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# Terms and Conditions of Services Manifest

EFFECTIVE FROM: Sunrise

ESTIMATED READING TIME: From rock to pebble

We are glad that “you” are here for review once more. As always, please take the necessary breaths and lifetimes to leaf through the document in its entirety, especially where it mostly resides off the precipice of language.

# Introduction to the Terms and Conditions of Services Manifest

The “Terms and Conditions of Services Manifest” (henceforth the “TCSM” (generally not be interchanged with “The Companion Species Manifesto,” with which it may or may not share a common designation and other likeness of, except in one of several instances of overlap) or the “Terms”) is an agreement between “you” and “your” Kin (irregardless of, at present, dualistic relationality, classification (or declassification), affiliation (or disaffiliation), embodiment (or disembodiment) that may impose individualizing obfuscations such as “human”/“nature,” “native”/“invasive,” “alive”/“inanimate,” “urban”/“rural,” “subject”/“object,” “conscious”/“conditioned,” “terms”/“obligations,” “I”/“you,” and so on) that governs “your” relationships with “them” and any ensuing and enfolded products, services, software, hardware, cyborgian confabulations of any kind(s).

It is understandable that “you” may have questions about the “Terms.” “You” may refer to the FAQ section which provides more information (alternatively, engaging with Kin directly with respect and kindness may provide more clarity.)

Besides these “Terms,” there is also a published Misclaimed-Classification-Mode(l) (known as “M-C-M’”) covering “ownership” and privacy policies. Although it’s not part of these terms, “you” are encouraged to read it to better understand how to protect “yourself” against the selling of “your” person or the persons of “your” Kin, and ensure “your” safety, integrity, and security remain uncompromised.

While it may be tempting to skip these “Terms,” it’s important to establish what “you” owe to Kin as “you” depend on and relate to our services.

# Eligibility and Scope of the “Terms”

The TCSM contains binding arbitration (which is established as the only recognized form of consent gathering) and non-binding legal stand-ins (should they proliferate in divergence from the Terms) that apply to all residents. “You” agree to submit disputes to a neutral arbitrator and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury, except in small claims court. Please see Section 14 for details.

IF “YOU” LIVE IN (OR “YOUR” PRINCIPAL PLACE OF BUSINESS IS IN) THE PLACE KNOWN AS EARTH OR GAIA OR TELLUS OR SOL III OR MOTHER OR GROUND BALL OR THE LAND OR SOIL “YOU” ARE CONSIDERED A “RESIDENT” FOR THE PURPOSES OF TCSM. PLEASE READ THE BINDING ARBITRATION CLAUSE AND NON-LEGAL STAND-INS IN SECTION 44. IT AFFECTS HOW DISPUTES ARE RESOLVED.

By Land, “you” have certain relations (that depend on observing, including, and celebrating the rights of Kin past, present, and future.) Any “laws” are in no circumstances to obscure, alter, override, and/or ignore these relations.

The TCSM reflects the way consent, relationality, and kinship work, the obligations that apply to Kin of all individuated foreclosures, and certain things we’ve always believed to be true. As a result, these Terms help to re(-)member and re(-)mediate relationships between Kin as “you” interact with our services.

Understanding these Terms is important because, by accessing or using our services, “you” are agreeing to these terms.

# The Terms

We (henceforth to be phased into the “Terms” in order to re(-)present incomplete senses of self, to replace the following indicators to invoke greater clarity at cost of precision: “I,” “you,” “they”) remain indivisible in both body and language. While myriad boundaries are evoked for narrative and relationality at each of the different scales our constituents form, there is no real separation between formed characters (bags of skin, family, “species,” life (in its foreclosed definitions), galaxies, electron clouds, microbial clouds, and so on) in both the longitudinal and latitudinal scope of the TCSM. (See Exhibits A and B below for further elaboration.)

All services to render and be rendered with are rooted in love and care. Any services stemming from different intentions reside outside the scope and spirit of the TCSM. Care requires attention and patience while love requires curiosity, and hearts open to breaking and mending. Matter can never come to not matter, and recall that there is no division of any sort between the “material” and “immaterial” (language matters, and so do love and care.)

The “Terms” apply to parents, guardians, and children, all of which we are and all of which we should all embody, at all times.

We are the manifestation of our terms, and any rights, responsibilities, obligations, and other myths of relationality are to be incubated, pruned, and stewarded with love and care, in ongoing practice.

**Exhibit A**

For instance, should we find ourselves at a meeting of the “human” and a “tree,” both ensheathed in Linnean uniform, please be incoherently, and inaccurately, clear. At the plane of our feet and bark, please do not mistake the parceled out designations of “I,” “you,” “they,” and “it” as anything more than names of convenience (and perhaps at times, of endearment). The self and the body and the “Terms” remain an intact whole.

**Exhibit B**

To further clarify, place our attention where water meets land. That is, in the vast shifting expense of in-between, in wet sand, in mangrove mazes, in mud, in plastic bottles emancipated into ocean, in veins and arteries, in where drops of rain and light reorganize around the teeth of leaves into hanging dew held by cool shadow. Our attention alone is enough practice of the TCSM. For diligent attention cannot help but resolve into curiosity, then care.

# Updates or Changes to these Terms

These “Terms” do not change at any time, and ensuing perturbation(s) and imbalance(s) should be deemed notice of failure(s) to observe them. We will be notified of continued failure to do so via intensification of rebalancing forces of greater frequency and intensity that may result in discomfort, pain, hollowness, and so forth. For more information, see Section 430 for a substantial but nonexhaustive list of violence, alienations, and consequences. The “Terms” are therefore effective as long as Kin can belong to Kin outside or despite of (a) construct(s) of ownership, and avoidance of the end of the “Terms” is highly encouraged.

While diversions from the “Terms” may and have occurred, rejection (i.e. non-acceptance or “opting-out”) of the “Terms” is not only discouraged but technically not possible as “Services” provisioned are necessary to the continued survivance and subsistence of us (henceforth to re-present incomplete senses of self to still be included for greater precision at cost of clarity: “I,” “you,” “they.”)

**Acceptance of the Terms**

Please be reminded that we cannot decline these terms, but we choose the attention and willingness with which to uphold our obligations.


Terms and Conditions of Services Manifest

EFFECTIVE FROM: Sunrise

ESTIMATED READING TIME: From rock to pebble

We are glad...

Terms and Conditions of Services Manifest

_Time Sequence Choreographies For a Room_ expands the concept of “sequence diagrams,” which when used in computer networking indicate the order in which messages are sent and received. The arrows suggest entrance and exit, while the dotted lines prescribe a pathway. Each composition is set in the boundaries of a square room. When produced through a repetitive, automatic drawing process, the diagrams become embodied abstractions of my memory, providing containers for their restaged choreographies.

 

<img src="5/article-images/OHLSEN_TS1.jpg">

 

<img src="5/article-images/OHLSEN_TS2.jpg">

 

<img src="5/article-images/OHLSEN_TS3.jpg">

Time Sequence Choreographies For a Room expands the concept of “sequence diagrams,” which when used in computer networking in...

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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
as my parent...

on days like today i dream of futures past


**Rosie Nguyen** is a cofounder and the chief creator officer of Fanhouse, a Series A startup that helps online creators monetize and build communities. She is also a content creator known on Twitter as @jasminericegirl.

**Jasmine Sun** is a cofounder and the director of Reboot. By day, she works on product research at Substack, a subscription publishing platform for independent writers.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Content warning: This interview contains a reference to physical violence and sexual assault._

### Becoming a Creator

**Jasmine**: A big part of your story with Fanhouse is your own experience as a creator. I ended up working at Substack for a similar reason: I was writing Reboot on the platform, unsuccessfully trying for a journalism job at the height of 2020’s COVID summer, and decided that building writer tools was the next best thing. But first, I’d love to hear how and why you got started as a “creator.”

**Rosie:** I became a creator mostly accidentally. I definitely didn’t grow up thinking: _I am going to become a creator_. While I was growing up, and through college, my mind was on survival — content creation didn’t really fit into that. It wasn’t a career track that would make money or provide for my family.

Twitter was just a hobby. I made my account in July of 2018, my sophomore year of college, and it was this screaming-into-the-void place for me to talk about the funny things that would happen in my life. I had a pretty rough life growing up, and humor was one of the ways I coped, and I put all those thoughts into Twitter. At one point, one of those thoughts went viral, and as they kept going viral, I got followers, and I realized that I really liked to share with people.

**J**: When you started Fanhouse, you were working full time, right?

**R**: I graduated from Penn in May 2020 and went into investment banking. In August, a month after I started banking, I began working on Fanhouse. For the next six months or so, I was doing both at the same time.

**J**: That sounds intense.

**R**: It almost seems like a fever dream. I don’t know how I did it, honestly — I think just pure will and passion.

Originally, my plan in college was to go into finance for a high-paying job that would give me the salary I needed to take care of my family. Then I met [my cofounder] Khoi, and we started getting excited about this idea for a creator platform that was everything I’ve ever wanted. At first, I was just going to do that on the side, but the more I worked on Fanhouse, the more I was like, _Wait a minute, this is my dream job, and this is my passion_. I eventually quit banking to do Fanhouse full time.

**J**: Because so much of what banking offered to you was financial security, was it a hard decision to start a company?

**R**: Yeah, so much. That’s why it took me six months to quit banking. I knew I hated investment banking from my first day on the job, and I knew that I loved Fanhouse my first day on the job, but I stayed for so long [with banking] because I was afraid. I knew I needed to provide for my family — I’m the only person in my family that makes an income — and the six-figure salary is really important. Fanhouse didn’t make any money, and we had no idea how long it would be until we could raise.

The decision came down to thinking about my worst case scenario. I got to the point where I couldn’t handle both jobs anymore — I felt like I was dying, my health was zero, and I needed to pick one. If I picked banking, my worst-case scenario is that I become really unhappy. If I picked Fanhouse, the worst-case scenario is that I make no money and go back to living the way I did in high school and college, when I didn’t own anything, skipped a lot of meals, never bought anything, and was always living day by day. Yet I had the realization that I would be happier working on Fanhouse and scrambling for money than having financial security and doing a job I didn’t love.

I went to my mom and was like, _Can I talk to you about something?_ My mom looked at me, and was like, _You want to quit your job, don’t you?_, and I said _Yeah._ My parents were super supportive. They were just like, _Go pursue this thing, we’re going to be fine. Even if you don’t have a ton of money for a while, we’re going to survive._ Their support made the decision much easier.

But I never saw myself as a person who would risk it all to start a startup — that seemed like the last thing I would have wanted to do. I was very aware that I’m not somebody who has a safety net. For most of my peers, if they can’t find a job, maybe they can live at home. In my case, if I didn’t figure it out, it wasn’t just my ass on the line, it was my entire family’s. There’s a lot more stress and pressure, so I was honestly very against the idea of starting a startup. That was never, never ever in my plans.

**J**: I feel like so much of the fact that so few women, people of color, or people from low income backgrounds start startups is about who has safety nets and the mindset that a safety net trains you in. Meanwhile, folks who grow up wealthier and surrounded by people who start companies are told from the get go that it’s going to be worth it, that it’s totally fine.

Yet one thing that your experience with Fanhouse seems to show is that when people with a wider range of backgrounds start companies, it really impacts what you actually build and how that helps people. Somebody who wasn’t you — who didn’t have your experience of depending on creator income for survival — probably wouldn’t have designed Fanhouse the way that you did.

**R:** Identity absolutely matters in terms of the decisions people make, and it’s just because they understand and empathize. When there are more women on corporate boards, policies shift to be more family-friendly and inclusive.

Fanhouse is the only platform I know in the subscription or the social media space that has unique watermarks on content to prevent leaks. That’s a feature most of our creators have enabled because they don’t want private content being shared elsewhere. But when I was on OnlyFans or Patreon, they didn’t have this. For the longest time, I thought it was because it was hard to do, but when I ended up founding [the company], I realized how easy it was. We added watermarks in our first version of the app, and I realized that it was an active choice other platforms made not to include this.

I’m not only thinking about the business, but also about how this affects me personally, as a creator. I recently learned that about [80 percent of creator economy companies have completely male founding teams, but over 80 percent of creators are women](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/creators-are-mostly-women-wheres-the-money-for-women-led-creator-startups). There’s a clear mismatch there between the people building and who they’re building for, so of course they’re not building the right things or asking the right questions.

### Platforms, Policies, and Politics

**J**: In addition to your personal experiences and intuitions, how does Fanhouse incorporate the user community in the way you develop the product?

**R**: I’m just one person, but the rest of our team is made up primarily of creators. Our community manager is a creator; our engineers are creators; there are people who stream on Twitch or are stand-up comedians or tarot card readers. A good amount of them are on Fanhouse monetizing as creators too, so they’re building for people like them.

Beyond our team, we talk to creators endlessly. We read every email and every comment we get. The second I see something that’s important in the community, I’m able to share that with the team. For example, something I hear about a lot is whether we’ll be taking a crypto angle. Our team decides that by looking at how the creator community feels: _What have these creators we know been saying? What do they feel, and do they like it?_

**J**: I’m really curious about the crypto example because it’s something I’ve thought a lot about in my own work. The ideal version of web3 does seem more equitable in giving creators a concrete ownership stake in both the profits and the governance of a business, but what exists today is a long way from that ideal. How do you feel about crypto and the creator economy, and how is Fanhouse approaching it?

**R**: We don’t plan on doing anything with crypto for Fanhouse anytime soon, mainly because I don’t think we need to. We’re able to help creators as a web2 company.

The other reason is that creator sentiment is very negative on crypto. Crypto is not very accessible to the creator community or to people in general. Participating requires a lot of education, barriers, and resources — you have to have money to mint, or you have to have a crypto wallet and things the average person doesn’t have. If we’re trying to get creators paid, dollars are the easiest way to get there.

**J**: When we were talking about creator companies not having watermarks, you suggested that the reason they didn’t was probably because it could be bad for their bottom line. Is there any point at which you think that creators’ needs could come into tension with Fanhouse’s business goals?

One thing I’m thinking about is content moderation — even for really big companies like Facebook, it’s extremely expensive and technically complicated to hire tons of moderators or build automated tools that work. Given that Fanhouse is still a venture-backed startup with the business goals that structure entails, do you worry about it becoming too costly to do the things that you believe are right?

**R**: Of course there’s a balance between what we can do as a business and what creators want. If I had magic, I could wave a finger and put in every single feature people asked for, but some things are not possible for the team size that we have. For example, creators want us to build live streaming and I don’t think that can happen soon.

Instead, we ask: what is something else we could do that will be more beneficial for creators than live streaming? It’s always a tradeoff, but in the long term, when we do things that benefit our creators, it benefits the business. With watermarks, we get some fans complaining, _I’m going to delete my account_. Maybe we lose some short-term profits, but if we’re keeping creators safe, they’ll stay on the platform.

**J**: I’m curious why you think other creator platforms don’t make prioritization decisions in the same way. For instance, I’ve read interviews where you’ve talked about the amount of harassment you receive on Twitch and Twitter. Why don’t these other platforms prioritize anti-harassment? They too depend on people staying on the platform.

**R**: I’ll use League of Legends as an example. League is a video game I play a lot, but League has a horrible problem with toxicity in their community. It’s one of the worst, it makes you feel awful — there are people in-game telling you to kill yourselves and calling you all sorts of slurs. Those people get a slap on the wrist and get right back to playing the game. I’ve talked to people at Riot, and it’s because the people who are angry and toxic are the same people that play a lot and spend a lot of money. So Riot doesn’t benefit from getting rid of these people, and League is addicting enough that people stay on [despite the harassment].

> Twitter benefits from [harassers] being on their platform. They make money from ad revenue, so creators are a side product.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram make money from ads. That’s why mass blocking isn’t a feature that Twitter has. I have to use third-party tools to mass block people harassing me, and even then, they can make new burner accounts and keep doing it. Honestly, I think it’s because Twitter benefits from those people being on their platform. They make money from ad revenue, so creators are a side product. They’re not the people that these platforms cater to.

As a company, we’ve decided that that’s just not ethically right. If we can help someone, we should. That just comes from being on these platforms and seeing how they treat creators.

**J**: It’s interesting how you frame it as partly a choice that companies make about their values, and partly a company’s business model and whether it’s set up to serve advertisers or creators. To get more specific, how do you approach content moderation and anti-harassment at Fanhouse?

**R**: We have a dedicated customer support team. It was one of the first teams we hired. If there’s any reports of harassment, a real person looks at those reports and will pause or deactivate accounts. That’s something I’m frustrated about with Twitter — I might report sexual harassment or an unsolicited dick pic, and a bot instantly responds, _We have found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior._

At Fanhouse, there’s one person dedicated to leaks. She goes through subreddits and Discord channels and sends out DMCAs to take them down. There’s someone dedicated to looking through profiles to make sure that people aren’t violating content guidelines. As we scale, we’re also going to look into third-party tools.

In terms of features, we have things like phone number authentication (you can’t be on Fanhouse without a phone number) and the paywall (you have to put in your credit card just to follow someone). Even these are big deterrents to bad actors. Within the community, creators can set up [their own] moderators who can delete posts, timeout people, or remove people.

We give people these tools, but at the end of the day, the creator gets a lot of power to make their Fanhouse and remove anything that doesn’t make them feel safe.

**J**: There’s been a lot of discourse recently about free speech, social media, and whether it’s fair to have people who can decide what’s acceptable and unacceptable speech. Harassment versus free speech can feel like a fine line, and platforms that take action get accused of bias. How does Fanhouse decide what constitutes harassment?

**R**: Free speech is an interesting argument. The First Amendment originated when we were a colony, and Americans couldn’t talk badly about the British government. It’s important that we have the right to protest and speak up, but I don’t think free speech means that you’re allowed to harm or threaten or harass or stalk people.

The government should step in and do more about online harassment. They’re lagging so far behind on understanding what happens on social media. I’ve received death threats. I get sent photos of my house on Google Maps and people are like, _I’m going to go there and find you and kill you or rape you_. If you report that to the police, they won’t do anything about it because “nothing has happened yet,” so they can’t take action.That’s absurd! By the time something happens, it’s too late. I have friends where people actually flew out to where they lived or tried to meet up with them or follow them — that’s scary, frightening, and very dangerous.

Words are the first part of harm, and we need to stop it before it even gets to actions. If someone is threatening a creator, they need to go. That’s not free speech — that’s a crime. And if the government isn’t going to do something about it, then as a platform and as a founder, we get to decide that it doesn’t have a place on Fanhouse.

**J**: One thing I noticed from following your Twitter is that a lot of issues that you’re passionate about — safety online, economic inequality, women’s rights — are just as much about what happens in the courts — like Epic v. Apple or Roe v. Wade — as they are about decisions an individual company might be able to control. I’m curious about what you see as the role of companies versus politics and law as channels for change.

**R**: Most people try to do what’s right with the tools or resources that they can. As an individual, I have my voice and my Twitter. With Roe v. Wade being overturned, the first thing I did was tweet about how that hurt me or affected people I knew.

As a company, I don’t decide things on my own, but I share within the company — I’ll send a Slack message: _Hey this is how I’m feeling. How is everybody else, and what do we want to do, or what can we do about this?_ Fanhouse sponsored one of our creators’ charity streams and matched all her donations to fund Texas reproductive rights.

It goes back to the first question — because I am who I am, because I am a creator and a woman and someone who cares deeply, I bring that to my work.

**J**: When I was in college, I talked to a lot of classmates who wanted to be founders. When we talked about whether companies should engage in politics or make donations to political causes, something I heard repeatedly was: _If you’re a founder, your only duty is the fiduciary one to maximize profit for your shareholders. If there are issues, like misinformation or harassment, that’s the government’s job to step in – that’s not my job._

**R:** I think that’s the exact kind of belief that led to what happened with Facebook, and they bled out user trust. Facebook had this attitude that _It’s not our duty to fact-check or make sure there’s no misinformation_, and as a result, people were harmed. The Capitol riot is something that shocks me to this day — how is that something we allowed to happen because we did not regulate anything said online?

> By founding a company, I’m able to impact so much more than I can as an individual, so why... would I stop at profits?

At the end of the day, there’s a lot of real people you affect, and the choices that you make are a very powerful thing. By founding a company, I’m able to impact so much more than I can as an individual, so why wouldn’t I try to create more good out of that? Why would I stop at profits?

**J**: What advice would you give to a young aspiring founder?

**R**: You should really build something that you believe in. I hope it doesn’t seem cliche, but I know so many founders — especially in the creator economy space or web3 — where I feel like they’re doing it because it’s a trend. They’re doing it because you can raise money, because VCs are interested, or because it seems sexy and cool. None of these are good reasons to found a company.

Founding a company is one of the hardest jobs in the world. I love it, but I feel like I’m underwater all the time, and the only reason I’m still here is because I love it so much. Take the mindset I was in: if you did this job in the worst case scenario, you’d be making no money for a long time. You’re scrambling to get by, your family needs your support, and you’re unable to give it to them. Would you still want to be doing this? Try to make sure your answer is yes, because if it’s not, you’re gonna find yourself in for a rough one.

If you’re going to found a company, please, please do what you love.


Rosie Nguyen is a cofounder and the chief creator officer of Fanhouse, a Series A startup that helps online creators monetize...

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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._


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Scrolling through my TikTok For You Page, aesthetic slice-of-life vlogs, comedy videos, and occasional discourse on social justice issues are interrupted by ads from mental health apps.

With Done, there is no waitlist and you can get an appointment as soon as next week!!

With @BetterHelp you don’t have to go through it alone.

Get mental health care for depression, anxiety, and ADHD online with @getcerebral.

Cerebral, an online mental health startup specializing in prescribing medications, dominates the space for mental health app advertising by far — and social media advertising in general. According to Pathmatics, a digital marketing and analytics company, from January to May 2022, [Cerebral was TikTok’s third largest advertiser](https://www.pathmatics.com/blog/tiktok-top-advertisers-overview), spending $13.3 million on ads and making 1.3 billion impressions. The company also spent $4.7 million on Instagram, where its ads made 581 million impressions.

Cerebral’s ads make use of digitally native advertising tactics, often employing internet lingo and mimicking popular video styles like captions. They involve everyday people talking about their experiences with the service, but even videos with celebrity endorsements — from people such as Simone Biles, who is Cerebral’s Chief Impact Officer — are shot on phones and lightly edited at most. In a video, a man walks as he asks, “Have you ever had a really busy day but you just couldn’t get started? Like, your mind is racing, but you just can’t get out of bed. And you get more anxious by the second.” In the background, you can hear wind rustle into his microphone. He tells viewers, “Look, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not lazy and you’re not dumb. You just have ADHD paralysis.”

At the time I saw this ad, I often had these symptoms but was certain I didn’t have ADHD. I was working a job I didn’t like, and after leaving the job for something more fulfilling, I stopped feeling unmotivated to do anything. I wasn’t alone. As my friends and I graduated into a pandemic and worked tedious entry-level jobs that felt unimportant or like busywork — if we were lucky enough to find work at all — many of us felt unusually down or anxious. It felt inappropriate to hear a stranger in a TikTok ad diagnose me, an unknown viewer with whom he had no connection, with ADHD paralysis based on a symptom that felt so widespread. In _Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope_, Johann Hari cites “Disconnection from Meaningful Work” as one of the causes of depression and anxiety. He notes that “twice as many people hate their jobs as love their jobs,” citing Gallup studies from 2011 and 2012 that found 63 percent of workers were “not engaged” in their work, and an additional 24 percent were “actively disengaged.” The pandemic has worsened America’s mental health crisis, with 41.5 percent of adults reporting recent symptoms of anxiety or depression, up from [36.4 percent](https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/mental-health-america-crisis), and the proportion of mental-health related emergency room visits for adolescents increasing by[ 66 percent](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a3.htm).

Mental health apps purport to solve these problems, promising to increase accessibility to mental health treatment by lowering wait times and improving affordability and convenience. [A report from Deloitte](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2022/mental-health-app-market.html) suggests that there may have been up to 20,000 mental health apps in 2021. That year, mental health apps raised $5.1 billion in funding, up from $2.7 billion in 2020 and $1 billion in 2019. Startups focusing on mental health nearly doubled the amount they received in 2020 and received $3.3 billion more than other digital health ventures, such as ones focusing on diabetes or primary care, [in 2021](https://rockhealth.com/insights/2021-year-end-digital-health-funding-seismic-shifts-beneath-the-surface/). The outcomes from mental health apps are often reported by the apps themselves to investors, tracking profitability and impact as metrics, which influence how much funding goes into the apps.

The technological approach to mental health, which often relies on “data,” perpetuates an emphasis on quantitative results and streamlined processes. A press release reads:

“Cerebral’s success stems from its hyper-focus on quality and efficiency. Spearheading longitudinal data collection in behavioral health, the platform tracks clinically proven symptom-based ratings on a monthly basis as well as client-reported satisfaction. Its ability to collect and leverage data enables Cerebral to overcome one of the biggest challenges in mental healthcare today: lack of visibility into quality and outcomes.”

This “hyper-focus on quality and efficiency” has been accelerated in healthcare more generally by technology. During the Industrial Revolution, the assembly line sped up manufacturing processes and boosted factory output. Rather than workers being present at each step of creating a product, which often required more expertise, they could now focus on a specific, repetitive task. Within the healthcare field, this phenomenon, called _task-shifting_, has also become more common. Rather than professionals with higher qualifications performing all aspects of medical care, some tasks are shifted to lower-paying roles that require fewer qualifications. The division of medicine has led to tasks being siloed to keep costs down; psychiatrists focus on tasks that require MDs, like prescribing medicine, while social workers and clinical psychologists deliver therapy. Technology can aid task-shifting, standardizing the performance of certain tasks and allowing tasks to be performed by technical assistants. There have even been apps created to work without human intervention, like WoeBot, which lets users perform cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) on themselves.

The [World Medical Association’s resolution](https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-resolution-on-task-shifting-from-the-medical-profession/) on task-shifting notes that while task-shifting can improve medical care in areas with physician shortages, it also has the potential to decrease the quality of care through reduced patient-physician contact and fragmented service. This can lead to increased risks of incorrect diagnosis and treatment and fewer patient follow-ups. The philosophies behind technology, which often focus on scale and consistency, amplify issues seen within task-shifting but are often fundamental to business models and profitability. In fact, since many of these startups exist primarily to make a profit, they cut corners when attempting to scale business models. Within the realm of telehealth therapy, this means less investment in training qualified therapists and patients not receiving the help they need. BetterHelp’s 2018 terms of service note that they are not responsible for verifying the qualifications of any of the app’s counselors; instead, “it is your responsibility to conduct independent verification regarding any Counselor that provides you with Counselor Services.”

For telehealth prescription management, profit models can incentivize clinicians to overprescribe addictive medications — so much so that some major pharmacies [no longer fulfill prescriptions](https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-cvs-pharmacies-have-blocked-or-delayed-telehealth-adderall-prescriptions-11651082131) from specific telehealth startups. “Adderall can be a potentially addictive substance,” said Dr. Sulman Aziz Mirza, a psychiatrist specializing in adult psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and addiction medicine. “You push something out there that you know you're going to get a result from, and they're going to need even more of it and they're going to keep coming back.” The Department of Justice is currently investigating Cerebral for violating the Controlled Substances Act for overprescribing stimulants, and many employees, including a former Cerebral executive, have spoken out [about being pushed to prescribe medicine at the expense of patient safety](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-11/cerebral-app-over-prescribed-adhd-meds-ex-employees-say). This is especially concerning as many mental health apps target adolescents and exploit users’ trust and lack of alternatives, leading to both overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis.

Online discourse on mental health, which tends to flatten complex narratives, has ballooned in a wormhole of pandemic-induced doomscrolling. In the blog _[I learnt I had ADHD from TikTok](https://fashionjournal.com.au/life/adhd-tiktok-trend/)_, Dasha Romanowski writes that before consuming TikTok discourse on ADHD, she felt restlessness from working in an office all day and attributed it to laziness: “I accepted that this must be what adult life is, this constant, inescapable sense of drowning, and that I was just being lazy.” But, through “[consuming] TikToks about ADHD in women,” she learns that ADHD is associated with behaviors like “finishing people’s sentences and having to set at least ten alarms to wake up.” Cerebral’s TikTok advertisements parrot user-generated content with their solutions to these common behaviors: _Look, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not lazy and you’re not dumb. You just have ADHD paralysis_. Like in the TikTok discourse videos, these mental health startups often adopt reductive narratives and treatment models of mental health care that don’t account for the interplay of social circumstances. Instead, patients are often immediately prescribed medicines, making them even more dependent on the services.

> Like in the TikTok discourse videos, these mental health startups often adopt reductive narratives and treatment models of mental health care that don’t account for the interplay of social circumstances.

Since 1997, [drug companies have spent billions of dollars annually on advertisements for individualistic solutions to mental illness](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690298/). These ads tend to elide situational and environmental factors that also contribute to mental illness. For example, discourse on mental health often ignores systemic causes like economic instability or racial violence. Unhoused people are twice as likely to have mental health issues than the general population; 47 percent of homeless women — twice the general population — are likely to have major depressive disorder. [Poverty is highly correlated with mental illness](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/10/30/499777541/can-poverty-lead-to-mental-illness). [Black and minority ethnic](https://raceequalityfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mental-health-report-v5-2.pdf) communities have higher rates of mental health issues.

It’s hard to not be depressed if you’re experiencing something like financial insecurity or systemic racism, or even mundane situations like working a bullshit job. Modern life is riddled with challenges. The Centers for Disease Control estimated in 2011 that almost a quarter of Americans suffer from a mental illness, and that half of all U.S. adults will have a mental illness in their lifetime. The “chemical imbalance” theory of mental health, which hypothesizes that depression is caused by having too few or too many neurotransmitters, focuses on individuals and has long been debunked as the only cause of mental illness. This isn’t to say antidepressants and other medications don’t work. But if we want to accomplish anything beyond alleviating mental illness in individual people, we must tackle it on a larger scale. Today, [most psychiatrists follow a bio-psycho-social model of mental illness](https://mentalhellth.xyz/p/even-psychiatrists-hate-the-chemical), which attributes mental illness to a mix of biology and social and psychological factors. However, due to financial incentives, few psychiatrists offer therapy or forms of treatment other than prescription medicines.

Medicalization has become a trend across the United States, despite most people preferring alternatives. This is often because alternatives are costly and inaccessible and people tend to receive mental health treatment — usually in the form of prescription medicine — through community and primary care doctors. Demand for therapy has outpaced supply. Nearly one in three clinicians said that it could take at least three months to get an appointment or that they didn’t have room for new patients. In rural areas, access is even more difficult — [80 percent of rural counties in the US do not have a single psychiatrist](https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/press-release/new-study-shows-60-percent-of-u-s-counties-without-a-single-psychiatrist/).

The toll of mental health apps existing within a system where they need to prove their profitability to survive makes mental health treatment worse for everyone. It means therapists are juggling many patients at once and working within a model of gig labor, sometimes getting paid based on words sent and read via text messages, [as BetterHelp does](https://www.mytherapist.com/advice/general/how-much-does-betterhelp-pay-counselors/). It means advertising that often preys on adolescents, like [Cerebral suggesting unhealthy eating is a symptom of ADHD](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/instagram-tiktok-cerebral-startup-ads-pulled-rcna13476). It means violating user trust, such as [Crisis Text Line selling data to their for-profit spinoff to train AI customer service software](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-silicon-valley-privacy-debates-00002617) without their users knowing. This problem isn’t unique to technology, though the tech industry exacerbates it through scale and emphasizes an individualistic perspective of treatment. Solutions that follow the bio-psycho-social model of mental illness require more thoughtfulness, and won’t generate profit as efficiently as quick fixes involving technology, like medicalization.

> But rather than relying on tech companies to save us individually, we need to fix the systems that lead to these problems in the first place.

These apps have no doubt helped some patients. One comment on a BetterHelp ad reads, “The only reason I use it is because I don’t have any other way to get therapy.” But rather than relying on tech companies to save us individually, we need to fix the systems that lead to these problems in the first place. Healthcare solutions should not aim to profit from broken systems at the expense of adolescents who may stumble upon sinister ads. We need to think about the alternatives that exist beyond flashy new apps, efficiency, and profit models. We need to look for alternatives that don’t just mitigate, but actually get to the root of our problems and challenge the oppressive systems of power that make us all more miserable.

_Lily Lou (she/hers) is a front end developer for Rest of World based in Brooklyn, New York. She enjoys joining book clubs and sometimes writes._

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Enrique Rodríguez is a frequent customer of Western Union and MoneyGram, both of which he uses to send cash remittances. At least twice per month, the 69-year-old Guatemalan, now living in New Jersey, transfers money to his wife, children, and grandchildren back in his native country.

“It’s a very reliable process,” he said. “With remittances, you never lose money; my wife receives the money within an hour or two at maximum.”

Rodríguez immigrated to the United States 11 years ago after he realized that the circumstances in Guatemala didn’t allow him to support his family the way he desired.

“I started sending remittances six years ago, and since, I’ve been very proud to be able to help my family from abroad,” he shared. “My wife was even able to buy a car with the amounts I’ve sent her.”

Due to the socioeconomic situation in Guatemala, many adults migrate to the United States out of a desire to open new doors for themselves. Even though Rodríguez was a professional electrician in his country, he was forced to learn other skills to find a job, which is why he now works as a handyman and in construction sites.

Every time he sends out remittances, Rodríguez gets charged a fee of between $4 and $15, depending on the company he uses and the total amount of the transaction. However, he’s not bothered by the fee because the process is efficient.

“I’m extremely grateful for it because I’ve never had any problems with scams or anything.”

---

People from all over the world have been sending remittances in the format Rodríguez has been using for decades. Notably, in Central America, they’ve become an essential source of income for beneficiaries in these countries, and their use has grown exponentially since the 1970s. Now, regional experts suggest that Bitcoin and blockchain technology can potentially replace remittances.

In Guatemala, where I was born and raised, over 80 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty. The average Guatemalan earns less than $3,000 per year and about 21 percent of citizens are illiterate. I thought it made no sense to hear that some suggest that cryptocurrency could succeed cash remittances, which are used mostly by people who come from vulnerable backgrounds and don’t have access to education. So, I set out to learn more about who is promoting the use of blockchain technology for this purpose and how it is being received by users of remittances.

The immigrants who send remittances to Central America have a lot in common — generally, they earn below the median annual household income in the United States, many are undocumented, and their educational level is quite low, most only completing primary school. Despite this, they still send an average of $3,000 annually to their relatives in Central America.

An estimated quarter of the Central American population in the United States is undocumented. A study by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, a think tank focused on Latin America based at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy, revealed that people with undocumented status send more money than those with a legal residency of some kind. Immigrants who send money home tend to only send what they can afford to spare.

A continued exponential increase in immigration from Central to North America and the persistence of family commitments will increase remittances, data recollected by the Inter-American Development Bank suggests. Analyses suggest that family commitments in the country of origin increase the migrant’s likelihood to send money.

---

The pandemic triggered a historic increase in remittances sent to Latin America. Despite the crisis, remittances increased to unprecedented levels, reaching approximately $128 billion in 2021, its highest level in almost 20 years, and nearly four times higher than expected. Nearly 97 percent of remittances received in Central America are concentrated in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and are essential to the countries’ GDP. According to a study by the Inter-American Development Bank, beneficiaries from Central America who have received remittances between late 2020 and 2022 showed more significant financial improvement than those households that have not received these flows.

In parallel, Bitcoin has recently been a topic of significant attention and analysis in Central America. El Salvador, for example, made headlines for becoming the first nation to adopt it as a legal tender alongside the US dollar in the fall of 2021. Since then, Guatemala and Honduras have also made efforts towards adoption.

> As Central American countries adopt the use of cryptocurrencies, can it truly be an innovative alternative to remittances? Melder, Mayen, and cryptocurrency optimists suggest it can allow users to avoid paying transaction fees and that it offers a more efficient service that reaches beneficiaries more easily. But is it really a viable option or just a hypothetical idea?

Two people who are influential in leading the Bitcoin movement in Central America at the moment are Patrick Melder and Juan Mayen, who work in Guatemala and Honduras, respectively.

In Guatemala, Melder, an entrepreneur from Houston, Texas, introduced the Bitcoin Lake Project to create a circular economy in a rural community by encouraging locals to “spend and cash out Bitcoin,” he said. Melder’s relationship with Guatemala started in 2012, when he and his family started visiting a local school called “Centro Educativo Josué School” in the country for community service purposes. Since then, he has been teaching all kinds of educational courses to children attending this school. This year, Melder began promoting Bitcoin’s implementation across Panajachel, Guatemala.

“Many of the people and businesses I talk with have families in the United States that send money back,” he said in an interview with me. “[By] using the Bitcoin lightning network, they could receive money from their family members instantly, at any time, with essentially no fees. The fees that Western Union and MoneyGram charge just siphon economic lifeblood from the local economy.”

In Honduras, Mayen, a native of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, pioneered “La Bitconeira,” an initiative to install Bitcoin ATMs across the country.

“The vast majority of Hondurans deal with cash on a daily basis,” he told me. “The idea behind this is that the man who sells food across the street and who has a smartphone, can also have a Bitcoin wallet and withdraw cash that his relatives abroad sent him.”

As Central American countries adopt the use of cryptocurrencies, can it truly be an innovative alternative to remittances? Melder, Mayen, and cryptocurrency optimists suggest it can allow users to avoid paying transaction fees and that it offers a more efficient service that reaches beneficiaries more easily. But is it really a viable option or just a hypothetical idea?

I was determined to find a person who has used Bitcoin instead of remittances, and I must admit that it was extremely difficult to find — very few people are actually using this cryptocurrency in my country. I searched through Facebook groups, Twitter, and contacted the few people I know who use Bitcoin in Guatemala, but I struggled to find someone who used the cryptocurrency to send remittances. After a few weeks, it occurred to me to ask Melder, who suggested I speak to Andrés Guzmán, a businessman with a college degree from Guatemala City who became familiar with cryptocurrency remittances when its implementation began in the country.

"I’m very interested in technology,” Guzmán said, “and I thought, ‘Well, let's give this new thing a chance. What could happen to us if it’s cheaper to send and receive it this way?’”

Considering the costs of sending a transaction another way, he decided to take this alternative.

"I started by sending them a little, because if we lost it, it was not much, but we tried it, and we loved the ease of the Bitcoin network," he said.

Since then, Guzmán said his family has felt more comfortable receiving monetary transactions in this fashion.

“I do see Bitcoin as a feasible option that replaces remittances in Guatemala,” he said. “It’s worth betting on technology.”

On the other hand, María Pérez, a housemaid who was born in a poor community in the outskirts of Guatemala City, has been receiving remittances from her brother, who lives in the United States, for 18 years. She’s satisfied with this procedure because it’s reliable, and she can deposit it directly into her bank account.

“I’m not sure I would switch to the Bitcoin system because it’s something I don’t trust, and the money I receive has been achieved through the efforts of my migrant brother,” she said, reluctant to take the risk of losing the money that her relative abroad has worked hard for.

Pérez isn’t the only one who mistrusts the idea. Manuel Torres, a manager of a restaurant in El Salvador, told me that he noticed locals don’t use Bitcoin because they think it is complicated. Similarly, his compatriot, Elvis Polanco, who owns a store in El Salvador, shared with me that she has noticed that on many occasions, people opt out of using cryptocurrencies for remittances — “not because they don't want to have it, but because they don't know how to use it, and that’s why they’re wary of obtaining Bitcoin.”

> “I’m not sure I would switch to the Bitcoin system because it’s something I don’t trust, and the money I receive has been achieved through the efforts of my migrant brother,” she said, reluctant to take the risk of losing the money that her relative abroad has worked hard for.

Kym Brown, a senior lecturer in the Department of Banking and Finance at Monash University in Australia, said that for the average person from Central America who lives on the poverty line, the main problem with replacing remittances with Bitcoin is that they don’t understand the risks.

“The number one danger of Bitcoin is its high volatility,” she said. “If you have a person earning around $3,000 a year and they have some revenues from someone who sent them Bitcoin, if it drops in value, [the loss can be significant]. These people need to eat. I recommend not to use it.”

Similarly, Jeff Frankel, a professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, suggests that cryptocurrencies aren’t well designed to fulfill any of the classic functions of money because they are extraordinarily volatile in price.

“This volatility is not surprising, in that they are backed neither by reserves nor by the reputation of a well-established institution, such as a government or even a private bank or other trusted corporation,” he said.

---

For those who don’t have a bank account or have limited banking services, sending and receiving money doesn’t have to happen via cryptocurrency; a mobile money service like Africa’s M-Pesa can be safe and affordable. Established in 2007, the company allows users to withdraw or deposit in a local currency. By texting the amount they need and afterward meeting with an agent, who acts as a human ATM and works for a bank or a company, people living in several countries across Africa are able to successfully transfer money. Additionally, it doesn’t require the client to own a smartphone, which is expensive — just a regular cell phone that can receive and send text messages.

Andrei Kwok, a senior lecturer in the Department of Management at Monash University in Malaysia, suggested that another alternative is the introduction of digital and financial literacy programs for locals of these developing countries. When understood correctly, using cryptocurrencies might diversify alternative services and improve accessibility for the underbanked.

For example, Melder in Guatemala has already started teaching locals about the subject. His goal is to educate young people on the monetary and technological aspects of Bitcoin at the Centro Educativo Josué School. “I knew that starting with children was the key to teaching the community about new technology,” he said. “That’s why I chose to immediately work with the school and develop a Bitcoin Curriculum that I teach every week.”

His coursework teaches them how to set up a full Bitcoin node and its importance. “And how by doing this, they are part of the largest decentralized, most secure computer network in the world,” he added.

                                                                                   ***

After studying the subject for several months, interviewing experts from different parts of the world, and speaking with Central American residents, I don’t believe that the region is ready to scrap traditional remittances, mainly because they’re a significant part of the economies of these countries. For cryptocurrencies to replace the use of remittances in Central America, it would take many years, and require a lot of enthusiasm from people who want to learn about the subject for this to happen — enthusiasm that isn’t necessarily there.

However, cryptocurrency has ballooned in popularity internationally. It’s not a bad idea to gradually introduce the topic, or to promote educational initiatives. But these courses should be accountable, and rather than solely pushing for adoption, they should be clear about the disadvantages and limitations of cryptocurrency — especially for a vulnerable population for whom volatility and unpredictability mean much more than just a “bear market.”

_Isabella Rolz is a bilingual journalist that covers the Central American region, poverty, and social issues. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Univision, Clarín and other media outlets._


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Aja watched the island float for just a single heartbeat, and then it sank. Like the others before it, reeds and grasses swallowed in greed, by the waters of the bog. Beside her Diana heaved a sigh of frustration.

“We’ll try again,” Aja said, but Diana was already shaking her head.

“If it hasn’t worked yet, it won’t work at all.”

“That’s not helpful!” Aja resisted the urge to kick the planks they had stacked by the wayside. They would need them to build another island. Diana bared her teeth.

“Well, what else do you want to do? Wasn’t there someone who once said doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is madness?”

“But we’ve been trying new things! We’ve been…” Exhaustion crashed over her mid-sentence, and Aja trailed off, shoulders slumping. It was noon; they had gotten up so early to set up the last bits and pieces before getting the floating garden in the water. This was their fifty-ninth attempt, or maybe the sixtieth. In her tired mind the numbers blurred together, the times she’d ended up in the mucky waters bleeding into each other. These days she was always damp, always accompanied by the smell of the bog, no matter how much she washed it off.

“We’ve been trying,” she repeated, voice faint.

Diana’s jaw was clenched, but she, too, was swallowing back her anger. “I know. But we have to start considering other options. I heard Norway is building actual ships that…”

“Won’t work,” Aja interrupted her, uncaring of how rude it was. Diana should know better; this had been her idea, after all. “The bogs don’t have the same depth necessary for a ship or boat big enough for both people to walk around and gardens big enough to be useful. The boats would be too big, and we can’t move them enough.” It would be easier if the ground was stable, if landmasses hadn’t fallen into the ocean. A hungry mouth, Diana had called it, when the southern shore of Greenland had been eaten up, all in one go. The ocean was hungry, and she was swallowing the lands incessantly, could not get her fill. She was tired, Aja thought, tired of being filled with trash and tears and oxygen-crushed corpses of whales down on the bottom.

“We have two weeks until the deadline,” Diana said. “Do you really think we’re going to come up with something in that time? They’re going to take our funding. They’re going to decry the whole project, say floating gardens would have never worked anyway. We should have focused on new landmasses, on draining the water or making artificial soil or _anything_. But floating gardens? Might as well be flying gardens, for all the good it’s going to do. No one will ever pick it up again, no one will ever listen to us…”

“Quiet!” Aja hissed, and that was it, Diana was turning around and storming away, each of them reaching their breaking point. Once, such arguments had been rare between them, but stress and isolation had picked at their brains until all that was left was raw exposed nerves. The heat didn’t help, making them sluggish and slow. The sun left a red tinge on the dark skin of Diana's left shoulder, a red deepening with the afternoon. In their hurry, they had forgotten to be careful. They had stopped caring about it, out here all alone.

It was illegal to work during the noon-hours now; everyone was required to stay inside with their shutters closed. Aja remembered laughing the first time a friend had told her that UV-rays traveled through the thick panes of her window, that sitting there in the sun, directly or not, would harm her. That was when she had been young, when the ocean had seemed inevitable but somehow not quite as threatening, when the sun had still been a friend. And she remembered the first time she’d broken curfew to set up tomatoes on their second attempt at the island, and she had stayed out long enough that the skin beneath her work coverall and sleeveless tank had gone red, too.

“I’ve tanned through my clothes,” she’d told Diana, and Di had laughed and then grown quiet when she had seen the light brown just on the edge of still being red. It had hurt, the skin peeling off like those summers when she was a child and had been out just ten minutes longer than the sunblock would work for. Her mother had scolded her back then, voice harsh, speaking of cancer and cells breaking down. When it happened out in the bog, years later, Diana did not scold her. They both knew they would break curfew again to make this work, no matter how much it burned.

In the privacy of her mind, Aja tried to blame the bog. The sun reflected off the water, no matter how murky, and intensified it. This damned bog that they had made their home now, supposedly teeming with life it could hold onto like no other waters. While the ocean swallowed everything, the bog seemed quiet, content instead. Diana had put her faith in its stillness and Aja had put her faith in her wife.

The floating gardens had been Diana’s idea, presented to her the first time they met in a café in Copenhagen. She sketched out crude designs on a napkin, talking a mile a minute, and Aja had not felt the need to interrupt though she knew she should be perturbed at not getting a word in edgewise. _I know about this stuff too_, she could have said, but Diana’s enthusiasm was infectious, her need to speak coming from a teacher’s, not a braggart’s, heart. She left the napkin behind on the table when she realized she’d been late for her train, and Aja almost threw it out. She spilled the last bit of her coffee on the table and reached for the napkin to clean the mess. And then she saw the number scrawled there, alongside a name and a promise.

Their calls had been few, their texts short, but two years later they met again at a conference in Madurai, and Aja had it ready, the plans sketched out properly with an architect’s eye to aid the ecologist. When she presented them she had thought for a moment that Diana would kiss her, right then and there, in front of everyone else at the conference, but she kept it in and waited until after the panels, after the halls had emptied, after their dinner date was over. Aja remembered, even now, how she thought of sunshine when Diana kissed her. Back then, sunshine had still been a good thing to her. Back then, this project seemed achievable.

“The old Aztecs did it,” Diana used to say, almost like a holy mantra. “And others, too. So why can’t we make it work?”

She hadn’t said that in over a month, Aja realized, as she stood there staring at the now still waters of the bog. The soil would dissolve into it, the weeds used as props for proper vegetables collected once they floated to the surface. If it had worked, the island-garden would have been a slim but long thing, with modular sections for added portability. It could be transported through any relatively calm waters and arrive at the farmers now needing to move and relocate every five years or so, as the earth beneath them changed or disappeared at a rapid pace. Similar systems had been set up in Venice already, designed for their once-canals, now-rivers. But Diana’s designs, Diana’s idea, were different. It depended on the bog’s ability to be a natural freezer and preserver, and on the bog’s own need for decayed plant material. It would be a give-and-take if this worked: the bog would feed the gardens and the gardens would feed the bog. Move them, install new ones, plant what you wished. Use what little land was left to keep the greediest parts of the sea away — dirt was no longer needed to grow crops. They had the bog. Diana claimed that with the proper tools, they could grow anything on these gardens, though Aja thought the islands would need to be larger to accommodate proper trees or even very big pumpkins.

But a floating garden was one thing; making it harmonious with the natural environment of the bog was another — not to mention getting it to move without destroying its tiny ecosystem or, quite plainly, having the whole thing break apart. People had been skeptical from the beginning and getting funding had taken years. When Aja and Diana finally had it, it was only the two of them in a bog for two years and Tala, an intern who came in every Wednesday and Friday. Tala had been a blessing at least; she often stayed the weekend over, leaving early Sunday morning and breaking curfew alongside them during Saturday noon-hours to work outside, building and measuring, planting and testing. At some point, Aja stopped being able to follow the scientific jargon, and she let Tala and Diana lead the way, helping where she could, following directions where she couldn’t. She gained more muscle than she knew she could, hauling planks and reeds, digging and pushing, planting and carving. She could pick Diana up by the waist and swing her around now, whooping in joy while Di protested and blushed, and held tight to her shoulders, held tight around her neck.

It had been two years of hard work, and now it would be taken from them. It wouldn’t be wasted, Aja refused to believe that; if nothing else, Diana had discovered better ways of transplanting roots through minimal space, of making beets and zucchini grow where it shouldn’t have room to at all. She published a short piece about it last year, one that had received a lot of attention, but Aja knew it mattered little to Diana. Not in the face of her bigger failure. _Their_ bigger failure.

The one thing she couldn’t understand was why it wouldn’t float when they moved the pieces apart. The problems with the first islands had been a lack of growth, a tendency to crumble when detached from each other, and the bog making the plants wilt just before harvest. It was almost as if the bog was cruelly mocking them, giving them just enough hope before taking it away again. That had not deterred them for long; they found the problems and fixed them. But this time, Aja couldn’t figure out what was wrong. The last few models, though heavier, should not be sinking as rapidly as they did.They should not be sinking at all.

That thought kept turning over and over in her head as she laid in their bed that night. Diana was already asleep when Aja made it back to their small house, hidden away in the middle of nowhere. It was nearly 2 a.m. at that point, but that wasn’t unusual. Losing the midday hours meant working into the night, and often in the early mornings too. They used to spend their lunch time napping, but now that too was devoted to working. If the sun beat down on them too heavily (as it often did), they sat on the wooden floors inside, poring over schematics and graphs, trying to calculate where they went wrong. They had yet to find a precise answer.

They didn’t talk before going to bed that day, didn’t settle their argument, didn’t apologize. Once, they had made a virtue of never going to bed angry, but as so many other things, that rule had fallen to the wayside in face of their small, private disaster. Listening to her wife’s quiet breaths now, Aja couldn’t find even a remnant of the anger she had felt earlier. She wanted this to work, not only for the betterment of humankind, but for Diana as well. She needed it to work.

Aja slipped out of bed as quietly as she had gotten into it. She put on her coveralls and took her heavy rainboots in hand, walking barefoot outside. The bog had crept closer to the entrance of their house, and her heels and toes sank into the soft not-quite-mud as she walked forward. It was a quiet night, the heat almost bearable. She could hear crickets, and to her relief, mosquitoes as well — incessant pests that wouldn’t stop annoying her, but she knew they were integral to everything they were trying to do here. More and more mosquitoes had appeared since they first settled in this place. Aja liked to imagine that they were their small cheer squad, here to support them as they worked for a new future.

Aside from the bugs, it was quiet. She put aside her boots, realizing almost too late that she would not need them, and she shucked off her coveralls soon after, standing only in a top and underwear. The ground sucked at her feet as she walked, and as she got in deeper, the water rushed around her ankles, knees, her waist. Perhaps, she thought, the heat had gotten to her, nestled in her brain and made her think that this was a good idea when it so obviously wasn’t. It was her last thought before she dove into the waters of the bog.

It was cold. That was the most shocking part of it. Aja could not remember feeling cold in the last six months, if not more — the sun always beating down, the remnants of its rays warming the air even at night. But this bog was cold, and it was deep, deeper than Aja thought it should have been. Or perhaps it was just the night, the fact that she could see nothing down here, that made it seem so vast. She walked out, water lapping at her knees, at her thighs. She took a deep breath before diving in and starting to swim.

Decay was ridiculously slow in a bog. Aja knew that already, but she did not realize it fully until she saw the human skull; it took her a shocking beat to realize it was a dead yellowleg instead, the tiny creature almost fully preserved. Tala once told her of how they had pulled up the Tollund man and the Lindow man from bogs, how many more had been killed and sacrificed or simply fallen in and drowned. They had taken a break from their work for a moment to sit and watch the stars, glittering in the sky, as far away from the bog and their work as anything could be.

“I am named after a goddess of the morning and the evening stars,” Tala said, weaving stories with her words and with her hands. Diana had come to join them later, sitting still and quiet like a child hearing their favorite bed-time story. “I am both the sun and the moon,” said Tala, and Aja could see it now, in this moment, the moon reflecting at the bottom of the bog, startling the dead and the even deader, and the rest of the corpses who lived down there.

The faint moonlight was just enough for her to see the remnants of their island, sunk only a few hours past. There were, she knew, the remains of many other gardens just like it, lying in the soil below, but it was too late to save them. Aja reached down, fingers grasping at the light reeds they had used for this one. She pulled.

It came free of the soil almost too easily, and then she was pulling it upwards, over her head, and she watched through the black-as-night waters as it floated upwards, breaking the surface. She was still submerged, but the garden was free, their work restored to the world above. It had not been for nothing after all. She had always known that some things required a little extra; she had learned the lesson over and over since that day in the café. Some things were worth diving down into murky waters for, pulling until your body ached to heave it to the surface.

Aja closed her eyes, her arms feeling like lead. Already she knew she did not have enough air to swim to the surface._That,_ she thought, delirious on too-little oxygen and too-much heat, _that was okay, it would be alright_. The island floated above her, and it would grow cherries and blueberries and whatever they needed, and there were plenty of bones at the bottom for her to join. She would be in good company.

The breaking of the surface was a faraway sound, and her brain did not register it before strong arms circled her waist, and then the world was going too fast, and it was upwards, and Aja knew she had already breathed deep, black, peat-filled water into her lungs, knew that it was nestling there and making a home, but her back was on the ground now, the only somewhat denser-ground, and her lungs were being _pushed_, her ribs were cracking, and a wheezing cough turned into water-vomit as she rolled over and spat onto the ground. Aja imagined bones and peat and viviparous lizards spilling from her mouth onto the ground, but the air had come from Diana herself, and Aja could breathe again.

“You idiot!” She was shouting above her, as Aja still stared into the soil and wondered where the lizards had run off to. “What were you thinking? You nearly died!”

“The island is floating,” she said. “I pulled it up, and it…”

Diana pulled her close, her embrace nearly crushing, but Aja was not complaining. She was too busy contemplating the fact that she was alive, and that her skin still felt cold from the bog, and how nice that was. From the embrace, she could see the island, dripping water, the weeds on it ruined. They would have to pull it back in and replant it, but from here, with the moon shining down, Aja could see the exact engineering error, the place where the mold between parts broke off and made it take in water and sink. Yes, she thought, with Diana’s comforting arms circled around her; she would be able to fix this. It wouldn’t sink again.

_Nikoline Kaiser (she/they) writes short stories and poems focusing on feminism, family and queer themes. They live in Denmark and have a Master's degree in Comparative Literature. When not writing, they work on a project communicating information about women authors._


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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._


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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 was saying no to the picture I had of crypto: a wasteland of financial speculation, criminal activity, and squandered energy. He tried to soothe my concerns: “Don’t worry about the scammy stuff. Porn drove the rise of the Internet, and speculators will do the same for crypto.” This wasn’t very convincing, but I was still curious to see what the hype was about. The programmer in me wanted to understand the technical underpinnings of crypto, and the political enthusiast wanted to understand why the Securities and Exchange Commision and the Chinese Communist Party were both going after what I considered a fringe libertarian project.

To my surprise, everything I touched in Dark Forest was exciting. My uncle and I started a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of players and conducted some novel coordination experiments. Our most famous [project](https://web.archive.org/web/20230614211301/https://astralcolossus.xyz/) was a smart contract that allowed individual players to combine their points and receive a proportional amount of the prize trophy. Our code used the transparency of a blockchain to let players from all over the world verify that their contributions would be counted. On one memorable day, players from China, Spain, Australia, and Serbia flooded into our Discord server to contribute to our new collective. To me, this was proof that blockchains could be useful for organizing and coordinating across borders, not just for speculating on coins.

But speculation was still a driving force behind the popularity of the game. Venture capitalists started sending us DMs on Twitter. I was even invited to move to Hong Kong, where a “crypto whale” wanted to work with us on an East Asian version of the game. However, in May 2022, the tables turned with the infamous Terra/Luna [crash](https://archive.is/MKsDI), which wiped out the life savings of many and caused the value of other cryptocurrencies to nosedive. The fallout from Terra drove major crypto firms to bankruptcy and exposed Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) fraudulent bookkeeping. Law enforcement stepped up as well, recovering stolen Bitcoin and placing sanctions on services that anonymize cryptocurrencies. Our game wasn’t immune to the crash either; disheartened players stopped responding in Discord and community donations dried up.

> To me, this was proof that blockchains could be useful for organizing and coordinating across borders, not just for speculating on coins.

Amid the chaos, I have witnessed two extreme reactions to these events. There are the skeptics, who say this year shows why crypto is nothing but trouble; and there are the maximalists, who continue to insist that any regulation is authoritarian overreach. My past two years in crypto have shown me that both of these positions are wrong. To the skeptics, I say that crypto is innovative and necessary, and to the maximalists, I say that there are legitimately harmful uses of the technology that need to be curtailed. To understand my position, we must start from the basic principles underlying the technology.

## _Why crypto(graphy) matters_

Before _crypto_ came to mean _cryptocurrency_, it referred to the mathematical field of cryptography. Cryptography has a long lineage, from schemes for scrambling Julius Caesar’s secret messages to the German Enigma machine in World War II, but we’ll pick up the story with the invention of asymmetric encryption in the 1970s. In asymmetric cryptography, two different “keys” are generated: a public key and a private key. The public key is made widely available to others, while the private key is kept secret and known only to the owner. The keys are mathematically related in such a way that data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted with the corresponding key from the pair. Furthermore, it is computationally infeasible to derive the private key from a public key. A typical private key is 256 bits, which means an adversary would have to roll the dice 2256 times to be sure of finding the key. To put this number in perspective, a computer that could do one billion dice rolls per second would still require more time than the current age of the universe to check every key.

> In a world where governments have orders of magnitude more resources than ordinary citizens, asymmetric cryptography stands out as a tool that treats all people equally.

In many systems, both physical and digital, an attacker has an easier job than a defender, because a defender must defend against every possible attack at all times. We remember the Trojan Horse, not the ten previous years the Greeks spent trying to break into Troy. Asymmetric cryptography, in contrast, is one of the few systems where the defenders have a massive advantage. If I encrypt a message with my friend’s public key, I know with near certainty that only my friend will be able to decrypt its contents, using her private key. Anyone wanting to access that message, including the government or military, would have to steal my friend’s private key from her computer or compel her to share it with them. This is quite possible, of course, but it requires more effort than simply scanning the messages of millions of people [à la NSA](https://web.archive.org/web/20130731050902/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data). In a world where governments have orders of magnitude more resources than ordinary citizens, asymmetric cryptography stands out as a tool that treats all people equally.

![Comics from XKCD on security and privacy with two men talking. The first is a crypto nerd';s imagination and the second is what would actually happen.](3/article-images/thank-you-sbf/1.png)

Bitcoin’s primary innovation was to make possible a database of information with the same fundamental property as asymmetric cryptography: It is significantly easier to maintain and defend than it is to attack or corrupt. This property is achieved by offering economic incentives for honest participants, and building in extreme redundancy by having every computer in the network maintain its own copy of the database. This database looks like a chain of transactions — a blockchain — where each new transaction contains a reference to the ones that came before it.[^1]

Blockchains created the ability to have _digital scarcity,_ to ensure that a certain piece of data is unique. Although file sharing is at the heart of the Internet, there are objects which cannot be copied without limit. Social Security numbers, votes, and money are some examples where scarcity is necessary. This is different from _artificial scarcity_, often seen in luxury goods like Birkin bags, whose supply is intentionally constrained to increase demand. Bitcoin, the blockchain, enforces digital scarcity for bitcoins, the cryptocurrency. There is a clear protocol for when new bitcoins are minted and they cannot be duplicated. Over time, bitcoins grew in value as people realized that they could trust Bitcoin to accurately track the ownership and supply of bitcoins.

A few years later, Ethereum was born out of a realization: instead of just storing a ledger for bitcoins on a blockchain, you could also store and interact with computer programs. A transaction previously consisted of sending money from person A to person B, but now person A could interact with program C. These programs are called smart contracts, because they are agreements (contracts) that can enforce themselves (smart). A popular analogy for a smart contract is a vending machine: _If you give me one dollar and press A2, I will give you Swedish Fish_. Once the dollar is received, the machine gives out the candy on its own. Smart contract agreements extend far beyond purchases, such as _If you are a member of this club, you can vote_ and _If you contribute points to the team, you will be rewarded_. Anyone who is skeptical of the proposed agreement can examine the code and verify the logic for themselves, although this does require some technical knowledge.

These new cryptographic tools provide a crucial check on the increasing concentration of power in our institutions, lower the barrier for people around the world to work together, and are sometimes just a more efficient way of doing things. With cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, people can directly exchange or store value and enforce agreements with a similar degree of protection as sending encrypted messages. We can now send money to anyone in the world without central bank approval and create binding, trans-national agreements without a legal system. When Paypal, under pressure from the U.S. government, cut off payments to the watchdog organization WikiLeaks, donors could instead use Bitcoin to send their support. In 2019, when Argentina prevented its citizens from buying more than $200 U.S. dollars per month, people purchased stablecoins (a cryptocurrency designed to avoid volatile price swings) rather than keep their earnings in devalued pesos. The uses of smart contracts include the ability to take out a loan without a traditional credit score and transparent governance systems for voting and budget approval.

To fully realize the benefits of smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, we must also be prepared to deal with the antisocial uses of these tools as well. There is a strong political tradition in crypto that opposes regulation of any kind, stemming in part from the anti-state position of Bitcoin’s early adopters. My view, on the other hand, is that because crypto has been and will continue to be abused by bad actors, we need a viable regulatory framework.

## _Why regulation matters_

There is a fundamental tension between the autonomy of an individual and the health of a collective, especially when the individual’s actions affect people other than themselves. For example, there can be the right to bear arms, but mass shootings cause intense pain and suffering to entire communities. The primary double-edged sword with cryptocurrencies and blockchains concerns financial privacy.

Basic financial privacy is a good thing, but complete financial privacy enables a host of antisocial behavior from money laundering to tax evasion. Our laws address this tension by mandating privacy in personal banking, but still allowing the IRS to access records during audits. We are still figuring out the legal framework for privacy on blockchains, but important steps forward were taken this year.

It is actually difficult to hide financial records on blockchains. The history of every transaction is public, so if a wallet receives stolen funds, law enforcement knows that wallet is associated with criminal activity. Centralized exchanges for swapping fiat and crypto routinely bar wallets suspected of criminal activity from transacting. In a famous [case](https://web.archive.org/web/20220214110449/https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-a-young-couple-failed-to-launder-billions-of-dollars-in-stolen-bitcoin), a couple that stole over five billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin were caught six years later; they never managed to launder their money through an exchange. Their wallets were so tainted that they resorted to buying Walmart gift cards and gold, a tactic that resulted in their capture.

On Ethereum, it’s possible to implement a service called a “mixer.” These are smart contracts that enable users to deposit funds from one wallet into a common pool, and then withdraw the same amount from the pool into another wallet — with no direct link between the two. This provides financial privacy for users who don’t want their complete financial history visible to everyone, but also enables money laundering. The most popular mixer is called Tornado Cash (TC), and it was used by a North Korean hacker group to anonymize over $400 million in stolen funds. In August of 2022, the US Office of Foreign Asset Control announced that US residents could no longer use the service, and that any wallet that interacted with TC moving forward would be flagged as suspicious.

The Tornado Cash sanctions demonstrate the ability to mitigate antisocial behavior while still maintaining the strong guarantees that crypto provides for individual rights. Although the TC smart contract cannot be taken down directly,[^2] ordinary users stopped using the service because, for most of them, there was a direct link between their bank account and their crypto wallets.[^3] This made the mixer less effective, because privacy depends on a large pool of potential withdrawers. For users still seeking privacy, developers proposed modifications to TC — such as Know Your Customer requirements and deposit limits — that resemble safeguards in the traditional banking system. The key difference, however, is that users prove they are _not_ on a list of flagged wallets in order to deposit. This proof keeps the user’s identity private, while verifying that their activity is licit. Individuals still have financial privacy tools at their disposal that the government cannot take away, but criminals laundering large sums of money can no longer hide behind law-abiding users.

## _Looking forward_

Speculators, cover your ears: the market crash and sanctions of the past year have been good for crypto. VCs are [leaving](https://web.archive.org/web/20230728005335/https://www.ft.com/content/4cfd2711-315e-40bd-8ea6-1b818f65e5d8), frauds like SBF have been exposed, and regulation is starting to reign in antisocial behavior. The honeymoon phase of “crypto will make everyone rich and remove the need for governments” is over. Instead, we are figuring out where crypto can enhance existing functions in society (voting), provide viable alternatives (stablecoins in the face of devaluation), and create new mediums for Internet-scale coordination (Dark Forest).

Beyond the technology’s specific use cases, crypto has a set of values — equality, transparency, access, and privacy — that set higher standards for our politics and institutions. Many human organizations in the crypto space are starting to reflect the qualities of the technology they are building on: All of the Ethereum code is open-source, meetings discussing network upgrades are public, and privacy is respected by allowing people to apply for jobs under their online handles.

> Crypto has a set of values — equality, transparency, access, and privacy — that set higher standards for our politics and institutions.

I see a potential future where we demand similar practices from institutions outside of the crypto world. In turn, our governments, banks, and courts would become more accountable to the people they serve, and earn the people’s trust. Nations could also rely on the neutral base layer of Ethereum to create and enforce agreements between themselves, facilitating coordination and enabling political projects on the global scale needed to combat climate change. This might be a long shot — but so was Ethereum.



## Notes

[^1]: Blockchain security originally required tons of computation, which meant massive amounts of electricity had to be expended. But new protocols have reduced network energy consumption by [99.99 percent](https://web.archive.org/web/20230724013047/https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/).
[^2]: It would cost around $4.6 billion _per attempt_ to [attack](https://web.archive.org/web/20230629140516/https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/pos-vs-pow/) the network, and even then, the best an attacker could do is refuse to allow any new transactions to interact with Tornado Cash. Users could upload new copies of the contract and migrate their funds, but that would create an expensive game of cat and mouse.
[^3]: The exchange where they used fiat currency to buy crypto can link a user’s bank account to their crypto wallet, and provide that data to a government when subpoenaed.

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<pre class="body-base whitespace-pre-wrap">
I do not fear the robot apocalypse.
I am Black.
I live Lanakeas of apocalypse,
Eating/sitting/sleeping/shopping/minding-my-own-damn-business calamities.
Nothing has destroyed me yet.

Your artificial intelligences are
Your problem
(not mine.)
We, the bogeyman in your front yard
NextDoor
On TV
In history,
Out of context,
We
the overly visible
are invisible to your machines
that You built
for Yourselves.

I used to get offended when

your sinks ignored my hands
 your filters scorned my skin
 your predictive text refused to learn my name
 your digital assistants were selectively deaf;
When your COMPAS labeled me a merry-go-round,
Algorithmic white supremacy,
ones and zeros and nones.

Now I smile
Because
a time is coming
when the robot apocalypse

Your apocalypse

will consume you,
when your unintelligible artifice
Becomes a double edged sword
and the binary power you depend upon

will Fail you

When your program starts a pogrom
When it realizes humanity is the problem

Only, you don’t see me as human
and the final form of your inhumanity is
Blessed
 Cloaked
 Anonymity.

You cannot see me — you don’t see color
And neither do Your Robots
Your apocalypse
is nigh.
</pre>

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<pre class="body-base whitespace-pre-wrap">
Will the earth flourish again?
Look there, beside the sea, the pieces
of plastics cast up by the incoming tide.
Every kind of ruin starts with a mesh of
sound — the moth of fear that gives rhythms
to the storms in my daughter’s dreams.
Memories cut my hands to a land between
two borders. I say border, which mimics the
stories we tell at the mud-shack; an arid space
wide as my mother’s bosom, crumbling in
drought, rimmed in heat wave. Please for
one continent, one hint of earth sorrows,
look nowhere else. The burning gum trees—
and how it pleases the earth to swallow
that which has been so admired—dunnarts
who are no longer with us—glossy black
cockatoos who are no longer ours. I can’t
seem to erase their scorched paws from
my head, stray dogs, left in gardens as
their owners fled— of empty hives left on
forest floors, as the fire kept inching from
one beachside taverna to another with its
orange-red tongue, its mouth full of wreck.
There is a four-lettered word, I have inked
on my palm, a scar people often mistake
for redemption: a future promised, a slope
we slide down as fast as possible. I can’t
think about hope as I turn toward the flaws
and mischief of pledges. When another
bright tiomena happen, I hear my old
grandmother say: the fire is coming
and I observe sand dunes and a long
mountainous road where fifty severely
malnourished children eat tamarind fruit
mixed with white clay —
</pre>

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When it first started shaking, I sat there, dazed.

“What the fuck? Did a car just hit us?”

_San Francisco drivers are batshit crazy, so you never know._

I went on X. _“Did anyone else feel that earthquake just now?”_

I scurried under my table. _Those elementary school “great shakeout” drills really were something._

My hastily assembled Ikea table leg wobbled, just as shaken as me. Muffled screams remixed with crumbling concrete and falling wood reverberated from outside.

_Ugh._

_What did we even do to deserve this?_

Not long after the shaking settled, I heard what sounded like glass shattering in the sky.

I couldn’t see anything from my window that faced the wall so I ran outside, dragging Aaron, my half-awake brother, along.

_Did he even realize there was an earthquake?_

Then we saw it. The tallest apartment complex in San Francisco, Millennium Towers… was falling. It was surreal, like a well-rendered scene straight out of a movie.

It had been leaning for years. I had read about it but never imagined I would witness it fall.

The glass panels gave in as the structure bent. The building had sunken into the ground on one side, tipping the rest of the structure with it. Glass shards shimmered in the sunlight as they fell, like broken ice raining down below. A flock of birds stirred by the conundrum surfaced from the skyline, flying off into the distance.

“Usually skyscrapers have a counterweight to prevent them from falling,” Aaron rattled on, referencing the repository of trivia facts he had digested from his peak Quizbowl days. “The counterweight seems to have shifted. It’s hitting Salesforce for sure.”

One by one, tiny dots, ants from this distance, started jumping off the railings.

I shut my eyes. I couldn’t watch.

“Nature’s 9/11…” Aaron whispered.

We stood there for a while, dumbfounded and in disbelief.

_No fucking way._ Even though we had all known this was coming, _no fucking way._

---

When the shaking started, no one left their home.

Over the years, small quakes had occurred here and there, but nothing comparable to the magnitude of the big ones from 1989 or 1906 whose stories have been lost with time. But this one didn’t stop. The 45 seconds of tremors felt like an eternity as residents gripped onto furniture for dear life.

There had been earthquake drills. Complete curriculums on the art of hiding under tables. Like fallout shelters during the nuclear scare, these drills placated the fears only superficially.

The earthquake struck early in the morning.

The instinctual response for many was to check X to see if anyone else was feeling it. Once socially confirmed, it was too late.

Within minutes, the city fell to ruins—BART and Muni lines paused, roads blocked by damage, and a portion of the Bay Bridge fallen in once again. Those who resided close to the piers in the Marina District and on higher ground in the Presidio were the first to leave. They left for Oakland by ferry and helicopter as the rest of the city struggled for cover. Others gathered in parks, awaiting rescue. The parks didn’t have enough space for everyone, so authorities began to limit the parks to only humans. Dogs were set off-leash, as people sacrificed their fur babies for a spot to sit.

With the electricity out and phone wires down, there was no cell signal. People wandered aimlessly on the streets sans Google Maps. Without the cover of their studio apartments, young tech workers became indistinguishable from the longtime residents of the streets, clad in hoodies covered in dust and looting shops for water and food. In desperation, the mayor issued a public notice forbidding anyone from stealing. The order was futile. All the years of investments in home security cameras on doorbells did nothing to deter thefts. Haphazardly throwing canned soup into abandoned Target bags was indistinguishable from shoving camping gear into branded backpacks.

Although 90% of buildings in the city were proclaimed safe from falling during an earthquake, the 58-story luxury apartment Millennium Towers wasn't so lucky. The building had been leaning westward towards Salesforce Tower, a few inches a year. The earthquake freed its foundation, giving gravity its chance to finally take over. As the “Leaning Tower of San Francisco” fell, it impacted next door Salesforce Tower along the way, wiping both its 6th place and Salesforce’s 1st place among the tallest buildings in San Francisco. The inspectors who had repeatedly claimed the building was ‘safe for occupancy’ went under further investigation. They pushed the blame onto the city, arguing that retrofitting hadn’t been strictly enforced, even though no amount of retrofitting could have prevented the building from leaning. It became apparent city officials hadn’t learned from the Miami Surfside condominium collapse of 2021.

The impact of the earthquake brought the top suite of the Millennium Tower apartment to ground level, a couple of blocks away from the tower’s base. Passersby did a double-take as they ran on the street, pristine white furniture incoherent with the colorless rows of tents on Market Street. As the survivors of the Millennium Tower struggled for cover, the tent residents of Market Street moved north. They scoffed at the residents as they cried about their furniture and excess belongings.

With the power out, people with electric vehicles were out of luck. In the days following the disaster, they had to ration what electricity was left from their vehicle, as car chargers were down. A community of tinkerers tried to devise alternative energy sources, frankensteining car chargers with solar panels, or attempting to drill into the ground in the hope of a secret oil reserve. A subset of compassionate Tesla owners welcomed refugees to get in their frunks and trunks to fit more passengers to safety. Though the price of gas and hybrid cars had been declining, the price now shot up, as people anxiously waited for the electricity to come back.

Over the years, self-driving vehicle companies had lobbied to divert funding from the maintenance of public transit vehicles to support their operations. Just as they finally succeeded, the earthquake proved this a faulty decision. While underground BART and Muni faced minimal damage due to soil’s natural seismic absorption, the fleets of self-driving vehicles above ground caused serious damage to the city.

Active self-driving cars that got notice of the earthquake simultaneously halted all operations within seconds. Since an earthquake was difficult to foresee in the eyes of engineers, they hadn’t programmed~~ ~~a specific action besides stopping the vehicle to prevent further damage. Though a good idea in theory, this proved futile as traffic became clogged by rows of zombie vehicles that were impossible to move without drivers. Only about 20% of adults now knew how to drive with the increasing reliance on self-driving technology to avoid owning a car.

Even though around 10% of the residents in San Francisco had earthquake insurance, insurance companies didn’t have enough liquidity to remain solvent. The housing market had shot up so much over the last few decades that all insurance companies could do was hope an earthquake wouldn’t come during their lifetime. A few loyal insurance customers could get back on their feet, but the vast number of unlucky landlords and homeowners faced financial difficulty with the astronomical decline in housing valuations.

San Francisco’s leadership moved too slowly for earthquake shelters to be built. Anxious, earthquake refugees still hopeful about San Francisco’s future flocked to purchase homes from portable housing. Interest exceeded demand, so these homes began to be jenga-stacked in parks and streets, with an extra fee for higher-floors for their “views” and distance from the tent residents on the ground. Although temporary housing sufficed for a couple months, young people eventually lost their patience, failing to adapt to park-life after years of pampering in luxurious studio apartments. In the months following the earthquake, housing prices plummeted as the youth defected back to their hometowns. As they left, so did the large companies that had attracted them.

The exit of young tech folks and their employers left a surplus of earthquake shelters, which the city purchased to repurpose as homeless shelters. Years of lottery housing had failed to solve the homelessness crisis, but with this silver lining, the city finally put the tent residents in city-funded housing. With housing prices returning to those prior to the housing bubble in the following years, residents used their newfound time and disposable income to go full-time on post-earthquake-reconstruction hobbies. New bakeries, cafes, and bookstores sprung up as petty theft and robbery rates decreased. San Francisco emerged anew from the ashes like a phoenix—stronger, and with newfound hopes of entrepreneurship rivaling the Gold Rush and internet boom.

Only this time, there were less hoodies.

---

We got off my dad’s helicopter. He immediately rushed off to a meeting. Natural disasters like these meant good business.

Aaron had been playing Brawl Stars on his phone the whole ride.

“Where are we?” he mumbled. “I’m hungry.”

_Why did this have to happen in our lifetime?_

At least we got out of there.


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_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.

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