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As technologists, our work involves acts of immense power, and society both admires and fears these acts. This power is a recent phenomenon. In ancient times, those who made technology were devalued as laborers: they were lowly potters and bronze-smiths, not space billionaires. Plato believed in the inferiority of practical craftsmen compared to philosophers, since they deal with the corrupt material world rather than the pure plane of Being and Ideas (Cuomo, 2007).

But for the last two centuries technology has been eating the world. The Industrial Revolution joined technology with industry, thus bringing many areas of human activity into the purview of industrialized technology, and allowing the acceleration of technological development. The newfound status and significance of modern technology requires us all to set aside space for probing the weighty questions that our work elicits, questions about its meaning and influence.

We must start at the beginning: what is technology? Indeed, how deeply do we understand what we make? The increasing power and consequence of technology seems to obscure its definition. Technology is like a cloud; it envelopes and surrounds us, but we can’t quite apprehend it because its omnipresence obscures our vision. We know it familiarly, thus vaguely.

The philosophers and historians, who have some distance from the practice, are often the ones who have thought deeply and rigorously about what technology is. But contemporary technologists cannot rely only on definitions made by those who are not engaged in the practice of technological creation. Terminology is the building block of concepts; in order to create concepts that allow us to improve the praxis of technology, us practitioners must define technology for ourselves.

## Technology as a Path to an End

Any characterization of technology should adequately acknowledge its inherently goal-driven nature. A simple definition is that technology is tools, processes or systems that make something easier. In other words, technology is a reusable, low-resistance path to achieve some end or goal. Thus, by materializing this path, technological creation gives power and primacy to a chosen course of action. This is often done by making the path an efficient one. For example, if I build a water turbine, I am creating a new, efficient path—that of the turbine’s process of channelling hydropower to create force on its blades—to the goal of generating electricity.

> A technology implicitly endorses its own route and ends above other routes and ends.

Implicitly, I have also favoured this _particular_ path to the goal over other means—technological or not—to that end. Bringing something into existence is in fact endorsing that thing itself. The first digital camera was a low-resistance path to an end, the end being photographic images. Its invention and manufacturing was an endorsement of the digital-camera-path over the existing film-camera-path as the way to achieve that end. Not only does a piece of technology always carry its maker’s endorsement; it also has a way of advocating its own use. A thing that exists beckons us to make good on the assumed telos of its existence. Richard M. Weaver said that the automobile’s simple being, its mere standing by the curb of your house, is an invitation to use it.

Prioritizing certain paths necessarily neglects others. The technology must efficiently route people’s finite energy and attention; that necessitates routing _away_ from something. A technology implicitly endorses its own route and ends above other routes and ends. Often different technologies clamor to offer competing routes or ends; sometimes, certain technologies end up dominating others, rendering certain routes or ends obsolete. For example, as digital cameras proliferated, many people switched to them, moving away from film cameras and darkrooms as the route to photographs. The analogue photography pathway was deprioritized, along with its associated behaviors: the inefficient, but gratifying workflows and the painstaking culture of physically retouching a single image for hours. Analogue wasn’t necessarily worse, it was just deprioritized, made harder and less attractive.

Technology is not neutral. These tools, processes and systems favour some paths and necessarily disfavour others. The technology-maker decides what to value and endorse, helping to perpetuate some moral slant or system. Even if two technologies have the same ends, differing paths can generate divergent consequences. Facebook and Instagram might have the same or similar ends (having people connect online), but Instagram makes people more visually aesthetic as a route to that. Image-first is an implicit value baked into Instagram.

Precisely because a technology is a reusable, low-resistance path, when a piece of technology catches on widely, it tends to exponentially scale the type of behavior that it makes easier. When TVs exploded in popularity in America, it exponentially scaled the behavior of zoning out in front of a screen, hypnotized by constant visual stimulation. Social media websites have exponentially scaled the occurrence of one-way parasocial relationships, where only one person is aware of the other’s existence. The more technology scales behavior, the more consequential the decisions that constitute it become.

Notice that we’re not defining technology as a solution to a problem, but rather a path to an end. Though many technologists see their work as “problem-solving”, problems are in the eye of the beholder; one first has to _make decisions_ about what constitutes a problem before _making decisions_ to solve it in a particular way. That decision-making process is prior to and more fundamental than the problem-solving process. It’s also highly subjective.

Joseph Dunne (2005) points out that, when confronted with a problematic situation, “one is not calculating the efficiency of different possible means towards an already determined end. Rather, one is often deliberating about the end itself: about what would count as a satisfactory, or at least not entirely unacceptable, outcome to a particular ‘case’" (pp. 381). Making technology involves an ongoing attempt to bring the world closer to the way one wishes it to be. The technologist actively participates in determining _what that wish is_, rather than having clearly defined problems handed to them.

## Distinguishing Technology from Science

_“Science concerns itself with what is, whereas technology concerns itself with what is to be” - Henryk Skolimowski, 1966_

It may be clear by this point that technology is deeply entangled in human will and judgment. Technology is certainly not value-neutral, although it is often portrayed as such. Part of the reason is our messy collective handling of the relationship between technology and science. Science and technology are frequently mentioned in one breath; while they are related, we must decouple the two to fully understand what technology is, apart from science.

A scientist is a spectator whose goal, at least in theory, is to detach their identity from the scientific process. The person’s will is constrained to looking for truths that are universal, certain and timeless. The scientific method is constructed to rid its output of human context and distortion, so that in theory, anyone should be able to replicate a set of results. The scientist’s identity should be rendered irrelevant.

> In its idealized form the scientific method limits freedom of the will, while technology amplifies freedom of the will.

In a sense, science aims to be a minimally instrumental pursuit, as it only aims at the truth. In contrast, technology is highly instrumental; it’s all about pursuing various goals using tools.

Consequently, in its idealized form the scientific method limits freedom of the will, while technology amplifies freedom of the will. Technology is by no means derived with certainty. It is the extremely particular result of someone’s will, based on rationalizing through the concrete and contingent circumstances of the world.

We are not pursuing “truth”; we are exploiting “truth”.

(The caveat is that science, of course, involves significant free will and judgment in practise too. Scientists have to make decisions about what constitutes a worthy investigation, outlining and framing the task at hand. Science has also been commissioned for entirely instrumental ends. I have noted that objectivity and non-instrumentality are ideals that the scientific process aims for, which does not reflect practise. Still, the difference in ideals for science and technology has major implications for the way people conceive of and execute the work.)

Even though technology often exploits scientific truths, technology does not _require_ rigorous science. For millennia, humans built tools and found new and more efficient ways to do things with trial and error, without needing a methodical pursuit of truth. Cheesemaking is an ancient biotechnology whose genesis never relied on a theory of bacteria. Nowadays, science and technology have a closer relationship, but even so, technology is not determined by science.

Anyone trying to apply science via technology must reason through contingencies, constraints, and behavior in specific circumstances. Questions like _What is most appropriate and desired in this context?_ arise. Science focuses on necessity and universality; technology focuses on contingencies and specificities. Thus, technology does not just follow from science as some kind of 1:1 relationship. There is a critical juncture between science and technology, between present and future. Here the technologist stands, choosing what kind of future, out of the infinite possibilities, that will actually materialize based on our scientific understanding of the present world.

A piece of technology prioritizes some low-resistance path to achieve an end, and its essential nature involves instrumentality and free will. It must inherently be purposive.

Correspondingly, neither the work of technology nor a technological artifact can be either neutral or deterministic. Viewing a technology as a purely neutral object is ignoring the human intention designed into it, the meaning that humans give to the technology we interact with, and the incredible agency involved in a technologist’s work.

Skolimowski (1968) asserted that our technological pursuits consist in providing means for constructing objects according to our desires and dreams (pp. 554). After we internalize the scope of our agency, the critical question for technologists will become: what are the desires and dreams worth specifying, and the paths we should create, and endorse, to get there?

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Works Cited

Cuomo, S. (2007). _Technology and culture in Greek and Roman antiquity_. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Dunne, J. (2005). An intricate fabric: understanding the rationality of practice. _Pedagogy, Culture & Society,_ 13(3), 367-390.

Skolimowski, H. (1968). On the Concept of Truth in Science and in Technology. \_Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Philosophy, \_Vienna, Austria (2), 533-559.


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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The notification lands with a soft ping as soon as I connect to the airport Wi-Fi.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Hello Jasmine! We enjoyed our conversation and are excited to offer you a term sheet.”

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;My podcast drones on in my AirPods. The interviewer discusses how engineered pandemics more infectious than COVID-19 will disrupt the supply chain and wreak more destruction by an order of magnitude. His voice is low, steady, and comforting. The natural pauses between his phrases are engineered out so that each word smoothly elides into the next.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;After a few seconds of debate, I duck out of the stream of fellow passengers pouring out of the airplane, tuck myself into a corner tightly against the wall, and free my thumbs.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The email contains a PDF file with delicate letterhead that says the company I started three months ago was worth more than eighteen million dollars. Holy shit. I scratch my head and feel a dull blueness develop at the base of my tongue. I can’t tell if it is dread, excitement, or the caffeine tablet I took while waiting for the plane to dock.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I look up, expecting to see my fellow passengers standing stock-still, gaping at me, faces stretched with incredulity, admiration, even envy. But no, the stream of passengers has thinned to a trickle, and everyone is busy deciphering their own small screens. I wonder what missives have landed in their inboxes.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Over the last week of fundraising, I have become unnecessarily paranoid about infosecurity, all too aware of how information is treated as currency in fundraising. The airport’s Wi-Fi is neither reliable nor secure, and my phone is about to run out of battery. I quickly take a screenshot of the term sheet, festoon it with cartoon exclamation marks, and send it to my mentor, a female founder who has raised several rounds from Sequoia. I open up the screenshot after it sends successfully and squint at it. The obscene numbers have not changed. This digital picture-in-a-picture stabilizes my reality. I turn off my screen to preserve my phone’s battery, but the after-image of the file stays with me, gently but insistently etched into the corners of my vision.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is my first time in Cancun, and I learn quickly that I cannot expect amenities like charging ports in public spaces here. As I push my luggage cart through the winding corridors, my mentor, as well as other founders who are advising me on the raise process, try to call me. My phone dies in the middle of a call just as I emerge from the airport into a moist darkness, surrounded by tall palm trees, an early birth into a strange world. I turn in a few circles to orient myself. I search for a power outlet to no avail, digging through both my suitcases in the exit foyer, and finally return to the taxi area, where I plead at a sequence of desks for a charger. One lady takes pity on me. I prop my laptop open on the counter and text an investor who I am supposed to call later that night that I need to cancel. Riding double dopamine waves from the term sheet and cancelling the meeting, I let myself be exploited by the attendants at the taxi counter for what I learned later was more than four times the usual price. The taxi driver tries to point out local landmarks as the city flashes by. I leave my suitcases just inside the door to my Airbnb and find a $3 burrito a few minutes away. I scarf it down so quickly that I still feel the warmth of it in my throat when I fall asleep.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is the spring of my twenty-second year. The world is caught in the throes of a global pandemic. I have retreated from the land of dreams, magic internet money, and robots to shelter at home with my family. Then, on this stopover to Cancun, I conditionally become a millionaire on paper.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is nearly four more days until I have a proper meal again, as I zoom between different cyberspaces. An alien petitioner on pilgrimage for digital alms to build digital tools to produce more digital alms. My family has packed me a half-full Kirkland container of pistachios. In Mandarin, we call them “happy nuts.” I crack open pistachios between calls, and shells of happiness pile up to the left of my webcam.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Every morning, I wake up and apply a thin layer of sunscreen. When I was younger I read dermatology papers obsessively and now wore sunscreen every day. This is the only part of my self-care routine that persists for the next few weeks, even as every other semblance of normality dissipates. I develop strange red triangles under my eyes that remind me of the face paint on the Joker in a card set I had once lost. I take all my video calls perched on a storage stool in front of a large mirror. It is a setup for admiring one’s face, not for digital fundraising marathons. In between video calls, where I watch my face alternate between excitement and seriousness, I rest my eyes on my reflection in the mirror, gently smooth cream over the rough red skin, and feel my face burn.

> If one must imagine Sisyphus happy, then one must imagine entrepreneurs happy, these glistening heroes of the American imaginary.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Late in the night, I scroll through articles of smooth-skinned and smiling young people under headlines with obscene numbers. If one must imagine Sisyphus happy, then one must imagine entrepreneurs happy, these glistening heroes of the American imaginary. I imagine myself as the subject of one of these articles. I imagine myself happy, the skin under my eyes smooth. Other than the happy nuts, I don’t have time to eat. I think of holy female anorexics, who fasted so that they might see God, and wonder what I am fasting for.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All my communications move to text or Signal in an effort to consolidate my information streams. Founders, mostly the male ones, encourage me to raise at a higher valuation, to get aggressive, to play things fast and loose. Founders, mostly the female ones, warn me to be careful. I do reference checks with founders, on the venture capitalists that offer me millions, as I’m supposed to, staying mostly on-script. I try to beam my questions to them, like some request for shaktipat: Is the investor a good person? Are they the sort of person you want to line the pockets of? Are you happy when you wake up? I hope that these founders feel the subtext in my questions. I mine their answers for potential subtext, alternate readings, anything at all, and come up blank.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Mexico has not yet solved the last-mile connectivity problem. I fight with the Wi-Fi gods to no avail. Questions from investors arrive in drips and drops, smiles frozen midway in strange grimaces. Sometimes, they ask where I am, and I apologize profusely. It is bad timing on my part, I say, to move to Cancun in the middle of a raise process. I wonder if they feel like they are talking to a glitchy cyborg.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I test out different spots in the house for calls. While speaking with a partner at one of the world’s top seed funds, their smiling face suddenly freezes on my screen. Shit, shit. I swear under my breath, turn my video off, and decide to try a space outside. I remember that the hallway right in front of the balcony had done well during a cursory internet speed test. I step outside barefoot onto the small balcony, close the door behind me for privacy, then sit down cross-legged on the red tile. The face begins to move again and then freezes yet again. I test the door, and realize I have locked myself outside. I am beyond the worldly grasp of connectivity and cannot do anything about it. I close my laptop and relax into fifteen minutes of something almost like peace.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I grew up telling stories, and I am in my element as I tell stories over and over again. Stories about myself and my upbringing. Stories about the company’s metrics, and stories about where the company is going. Past, present, and future layered on top of each other in a complex wheel, births and deaths and reincarnations and re-imaginings. Every call, I leave feeling that I have made a successful case: the one and only conclusion, both necessary and sufficient, of my story was that I would start the most successful AI-powered marketing company the world had ever seen.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;One of my last video calls with the top tech venture fund in the world is taken outside by the pool, with the sun streaming behind me. I feel like a fiery angel, executing the algorithm of how to raise a successful seed round as if it were a divine mandate from the universe.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I wonder if investors would have been so excited about handing me millions of dollars if they had met me in person, without the armor of the Zoom blur feature and Wi-Fi delays. On good days, I am five foot three. On bad days, the red triangles under my eyes are terrifying. In person, I wouldn’t have been able to hide the septum ring that was just thin enough not to show on video calls—it catches the light obviously in meatspace.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As more and more term sheets come in, I feel the same nervous excitement I had at the airport. But now, I am bone-tired. It is the sort of tiredness that makes me want to lie in the sand and bury my neck there, along with all the other humans patiently awaiting oblivion.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There’s one investor I’m quite excited to meet. I pace around my room steadying myself before our call. I’m ready to weave my story, having already woven it a dozen times today. But he cuts in before I can finish my monologue.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Why are you doing this?_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I answer, and he repeats the same question. Each time it feels like the emphasis rests on a different word. _Why_ are you doing this? Why are you doing _this_? Why are _you_ doing this?

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The question of the company itself falls quickly behind us. He speaks of airdropping teddy bears all over the African continent that carry essential nutrients inside their bellies and can simulate real human hugs. I tell him about my dreams of being a writer, of the immense burden and gift of my own subjective experience, of being constantly overwhelmed by the beauty and ugliness of what I perceive. He laughs a silvery, ringing laugh that makes me understand what Hesse meant when he described the laugh of the immortals. He sold his first company a decade ago, and is now merely outrunning death, but he is no longer afraid of it.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I never see this person’s face. I prefer to keep it that way, to remember them as a disembodied voice in the ether, entirely free.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I hang up and fall asleep. I dream a dream I’ve dreamed many times: the trip I’d take my dad on if I were rich. He loves _Les Miserables_; it is the only movie he has watched multiple times. We have dinner somewhere in Tribeca, somewhere where the menu doesn’t have prices, then take a yellow cab up to the theatre, the biggest in New York. When the curtain comes up, my father begins to cry immediately. I watch him out of the corner of my eye with something like curiosity. By the time the third death happens, I am frustrated with myself that I have not yet cried. At intermission, I hug my dad, give him my tissue pack, and go to the washroom to inspect my face. I try to make myself cry, and instead red triangles bloom under my eyes.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I wake up and call my sister. I tell her about all the term sheets. I don’t tell her about the dream. I talk quickly and seriously, not letting her interrupt. At the end, framed as an afterthought, I tell her that another potential path has emerged—an acquisition. I spell out that path more hesitantly. It would mean that I could leave the company, while she would have to stay on. It would mean I would be free to pursue other dreams to which this particular project had originally only been instrumental, before it had started to fill up my entire life. While I wait for her reply, I watch the moon outside my window. It is large and bright. I always have to watch my mood when the moon fills my vision like this.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Big sister, you don’t sound so well. I worked on this company with you because I wanted you to be free, in order to be well. That was the whole point. I love you. I trust you to do whatever you think is right.”

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Oh.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It was as if some missing pin had been slotted into place, cleanly dismantling a massive and indestructible mental construction. As the construction imploded, it screamed. _But you’ve already convinced so many people to support you. You could be happy doing this, maybe, starting a B2B SaaS company and telling yourself you’re saving the world._ A different tack: _You need to amend your morals; if in fact small is beautiful then it should be enough that you are able to salary people you believe in._ A final swipe: _what kind of storyteller are you, then, that you convinced so many others and not yourself?_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The skyscraper of justifications and counterarguments fall all at once, cleaving possible futures in its wake. Ones in which I keep telling this story, where my self-concept becomes even more inextricably tied to that of the company. These futures play across my mind, miniature films. I watch myself play a successful prophet for the religion of my company. I watch as various successes lit up my eyes but not my soul, and failures scarr me permanently, as I remember this moment and the choice I made, and what that says about my values. I watch as I stop going to bookstores, because seeing different variants of the common critique, “the best minds of my generation are consumed by improving click-through rates”, becomes so painful that it almost drives me insane.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The morning sunlight paints the insides of my eyelids soft red. I am awake again, and ready to work. I have to tell new stories now in response to new questions, but these stories feel more true.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Why do you want to sell the company now, when it’s doing so well?_
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Because I don’t want to spend my youth on this problem. It doesn’t make me come alive._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Well, what do you want to work on?_
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_I don’t know. I’d like to go back to school perhaps, and write for a bit. Oh, and music. I miss that a lot. I think it’s quite likely that I will start other things, as a serial planter of seeds. Some might look like companies._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Why were you going through a fundraising process, then? And what changed your mind?_
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. That’s the story I was told, and the one I told myself.. I learned a lot from telling the story, most importantly that I didn’t want to live this exact one. There are so many other stories to tell and inhabit. The moment when I finally understood an equation on a chalkboard. The glint in my father’s eyes as he tells me about how he knelt at Tiananmen. How I tenderize the piano with my hands, and how it tenderizes me._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At the height of the GameStop frenzy, I have a strange, terrifying realization. What if I was being catfished? The deal had been miraculously timed, and everything had been going almost too smoothly. I texted the acquirer. _Can I FaceTime you very quickly?_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His face matches his profile page on the firm’s website. Smiling, smooth-skinned, clearly wealthy. _Great, I just called you to verify you had a face. Thanks. Bye!_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The man would tell me later, after the deal closed, that he thought the interaction had been very funny. An unprecedented event, he chuckled.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The deal is finalized on Chinese New Year. I fold dumplings with my housemates, most of whom work in crypto. For Chinese people, dumplings are a sign of prosperity. They ask me if I am rich. I shrug. They all think fiat is fake anyway. But I do say a small prayer inside as thanks for my salvation, for allowing me the road less travelled by.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It’s been a few months. Not much has changed. My friends talk of impending war, predictions around the timing of the next pandemic, and sketch their plans for the apocalypse. I joke that my praxis is non-instrumental time, what the young people call “hanging out”, after a decade of being painfully on. I have space to breathe.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I do often think of the constructions and stories I built, and how easily they might have remained unfelled, growing deeper and deeper roots into the very inner sanctums of my soul. How could I have come so close to harming myself in this way, to offloading my thinking to templates and playbooks? How could I have not allowed myself time to think? How did I get so close to executing other people’s algorithms without judgement, taste, or real pleasure?

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sometimes, I look at my face and touch my scars. Sometimes I talk to my friends who are just beginning their careers in technology, and I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them. _Please, please keep reminding yourself who you are and what you’re fighting for. Or else you might grow at supernatural speed into a beautiful tree, and everyone will admire your flowers and your fruits, but you will know that in growing so quickly you have become ungrounded, have lost any real driving principle, have lost your roots._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Most times, though, I stay quiet. I think, one day I’ll write a story about this. I think about all the ways that people who hope to impress some beautiful dream upon the world yet end up caught up in side quests justify the work they’re doing. I hope that when they finally make it, finally free themselves, that they do not retreat from the world into fancy villas, tired and jaded.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I am careful now to avoid blithely following algorithms, and I am wary of putting off the practice and pursuit of transcendent value. I try to think about, and talk through with friends, options that aren’t explicitly on the table. I think about how humanity has always been searching for the answer of how to be, what to do, what stories to tell in the face of seeming apocalypse. I feel the light behind my face, bright and moon-like. I choose to lift my head.

---


The notification lands with a soft ping as soon as I connect to the airport Wi-Fi.

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_Kinjal Shah is an investor at Blockchain Capital and co-founder of the Komorebi Collective, which invests in female and nonbinary founders in crypto. She can be found on Twitter at [@\_kinjalbshah](https://twitter.com/_kinjalbshah)._

_David Phelps writes on Web3 at [davidphelps.substack.com](https://davidphelps.substack.com/)._

_Jasmine Wang is the cofounder and Editor-in-Chief of [Kernel Magazine](https://twitter.com/kernel_magazine?). She can be found on Twitter at [@j_asminewang](https://twitter.com/j_asminewang?lang=en). Disclaimers: her personal holdings in crypto are viewable at jasminewang.eth. She was part of KB4 in [kernel.community](https://kernel.community/), and has received an honourable mention from Gitcoin’s call for public goods proposals. She is also an angel investor in a few crypto startups still in stealth, which are not mentioned here._

---

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

**Jasmine Wang (JW): Let’s start with how you became interested in crypto.**

**Kinjal Shah (KS):**
I was working at Fidelity and I was put on a project that forced me to go deep down the rabbit hole. What compelled me to say I want to do this full time was a chance to fix everything that's wrong with our existing financial infrastructure, and do it in a way that would by default be more open and inclusive and transparent. That's really what I wanted to see and I was like, this is going to be the future of how we get to that.

**David Phelps (DP):**
In 2017 when I read about Bitcoin and Ethereum, I never really understood Bitcoin. But Ethereum made a lot of sense to me. And I really saw it as the future in 2017. I had a failed company that I'd started that was doing auto pay and auto billing for freelancers. Freelancers have to handle all the pieces that are not the reason they got into the business in the first place. But trying to do that at scale, with credit card fees, was just totally infeasible. So I got into crypto as a way to disintermediate the credit card industry and really allow for more permissionless payments from anyone to anywhere in the world. That was the really big part of the discourse in 2017; there wasn't discussion of the ownership economy, it was really just about disintermediating big institutions to have easier financial transactions.
Now my overall narrative would be more around ownership and collectivization.

**JW:**
I was first introduced to crypto via the RadicalxChange community in 2019. It's a movement focused on mechanism design whose founder, Glen Weyl, has collaborated extensively with Vitalik Buterin and co-authored a paper on quadratic voting, among other mechanisms. My interest in crypto originated in its political and governance promises.

**JW: Were there any moments that you felt skeptical of crypto? Was there any hesitancy?**

**KS:**
I've had so many. When I got into this space, it was 2017 and I got introduced to Web3 via Bitcoin. Bitcoin made a lot of sense to me. I grew up in a family where having gold passed down generation over generation is important. I never fully got it but my parents have their jewelry and their gold bars in a safe somewhere and I'm going to get that one day. So the concept of store value in a digital sphere made a lot of sense to me. But when I started seeing all these ICOs happen [in 2017], that was a really big moment for me, where I was asking myself, do I want to enter a space where it feels like so much of it is just about making money?

The second piece is this internal battle of being one of very few women, or very few people of color, in the room and you don't see those people around you. It's like, should I be building up a community that doesn't represent me? So I found myself in this position where to do what I want to do, I have to climb up the ranks in the world that doesn't look like me. I'm devoting a lot of my time trying to figure out how to bring others up. So that's a constant battle of, it’s not skepticism about the technology, but it's skepticism about how things can go awry, when you don't build with that inclusivity in mind.

**DP:**
[For] a lot of people outside the US, this is not something that's accessible, this is something really intimidating. I think that [it] took me a long time to internalize that. Over time, it did make me very aware of the ways that my missionary advocacy for crypto can fall into very traditional, I think even colonialist, white guy tropes of wanting to be the savior of the rest of the world with something that benefits you the most. As exciting as it is to talk about the ownership that we're gonna have over our data, we're also talking about owning entire protocols. And those are privatized, mostly in the hands of American venture capitalists, who are crowding out anyone else from being able to invest in them. So I think that that's the thing I'm most scared of right now — that our discussion of ownership and the power of ownership is also very much masking the ways that ownership is in the hands of very few very powerful people will benefit the most from it. Democratizing opportunity doesn't actually democratize access.

**JW:
I completely agree. It feels like in order to make money in crypto I need to enter gated communities for curated information strategies. This makes me hesitant about investing capital in the space, because in order to succeed I need to implement strategies that I don't feel on board with ideologically. So much of the emphasis in crypto is being early on a project and being able to buy in before other folks and doing some sort of information arbitrage. Does that feel like a correct assessment to you?**

**KS:**
This entire space is so early that a lot of the information arbitrage is really a factor of — the markets are not efficient because we don't have enough capital, we don't have enough players. It's an inefficient market and people are taking advantage of those arbitrage opportunities. The thesis behind being early is just to say that if there's a little part of the world that you know, and you spent a lot of time in and it doesn't feel like a lot of other people spend a lot of time there but you want to bet on it. You should be able to do that and reap the benefits of that. That's the conversation about being early and [it’s] less about “I'm going to make 1,000x if I'm like the second person in.” That's more of the Ponzi model that I hope to see less of.

**DP:**
Carlota Perez has this distinction between productive value and financial value, where productive value is when you get value from the things you actually produce because they have meaning in the world, and financial value is when you get value because of arbitrage opportunities and speculation and market manipulation, and sometimes the boundaries between these things are blurry.

One of my frameworks for crypto — that I think is both a very good thing and a very negative thing at the same time — is that I think it democratizes collusion. Anyone can get together and create a Discord and drive up prices on NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and do wash trading, raise up those prices, to the point that everyone is just trading with each other without losing any money of their own. This is definitely a form of market manipulation. But so is everything that involves buying with money. It's just a question of the degree and power and who's being affected by that. What if instead of using the term “collusion,” we used the term “positive sum”? Now we have this way where anyone can get together and they're able to support each other in their community, and they're able to build value for one another. There's a real opportunity for communities to come together, create their own social token that has no value and give it value. I think it's a huge improvement over what we've had before.

**JW:**
I’m fascinated by the way crypto is leveraging language. Like within quadratic voting, you need to conceptualize yourself as an individual actor and not talk to other people about how you're expressing your preferences. This is known as colluding [and] you can't collude, that messes up the system. But there's also another term for this, which is coalition-building, which is a different framing. People are reinventing vocabulary to reorient ourselves to systems and their possibilities, and there are both dangers and opportunities there.

**JW: Which is to what degree is collective ownership the goal? Do we need to think beyond current concepts of ownership?**

**KS:**
I have a couple of somewhat related points to get to the answer here. First is defining what ownership means when you're collectivizing it, and understanding the rights associated with ownership and the level of involvement. Joining a DAO where you're one of 1000 people probably implies a different level of ownership than if you're one of 15. And then the other question for me is, when does collective ownership make the most sense? Does the value of this entity grow because it is owned and supported by multiple people? Does collective decision-making make sense? I don't think I buy the theory that everything should be governed by crowds of people. So trying to delineate where the boundaries are is super important because I don't think ownership should be taken lightly.

**DP:**
One economic model I'm obsessed with is Roblox’s [an online gaming platform] economic model. They give you all the tools you want and they give you all the land you want to build. Then you monetize, based on what you do with that. It's not even collective ownership — it's really no ownership. I just think we need to be careful that ownership is not in a zero sum system, and the question is about what you own the system you're in, and whether your ownership is taking away that right from someone else or whether it's enabling for someone else. One of the really powerful experiences I had was when Ameer [Suhayb Carter] started Crypto Cookout, where the goal was to buy Black CryptoPunks. As a white person, I asked him, should I participate in this? Do I have a place here? And he was like, absolutely, because you're helping support Black equity. By contributing to win that auction and putting in whatever money I had, I was also helping Black ownership in some ways. It's the first time in my life I've actually felt like I was an ally.

**JW: At Kernel, we're interested in the role of media in getting people excited about technology, and help them orient critically and actionably to those emerging technologies. I'm curious if there were any particular pieces of media that made you interested in crypto and if you have any thoughts about how crypto’s narrative is portrayed in the media.**

**KS:**
There's a deluge of information out there. Starting in the right places can lead to different outcomes. A lot of what I spent time reading early on was like Nick Szabo’s writing or the Bitcoin white paper. Mostly very old school blogs that were talking about this technology and the potential use cases. Today, if you want to get into the Web3 space, a lot of it is on Twitter or YouTube or podcasts, and all of those resources are great, but I think going to the fundamentals and starting with some of the historical information is a good idea. Because I did that, I always had this grounding that allowed me to form my opinions early on, and take each new piece of information and measure it up against some of the early writers and thinkers of the space. More broadly, the media portrayal of crypto has been extremely hyperbolic. I'm just disappointed in how much headline-driven reporting continues to be emphasized. I wish we could have reporting that is more focused on the people, the community, and the conversations that people are having and less about things like the underlying financial price.

**DP:**
The arguments that Marx’s Das Kapital makes in terms of how we create value out of thin air are really relevant to crypto. I think Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are always on my mind, especially works like _Ubik and The Dispossessed_.

**KS:**
I try to point people away from Twitter as the first place to go. There's so much context behind what people tweet that you don't really know, like you don't know if they've invested in a project, you don't know if they are best friends with this person. A lot of that comes from time and experience, and I just don't know if [Twitter] is the place for a beginner.

> My biggest worry is that it turns us all into constant seekers of upside.

**JW:**
Tweets lack so much context. The point of long form content is so different from a tweet. You have space to posit an entire world that is alien to the reader and make them feel at home in it, and thereby unlock it as a possible world to strive towards. Whereas on crypto Twitter, I feel like there are so many different memes that you’re supposed to extrapolate a worldview from by yourself, and project your own hopes onto. I would love to see more explicit long-form articulation of people’s different philosophies and hopes for crypto. But it’s difficult to create spaces for reflection when things are so fast paced.

**JW: One could claim that the tokenization of things strips them of some intrinsic value. Are you two worried about this, or about hyper- financialization more generally?**

To elaborate, Vitalik just published a paper in response to Nathan Schneider's article critiquing the limits of cryptoeconomics. His concluding sentence resonated with me: “Blockchain-based contractions have a lot to offer that other kinds of systems do not. On the other hand ... _blockchainized_ should not be equated with _financialized_. There is plenty of room for blockchain-based systems that do not look like money, and indeed we need more of them.”

**KS:**
I think one of my biggest concerns about hyper- financialization is that it implies that wealth and financial assets make you valuable. We're creating this culture where when you consume something, you have this assumption that you've already also invested in it because why would you spend time consuming something that you're not owning a piece of. It basically means that you need to have enough capital to be able to show that you're serious about supporting something or consuming something.

When you think of everything as a market, it does dehumanize it. It does turn it into a game of numbers and it's very difficult to separate your success from financial success. If I were to think about how crypto could go wrong, my biggest worry is that it turns us all into constant seekers of upside, and that measurement is done primarily through financial means, and we lose this ability to understand and benefit from social capital gains or meaningful contributions that come in different ways.

**JW:
There's a difference between a market economy versus a market society. The world that I'm worried about is one where we relate to all others through a lens of potential upside. There are ‘others’ that we understand to be ends unto themselves, intrinsically worthy, like other humans. Some people might feel like animals are intrinsically worthy, or trees or water are intrinsically worthy, and we shouldn't financialize those entities. Applying this lens to everything feels really alienating.**

One example I would give here is that in Sino culture, there is this important notion of filial duty, where because my parents took care of me, that when the time comes, as required, I will take care of them, as well as taking care of my children who will take care of me. This idea of reciprocity has so much beauty and virtue in it that would be lost if we approached it in a quantified financial way. For example, we could try to work out how much my parents spent on me until, say, I was financially independent, or even one step further, how much that money they would have earned if they deployed that as investment capital instead, or how much of my future earnings it entitled them to. If we did that I’d personally feel none of the intrinsic honor that comes with being a good daughter or a good steward. I think many people today would find applying this financial lens to their most intimate sphere uncomfortable, but I think those boundaries could shift culturally as we introduce this language and technological affordance to financialize our relationships with other objects.

> We need to think about the ways that permissionless is not enough. We need to be intentional in community-building

**DP:**
The counterpoint would be that we already are hyper-financialized. Our data and identities are already being monetized by corporations constantly, and everything we do is creating and generating gigantic amounts of actual financial value. And what we're really talking about is taking that back for ourselves, and saying like we should have the right to the financial value that we're already providing to all of these systems that are able to take advantage of it. A really simple example is if advertisers want to pay what they call customer acquisition costs to acquire the customer, those will go to the customer.

Then so much of the world we currently live in has often misaligned incentives, or even just a spectrum of incentives. The idea is that we can create these structures where we all co-own. I would like to think that there actually can be great emotional benefits to working in this kind of space, and that having aligned incentives can actually create better relationships. I would much rather not have dominant power with an organization where I'm not building sustainable relationships, I'd rather share all of that power. So I agree that there's an absolute danger here of financialization but I would like to think that the models we're building will actually create much more meaningful relationships.

**JW:** **What do you think are the most valid critiques of crypto? What could people do about those things? And what things are you excited for?**

**DP:**
I’m really excited about creating permissionless environments where anyone can build. Permissionless meaning anyone can go out and take anyone else's smart contract and then create their own version without having to ask permission and everyone gets monetized. But the other side of permissionless environments is you have to have those skill sets, resources, and time to do it. Those are all privileges and those will correspond to economic privilege in a non Web3 world, and I think as excited as we are about building Web3 we have to remember that if we're not intentional, it will just replicate the structures of Web2 and have intergenerational economic inequality that compounds over time. If you're not actively working to change the previous system, you're just inviting it in. We need to think about the ways that permissionless is not enough. We need to be intentional in community-building, and support making crypto much more accessible to the people who really need economic opportunity.

**KS:**
My other main critique of the space is that we put too much emphasis on speculation. [People in crypto] often say that investor protections, in the United States at least, are harmful.. I think the speculative behavior of crypto is part of the culture and it's very playful and it's really fun. But it's sometimes at the expense of security, so I think if you're looking to join this space, and thinking about ways to improve upon it, I would focus on how we make this more of a secure environment.


Kinjal Shah is an investor at Blockchain Capital and co-founder of the Komorebi Collective, which invests in female and nonbi...

A Conversation About Crypto

This piece is collaboratively written by the entire community that contributed to Kernel.

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The...

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**self portrait (with/without)**

With neatly diced fruit tucked into earthenware bowls. Without a real conversation
 as my parents served me. With a graze of fingertips as Ma handed over the fork.
 Without a napkin. With thousands of hours
 worn into pixelated tokens of nothingness,
 just a felt pillow on a screen. Without the laughter of a physical community from repeating each
 other’s words
 over and over until we can’t breathe..
 With online presence, a jovial
 /guild "who's up"
 that permeates my feeble skin. With a group of other geeks,
 wandering the online wastelands, searching for rare armor blessed by gods.
 With my brother, who laughed at the same raw moments, who came into my room as we sat
 side by side, equally absorbed in our digital lives.
 Without a sleep schedule. Without conversational skills.
 With a gentle awkwardness, talking to the first
 friend I made online. With a fight, where I learned that having your life on the internet meant that
 stealing was different, that the toils of hours put into a game were just data
 being stored on some server.
 Sometimes US-West, this time Korea.
 With tears.
 Without comfort.
 With thinking I was grown up because I saw my first penis online.
 Without realizing that I was too young. With many thoughts, wondering what it feels like
 to have another man's lips on mine.
 With Jack Evanson. With Xbox Live.
 With cross-continental Skype calls. Calls that would frame
 my twilight hours, at 2am, computer on stomach, with your face
 sprawled across the screen,
 blurry, broken, laggy, lively
 as we giggled. Dreaming, that one day, we could laugh together,
 with each other, next to each other, nuzzling.

**untitled.py**

import _lives_, _trauma_ from **“our parents”**

_let_ **me** be the object of love and loss;

_let_ **you** be the desires of stories untold;

let **us** be a world that takes in two lives (_me you_):
 <indent1>// i’m trying to remember how we met love,</indent1>
 <indent1>// can you tell me?</indent1>
 <indent1>**child_hood(me);**</indent1>

<indent1>// i was lost</indent1>
 <indent1>**college(me);**</indent1>

<indent1>// can i be found</indent1>
 <indent1>**marry(me);**</indent1>

<indent1>// maybe we can be, together</indent1>
 <indent1>**return** a bond filled with everlasting radiance;</indent1>

_let_ **child_hood** be a moment that takes in a bright light and returns a dimmed one:
 <indent1>// darkness</indent1>
 <indent1>_let_ **crushing_weight_of_existence** be the trauma that our parents never got over</indent1>
 <indent1>_while_ **crushing_weight_of_existence** exists:</indent1>
 <indent2>pray I find happiness;</indent2>
 <indent2>pray I find peace;</indent2>
 <indent2>pray I realize that the gentle sunrise is what gives me the life i need to sustain through the day;</indent2>
 <indent2>pray I find you;</indent2>

<indent1>**return** a child, governed by a god that does not care;</indent1>

_let_ **college** be a place that harms and nurtures a soul and returns a ghost:
 <indent1>// longing for a love</indent1>
 <indent1>_let_ **the_love_of_my_life** be a person that has never existed;</indent1>
 <indent1>_while_ **the_love_of_my_life** does not fill the void in my heart:</indent1>
 <indent2>**drink()**</indent2>
 <indent2>**date()**</indent2>
 <indent2>**cry()**</indent2>

_let_ **drink** be a thirst that cannot be quenched:
 <indent1>if Sunday:</indent1>
 <indent2>seltzer</indent2>
 <indent1>else:</indent1>
 <indent2>hard_liquor</indent2>

_let_ **date** be a space where our bared souls bar and returns a promise:

_let_ **date_time** be the following thursday;
 <indent1>// i don’t know how to dress</indent1>
 <indent1>// what should I wear</indent1>
 <indent1>// is this too formal?</indent1>
 <indent1>// am I too formal?</indent1>
 <indent1>_let_ **location** be the nearby bar;</indent1>
 <indent1>_let_ **memories** be hazy;</indent1>

<indent1>**return** &lt;Promise>(to meet again)</indent1>

_let_ **cry** be empty:
 <indent1>_pass_</indent1>

_let_ **marry** be a resolution to an indefinite promise and returns a union:
 <indent1>**return** the intersection of me and you</indent1>

_Ivan Zhao (he/him) is a human interested in immersive storytelling and playful experiences. He enjoys taking long naps in hammocks at the top of mountains and making fermented syrups. His greatest wish is to be petting multiple dogs at the same time._

self portrait (with/without)

With neatly diced fruit tucked into earthenware bowls. Without a real conversation
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![A digital painting of a focused woman sitting on the ground and drawing a rectangle](2/drawing_rectangles.jpeg 'Drawing Rectangles')

For so long I had thought product design was my dream job. It combines art, technology, and impact — a perfect field (and perhaps less stressful) for someone who wanted to be a storyboard artist. However, as I got into design, it just felt like consulting with the added responsibility of drawing rectangles. It wasn’t that innovative, and a lot of design was focused on making it as usable as possible, which meant falling in line with general UX practice of how screens should look. As a result, my thinking also became more methodical and logical and predictable.

In my piece, the girl is drawing a rectangle, but even more so we see that it’s a source of light — she’s fraying the hard border into something softer, more organic. A mindset breakthrough from the cynicism. A sign there’s more to discover. It’s my hope that despite the reductionist view I and many others hold about design, there’s a source of brightness in looking at it beyond rote work, in looking at the bigger picture.

_Connie Liu is a rising senior at Cornell interested in sustainable systems and meandering on the internet. In her free time she likes illustration and finding hidden spots in cities._


A digital painting of a focused woman sitting on the ground and drawing a rectangle

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![](2/technology_moving.png 'Technology Moving')
![](2/synthetic_meat.png 'Synthetic Meat')
![](2/singularity.png 'Singularity')
![](2/robot_learns.png 'Robot Learns')

_Phil Witte is a cartoonist and humor writer. His cartoons have appeared in dozens of magazines in the U.S. and U.K., including_ The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The New Statesman, _and_ Private Eye.


Technology Moving
Synthetic Meat
Singularity
Robot Learns

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I return to my desk
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It seems we...

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After Gina Apostol

Portrait of notes app / as eclectic collage / wherein I love choosing more than one toy / at the

$0.99 s...

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![A digitally rendered 3D image of individually tall blocks that, when viewed as a whole, illustrate a hilly green surface with a white horizontal line and a blue sky](2/green_like_no_grass_is_green.jpeg 'Green Like No Grass Is Green')

like the pointillists and impressionists, i'm exploring how blips of yellow can dust a field with summer. how the sky can shimmer if you seed it with purple and green. how enough lines of code, arranged just so, can be mistaken for a rolling field.

where they played their games with pigment, i play mine with a compiler, and a keyboard, and the glow of the screen.

_Luca (they/them) is an artist curious about nature and the algorithms we can use to recreate it. They run a technology studio specializing in creative technology and generative machine learning models. Past lives include signing with a record label and publishing academic papers on simulating language change._


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Open Source and Politics: A Conversation with Coraline Ada Ehmke

A 30-minute ride by high-speed rail from Beijing, Tianjin’s Binhai New Area is home to one of China’s most futuristic-looking architectures. Over the years, the eye-shaped atrium of Binhai Library has attracted millions of visitors, traveling from neighboring metropolises to experience what architects behind the design [dubbed](https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/tianjin-china-library/index.html) a “new urban living room.”

The only problem? Some books are so high up the curved shelves that they’re practically inaccessible for readers — but if you take a closer look, these copies on display are [either fake, or worse, printed on the bookshelves](https://www.archpaper.com/2017/11/mvrdv-library-fake-bookshelves/).

Places like Binhai Library are known for being _wanghong_, or “internet famous.” _Wanghong_ spaces are, [in the words of](https://chaoyang.substack.com/p/wanghong-urbanism) Amy Yueming Zhang, a lecturer in urban planning at the University of Manchester, spots where urban consumers produce “hundreds of similar photos… from the same angle in order to demonstrate that they are keeping up with the trend.”

_Wanghong_ spaces — walls, beach resorts, coffee shops, light rail stations, and restaurants — are not known for their advertised purposes. Most of Binhai Library’s traffic comes from online influencers, not eager readers. And there is no single _wanghong_ aesthetic in the vast world of photogenic backdrops. Wenheyou, known as a _wanghong_ mall, [recreates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSl7IM_hPdE) an old neighborhood lightened by neon signs amid skyscrapers in Changsha. Signs in propaganda fonts, reminiscent of a Maoist past, are engraved on battered cement walls. But modernity reappears where the nostalgia ends — QR code payment replaces ration stamps, and diners are not there because of their socialist work units but popular online posts.

These spaces stretch beyond urban boundaries. Consider Xiapu, a county in the southeastern province of Fujian that has attracted visitors from China’s metropolises. A social media search gives you images of a beachside utopia, where locals, secluded from modernity, are still dressed in old-style clothes and rely on water buffaloes for transportation. This, unfortunately, is too good to be true — there’s almost nothing in Xiapu that isn’t staged, so absurd that _The_ _New York Times_ [called](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/world/asia/china-staged-photo-shoots.html) it “a visual factory where amateur photographers churn out photogenic evidence of an experience that they never had.”

---

_Wanghong_ is about internet fame, but it reflects wider trends of a society living on social media-driven consumption. A shorthand for _wangluo hongren_, the Chinese term _wanghong_ originally referred to online celebrities.1 In recent years, however, the term has been used to describe social media influencers and subsequently, as an adjective, physical or spatial products an influencer would consume. The rise of China’s social media platforms, alongside its growing e-commerce consumption, led to a large number of influencers advertising and selling goods on social media, videos, and livestreaming.

The poster child of the influencer economy is Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-Pinterest hybrid app whose user demographics skew towards young, affluent, urban women with strong purchasing power. According to writer and investor Lillian Li, the Chinese app is [designed to be “actionable”](https://lillianli.substack.com/p/xiaohongshu-deep-dive) in contrast with Instagram; in other words, Xiaohongshu influencers are encouraged to share pro-tips instead of vibes. People do not go to Xiaohongshu to keep up with their friends; rather, they are more likely to browse the app to figure out which hairdryer to buy or which beach to visit next weekend.

On Xiaohongshu, influencers want the platform’s algorithms to promote their posts and make them trendsetters. By posting about a certain product — a lipstick, a pair of sneakers, or a chic coffee shop — the synergy of influencers helps users develop a desire for consumption. (Though some influencers are paid by firms to write posts about their products, most are not.) In Chinese internet slang, this process is often called _[zhongcao](https://globalmedia.mit.edu/2019/12/01/2058/)_, or “planting grass.” Once the seeds are sown, the user-turned-consumer wants to “pull out the grass,” or _bacao_: to quench that desire by finally making the purchase.

To complete the loop, consumers who hope to become mini-influencers themselves then post about their _bacao_ experiences — reviews and buying guides for physical goods, pictures of _wanghong_ spaces, and photo shoot advice. To visit a _wanghong_ place is called _daka_, or “check in” — cross the item off your bucket list, snap a photo, and move on with your life. “It is best not to wear white clothes when you come here to take pictures,” one popular _daka_ post, written from Binhai Library, suggested. “Don’t go on weekends when it’s too crowded to shoot photos,” another wrote. “Letting the library staff take pictures will be much easier.”

When the _wanghong_ economy turns urban spaces into commodities that can be consumed, cities embrace _wanghong_ aesthetics. In designing restaurant chains, shopping malls, buildings, and public infrastructures, developers and architects understand that the best way to gain foot traffic is not to serve their functional purposes well. In the public arena, tax money is invested into building libraries where nobody reads. Privately owned _collective_ spaces like community malls, coffee shops, and tea rooms should serve social functions for neighborhood residents. Now they sell latte drinks that no locals can afford.

---

If you look closely enough, _wanghong_ urbanism is everywhere. Just picture _[that](https://fashionista.com/2017/04/paul-smith-pink-wall)_ pink wall in Los Angeles, or _[that](https://littleisland.org/)_ artificial island by NYC’s Meatpacking District. The Brooklyn neighborhood that rhymes with “jumbo” — does anyone even live there? Or Binley Mega Chippy in Coventry, a little-known chip shop that [attracted tourists from all over the United Kingdom](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/may/30/west-midlands-chip-chop-a-tiktok-sensation) because it was featured in a TikTok sensation.

> If spaces are built around the _wanghong_ economy, the crumbling of platforms leads to the crumbling of spaces.

The ritual of location check-ins weren’t invented by Chinese influencers — it was U.S. urbanites who first started _daka_ at popular places on Foursquare, a location-based social platform trendy in the early 2010s. (The logic was simple: Visiting a hip bar in SoHo? Check in to share with your mutuals.) Dennis Crawley, co-founder of Foursquare, wanted to build the [“location layer”](https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/29/dennis-crowley-says-that-its-api-is-currently-underutilized-apps-using-its-location-data-are-smarter/) of the web. While the check-in feature eventually lost traction and was spun off from the main app, the notion of mapping spatialities to social networks is virtually ubiquitous in social apps today. Cities becoming _wanghong_ isn’t just a Chinese phenomenon; according to urban geographer Carwyn Morris, China “is just a more extreme case,” where people developed the language for the phenomenon.

Foursquare’s initial success was made possible by a small group of superusers who, [in the words of geographer Will Payne](https://logicmag.io/scale/crawling-the-city/), “crawl[ed] the city” by creating and maintaining venue data, so that details such as unit numbers and opening hours were up to date. User-generated check-ins also helped platforms and advertisers measure the popularity of locations and accuracy of geotags. This invisible “free labor,” as media theorist Tiziana Terranova [calls](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/31873/summary) it, was essential to almost all big data-powered online services. By making local knowledge legible and accessible, Foursquare users simultaneously facilitated the gentrification of neighborhoods — often their own. “Crawling the city is lucrative for technology companies, the real estate industry, and other beneficiaries of gentrification,” writes Payne. “But what happens when the users who crawl the city can no longer afford to live there? What happens when services like Foursquare and Yelp lose their labor supply?”

Similarly, Chinese users of apps like Xiaohongshu contribute a loop of free labor that requires not only posting but also real-life consumption supported by wages. If spaces are built around the _wanghong_ economy, the crumbling of platforms leads to the crumbling of spaces. Moreover, _wanghong_ aesthetics are a digital construction, a technological ecosystem built on broadbands, smartphones, photo filters, platform algorithms, and mobile payment apps — none of which are guaranteed to always function properly. Imagine if Foursquare’s network effects were large and critical enough that, when users stopped checking in online, customers no longer came to the physical restaurant. Who would, after all, be the clientele of overpriced restaurants with bad food and photogenic neon signs if they could not brag about the experience? Once the network ceases to exist, a _wanghong_ space loses its _raison d’être_.

> Once the network ceases to exist, a _wanghong_ space loses its _raison d’être_.

It is not too far-fetched to imagine a future in China where _wanghong_ ecosystems fall apart. Under Xi Jinping, Chinese leadership is increasingly anxious about the unrestrained growth of consumer internet firms, whose success has boosted GDP numbers but also encouraged excessive consumerism, exacerbated social inequalities, and promoted values Beijing deems unpalatable. Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign has already targeted video games, private tutoring, fintech, and ride-hailing. Two of the best known livestreamers in China’s influencer economy have been banned from the country’s social media platforms: [Viya](https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3160684/who-viya-chinas-live-streaming-queen-millennial) was fined $210 million for tax evasion in December 2021; [Li Jiaqi had his livestream taken down](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61715843) in June after trying to sell a tank-shaped cake on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, during which an unidentified protester was photographed standing before a column of tanks. (We still do not know what Li’s intentions were, or whether he had been aware of the political message.)

But building cities around _wanghong_ aesthetics is not necessarily bad. Wukang Road, located in Shanghai’s former French Concession, is home to historical architecture built in the 1920s and 1930s. In recent years, the road has become an iconic _wanghong_ neighborhood; while bougie cafés set up shop alongside local steamed bun vendors, Wukang Road’s _wanghong_-ization also led to restoration efforts of its century-old buildings. “There’s a tendency to think of _wanghong_ architecture as needing to stand on its own,” [writes](https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009187/what-if-chinas-viral-wanghong-architecture-is-good%2C-actually%3F) Jiang Jiawei, assistant professor of architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai. “But the Wukang Building suggests another approach: not building something flashy and new, but making holistic improvements to an entire area until it becomes a place people want to visit and spend more time in.”

_Wanghong_ cities are, according to the urban geographer Morris, “a bottom-up vision of the city where digital systems — and how people socialize and consume culture on digital systems — are key to reinterpreting what the city is.” In the past decades, the Chinese state has deployed various schemes to push for top-down visions of urban spaces: they need to be civilized, modern, global, and most recently, [smart](https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/China_Smart_Cities_Development.pdf). Digital cultures are more malleable than technocratic plans to create legibility and maintain stability; under authoritarian systems, networked popularity creates a leverage against centralized visions of how cities are organized.

To be clear, cultures of consumerism are not necessarily a tool of democratization; real estate developers, advertisers, and technology companies are the primary beneficiaries of the _wanghong_ economy. But that should not stop us from striving for healthier, more stable forms of _wanghong_ urbanism. More specifically, embracing _wanghong_ aesthetics while preserving utility can engage a broader citizenry in reimagining our living spaces; there are also ways to redirect tourist attention to local, actually existing economies, as opposed to restaurant chains or new commercial real estate. The Palace Museum, housed in Beijing’s Forbidden City, became a _wanghong_ destination of sorts over the past few years due to popular historical dramas and a cultish online [obsession](https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003199/forbidden-city-gets-celebrity-treatment-for-new-series) with its gift shop merchandise. The museum saw an increase in the number of visitors, and growing revenue allowed for the opening of previously enclosed areas of the historical palace to visitors. If shopping complexes can make the nostalgia of Changsha’s street foods their selling point, why not bring back the actual street food vendors whose livelihoods were sacrificed for cities’ scramble for civility and order? Since photogenic public libraries get a lot of traffic, wouldn’t it be nice if cities invested in more libraries in residential neighborhoods — and encouraged people to bring home a book after the photo shoot?

Decreases in user input of free labor, network effects, consumption, and increased state control can break the _wanghong_-industrial complex. When this happens, will we be left with cities built to serve an influencer economy that no longer exists?

1 For a history of _wangluo hongren_, see Shaohua Guo, _The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public_ (2020).

_Tianyu Fang (he/him) is a writer and researcher in San Francisco. He is part of Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter about everyday life on the Chinese internet._

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Many episodes of the classic high school sitcom _Saved by the Bell_ follow a similar plotline. The central character, Zack Morris, tells a well-meaning fib or takes on a task a little beyond his ken. Over the course of 20-something minutes, the original venial sin compounds; unexpected mishaps entice Zack to widen the gap between reality and his deception. This culminates in some desperate, toxic lashing-out against members of his friend group as he attempts to retain control over the situation. Finally, his friends intervene and bring him to his senses, each leveraging their own unique capacities, and together they figure out a way to clean up the mess.

The supposition I will convey in this essay is that the nation-state has found itself in a Zack Morris-like situation.

The dominant, European rendition of the nation-state dates back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Other forms of territorial governance such as tribal lands, empires, kingdoms, and feudal domains predate it. The federal, republican variant we know in the United States came about in the late 18th century. This is old social technology, devised before there was any whiff of global climate change, a border-crossing Internet, or transnational fast fashion brands. Yet nation-states remain the basic unit of global governance, responsible for ruling the world through a web of treaties and organizations where being a nation-state is the premise of participation.

It seems reasonable, in principle, to have governments that oversee bounded territories with more or less shared cultures. But, like Zack, that principle has taken on more than it knows how to handle. Lately we find ourselves in the lashing-out stage. Toxic, authoritarian, ethnonationalist politics are on the rise. Donald Trump’s campaign promise that “I alone can fix it” becomes more laughable by the day — for him or any other politician. The time has come for someone to intervene and put the nation-state in its place.

To try governing a nation-state in such a context is an ever more absurdist task. No one country can stop climate change. The U.S. President takes blame for rising inflation, even though similar patterns are occurring in most other countries at the same time. A viral headline shaping a country’s politics might be real, or it might be the work of profiteering teenagers on the other side of the world. Governing territorial areas remains important, yet an ever-larger spread of also-important governance challenges have to do with less territorial matters like the atmosphere we breathe, the supply chains no human being can comprehend, and the relentless torrents of networked meme-making.

One way to understand the turn to ethnonationalist fantasies and strongman-style leaders is as a symptom of the nation-state’s weakness. If governments continually fail to deliver the governance we actually need, we can at least feel better by doubling down on what governments _can_ do. Nation-states can’t stop climate change, but they can enact an elaborate, nostalgic fantasy of national identity and militarize their borders. Politicians can impress their constituents by denouncing transgender kids and insulting ethnic minorities. If they really need a fix, they can invade less powerful countries for inexplicable reasons.

> One way to understand the turn to ethnonationalist fantasies and strongman-style leaders is as a symptom of the nation-state’s weakness.

All this lashing out will not get us any closer to economic security or a habitable planet. But the frustration is boiling over, and when we feel most powerless, it is a kind of relief to exert what little power we have left. And there is not really any alternative but to lean on the nation-state nowadays. There are organizations like the United Nations, but it is just made up of nation-states. There are the governments of local jurisdictions, but they are really just parts of nation-states. There are corporations and NGOs, whose power can dwarf that of nation-states, but they are mostly out for themselves, and they do not even make a pretense of being democratic. And their existence depends on legal recognition by a nation-state.

Some argue that in this crisis, the nation-state needs to get bigger: Nationalize the social-media platforms, deficit-spend our way out of climate change, and provide a universal basic income on top of that. Others would prefer nation-states to go away: Everyone will be just fine without any regulation, except a few rudimentary property rights and markets. But neither of these agendas addresses the basic mismatch between territorial governance and trans-territorial problems. Instead, the nation-state could offload some of its governance burdens to other kinds of jurisdictions, other concurrent layers of governance that are more tailored and accountable in their domains.

---

Native-land.ca is a website that maps the Indigenous jurisdictions that nation-states have sought to erase, through violence and other forms of erasure. According to it, I live on overlapping territories of three separate nations; before colonization, they shared the land through seasonal variation and coexisting ways of life. The borders on the map are generally rounded, rather than sharp and precise. This kind of map can help us begin to imagine how governance can look in a world where politics is not reducible solely to nation-states.

My local community is currently deciding whether to move our library system from control by one city’s budget to a library district. People outside the city use its library, and many of them do not have a library of their own. Dedicated districts are a common kind of jurisdiction in the U.S. that establishes a tax base, crossing city and county lines, to fund a library system (or a fire department or the like) with taxes specific to the shared service. This also enables governance more tailored to the particularities of the issue at hand; our district’s board will likely be peopled with library enthusiasts. Though still a territorial jurisdiction, it serves as a kind of friend to the governments it overlaps with, removing from them the burden of funding a library. Waterways and fisheries have long been governed similarly. These are commons, with governance appropriate to their nature and scope.

There are many more examples of cross-territorial governance layers in the making. The municipalist movement is cultivating networks of international cities that have more in common with each other than with their surrounding countrysides. The Global Covenant of Mayors, for instance, enables cities to link their climate commitments independent of their national governments. Organizations like the Kurdish Academy of Language connect groups that speak a common language across borders; these could develop methods of shared decision-making and shared standards, just as communities of software developers decide on the features to include in their programming languages. Social media users, wherever they happen to live, could write the codes of conduct for their platforms — following experiments in crowdsourcing constitutions in places like Mexico City and Iceland — rather than deferring to the regulations and norms of the country where the platform’s servers happen to be.

Today, such cross-border jurisdictions rarely have teeth, because only the nation-state has real enforcement power. Nation-states hold claim over all habitable land on Earth. Property rights and organizational structures depend on nation-states’ willingness to enforce their provisions. Political possibilities are reducible to what is politically possible for nation-states to do or advocate for.

---

Sometimes it takes a flashy technology to shake us out of old habits. In addition to their usefulness for scammers, charlatans, and aspiring plutocrats, the advent of blockchains presents a fresh opportunity to establish jurisdictions. Because a blockchain contract can enforce its own rules computationally, it can operate at least somewhat independently of territorial laws and enforcement agencies. Users can co-govern a blockchain from anywhere in the world — even without disclosing their geographic locations. Blockchains also produce digital tokens that people regard as valuable, which means participants have a stake in the system: something to gain and something to lose. For better or worse, blockchain jurisdictions are already in the making, and so is the struggle over what they will become.

> Sometimes it takes a flashy technology to shake us out of old habits.

I have been around crypto long enough to have seen several cycles of libertarian fantasies for replacing nation-states with tokens and markets. Years ago, for instance, a startup called Bitnation promised we would all soon have blockchain passports and health insurance. More recently, crypto investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan self-published _The Network State_: _How to Start a New Country_; he envisions token-holders banding together and acquiring land in ways that bring to mind a corporate retail chain more than a contiguous territory. The mechanism of how power will flow, however, is unclear, and it looks suspiciously like the top-down structure of a startup. Crypto-hero Elon Musk promises “direct democracy” on Mars, but he prevents unions from forming at his factories. There is no guarantee that crypto-based jurisdictions would be any better, or more democratic, than the ones we now have.

New jurisdictions must not simply place public goods in private hands; the overlapping jurisdictions should offer more rights and protections than we have now, not fewer. But they can also be more creative in their designs than governments are, picking from among a diverse palette of mechanisms to identify what is most appropriate to their particular domains. Some jurisdictions might be small, while others might represent everyone on earth, regardless of their territorial locations. New jurisdictions should offer opportunities to experiment with the possibilities of democracy, as well as the choice to create another alternative when one fails to be accountable. The repertoire of democracy should be explored beyond elections and representatives, toward models that are less coercive and that enable people to participate in diverse ways.

A municipalist jurisdiction, for instance, might be a council made up of city governments, operating according to a model of “rough consensus” similar to the evolution of Internet protocols. Meanwhile, a language standards body might make decisions through a reputation system, where highly regarded users of the language — the poets, the elders, the comedians — make its future rules. Social media users might decide on policies and enforcement through randomly selected juries, whose members are paid to take time to understand the complexities of an issue before deciding on it. People around the world might opt in to an income tax that redistributes funds directly to those with less. Early experiments will set the tone for later ones, so it is important from the start to design systems that set a high bar — ensuring that those who abuse power will lose it, and those who need to leave a jurisdiction can do so safely. In addition to collective decision-making, democracy depends on a basic framework of rights.

If people have opportunities to be part of more kinds of jurisdictions, they can put less stock in any one jurisdiction. They can keep identifying most with their nation-states, which can then focus on being great at governing their particular territory, or they can exchange that layer for other ones. The ethnonationalist fantasy has less to offer if the nation is no longer the only hope for change. A constellation of new jurisdictions is globalist, but it is also localist and more.

In a world of new jurisdictions, nation-states would need to relinquish some of the power they now claim. Just as the infamous U.S. law known as Section 230 gave social media platforms free rein to moderate content, governments can enable new jurisdictions to govern themselves as they see fit. In exchange, perhaps, the new jurisdictions should be expected to demonstrate that they are democratically accountable to their citizens. Over time, new kinds of jurisdictions may become important enough to people’s lives that the permission of nation-states no longer seems necessary. Our primary identities may someday have less to do with accidents of birth and more to do with the jurisdictions we choose.

New layers of global governance are forming whether we like it or not, but how we build the new jurisdictions matters. People experimenting with practices and tools of self-governance today have the opportunity to show the nation-state what Zack Morris realizes over and over: You don’t have to do everything yourself.

_Nathan Schneider (he/him) is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is "Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy."_


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I first discovered afrofuturism during one of my first years of university through the short film _Afronauts_, directed by Nuotama Bodomo; I was still a teenager. I can’t remember if I saw the film first or just a clip in a showreel, but I do remember this image clearly: an afro in an astronaut’s helmet, like a perfect fishbowl. This vision of an imagined future struck me. For the first time, I was seeing myself somewhere I hadn’t even realized was outside of my imagination. But it was just that — a vision. The way the piece looked and felt was the first and only thing that stuck with me; whether or not it _looked_ cool, I _knew_ a Black woman had never been to the moon. At the time, this encounter with afrofuturism as only aesthetic felt disappointing. Aesthetics were only for wishes, for hopes, and never crossed the barrier into reality. I felt that afrofuturism only depicted things that potentially would never be real. (Despite _Afronauts_, there still aren’t any Zambian astronauts.)

The film is inspired by Edward Makuka Nkloso’s attempts at starting a space agency in Zambia during the 1960s. Though he appointed himself as the agency’s head, he was not affiliated with the Zambian government; he was a teacher by trade. Documentary footage that I watched outlined the efforts of the group, clearly mocking what was portrayed as a misguided attempt. It was painful to see Nkloso reach for the stars, only to become a laughing stock. I couldn’t finish watching even a few minutes of footage. I’ve always been drawn to technology and am constantly reminded, including by this documentary, of what a powerful force it can be — and of how people are systematically excluded, undereducated, and denied access to this power. I couldn’t understand why, as an imagined space, afrofuturism didn’t tackle this more.

During university, I became a fan of Janelle Monáe. I loved her depictions of cybergirls being chased through space and dirty computers being coercively deprogrammed. But though I was pulled in by the incredible look and visceral feel of these media, I was still disappointed by the lack of stories to back them. Around this time, I also read Octavia Butler’s _Kindred_ (an impressive book but so full of trauma that I’m not sure I could bear to read again). I read her work as afropessimistic, arguing that the exclusion and permanent othering of Black people can’t be addressed in our world as it currently stands, or possibly at all given the conditions of our world. _Kindred_ was the first piece of Black “science fiction” I read. Science fiction and futurism have fuzzy boundaries for me, and this introduction to Octavia Butler’s work meant that I assumed a lot of the media flown under the afrofuturistic banner reinforced afropessimistic feelings, that we can dream of and create a better future only in our imaginations. Under this theory, nothing can be done in the real world, so we look to our stories. And yet, in some ways, this aligned with how I actually felt about the real world. When I watched _Hidden Figures_, I expected to feel uplifted. Instead, I left the theater feeling crushed, knowing that these Black women had walked the same paths I struggled on in the tech industry, innovated and fought against misogynoir, and barely got recognition within their lifetimes. It was desperately sad.

I would be remiss to omit that afrofuturism is not explicitly about me as a Black British person of Nigerian origin. As an _aesthetic,_ it originated amongst and belongs to African American people. As a _term_, meanwhile, it was coined by Mark Dery, a white man, in a 1993 essay titled _Black to the Future_. This surprised me: a white man coining such an important term in Black aesthetics leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Can a concept coined by an outsider ever truly represent us? Dery begins his essay with a question: “Why do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other — the stranger in a strange land — would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?” A white man posing this question is disingenuous at best. The science fiction canon is famously white and male, as he well knows, and difficult to break into for those who don’t fit the look. Even the Black greats such as Octavia Butler had such a hard time breaking in. It’s difficult to reconcile his naming of the term with its apparent expansiveness now.

I sometimes felt traitorous for my ambivalence about afrofuturism. A non-Black friend told me how terrible they thought Ryan Coogler’s _Black Panther_ was, and I felt viscerally defensive. It wasn’t their place to criticize something that had touched so many Black people. But for me, _Black Panther_ as a film leaves me cold. It presents an interesting springboard and inspiration for children, and some of the portrayals of Wakanda and the technology are visually stunning, but I can’t forgive the opening sequence of a Boko Haram-esque bust being interrupted. I’m always unsure how to square the idea of Wakanda with the reality of the transatlantic slave trade, with hunger and disease from preventable causes in pockets of the continent, with conflict minerals and myriad other issues. I know that fiction doesn’t have to address every possible issue, but the ending of the film paints a strange picture of Wakandan politics that unsettled me. Opening an embassy in the United States as their first gesture towards international outreach was odd, and using the United Nations as a floor to reveal Wakanda to the world was even odder. It paints a picture of a world where many problems don’t exist. It felt like afrofuturistic portrayals always ignored the reality of the world we live in and the material conditions we face as Black people.

> Afrofuturism allows us to see a world where Black people may have their needs and desires met or dashed, but it holds us in focus, us in the center, us as important, loved, cherished.

But my perspective on afrofuturism changed after I soaked up N. K. Jemisin’s _Broken Earth_ trilogy. Her vision of this alternate reality, whilst dark, rendered her characters as fully fledged beings, and many were of color, something missing from earlier science fiction I had consumed. Though their world was grim, they tackled this head-on, controlling their destinies and the fates of those all over their planet, for good and bad. They faced the realities of their circumstances, made horrible but fully informed choices, and took into consideration the broader scope of their actions — everything that the characters in _Black Panther_ didn’t. I wasn’t used to seeing characters like myself — trans, with locs, Black — in fantasy or science fiction novels, and it was a breath of fresh air. My enthusiasm for the genre returned. Janelle Monae’s cybergirls took on more meaning for me after she came out as non-binary, made me feel vindicated in my reading of her android persona, and I let the optimism of her visions encourage me. N. K. Jemisin’s novelette _Emergency Skin_ follows a member of an off-Earth civilisation as he grapples with the discovery that his homeworld is not as idyllic as he was taught. It tackles racism and sexism in its few pages, imagining a future where we all have what we require and live well, because those who were stopping us had finally gotten out of the way.

Another reframing of afrofuturism came from the YouTube creator Andrewism. His videos follow a simple format, a cartoon version of Andrew’s face making a few select expressions, layered with commentary and illustrative images. His videos often take a solarpunk bent, an aesthetic and political view of the future not too far divorced from afrofuturism, and this drew me in further. I learned about anarchism and visions of the now and the future from other Black people fighting for these visions. The realistic optimism and focus on a better future showed me that consuming these kinds of media can help channel people towards better ideas. Andrewism’s channel focuses on the future, illustrating a path to post-ecological justice through a combination of theory, speculation, and potential solutions from both history and the present day. One video tackles ways we can live solarpunk now — by treating wastewater with fishes and pollarding and coppicing trees to maintain forests — wacky solutions that have been proven to work. A different video tackles international anarchist solidarity, and yet another reassures pessimistic environmentalists that humanity is not a parasitic presence on the earth. In his videos, we can imagine a future where people live in conjunction with nature and thrive. People are doing things with these ideas right now, and are creating stories on one hand whilst changing their environment on the other. It’s not a binary choice between imagining or doing. One begets the other.

I began to recognize that we had always been inventing and building and innovating, but our discoveries were crushed into the machinery of a white supremacist and capitalistic culture, obscuring those who didn’t look like the ones in power. This misfocus erases the people who have always existed in the background. They were working towards a better future for themselves and for us all, and getting no recognition for it. Despite this, Black people have always been at the forefront of technology. Even though the film _Hidden Figures_ made me sad, the book and the history behind it connected me to Black people everywhere. They were scientists at a time when it was near impossible for Black people in the United States to thrive, let alone dream up science fiction. Afrofuturistic visions allow us to conjure forth futures where we are recognized for our work, where Black women plot the course to the moon and set foot on it, if they want to. Black history is not Black future, but it informs and nourishes it.

I see now that afrofuturism is a lens in some ways and a portal in others. I see that what I call aesthetics has a heft and power to it that allows us to imagine new futures, to build utopias and to usher in a new world. Aesthetics aren’t the dead end I imagined at all; they are a door to a new world. Afrofuturism allows us to see a world where Black people may have their needs and desires met or dashed, but it holds us in focus, us in the center, us as important, loved, cherished. Janelle Monae’s work may all be works of imagination, not tethered to a real occurrence, but it allows us to imagine ourselves as Black people into these worlds, and to feel that we belong. N. K. Jemisin’s work paints rich internal lives, and fantastic situations large, allowing Black people to see themselves at the center. Andrewism allowed me to see that these works of fiction can give us courage now to build better tomorrows. How we get free, how we ensure the freedoms of others, however they are bound, is central to the works that grab me the most.

> Afrofuturism gives me courage and hope, that the world will improve, and that the world will have people that look, love, talk, and think like me in it.

I recently rewatched _Afronauts_. The end is left open to interpretation; it’s up to the viewer to decide if Matha, the protagonist and astronaut, lands on the moon or is “turned to fireworks,” in the words of her worried mother. The film is a snapshot, a vignette of the Space Race and its avid followers, of its possible consequences for those reaching for the stars and those left behind. It is beautiful. I also now know Octavia Butler did citizen science, often studying slime mold, inspiring many an essay, artist, and scientist in the present day. Their legacies long outlive them.

At its best, afrofuturism allows Black people to feel that the future is as much ours as anyone else’s, and that it is somewhere we belong. Oppression and the freedom from it interweaves itself in all of the works mentioned, and in the afrofuturist project as a whole. It is deeply present and planted in the now, with tendrils reaching through time and space and grasping for a better future. Afrofuturism gives me courage and hope, that the world will improve, and that the world will have people that look, love, talk, and think like me in it. We are all in the future. Though I couldn’t see it at first, all of this has always been true.

_Olu Niyi-Awosusi (they/them) is a web developer and writer living in London. They love Javascript, plantain, web accessibility, exploring ideas, lists and run-on sentences._


I first discovered afrofuturism during one of my first years of university through the short film Afronauts, directed by Nuot...

Afrofuturism: From a Lens to a Portal

Do you still use our words —
astronaut, colony, alien,
lift-off?
I, old Earthbound,
listen for you in the night,
dream you fl...

Space Sisters

It’s easy to feel like the future is always arriving. _It’s the age of AI_, headlines blare; the age of automation, of surveillance capitalism, of remote work, of distraction. Before that, the age of social media, of the internet, of information overload and big data. We live in a flood of prophecies, the age of ages, drowning in news and takes and things to know.

Why add to this cacophony? In short, because we still have more to say.

Reboot was founded in 2020, and Kernel’s first issue was published in 2021. In these short intervening years, we — the core and founding teams of the first versions of the newsletter and magazine — have collectively graduated, landed jobs, quit jobs, gone back to school, moved across the U.S. and back. We’ve learned to live with Covid-19, seen longstanding publications [shutter](https://reallifemag.com/about) and [resurrect](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/books/the-believer-mcsweeneys.html), watched the tech industry go through an entire boom-bust cycle. _SUSTAIN_ is as much about the content of this issue as it is about our decisions to keep going. If in Kernel Issue One we were dreaming something into existence and in Issue Two we were trying to do it right, Issue Three is for building something that lasts.

---

But _SUSTAIN_ isn’t (just) about us. _To sustain_ means to _cause_ or _allow_ something to continue; to keep alive; to suffer (damage); to support (emotionally). _Sustenance_ is the thing that sustains; _sustainability_ is a property that describes the possibility of limitless continuity, to the vanishing point of the future.

I should say that _sustainability_, these days, often refers to the environment — how we might survive or mitigate climate change. To be clear, this issue of Kernel is not primarily about climate. Still, it’s impossible to think about how to keep anything going without also considering this ecological backdrop, carbon ticking into the atmosphere.

In other words, _sustaining_ requires flexibility, a willingness to revisit past principles to accommodate a changed present and a changing future. When discussing this issue’s theme with friends and colleagues, the word _maintain_ kept coming up. But to me, _maintenance_ implies stasis, an almost-technocratic endorsement of the solutions we have today. Maintenance and maintenance work are, of course, important. Some of the core principles — refusal to jump ship for the new, shiny thing; respect for the past, and its lessons for the present — are worth preserving (maintaining, even). But sometimes to _sustain_ (an ideal, a movement, a path forward) also requires a refusal to _maintain_ (an unjust institution, harmful norms, the status quo).

All that to say: I’m interested in what _SUSTAIN_ implies about agency. To _cause_ continuation is active; to _allow_ it is passive. To sustain an injury means that something has been done _to_ you; to sustain someone else means that you are doing something _for_ them. This issue of Kernel Magazine is about this question of agency, which means it’s also, fundamentally, about how we live together, about how we decide to participate in the world around us.

---

This issue is loosely organized in three sections: _The System, The Individual_, and _The Collective_. How do we name the systems we are working within and against? Can we “[trace their edges](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/ghosts-world)”? How might individuals [find the agency](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/stack-overflow) afforded to them within these systems? How might they [demand more](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/top-o-the-world)? And how might individuals come together — across differences — to accomplish something together, greater than the sum of its parts? We need to understand the systems in order to contextualize our actions within them, but lasting change comes from moving together.

The pieces in this issue exemplify where I think tech writing, and tech criticism, must go.

We should be more willing to be wrong, to make mistakes, to entertain a wider range of possibilities. Maybe there exists a range of fractional truths, of fractal truths. A healthy — sustainable — space of intellectual discourse is one where we hold contradictions together, to seek among them not resolution, but consilience within the tension. To extend an environmental metaphor: if a habitat requires biodiversity for stability and longevity, then an ecosystem of ideas requires a plurality of perspectives. We should think of disagreement and dissent not as symptoms of “error” or “incorrectness,” but as the variations that protect against dogmatic monocultures. So consider: _Perhaps [we should be suspicious](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/democracy-affirming-ai) of “democracy-affirming” AI. Despite everything, crypto — both the industry and the technology — [might still be good](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/thank-you-sbf), actually. Quantitative climate models, these data-driven tools which profess to predict the future, [aren’t the only way to understand](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/climate-science-crystal) the environment. And even those who work at Port Fourchon, the site of the 2010 BP oil spill, [aren’t necessarily the enemies](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/port-paradox) of the climate movement._

We should also be willing to be prescriptive. Of course there’s a critique for any proposal, and of course there are systemic issues at play. (_A spectre is haunting tech criticism…_.) But analysis and nuance need not be paralyzing. Instead, we should understand that the complexity of the forces that made the world we see today — forces as vast as capitalism, imperialism, anti-blackness, patriarchy, and more — is precisely why their persistence should not immediately disqualify any proposition for action. We should try a lot of things and a lot of them _will_ fail, but we shouldn’t not try just because _some_ are going to, because we don’t know ahead of time which are going to work and which aren’t. We plant more seeds than could possibly all grow, but the failure of any individual seedling to flower is no referendum on the rest. _Might higher standards for [computer animations used in legal trials](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/computer-witness) alleviate their most dangerous characteristics? What would a tech ecosystem look like if it was filled with people who “[took business personally](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/charles-broskoski-interview),” who were manifesting specific visions into the world rather than just trying to get rich? How would incentives shift if tech companies really had to make money from day one, and [if all workers had a say](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/tech-coops) in the direction of the business?_

---

_Are we there yet?_ It’s a trick question, because I suspect we will never be “there” — the horizon of a perfect world. And yet that’s no reason not to try. For all their differences, community organizers and tech founders have at least one belief in common: _The future doesn’t just arrive; it has to be built._

So words, by themselves, aren’t enough. We may speak and write new possibilities into existence, but to translate possibility into practice requires, well, building. Real people — you! — doing real things, in the world. When I say that _SUSTAIN_ is about agency, I mean this not just in a theoretical sense: I mean this for you, too. From here, it’s choose your own adventure. Choose wisely, and remember, you’re never doing it alone.

With love,

<img style="margin-left: -20px; margin-top: -10px; margin-bottom: -20px;" src="3/dai-signature.png" width="200" height="50">
 

Jessica Dai

_Editor-in-Chief, Kernel Magazine, Issue Three_

It’s easy to feel like the future is always arriving. It’s the age of AI, headlines blare; the age of automation, of surveill...

When my uncle called in May 2021 to ask if I wanted to program for a crypto game called Dark Forest, it was an easy pass. I w...

Thank You, SBF

Trace

I’ve been trafficking in data. Petabytes of it: ocean temperatures, atmospheric halocarbon concentrations, Arctic sea ice ext...

Climate Science Crystal Ball: Towards a Cyborg Climate Science

No Girls on the Internet

Kaixi

Algorithm Minuet

I spent the summer after my sophomore year of high school bedridden with pneumonia, watching every episode of the crime show...

When the Computer is the Witness

Ones and Zeroes and Nones

AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party...

“Democracy-Affirming” AI Could Make Things Even Worse

You’re hitting a wall with your code. It’s getting dark outside, but you have yet to find the solution even after stepping th...

Marked as Irrelevant

We make quite the pair. Kenny, a slender six-foot-six giant, a difficult-to-judge thirty-something years old. He’s a Ugandan...

Top O’ the World

Sweet Incentives

On August 28, 2021, Chett Chiasson looked out from his office in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Since 2010, he has occupied that...

Port Paradox

<pre class="body-base whitespace-pre-wrap">
An evergreen whose leaves have
begun to shine too bright & sway
too freely. As if they were told
to do so, manufactured constraint
on my breath. Sometimes there is
beauty in the world that flakes away
when you look closer, a veneer
staged for actors to tell stories
elementary ones, conflict, love &
a hero’s journey which ends in
unfailing happiness. Balloons filled
to the brim with bright yellow helium.
Picking up trash might be part of mine.
Performative environmentalism is good
for coping. I don’t care for the greater good
rather the otherworldly, a conch
in the desert, a lily pad floating
atop a snowy apex, a bright red
flag with a reflective underside,
big capital letters plastered
against the lining of my soul.
</pre>

I picked up a plastic wrapper today

Meghna Rao is an editor and writer from Queens, thinking about diaspora and technology.

Charles Broskoski is the co-founder...

Taking Business Personally: A Conversation with Charles Broskoski


were not meant to be. I wish

to be lucky, enough

for the red I am wearing.

For random() to

always return me

to you. To be formless, genreless.

Miscellaneous

always. To be willingly

categorized. I give you

consent to filter for me in

search for the message that made your

home online. To be a factory of

permissions. Maybe it isn’t so bad

to keep lost sites in our hearts.

To be a stronger vessel for my heart.

To be kept.


were not meant to be. I wish

to be lucky, enough

for the red I am wearing.

For random() to

always return me

to you. To b...

Some things to be


**Jessica Dai** is, among other things, Editor-in-Chief of Kernel Magazine.

**Michael Falco** is Executive Director of Incite at Columbia University. They play a leadership and project design role on several projects, including as interim managing editor during the relaunch of Logic(s) Magazine.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

## _From Logic to Logic(s)_

**Jessica: How did Logic become Logic(s)?**

Michael: In December 2021 our Editor in Chief Khadijah Abdurahman produced a special issue of Logic called _Beacons_, which was an opportunity to do something a little different than what Logic had been doing at the time. There was creative fiction, there was poetry, there were visual essays, and it was primarily with Black, Asian, Queer individuals. It gave platforms to people who are engaging in technology, many of whom were outside of academia.

Around that time, Logic was thinking about closing up the magazine operation; they were ready to put their energy into something different, and in the midst of those conversations, Khadijah proposed taking it over, moving it to Columbia where she had worked with Incite since 2019, maintaining its mission and values, but also thinking more critically about engaging voices that are outside of the normal discourse around tech. All of this with the goal of really investing in people, supporting them not only in the development of their pieces, but also in the development of their careers. She also wanted to ensure we focused on the global south and linked with orgs doing on-the-ground work across the globe.

I should be really clear: we’ve very much been rebuilding the plane mid-air. The former Logic team has been tremendously supportive, and they built a really impressive organization. At the same time, we started fresh with an entirely new editorial process, including fact-checking, a new editorial team, and a new way of development-editing pieces and compensating people. Our team is growing so much and it’s been so fun building out the team with so many talented people.

**Why the name change? With the parentheses-s? I read this as having a plurality of people speaking, a coalition of voices, and less of a single, idealized, "true” logic.**

Your read is exactly right! Of course, it was also important that we kept the name to maintain continuity with Logic Magazine, its brand recognition, and our commitment to its founding mission, which is also why our _supa dupa skies_ issue is number 19. Second, as you say, adding the “(s)” represents what we are doing: representing a multiplicity of viewpoints and logics to deepen the conversation around critical tech, not just implying there is a singular solution or vantage. So the name reflects our effort to elevate perspectives outside traditional tech discourse that offer new ways of thinking and approaching the problems of today.

## _From Knowledge to Action_

**So there’s the continuity from old Logic of — we want to talk about tech, and we want to talk about it critically. What’s the vision for the role of Logic(s) moving forward?**

What we want to do is to create spaces for people to be together, to think together, to dream together. We think of the magazine as one mechanism for actually doing that — both for the writers and in its creation by our staff.

In our first editorial note, we really emphasized getting rid of the dread of just recounting that “the sky is falling” — that these are apocalyptic times that we can’t do anything about. We wanted a dynamic magazine that creates room for people who have been impacted by tech in all sorts of ways — whether they’ve found community through it, or organized against it, people who are incarcerated and surveilled inside and outside of prisons. We wanted to create room for possibility, and also highlight the exciting things that are coming out of the organizing space. We want to make room for creative expressions, for people who have the capacity to imagine beyond the constraints imposed by existing structures and institutions.

**You have a very specific vision for what kind of content you want to cover. Something we think about is — as a magazine, we’re producing words, knowledge, not physical action. How do you think of knowledge production in relation to a broader project of justice in a material sense? How do you think about bridging the two?**

As someone who came to academia in a roundabout way, the way that some within universities conceive of “knowledge production” has always been so interesting to me and a little divorced from the on-the-ground processes that influence and move people. Often it feels like — we can design a study, then run it, it’ll end up in a peer-reviewed journal, someone will use it, and we’ll have some impact. That’s a very passive way of thinking even if it can reflect so much work and energy.

So how do you move knowledge to action? You have to start with — where does knowledge come from? Who can speak authoritatively about any given subject? If someone wants to understand the implications of low-wage work on a gig worker, you can certainly design a study on that person’s life and their freedom of movement, on how they’re surveilled, on how they perform the functions of their job. If done right, it can influence policy and the future course of study.

But to do that you need to start from the experience of that person, what they know from having lived that experience, what it feels like to have hours cut short or to not have insurance or not have access to a bathroom or for their every movement to be tracked and parsed in search of greater efficiency, the precarity that comes with all of that. They hold so much expertise and understanding of how these structures work and how they feel. When you start from there, you realize reducing people to categories for study may be efficient for producing “results,” but it cleaves off any possibility of understanding the textures and unknowable possibilities for an individual’s life that only come from direct engagement and personal investment—listening more than speaking.

Academia has a financial incentive to say that, you know, there’s a methodology and a process for creating knowledge, and to do that you need to pay for an education, get their credentials, keep the work sealed within the walls of the university, and so on. But that can’t be the only — or even best — way to say something meaningful to enact change. Universities are important and essential to knowledge production, with profound resources and capacities, but consequently they often diminish — and sap resources from — other important sites of knowledge, other repertoires for inducing change. So part of the challenge is removing ourselves from that orientation, and figuring out ways to privilege, fund and engage with ideas that surface outside of ourselves, and to do it through bureaucracies not always designed to work well with outsiders.

**Many readers won’t have the first-hand experience that your writers do. What do you hope your readers come away with, and what do you hope they do within their own spheres of influence?**

For me, I hope that readers think critically about the structures they work in, that they may be reproducing. Some — not all — of our readers have the ability to alter their conditions of work, the contracts they enter into, the systems and products that they create — even in the day-to-day of designing an A/B test, for example. As with the old Logic, we’ll continue to think about the way that labor is structured within — and well beyond — the tech industry: the university, manufacturing, all sorts of places.

Separately, there’s something really powerful about storytelling, and the ability to share experience. It’s hard to ignore, for example, the story of what it’s like to be locked in a box, to write a letter, to have that letter scanned, for the cost to be carried by your family that is already struggling to support you, for them to now be surveilled too, and to have a delay in the receipt of that information that further frays your connection to others, and what that does to you personally. And, by the way, what it means to be told that these systems are justified, all-knowing, that they’re rational — to do this under the guise of, for example, trying to stop contraband from entering prisons, even as we know that’s not what it’s really about; that it’s about expanding surveillance beyond the walls of prisons. So I think in reading those stories, I hope that folks get a deeper sense of the long tails of what tech is putting into the world, and the unintended consequences that reverberate out into the particulars of people’s lives. I should say, too, as more people get involved in the magazine, there are going to be so many more possibilities for what we can achieve in the pages. It’s so exciting to be part of that.

## _Activating All Parts of the Self_

But also, the magazine is an object. It’s a physical object. We’re really proud of it. It’s very beautiful. We’ve switched from a more book style to a full color magazine.

**That’s so funny. We’re switching the other way.**

Oh, really?

**We started with 8.5 x 11 and now we’re going to 5.5 x 8.5.**

What was your rationale?

**For us, it was partially because printing and shipping, the big magazines are really expensive** — Yes, ma’am — **Just changing the size, even with the same number of pages, cuts the printing cost more than in half.**

The physical object is important. The magazine format lends itself to allowing people to design inserts, visuals, “how-to” explainers, and to design and think in color. It just made sense for us to make the shift.

With a magazine like this, there’s a challenge of audience. Because we do have pieces that are profoundly, undeniably academic. They come from ethnographic research, quantitative research, really rigorous ways of thinking about and trying to understand how things operate. These pieces need to stand alongside fiction and poetry and other pieces that activate a different part of your mind. It helps that at this point, we are all technologists. We are all connected to technology through our work. We are all implicated in its processes and logics — we all have something to say about the tangible ways technology contributes and intrudes into our lives, our relationships, our artistic and professional practices. So, if you are looking to create new ideas and visions for tomorrow, we have to make room in our pages to engage everyone in this dialogue and we have to think more expansively about who we are writing with and for.

At the same time, we’re thinking about the ways that people learn, the ways that we’re motivated, the ways that we’re inspired. It isn’t just through an academic text, it’s also through the arts, fashion, storytelling, poetry. Our responsibility is to create something that activates all parts of the self, that makes you feel something about the topic and the interconnectedness and asymmetries of our experiences and perspectives. If you put a poem that really hits and resonates alongside a piece about incarceration or a piece about indigenous technologies or how the blueprint for modern computing came from the plantation — it just _does something to you_. It lights up a part of your thinking, and you end up internalizing the implications of the essay very differently. It’s hard to describe. When you go to a show and you’re just floored by what it is you experience — that’s what we want to create.

**It _is_ a different form of knowledge production, but I almost feel icky calling it that — “the academy” is always trying to\_ \_make things legible as knowledge production.**

---

With this project, I think a lot about legibility from the perspective of administration and the academy. There’s a certain type of approach that generally makes sense to them, a funding process that makes sense. University bureaucracy imposes a host of obstacles that attend to a very specific person, hierarchical structure, and way of working. Those paint-by-number processes aren’t meant for the nuances of a person’s life. Legibility is one of our real challenges. Who is reading this and how do they understand the project — and how does the university understand it?

So what are we doing? We’re creating a magazine that doesn’t look much like a traditional academic publication — and we don’t want it to look like that, even as we think academics will find tremendous value engaging with it. We’re seeing how things can fit together. A piece that’s maybe more strictly academic can really resonate if it’s standing alongside a fashion centerfold where the designer is thinking critically about, for example, who gets resources and who doesn’t. But that is our challenge. I think that’s the same challenge as finding an audience: how do you make something that resonates? How do we use the pages of our magazine to queer the tech space and reclaim it from capital and the tech-bro mindset? So part of the work of legibility is being seen and understood at least enough that you continue to exist — as a queer person this is the struggle we face all the time, living in worlds and structures that don’t look like us and so try to actively bend us toward their will.

**I really like this point about flipping legibility because it’s also about accessibility — having this range also means that the entire magazine is more accessible to a much wider range of people. Maybe someone doesn’t care about the academic stuff, but they’ll enjoy the poetry, or maybe someone hasn’t had a lot of background in art, but the more academic work can be an entry point for them into the entire package.**

Exactly. And it’s fun, it’s playful. We’re still thinking, how do we do calls that reach people that are outside of ourselves and outside of our networks? Those are things that happen with time, and they happen, as you say, through different mediums. But it’s not just mediums within the magazine, but also beyond it. Our fashion designer, Bones, did a show on Pride, and it was an opportunity for him to think about the topics and themes in the magazine that he discusses. And at the same time, it was an opportunity to open the doors to an underground club to 60 queer, gender-nonconforming and trans people during Pride, to celebrate, to enjoy each other, to enjoy a show, in this unending moment where our community remains under assault and at risk of erasure. That was also a way to sit with the ideas that reside within the magazine, but in a much more visceral, lived-in way.

## _Logic(s) as Community Investment_

**Earlier, you mentioned the idea of Logic(s) as a community-building project, maintaining a commitment to the people you’re working with. What do you mean by that?**

To the point of legibility, and defining impact: it’s hard to know ahead of time what kinds of ideas readers will be influenced by. What you _do_ know for sure is about the people you interact with, the people you support; you have an opportunity to really shape that relationship. And those individuals, if they’re treated with respect, if they’re compensated in a fair and transparent way, if they’re given the room to create and think, and then to also get feedback and the opportunity to improve, if they have the opportunity to produce something that nobody else would ever commission — those investments in _people_ are how you can actually feel impact.

“Impact” is a loaded term because foundations, for a long time, were obsessed with it. _I_ was obsessed with it, creating metrics that would astound whoever read our proposal. “What is the impact of this study?” They want to hear concretely that this touched 25, or 100, or 1000 people, that it influenced a policy that led to _xyz_ measured in _abc_ way, but from my own life experience, and from our own work, the impact that you have is not always as clearly measurable. They’re in the subtle things like treating people with dignity and respect, like taking their perspectives seriously, and helping them experience how powerfully Universities can marshal ideas and resources.

So the magazine is just one part of what we’re hoping to do; our real objective is to support a whole new set of individuals to create and to tell their stories — and to forward their solutions — and to invest not only in the development of their pieces but also in their ability to tell those stories and find those solutions. It means thinking about where they’re trying to get beyond the life of the magazine. That’s essential to us — we’re trying not to be extractive. Sure, somebody writes something for the magazine, they get money, we get a publication, everyone wins.

But the longer term commitments really require thinking about: how do we help this person tell the story the best that they possibly can? How do we dedicate the editorial resources to helping them flesh out that idea? How do we support them to capture what they need to, especially if they’re a creative or a producer of some kind? How do we help move their ideas toward solutions? And as we all know, tech has these very powerful networks that open up a lot of doors, so how do we leverage those for them? I’ve mentioned, too, the team we’ve been building. They bring so many visions to the work — so we also have to leverage and invest in that energy, and compensate at the same rates we give ourselves and other academic professionals.

Sure, we’re putting a magazine and ideas into the world, and we hope those ideas might transform and shift something — that our readers understand something new about technology. But materially, we know that we’re directly impacting our contributors, staff and collaborators. We want to help them get to where they want to go; we have the capacity to do that, and that’s really powerful. Our goal is for them to find other ways to keep telling stories, or tell new and different stories, and so we want them to leave Logic(s) with access to a network and a set of tools and validation of their work and ideas. That will outlive whatever we do for any single issue of the magazine.


Jessica Dai is, among other things, Editor-in-Chief of Kernel Magazine.

Michael Falco is Executive Director of Incite at Col...

The Logic(s) of a Magazine: A Conversation with Michael Falco

on a rainy, empty street,

my electrodes glistening in moonlight.

My mind’s music melts me

like sugar in hot tea

on a De...

Electrodes

after Ama Codjoe

how do you describe a loose song you can’t sing anymore? most days I want to take
pleasure in sparrows and splashed sunlight. I wake as if surprised my lover is still there:
the great record of touch, I have been dragging around for years. what is faith but a
different prayer? like butterflies landing on flowers to sip nectar before moving on again
— it happened otherwise — but still my only desire is not to go away — and that’s the hard
labor of falling. I drink pina colada and watch the snow fall outside. most of my decision
have been wrong: you come in from a cold place and sit in another cold place. what it must
feel like to not yet have it — the hope of recovery — a counterbalance for the long nights
and short years running out. when the women leave me, I swim in the public pool. a body,
I’ve read can sustain its own compression, but in a world of heat, liquidity and
magnificence. I wish I could stop bringing myself to the bay window of my child’s room.
in my dream, my father checks my forehead for pyrexia: my grandmother’s flame passed
down unabated. the news called it a dove, or trees, or fog. I called it a voice gone missing.
there are no right words for this restless lake, in which I drank deep. maybe it’s true, there
was something in the water wriggling, something alive.

how do you describe a loose song you can’t sing anymore? most days I want to take
pleasure in sparrows and splashed sunligh...

And In My Marrow, The Rungs of Faces Knocking as A Chime Against Pleasure

Magical Nature

Organic Envy

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science during the pandemic, I found what I thought to be my dream job: a technology startup building software for city transportation departments and planners. As a self-declared Numtot, I was overjoyed to discover a software engineering role that involved building public-facing solutions for urban planning. A couple months into this new role, the situation rapidly changed. We were informed of an upcoming acquisition, one that would allow us to expand our reach and services, and, for many of us, make it difficult to maintain our values. One of my coworkers vowed to never care so much about their workplace again. Given that venture capitalists expect a return on their investment, startups are ultimately left with three options: go public, get acquired by a larger company, or run out of money.

This reality was difficult for me to accept. How could one maintain value alignment at work if, at any point, it could be acquired in order to survive? Who did this acquisition benefit, and who did it harm? Even though our company was spending more than we were making, our co-founders walked away with lots of money, while other employees were laid off after the merge. I re-entered the job market, discouraged, until I came across a job posting at a tech worker-owned cooperative. The simple idea of an equal vote in company operations for all workers enchanted me, pulling me into the promise of an anti-capitalist workplace.

From the inside, that promise takes a great deal of operational planning, open communication, and willingness to work through conflict in order to be realized, and sometimes that conflict is further entrenched by assumptions about what it must mean to work at a cooperative. Yet the dream and the promise remain, available to some and just out of grasp for others.

> The simple idea of an equal vote in company operations for all workers enchanted me, pulling me into the promise of an anti-capitalist workplace.

## _What is a tech cooperative?_

According to the [International Cooperative Alliance](https://web.archive.org/web/20230727002637/https://www.ica.coop/), a cooperative is a “jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise” formed by an “autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations”. As you can imagine, a cooperative can take many forms, and within each type of cooperative, there are a range of industries, legal structures, and leadership models. You’ve likely interacted with them already, maybe by living in a housing co-op, ordering produce from a Community Supported Agriculture, shopping at REI, or opening an account at a credit union. While startups are a familiar part of the tech industry, the rise of worker-owned cooperatives has been a more recent wave. In order to be a worker cooperative, these two characteristics must hold true: “[1] workers own the business and they participate in its financial success on the basis of their labor contribution to the cooperative; [2] workers have representation on and vote for the board of directors, adhering to the principle of one worker, one vote”. Members of a worker co-op thus participate in democratic decision-making as well as profit sharing, reaping the benefits of their own labor.

Dylan Kohler, co-founder of a shared mobility app called RideHare, reached out to me earlier this year for advice in structuring his new company as a cooperative. For Kohler, and others, the co-op model offers an alternative to the fast-paced, capitalistic environment of a tech startup. It allows workers to build “real collaboration and solidarity” among each other and “make decisions based on what works for us, not just on maximizing profits.” A sustainable and financially successful cooperative would make Kohler “far prouder than just becoming another rich tech bro.” It is grounded in both personal and financial wellness, in collective governance and care.

## _Cooperative Business Models_

According to an [open-source list](https://web.archive.org/web/20230727002747/https://tech-coops.xyz/)[^1], there are at least 31 tech cooperatives in the United States, which make up a small portion of the 612 reported worker cooperatives and democratic workplaces in the U.S. While they operate across a range of industries, including food delivery, rideshare, and gaming, most tech co-ops function as consultancies, offering design, user research, or IT services to their clients. Because of that, their impact on the tech industry has historically been outsized by the hypergrowth, capital-infused companies that characterize the economic landscape of Silicon Valley. Danny Spitzberg, a user experience researcher who has worked with a variety of co-ops, explains that the consultancy model allows companies to “spread the risk across lots of clients”, providing a lower-stakes business model, one that is more sustainable yet less likely to scale.

Software products and applications, on the other hand, require greater investment up front, but they hold a greater potential to magnify in market share. For the last two years, I worked as a developer at Politics Rewired, a tech cooperative bringing peer-to-peer texting software and consulting services to progressive political candidates, advocacy organizations, and unions. Like[ The Drivers Cooperative](https://drivers.coop/), [Gemify](https://gemify.tech/), and a few others, it stands out as a tech cooperative that builds and sells software. But the models for how to do so are extremely limited, or, even, nonexistent; we have yet to see a software cooperative achieve a level of financial return that allows it to compete with a “regular” tech startup.

Greg Brodsky, founder of [Start.coop](https://web.archive.org/web/20230727000334/https://www.start.coop/)[^2], witnessed a common trap among cooperatives: too much focus on governance and not enough focus on developing a strong business model often led to failure. Co-op founders assume that because they are structured as a cooperative, “customers will flock to it, revenue will magically emerge, and the business will thrive.” But that’s rarely true. Loconomics, for example, created a platform for local service professionals, like dog walkers and tutors, to connect and offer their services, but closed down in 2020 after running out of money. In an interview with Spitzberg, co-founder Joshua Danielson said he regretted building a marketplace that “didn’t have the funding or ability to generate demand on both sides, even though it seemed like if we got the marketing right it could happen.” In practice, the marketing of a cooperative structure cannot take the place of building a robust financial business plan.

Most tech startups rely on venture capital to bail them out or fund their next pivot, contingent upon the expectation that they will yield a high return on investment in the future. Cooperatives, in contrast, are expected to build revenue from the start. This is how the tech industry, and most companies, should be expected to operate; it’s a dose of reality that I welcome. Many tech startups, bolstered by VC funds, can mask their negative cash flow or unsustainable business model by continuing to provide high salaries and strong benefits. In a cooperative, in addition to reaping the benefits of financial profits, worker-owners share the consequences of financial losses. Employees may decrease salaries or delay profit disbursements until their product is more viable. While those financial burdens increase the barrier of entry to working at a cooperative, they also provide a counterbalance to the inflated salaries and lack of profitability across tech.

Because of this early focus on building revenue, tech co-ops with a strong business plan are well-suited to build a lasting and sustainable workplace. The five-year survival rate of worker-owned co-ops [is 69 percent higher](https://resources.uwcc.wisc.edu/community%20development/BC_Coop_Survival.pdf) than non-cooperatively owned businesses. Cooperatives are designed to build jobs that last a long time — in stark contrast to the rest of the tech industry, which has recently gone through waves of devastating layoffs. There are also a growing number of resources for early-stage co-ops, like the[ U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives](https://web.archive.org/web/20230727002316/https://www.usworker.coop/en/), the Start.coop accelerator, and non-extractive lending sources such as the[ Cooperative Fund of the Northeast](https://web.archive.org/web/20230727002630/https://cooperativefund.org/).

---

What does it take for the promises of a cooperative to be actualized? How does one know that it’s worth that leap of faith, that the cooperative is a reflection of their own values and vision for the world?

To start, we can draw inspiration from the labor movement, as worker cooperatives have been influenced by the economic and social conditions of working-class people throughout history. Cooperatives in the United States first arose in the 19th century, in response to the Industrial Revolution and its harsh working conditions, and they continue to provide an alternative to the typical “winner-takes-all” capitalism. [Design Action](https://designaction.org/), for example, a union worker co-op that provides graphic design and web development services to progressive movements, wrote a union contract with Communication Workers of America to explicitly list the benefits “hard won by organized labor” that they wanted to provide but could not yet afford. Graphic designer and owner Sabiha Basrai recalls, “During the hard startup years, in the early 2000s, our wages were really low; we barely had any benefits.” That was especially difficult with the Bay Area’s high cost of living, but the union contract was a guiding star that allowed the co-op to plan from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. The contract provided a written promise of what the cooperative was working towards, even though they couldn’t offer everything right away.

Importantly, the decisions and values that a co-op documents in the beginning can and should change over time. The labor movement did not stop with a six-day work week. However, documenting something that is visible and revisable enables greater transparency and protections for vulnerable and marginalized communities. Of the thousands of people who work at democratic workplaces in America, the 2021 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector reports that 47 percent are non-white, of which 25 percent are Latinx and 13 percent are Black, while 56 percent are female or non-binary. Given the historical and present-day conditions of racial capitalism, worker co-ops can be a tool for economic empowerment among people of color and those who are traditionally exploited and undervalued by capitalism.

## _Psychological Safety_

Despite these ideals, cooperative governance structures are just as susceptible to forms of oppression and disagreement. Worker-owners must discuss and agree upon their desired decision-making model, organizational structure, and distribution of responsibilities and governance rights. As different values, personal experiences, and past and current workplace trauma converge, it can be difficult to sit with the emerging dissonance. Some want to sit back, focus on their code, and let someone else decide everything for them. Others want to be an active participant in every single decision. Some feel deeply opposed to an organizational chart that introduces hierarchy, while others cannot thrive without clear management and mentorship.

In many ways, I was able to thrive at Politics Rewired because of my tolerance for uncertainty and my willingness to jump into new areas of work. From my first week, when we were a company of six, I felt empowered and confident sharing feedback and contributing to different parts of the company, parts that were usually siloed off from me due to artificial role boundaries and hierarchies. After asking, _why don’t we have a Twitter account?_, I was prompted to create a social media committee. After asking, _why don’t we have a retreat?_, my coworker and I planned our first company-wide in-person retreat. After asking, _how do we hire more BIPOC?_, I created a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee and improved our hiring pipeline. My questions were almost always turned into action items, fueling my desire to influence and see change.

For others, however, imposter syndrome, learned insecurities, and past workplace trauma did not enable them to share input or raise concerns. Those who hold marginalized identities and lack financial safety nets feel even less comfortable pushing back against the status quo. As Basrai notes, “We are all capable of recreating white supremacy, and patriarchy and playing these out with each other.” In a cooperative, just as in any other organization, trust must be built rather than assumed.

At times, the public benefit mission of a cooperative can make it even harder to call attention to harmful power dynamics. At The Drivers Cooperative, staff and drivers were working to build a ridesharing company cooperatively owned by its drivers, ultimately in the hopes of competing with Uber and Lyft. Jason Prado, the former Director of Platform, shared that conflict between the founders created a fraught environment until one left, while another promised impossible features and pushed through uninformed decisions undemocratically. Staff members tolerated the working conditions “for the drivers and the cause.” Ironically, this acceptance of toxicity in the name of gig worker protections has an outsized impact on the rideshare drivers themselves, whose livelihoods are most affected by the founder’s overpromises and mismanagement.

At a cooperative, members pride themselves on freedom from the exploitation of a traditionally hierarchical place of work. This pride, along with the company mission, can contribute to a willingness to avoid conflict or accept unreasonable working conditions, a practice that holds back both the cooperative and the greater co-op movement. It prevents the organization from growing stronger in their vision and strategy, from clarifying the shared values and business model they need to survive, and from being vulnerable enough with other co-ops to exchange struggles and advice.

> This pride, along with the company mission, can contribute to a willingness to avoid conflict or accept unreasonable working conditions, a practice that holds back both the cooperative and the greater co-op movement.

## _Working Through Conflict_

In order to survive, cooperatives have to build a practice of engaging in healthy conflict, rather than shying away from discomfort. In order to facilitate such vulnerable conversations, workers should operate from a shared set of values. Design Action, for example, has been bound by specific[ points of political unity](https://designaction.org/about/points-of-unity/) since its inception over twenty years ago. These points of unity, which can be revisited at any time, provide a foundation for how the cooperative seeks to operate, make decisions, and serve their clients. Because the cooperative was built on shared values, serious impasses are rare. When they happen, however, Basrai says, “Part of being in a democratic decision making process with one another is also investing in continuing to check in with each other about anything that feels weird or needs to be shifted.” Power dynamics and workplace harm arise in every organization; they can either be discussed in a productive manner, building upon a foundation of mutual respect and honesty, or they can be utterly destabilizing.

Employees need to trust one another in order to raise points of conflict, and that trust must be built from the start and reinforced over time. Even though the ownership model of a cooperative creates the structural conditions for psychological safety in the workplace, relationship building requires continuous investment and commitment to shared accountability and transparency.

Yotam Maron, a grassroots organizer and leader of Occupy Wall Street, asserts that conflict is actually necessary to build the kind of strategy our movements need to succeed. “Sometimes,” Maron says, “moving towards conflict will mean changing course, letting partners down, losing funding… parting ways with our teammates, hurting or being hurt, firing or being fired.” Conflict reveals misalignments, disagreements, power dynamics, and areas of weakness that can be utterly destabilizing to uncover, but they need to be made transparent; a cooperative cannot sustain itself if conflict continues to go unaddressed. At The Drivers Cooperative, most staff members left the company because conflict with their founder could not be overcome. Conflict is a key element of a cooperative’s resilience.

> Conflict is actually necessary to build the kind of strategy our movements need to succeed

As a conflict-avoidant person, I was nervous to engage in conflict during my time as an active worker-owner. At Politics Rewired, however, we reached a point of tension regarding our product offerings. In response, our cooperative decided to take a step back from day-to-day work; we re-established our personal relationships with one another and re-clarified our vision, values, and personal and company mission. Upon this foundation, we vulnerably shared ways in which we felt harmed and exchanged opinions about how to move forward. We voted on a product roadmap to adopt, and while some people who didn’t agree with that roadmap decided to exit, the cooperative members continue to invest in their governance structure, decision-making processes, and personal relationships.

We can slowly grow this muscle by sharing the truth with one another, operating from a set of shared values, and approaching tension with deep curiosity rather than feigned ignorance. At Design Action, workers talk through differences and approach issues from different angles, bringing in external consultation support as needed. Taking time to document their values and build political alignment with one another has allowed them to be robust and effective in their decision-making and conflict management.

---

By creating or joining a cooperative, you accept a certain amount of risk. The cooperative may not be profitable at first, forcing you to take a much lower salary than you would otherwise. You may have to be debt-free and financially privileged to even join in the first place. The co-op may never IPO, provide benefits like family planning or 401(k)s, or match the level of financial success that one can find at a traditional tech startup. It may not even survive. However, with a strong business plan, a transparent governance model, a healthy approach to conflict, and some luck, your cooperative will be well-prepared to provide stable jobs, and when it comes time to distribute profits, you can collectively decide what to do with them based on shared values.



## Notes

[^1]: Maintained by a worker-owner at a tech co-op, this list has nearly two thousand “stars” on GitHub.
[^2]: Start.coop is an organization that seeks to promote the development of cooperative businesses, through programs like a co-op accelerator.

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“When did you first start disassembling yourself?” Dr. Hallopeau asked.

“I can’t remember,” I responded. “Maybe that sounds evasive, but I’m not lying.”

All my memories are scarred by disassembly. Even now, in my regular session with Dr. Hallopeau, I am scratching at one of the biosensors implanted in my pointer finger. The skin is starting to pull back, barely revealing the metallic pins embedded between flesh and bone.

Disassembly is always a gamble. Every few scratches I could flick the pins just right and receive a pulse of soothing pleasure down my forearm. A synesthetic blend of sound as color. But most scratches led to pain. A burning from raw, wet tissue suddenly bare to the harsh conditions outside the body. That is the simple cycle of my compulsion—an endless loop between temporary euphoria and inevitable anguish.

Dr. Hallopeau noticed the tic, softly inquiring, “What are you thinking about right now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, equivocating, “It’s hard to explain.”

“Why don’t you try?” Dr Hallopeau responded.

She began to smile, casting a genuine warmth that was evident even through the intermittent desync of her hologram. A ray of sun amidst the icy digital winds. She wanted me to get better. But she had also seen me erode over the years. Several of my bio-augmentations were now permanently exposed, emanating a verdigris from the metal into the surrounding skin. The tell-tale sign of a disassembliac.

I must be disappointing her.

“You know how it goes, Dr. Hallopeau, it always starts the same. Yesterday I finished a long day of remote piloting. Could not get the feeling of sweat and dust and heat off me. The taste of sand in my mouth. Had to take a long shower.”

The sadness of the night returned with the telling of the story. Dr. Hallopeau was taking in the description with a dutiful nodding.

“But then I was alone with no plans for the evening. I could hear the other families in the building laughing and having a good time. I knew I should go outside, even wrote myself notes all over the apartment. Go for a walk, get fresh air, drink water, whatever, but I just couldn’t escape.”

“Thought I would check the Feed for a little bit to take the edge off,” I continued, “you know the Feed’s motto, ‘all the content you could ever want, all the time.’ Before I knew it, I was dosing. That empty-headed feeling took over. Like my brain was replaced with a bowl of the thickest, grossest, cement-flavored pudding you could imagine.”

“Then what happened?”

“My hands started to roam. I didn’t want them to, but they made their way up to my head and I started pulling, looking for imperfections.”

Even describing the process started to summon that unmistakable urge to disassemble. I wanted to close the connection with Dr. Hallopeau, rush to the bathroom, and go all out on my implants. Tweak the wires of the engineered eyes, randomly shuffling and editing the wavelengths making up my enhanced visible spectrum.

At times I told myself that there was a higher purpose in the disassembly. A kind of bodily scrying that was required to unlock new experiences—hidden colors like Jupiter sapphire or the subterranean emotions of Calvinic depravity. But there were other aspects to the compulsion that were more practical. Pulling circuits until I passed out. Rubbing pre-chain coins against silicon to fuzz the biolinks on the central nervous system. Total temporary disassociation that removed any anxiety, fear, or worry.

“Why do you call them imperfections?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a word I came up with. You know, the raised lines and bumps and tabs on the implants. The engineers try their best to hide it, but those imperfections are still there. Something about it, I can’t keep away. The touching turns to rubbing, and then the rubbing evolves into biting, scratching, pulling, and worse. Anything to get the implants out, you know…”

Dr. Hallopeau shifts in her seat, betraying a clear discomfort as we broach the bodily specifics of my disassemania. Yet she has lasted so much longer than any of the others. I remember the first, Dr. Francis, who helped me through my earliest episode. It happened one night when I was nine years old. Managed to bypass the child locks on my ADOLINK. Spent the entire night parsing low fidelity adult content on some of the rougher corners of the web before it was completely scrubbed. A classic case of ‘Feed Overdose’, not that the medical community had a clinical name for it yet. By the time my parents came to wake me up I was huddled in the corner of the bedroom, digging several small divots into my scalp in an enclosing circle around the cranial implant. Could not focus for weeks after that night. Dr. Francis had recommended machine-assisted EMDR plus a limited memory wipe. My parents hoped the night was a one-off incident. That the urges and the memories would dull with age. _Soon you will be on your merry way_, Dad had counseled. Sixteen years later I am having the thousandth version of the same conversation.

“Where did you go just now?” Dr. Hallopeau inquired.

“I’m sorry,” I responded, “couldn’t get out of my head.”

“It’s alright,” she reassured, “you’re back now.”

Dr. Hallopeau paused, adjusting her notebook before continuing, “So, why do you want to remove these imperfections?”

Her question glided past me. My focus was back on exposing one of the pins on the biosensor. I could feel that a pin was bent. Did my scratches do the bending, or had it been installed with a slight bend? I needed to check the crookedness. But the last scratch was too much. I dislodged the pin entirely and the titanium tore flesh on the way out. A small teardrop of blood was collecting in the crevice of the install location. My nerves started to scream. A familiar rhythm of pain was beginning.

If I was lucky a little pain would be the least of my worries. Sometimes the blood and bodily fluids could interfere with a damaged implant, forging unpleasant hallucinations and phantom sensations. Usually, the only remaining choice was to close your eyes, clench your teeth, and rip the implant clean out. Hard shutdown. But I could not carry out the emergency surgery in front of Dr. Hallopeau.

Trying to concentrate on the conversation, I offered a halfhearted explanation. “I don’t know, it’s complicated. There’s that nanosecond where it feels so good to remove the implant. That moment of release—when the capacitor splits from the board, when the wire comes loose, when I finally remove what feels like an alien inside me. That feeling of dislodgement, a release…” I trailed off again.

Dr. Hallopeau left the silence open, waiting to see if I would continue.

I was scratching harder at the remaining elements of the biosensor. The broken base of the pin jutted sharply out amongst the muscle fibers in the third digit. Each flick drew the shroud of disassociation further. The room seemed to shrink and darken. All my possessions were swallowed by the darkness brought on by disassemania. Soon it would be only me and the hologram of Dr. Hallopeau.

“Like when the stores switched completely over to bio-aug’ payments. Everyone was so excited,” I exclaimed, “but all I could think about was where they were going to install my tech and how I was going to dig it out.”

Dr. Hallopeau nodded. She had seen me that week. I had tried to excise the new implant with my nails. The engineers had done a fantastic job—a nearly clean seam embedding a penny-sized chip into the anterior surface of the radius. But the imperfect line between machine and body was still there, barely noticeable. Or maybe not. I could have been feeling a vein roll over the bone. I had to check for myself, so I moved on to excavating with stainless steel tweezers. I managed to get the whole implant out without a visit to the emergency room, and stored the remains of the implant in a plastic bag. The hardest part was the look the other customers gave me as I passed the bagged implant over the scanners at the grocery store.

Sensing my sadness, Dr. Hallopeau asked, “What about the habitat reversal therapy? Have you been practicing our exercises?”

She was trying to move the conversation along.

“Yes and no. They work for a day or two, but something will come along, something at work, a new bird to fly, and I start disassembling again…” I responded, growing agitated.

The last scratch at my biosensor had suddenly sent waves of uncontrollable fire shooting up my arm and into my shoulder. I shoved the damaged hand under my thigh to dull the throbs.

“Why don’t we try one of the exercises?” Dr. Hallopeau proposed, as if on cue.

“Okay, okay...”

“Take the scratching hand, ball it into a fist, and squeeze for sixty seconds. I’ll count out loud. You just follow along.” Dr. Hallopeau instructed.

I listened to Dr. Hallopeau enunciate the numbers. With each passing second, I squeezed harder until my entire arm was taut. She was never going to get all the way to sixty, I was sure of it.

I lost her voice somewhere around fifteen or twenty. My rapid breathing brought me back to summer runs in the park with my older sister. Towards the brink of exhaustion one of us would point to a distant bench to mark a spontaneous finish line, encouraging a final sprint. After one of these races, we ended on a bench overlooking a small field where children were playing on artificial turfgrass. One of my arm bandages was spotting red. Staring at the bandage, she asked, “Why do you do it? Why can’t you just stop?” I looked back at her and smiled. Her own implants were undetectable, a suite of corporate-sponsored productivity tools that kept her connected to the mainframe. She had never come into contact with the raw Feed.

I came back to the session with Dr. Hallopeau shouting my name. Gasping, I unclenched my arm.

“How long did I make it?” I asked between rasping breaths.

“We made it about thirty seconds. Are you okay?”

I sat silently, feeling my face warm from embarrassment. Thirty seconds could feel like an eternity in the Feed. I had glimpsed hundreds of images and words in less. With a full minute I could parse thousands of content blocks on a hyperscroll. And how much damage could I do to myself in such a short amount of time? At least expose a few wires, unearth a subcutaneous connector, maybe even rip out a small chip, depending on the implant.

Thirty seconds was nothing in the face of the hours and days of unsupervised isolation to come. An ever-eroding will to change was the only thing that stood between me, the Feed, and more disassembly.

“How are you feeling?”

“I feel ashamed. Pathetic. Worthless. What hope is there if I can’t even make it a minute?” I cried, losing control of any ability to measure my responses.

Dr. Hallopeau did not respond to the outburst, trying to maintain an austere medical demeanor. The conversation came to a standstill. Without thinking I brought my left hand up to my mouth and started gnawing on the edge of a smart tip finger cap. The saliva coated the cap, sinking into the connections at the edges, making me feel like my feet were submerged in a warm bath.

Dr. Hallopeau broke the silence with a rare misstep that sent me over the edge.

“What if we increased your medication? People with severe cases are eligible for up to double the regular amount of clomipramine. Though we would need approval from the Government Medical Office, of course.”

I broke down, tears streaming down my face. Dr. Hallopeau took on a regretful expression, “It was just an idea. What’s wrong?”

Through choked sobs I tried to find a few truthful words, “I don’t want more pills! I don’t want more harm guards! They’re never going to slow down the Feed. I just want to get better.”

A memory from my time at the Academy returned to me. A rudimentary harm guard coated my left arm. It was a flexible metal glove that covered from the tip of the fingers to the middle of the forearm. The harm guard was supposed to withstand any attack of disassemania. One particularly stressful night—after the Feed swelled in reaction to a political event, an election or assassination or something—I was determined to get the glove off. I turned the minifridge in my barrack into a makeshift disassembly station, plying at the glove with knives and tools of various sizes. When bunkmates returned I was passed out, surrounded by streaks of blood running down the side of the makeshift workbench. Later they told me that there was a clean meat cleaver on the floor. The memory shifts as I try to hold it. Quicksilver fragments that refuse to be contained. I remember waking up in the campus hospital, surrounded by nurses, school administrators, and the barrack director. A doctor comes to the foot of the bed and holds court, telling me how lucky I am that none of the implants were damaged.

“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” I continued, wiping the dribble from my nose.

“What do you want? What would make you happy?” Dr. Hallopeau asked, her warmth returning.

I contemplated responding with what Dr. Hallopeau wanted to hear—a safe answer that would allow our session to conclude with the usual relief from hard-fought catharsis. We were at those difficult final minutes of an appointment where the emotional faucet let loose over the past hour had to be artificially closed. Dr. Hallopeau needed a response that signaled I was okay, that she did not need to arrange the mandatory 48 hours of observation for high-risk patients.

I flashed to a later-in-life meeting with Dr. Francis. More than a decade had passed since the first episode of disassemania. I had just graduated high school and was traveling to Academy Basic Training. We ran into each other at the airport. I called out to her with a proud smile as I was on an exceptional six-month streak without any disassembly. We talked for a few minutes. I told her how well I was doing, how things were looking up, and more. She smiled and nodded, as she had always done, but she never said my name. It eventually occurred to me that Dr. Francis did not recognize me. Her eyes betrayed that vacant stare of someone running an assisted memory search. I could not blame her. Who was I? Merely the thousandth patient with the same diagnosis. I wondered if Dr. Hallopeau and I were doomed to suffer the same fate.

I searched for a few remaining shreds of self-composure, gathering myself and staring directly at the hologram of Dr. Hallopeau.

“I want to get better. Stop disassembling. Try to be a good person, help others, see the world, that kind of thing. Get out of this city so that I don’t go crazy with loneliness. Stop piloting, or at least stop piloting for the government. Get the tech removed—properly—and settle down somewhere. Maybe even find someone to share each day with. Yeah, I don’t know….”

Saccharine, but Dr. Hallopeau took the bait. Maybe she knew I was lying. Maybe we were stuck in a boot loop without any chance of ever reaching the home screen. Or maybe our session was just out of time.

“Those are wonderful aspirations. Why don’t you write them down in your journal, and we can talk more about them at our next session?”

“Yes, Dr. Hallopeau, that sounds great.”

“Excellent. And remember, there is always tomorrow. The future is ever brighter.”

With that pronouncement we began the regular concluding ritual. Dr. Hallopeau smiled and waved with one hand, discretely moving the other in an attempt to close the connection. Her initial motion commands did not take. After a few awkward moments her hologram finally vanished. The chair she had projected onto seemed more empty than before.

Alone once more, I listen to the garbled giggling and conversation of the neighbors through the wall. A stiffness creeps up my neck, urging me off the couch and into the kitchen to stretch. Opening a cabinet, I provide my retinal scan to the electronic pillbox and dry swallow two purple hexagons. Staring out the kitchen window I manage to catch the last moments of sunset and contemplate what to do next. Turning back towards the dark interior of the apartment, I try to avoid lingering on the magnetic rack of knives hanging above the oven. Another night with no plans.

I could never tell Dr. Hallopeau what I really wanted. Sometimes I did have hopeful thoughts about how I could change, the person I might become. Maybe I could show the world what I looked like without disassemania. Pristine implants, unchewed fingers, and an intact scalp. I could be the poster child for the newest and greatest biomod. A blissful smile accompanied by corporate Muzak.

But in solitude the real desires surround me. They call for a complete disassembly. Start with the eyes so that I can no longer see the Feed. The hands do not need sight anyways—they know the body innately. The dismemberment continues until all flesh and technology have been painstakingly removed and laid out on the ground. Each piece is arranged exactly where it should be. I am left as a wraith above the pieces, haunting the strange reflection of my former self.

Perfect self-disassembly. Then I would finally be free.


“When did you first start disassembling yourself?” Dr. Hallopeau asked.

“I can’t remember,” I responded. “Maybe that sounds...

Disassemania


_This text first appeared as a short piece commissioned for an exhibit by Taryn Simon for the Prada Foundation._

**Preamble**

The human mind requires a human body and perceives itself only through the relationship
between its body and other bodies. Our company’s advances in neuroscience and information
technology have enabled us to scan, code, and store the sum total of data contained in an
individual brain. Our current scope of activities does not include the fabrication of bodies to
serve as hosts for our clients’ digitized minds. The following list contains three theoretical ways
of manufacturing such bodies. Though it is important to note that the artefact or organism
produced cannot necessarily be said to possess a human mind, it is nonetheless safe to say that the body is equipped with a mind that is derived from, but not circumscribed by, the contents of a human mind. This disclaimer appears in the waiver that all our clients are required to sign.

**BODY 1**

A compact electronic device with a chalcogenide glass hard drive capable of storing mind data in an object no larger than a small flashlight. The restricted size would also restrict the possibilities for sensorial communication, which would be limited to acoustic stimuli: an auditory sensor and an adjustable speaker that could mimic, to the best of its abilities, the timber and intonation of the client’s human voice. Such a body could be expected to produce a mind that is emotionally impaired but nonetheless exhibits strong logical skills and algorithmic efficiency. What the mind lacks in empathy would be compensated by the self’s adaptation to an increasingly mathematicized and mechanical world, detached from the organic murkiness of the flesh. In Timaeus, Plato attested that the divine, immortal soul—logos—is located in the head, while the entire body functions as its servant. Should that be the case, this method would require closely monitoring how the logos behaves without the rest of its body—that is, without any irrational, irascible parts for it to preside over. A body devoid of organs—and of organisms within organisms—might awaken in the digital mind a tendency to doubt its own existence. This method carries a high risk of psychological terror, which would be difficult to discern given the artefact’s limited emotional expression.

**BODY 2**

3D bioprinting has long been used to manufacture organs for use in transplants or plastic surgery. Incorporating quantum neural networks into this technology could make it possible for digitized human minds to be hosted in dynamic human-tissue generators. Housed in such a body, the mind would print, in real time, whatever organ, tissue, or secretion best conveyed their emotions or enabled further interaction with other bodies. The philosophical basis for this approach combines the encephalocentric and cardiocentric hypotheses found in the work of Pliny, the Elder. The Roman author and naturalist asserts that the brain is the “citadel” of sense perception and the “regulator of understanding,” while observing that the heart is “the first among the viscera that is formed in the foetus” and contains “the primary receptacles for the spirit and the blood.” It is in the heart “that the mind has its abode.” In a dynamic human-tissue generator, the mind would manifest not only in relation to the heart, but also in relation to other organs such as the tongue, skin, pancreas, ovary, and testicle, while expressing itself through blood, pus, bile, saliva, sweat, semen, and vaginal secretion. The organs and effusions would swell, wither, quiver, dribble, bubble, moisten, and rot. This body would be vulnerable to contamination from other bodies: organisms within organisms. This is a human body turned inside out, monstruous to human instincts, yet one that seeks out and thrives on affection, establishing a feedback loop between neural data banks and the results of its interfaces with other bodies. Although its morphology and body language are likely to be considered scatological and grotesque, it is worth remembering that the typical human body also communicates via blood, secretions, pheromones, and increases or decreases in volume. Tears dampen our eyes, our skin tingles when touched with passion, our humors simmer under the influence of hate, our breath reeks of sadness. The mind is formed and perceives itself because the heart beats, but who out there can quicken or quieten their own heart with thought alone?

**BODY 3**

When Aristotle claimed that the soul resides only in the heart, and that the brain is just a cold,
insensitive mass with the sole purpose of cooling the excess of heat that the heart generates in the blood, he put forth the possibility of a consciousness that is pure body, pure organ, untethered from the “operational center” in our heads. Such a perspective allows us to question the role that petabytes of data extracted from a specific bundle of neurons—services offered by our company—actually play in the making of a consciousness. In order to make a copy of the self, data would need to be extracted not only from neural connections and memories, but also from the experience of the body and each of its components throughout every moment of their existence; that is, it would be necessary to be born and live in the exact same way as the other organism. For this reason, we would recommend the narrative body method, which is characterized by the transferal of semantic and syntactic patterns through all kinds of materials. It is as if every possible event—the murmuring of a brook, an orgasm, a compound fracture, the color produced by the micrometric scales of a butterfly wing, Virgil’s Aeneid, a plastic straw—bears a signature or an impression that simply requires a particular angle, or a little distance, for it to be recognized and appreciated. Such a consciousness resides nowhere; its body is an eternal and infinite substance that bristles under the winds of cause and effect. Do what you will with the data. Humankind creates nothing. At most, it learns.


This text first appeared as a short piece commissioned for an exhibit by Taryn Simon for the Prada Foundation.

Preamble

The...

Guide to Manufacturing Bodies

\[poetry]

This is somewhat about poetry—how the poetry of a people plays a vital part in countering the propaganda of a mili...

Poetry Editor’s Note


## IT WILL BE PINK

_Originally published in_ [LitHub](https://lithub.com/poets-respond-to-the-anniversary-of-nakba/).

## the moon is pro-palestine

_Originally published in_ [Voicemail Poems](https://voicemailpoems.org/2021/02/02/the-moon-is-pro-palestine/).


IT WILL BE PINK

Originally published in LitHub.

the moon is pro-palestine

Originally published in Voicemail Poems....

There is no organization. There is no manifesto. In order to optimize your content for the algorithm, or “algorithmax,” the c...

Algorithmaxxing

> Think of the computer, not as a tool, but as a medium.

—Brenda Laurel, _Computers as Theatre_

_If you are reading this, this is for you._

My finger makes gentle contact with the glass matrix, caressing ceramic nano crystals and giving up heat to the obsidian screen. My phone, an inanimate 6 oz. piece of matter (the same weight as a deck of cards), is whispering soft nothings to me.

My face is enveloped by a soft glow as I attentively await my reading. “Tonight,” a smooth voice whispers, “we have the queen of cups... complete unison and harmony with this universe.”

I have been keeping quiet about my nighttime divination; private in my own room, yet aware of the publicity of the readings I receive—the videos are filled with strangers’ comments and reactions. The readings are for me, and for an indeterminate number of us. I scroll down the infinitely extending screen to unravel more stories for myself, until my eyes are heavy and I drift off.

During the day, I pry open models, reverse-engineering their inner workings and meditate on their societal ramifications.[^1] At night, I scry with opaque models, heart yearning for answers, fingers absorbed. I receive group tarot readings on Instagram, from someone with a beaming smile soaked in sun rays. The tellers are charismatic, the readings emphatic. One-in-four young women in the United States uses Co-Star, the AI astrology app―I am one of them. I code models, and I let models recode me.

Divination is a practice as old as human time. The word divination has the Latin root of _divinare_: “to foretell, prophesy, forebode, divine the future.” Ever since the concept of the future entered the realm of reckoning, humans have been weaving together what's around us to foretell the future. We gazed at the movements of clouds (nephomancy), fluffed up the flour (aleuromancy), poured wax (ceromancy), and dealt cards (cartomancy). Anthropologists [Ze Hong and Joseph Henrich assert](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-021-09408-6) that viewing divination as technology has a long history in anthropology, and that divination practices are often best viewed as specifically an epistemic technology: technology for knowledge-making. In ancient Greece, divination (_mantikē_) was categorized as a kind of technique (_technē_), which is the etymological root of the modern English word “technology.” Plato describes two types of divination: _possession divination_ where a diviner reveals information acquired from a deity, and _technical divination_, where the diviner interprets the hidden meanings of phenomenons, both of which have been considered as technē by the Greeks (Hong & Henrich, 2021).

Cultural anthropologist and oneirologist[^2] [Barbara Tedlock notes](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1260832?seq=2) that divination involves a primary process of seeing, and secondary processes of thinking or knowing. In her view, diviners are “specialists who use the idea of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice.” The key to good divination is the weaving of useful knowledge from open-ended oracular observations. Tedlock argues that “_[Diviners]_ link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience.” In this lens, divination is a way of knowing, with subjective validity and narrational depth.

As new technologies seemingly bloom beside us—seeded by companies eager to capitalize off our every last moment of attention—they too become a part of divination. The fortune-telling automatons from the era of penny arcades are precursors to the divinatory apps in my phone: divining with obscurity and novelty, a few bucks to outline the future and to be entertained.

Computational divination extends divination as a way of knowing to further imaginative depths. Computers, after all, are a natural medium for building worlds. In Brenda Laurel's seminal work _Computers as Theatre_, she argues that in the field of human-computer interaction, we may create “imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to reality—worlds in which we can extend, amplify, and enrich our own capacities to think, feel, and act.” Laurel emphasizes the metaphor of theater as an attempt “to represent something that might go on, simplified for the purposes of logical and affective clarity.” The expressive capacity of computation and computer interactions creates a wide stage for divination. In a [1995 Wired review](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/digital-divination/) of a Tarot software on CD, the reviewer praises the convenience of divining via software and notes that softwares have “jazzy features” including an “‘Gate of Entry’, an enticing virtual stone doorway,”and “ethereal New Age music.”

Effusive group tarot readings on Instagram; Co-Star's minimalistic, mysterious interface; and the illustrated “Gate of Entry” in 90s tarot softwares are examples of computational divination that fall under a category of phantasmal media, which D. Fox Harrell, professor of digital media and artificial intelligence, defines as “a combination of imagery (mental or sensory) and ideas.” He notes that phantasmal media is “a particularly pervasive kind of imagination, one that encompasses cognitive phenomena including sense of self, metaphor, social categorization, narrative, and poetic thinking.” Interactive, beautifully embellished divinatory content, even when taken as entertainment, creates a sounding board for one to renegotiate and reimagine their stories, metaphors and narratives.

Artificial intelligence-based models are the genies out of the bottle in the current wave of digital divination. Various divination tech startups tout AI, which is simultaneously common in its adoption among all kinds of businesses as a flashy feature for users’ benefit yet arcane in how exactly it is referenced and used. Co-Star promises users that it is able to give personalized astrological reading by using artificial intelligence to analyze NASA Jet Propulsion Lab data, thereby finding patterns in a user's planetary transits. Tarot readings show up on Instagram through artificial intelligence-backed personalized content ranking. The core of popular algorithmic divination from the receiving end is randomness and opacity. Under the hoods of my digital oracles lie models which have learned from my data and interaction patterns. Yet I have no interpretable context for what I receive. On one hand, speculations, randomness; on the other hand, a stroke of luck, a sign from the universe.

---

At times, my daytime profession of probing models leaks into my nighttime devotional hours. Currently, many models are opaque and there’s a lack of adequate tools to interpret them. Neural networks, the most popular and widely used class of models, are trained without symbolic reasoning. As such, even when we lay out a model’s internals—the model’s architecture and weights—we don't always understand what we see. How and why does the model generate its answers? Much of the algorithms that touch our lives are opaque and uninterpretable, qualities which pose real concerns for fairness and safety. When I divine with models, I am divining with a black-box.

The popularity of algorithmic divination today is inseparable from the opacity of the black-boxes that set out to personalize for users in a world of unlimited choices and data. The promise of the personal in models parallels the need to hear about and think about one's reality. Co-Star's co-founder [Banu Guler says in an interview](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/4/20879631/co-star-astrology-app-zodiac-signs), “The crux of feeling like a human is being able to talk about your reality.” The language of the messengers is telling: Co-Star presenting “your day at a glance”; TikTok promising fresh content “for you”. Much of algorithmic divination aims to deliver snippets that reflect on your reality: predictions of what is “in power” for you, what is troubling for you, how you relate to home and to work, what the year has in store for you. And with the premise of personalization, divinatory products argue that we have scaled understanding of individual realities. It's tempting to connect the promise of the personal to divine messages “just for me,” though the model only sees a skewed version of me that it further echoes.

In sociologist Charles Cooley's theory of the “looking glass of self,” we understand ourselves through the perceptions of others. Online, models perceive us, responding to and reinforcing the versions of ourselves which they glean from our behaviors. They sense my finger lingering, my invisible gaze apparent by the gap of my movements. My understanding of my digital self and my digital reality becomes a feedback loop churned by models I cannot see. Moreover, the model only “sees” me as data that can be optimized for objectives that I cannot uncover. That objective is something closer to optimizing my time spent on the digital product than to holding my deepest needs; the latter perhaps was never a mathematical question to begin with.

Divination and algorithmic opacity both appear to bring us what we cannot see. Diviners see through what is obscure and beyond our comprehension: it may be incomprehensible pain and grief, vertiginous lack of control, and/or the unwarranted future. The opacity of divination comes from the limitations of our own knowledge. But the opacity of algorithms comes from both the algorithm itself and the socio-technical infrastructure that it was built around. Jenna Burrell writes of three layers of opacity in models: “(1) opacity as intentional corporate or state secrecy, (2) opacity as technical illiteracy, and (3) an opacity that arises from the characteristics of machine learning algorithms and the scale required to apply them usefully.” As consumers of models, we interact with the first and third layer of the opacity―that of platforms hiding models from us, and that of the gap between what the model is optimizing for and what may be explainable. The black-box model is an alluring oracle, interacting with us in inexplicable ways: no explanation for the daily laconic message Co-Star pushes to its users, no logic behind why you received this tarot reading while scrolling, no insight into the models behind these oracles and their objectives.

The objectives hidden from me hold power. Their inexplicability is part of their charm. Without an explanation, I may build my own story for it. Would my reading be as meaningful to me if I could trace the clear thread of why it was pushed to me? That perhaps my scrolling patterns mirrored someone who was fresh out of a relationship, that the algorithm learned I wanted to hear whispers of comfort, wanted to feel digitally held amidst change? That it knows I eat up soft nothing prophecies of someone coming towards me with apologies like I’m watching junk TV? Delusions are a type of dopamine hit.

---

When asked about astrology, Banu Guler says “[Astrology] is a form of self care. I think it’s also a way of, sort of, collective care. Right? Maybe ‘collective self care’ is the word … this idea of building relationships with each other and taking care of each other.” Diviners are traditionally viewed as healers integral to communities. In Ingrid Rojas Contreras's memoir _The Man Who Could Move Clouds,_ she writes of growing up in Colombia in a family laden with magic, her grandfather a renowned curandero and her childhood filled with her mother's fortune-telling clients. Rojas Contreras writes of giving readings in her youth, eventually stopping as she felt the weight of divination. She learned the art from her mother and noted her mother's confession that “the biggest thing I have learned all these years...is that nobody wants the truth, but everyone wants a story.” Rojas Contreras writes of the heaviness of divination for her classmates as political violence loomed in the background: “I dealt cards despairingly, for the first time understanding the responsibility of divination. It wasn’t just about precision; it was about interpreting the language of grief and finding there a sense of direction that had eluded the client. But violence was nonsense. What possible answer could there be in the face of it?”

When diviners are healers, the healing comes from helping people rewrite a story: giving people a direction that may allow the easier digestion of truth. The core of the care, then, is the reader’s personal connection with their client. If you’re a skeptic, the personal connection may be just a cold reading of a client. If you’re open to magical thinking, though, the personal connection is the inexplicable intuition of another.

For algorithmic divination to be an instrument of collective care, one needs to examine the objectives of what's under the hood. Are Co-Star’s push notifications catering to me, or catering to seeing itself being screenshotted, and going viral on social media? The inexplicable push of Instagram content at me is optimizing for a version of me, but is that version of me most aligned with my real values and goals? Is it possible for these technologies to care for us without really understanding us?

We should be reminded that mysticism and obfuscation serve the aims of tech companies. Mysterious, personalized prophecies have a global following. The global astrology industry was valued at $12.8 billion in 2021; Co-Star is a multi-million dollar company. And, on Instagram, I am joined by millions of others who consume and like group tarot readings. Both high-tech and low-tech divination make for good products. Beyond divinational tech, the more inexplicable and magical products appear to be, the more we are sold a story of tech's inevitability and reinforcement of the status quo. Is generative AI so mystical, when models are trained on millions of data, and research has shown that they reliably copy from their training sets? While companies have the ability to demystify algorithms, doing so would reveal their failings. It is actively in their corporate interest to present the most magical and infallible versions of their products. From the rise and fall of Theranos to the unveiling of a Google AI demo video as fabricated, we have been swimming in grand illusions and mysteries served by tech companies.

We are in a new wave of public fervor in astrology and magical thinking. Maybe we can blame it on the economy: seeking to understand the future and ourselves is interlinked with seeking control. Social scientists [Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky conducted](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20144957?seq=1) experiments that show how lacking control increases illusory pattern perception among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. They note that, “even on a national level, when times are economically uncertain, superstitions increase.” Google searches for “birth chart” and “astrology” both hit five-year peaks in 2020, the first year of the Covid pandemic. When algorithms are hidden from us, anything we receive seems like a stroke of luck. And when we really need a story—about our life, about the things we cannot control—perhaps recommended content becomes prophecy.

We are all divining in our own ways: thinking about and predicting the future, imbuing meaning in scientific or occult methods. Algorithmic divination introduces a greater scale of dissemination, as well as opacity and randomness to this age-old practice. In incorporating algorithmic divination as a way of knowing, we are also seeing the world through the products that are stamped with objectives that may differ from our own. To acquire better understandings of ourselves, there exists an inherent risk as we weave through unreliable or perhaps conflicting narratives. Deep collective care requires true understanding and attention. In the meantime, pick your brooms wisely.



## Notes

[^1]: I research algorithmic fairness and interpretability of machine learning models. Some questions I've been interested in are: can we preserve fairness under changing data distribution? Can we efficiently find subnetworks for a task in a large model?
[^2]: A scholar of dreams

Think of the computer, not as a tool, but as a medium.

—Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre

If you are reading this, this i...

Oracles in the Machine


The weatherman is never / right / about this part of Setauket / but when we hang up / the backyard is white / six inches by eleven / cracked arrow on the Mac keyboard / I say I’ve been fixing / for three years / I wasn’t a fighter / making lodges / in my grade four Algonquin diorama / I learned it’s snow / that demands a familiar costume / waterproofed suede / nylon mittens / crisp Oxford / for a different diagnosis / picking out symptoms / to wear while a low cloud expands / light / from the ground / softly filters my face / like a gender / into the screen / where I exchange artifices with my clinician / and again / a machine / is the most predictable thing / in the landscape


The weatherman is never / right / about this part of Setauket / but when we hang up / the backyard is white / six inches by e...

Where do we draw the line?

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