing imprint, and received the Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Award. 2nd Floor Projects has participated in Printed Matter’s New York & Los Angeles Art Book Fairs, the San Francisco Art Book Fair, Berlin Art Book Fair, KADIST and Southern Exposure's Book Fairs, and SFMOMA’s Printed Publics exhibition.

Use Me at Your Own Risk is published as part of X Artists’ Books’ X Topics (XT) series, a collection of single-author books focused on the writing and ideas of marginalized voices.