Trace

Kaixi

How To Choose a Star

Sweet Incentives

Organic Envy

Top O’ the World

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

**Charles Broskoski** is the co-founder and CEO of Are.na, an online Montessori school for adults.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

Here’s a story you might find familiar: you sign up for a startup service one day. Let’s say, for the sake of this example, that it’s a social media network that lets you upload and share photos with your friends. You find this fun. You take photos of silly moments, moving moments, beautiful moments. The images spawn a culture unique to the platform. Memes become self-referential. More friends join, and so do extended family, celebrities, your favorite magazine.

One day, a few years down the line, you look up and realize that it’s no longer the same service you signed up for. Your feed shows more brands than family, and you learn about your newborn cousin two weeks late. The people you’re following are posting sponsored content, or they’re not posting at all. You’ve been given an endless scroll, so you find yourself falling through hours of recommended videos of strange recipes and struggling to exit.

It’s this feeling that Are.na, a platform for connecting ideas, is trying to avoid — and it’s doing so by eschewing traditional expectations of startup growth.

Are.na is 12 years old, just a few months younger than Instagram. I found my way to the platform on a friend’s recommendation when I needed a place to put all the weird and varied media that influenced my internet brain — TikToks, screenshots, PDFs. _You can use Are.na to link all of your weird online stuff_, my friend told me. _You can organize it into channels and browse through other people’s weird online stuff._

In some ways, Are.na felt familiar to other startups I’d encountered — easy to use, obvious how to sign up and unsubscribe, [transparent](https://www.are.na/are-na-engineering) about how they’re building their product. But there were other parts that were unfamiliar. Namely, that there are no ads on Are.na, that there are still active users from a decade plus, and that the startup limits its expansion plans to grow mostly by word-of-mouth.

It’s a small startup that is growing at a steady pace. It currently has 25,000 monthly active users (MAU),[^1] 0.00125 percent of Instagram’s reported [2 billion](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/meta-s-instagram-users-reach-2-billion-closing-in-on-facebook) MAU as of October 2022. [Around half](https://www.are.na/roadmap) of Are.na’s active members pay for premium services. As of July 2023, those subscriptions come out to around $70,000 monthly recurring revenue.[^2] They hope to reach $75,000 by the end of July, and update this goal each month.

A little over half the money goes to payroll (two full-time and four part-time workers). The remaining goes to everything else needed to run a business — servers, website hosting, software, taxes and other fees. They’ve never raised formal venture capital, but in 2018 participated in a ~$270K [equity crowdfunding round](https://republic.co/arena) that allowed people to invest to own a small stake of Are.na. Each new thing the team builds, co-founder Charles Broskoski tells me, is to ensure that the people using Are.na continue to like the product and stick around — that means [monthly](https://www.are.na/are-na-engineering/changelog) updates like fixing search bugs, editing design details, and adding features to the mobile app.

This is what Are.na believes in: Superfast is not the only pace for growth. It _is_ possible to sustain and grow a digital business without throwing venture capital (VC) money at it. You can still build something lasting on the internet that looks the way you want it to. Eventually, Broskoski hopes Are.na [will become](https://www.are.na/blog/on-motivation) the “next ​​Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan,” a hot spring spa founded in Hayakawa, Japan in 705 A.D. — a sustainable business that is around for the long-haul.

---

**Meghna Rao: You’ve answered this question in other places, but I think it’s important to ask again. How did you start Are.na?**

Charles Broskoski: I think it’s important to say first that the throughline of this story — my thesis — is that more people should be starting businesses on the internet. It’s doable within certain parameters. And I want people to know that what they see when looking at Are.na today is just the result of a series of situational decisions we made along the way.

I have a background in art. Specifically, art on the internet. I had been hanging out on the internet on a platform called del.icio.us,[^3] which was the first social bookmarking website.

You could save links. You see a timeline of your bookmarks, and get a sense of where you were ten days ago, and what it led into next. You could see who else had saved the things that you thought only you were interested in, and you could also see the trajectory of what _they_ were thinking about.

**Similar to Are.na in some ways. But unlike Are.na, there wasn’t a social, communication component, right?**

Exactly. Like Are.na, Del.ici.ous was first and foremost a personal utility. You could tell if you would get along with someone or not based on what their perspective was pointed towards. And I made friends with someone named John Michael Boling. There wasn’t really a direct message function but we’d follow each other’s work.

John was also making art at the time. We were both part of a scene. But then Yahoo bought del.icio.us, and there was no sense of what to do next. It wasn’t a political position, it was just like — OK, I guess we’re done here. We were like, they’ll fuck it up now. And they did; they did all of these things that made it unusable.

Everyone left. John Michael was badgering me to start my own version of del.ici.ous, and he wasn’t a programmer but he’d show me all these mockups and screenshots. He was looking everywhere for a short, interesting URL to purchase, and he found Are.na.

Then there was me — I was starting to feel weird about doing art commercially. I’d recently had a solo show, and it didn’t make me feel good. When I got back, John Michael had met this person he knew through his sister, J. Stuart Moore.[^4] He was the dictionary definition of an eccentric millionaire. He’d started a company in the ’90s, made a ton of money, and retired. They got to talking.

We were in agreement on some things. Like, there was so much stuff on the internet, we loved learning and engaging with work online, and we wanted to figure out a way to harness that more directly. We all went along with it. We hired three of our friends, all artists. Damon Zucconi, who is an artist and brilliant engineer and Dena Yago, also a brilliant artist who worked on K-HOLE.[^5]

**So Are.na really got its start because of J. Stuart Moore’s investment and his belief in your work.**

It wasn’t even an investment. We were employees. I was paid a salary. I also had that odd experience of making more money than I’d ever had before, after being primarily an artist and making zero money.

**So many artists experience that surge when they get a full-time tech job.**

Yeah, and Stuart hired all artists. We had very specific ideas about what we wanted. Our bar was basically — can we get all of our snobby, intelligent friends to use it without it being a favor to us? Can we make something actually useful for them?

We could, and this was a _huge_ win but Stuart didn’t see it like that. Still, we were like — _no, this means something._

Stuart wanted there to only be certain types of acceptable content. Not frivolous memes. He thought the platform would be better if we controlled what went into it, but we were the opposite. As people who were embedded in this world, we knew — you never know what will lead you into something good and serious. Sometimes you have to take weird, windy paths. We thought it would be better if we just attracted smart people to it.

Our approaches started to diverge. And to Stuart’s merit, instead of firing us, he said — you guys care a lot about this. So I’ll give you the company.

Stuart changed my life with that decision. But suddenly I had a startup. None of us ever wanted that for ourselves. I’ve had a website since I was 13, and Damon and I are self-taught programmers, but prior to this we didn’t have any desire to be entrepreneurial.

We languished for maybe a year. We kept the servers on. Our friends were using it, some really actively. But it was extremely small-scale. There was no business model.

Everyone else was losing interest — except for me and Chris Sherron, who did all of the design. Together, we formed a new company and transferred all the intellectual property. We formed it as a Delaware C-Corp. I got a job because I wanted to get better at programming. And I convinced Daniel Pianetti, who I met through Are.na and who had all these ideas for what he wanted for the platform, to work with us.

**Were you nervous at all? Scared that you had a company on your hands now, and that you had no experience?**

Yeah, I was. The adjustment took a long time. But Are.na will be 12 years old in August. I wouldn’t be running a business if it weren’t for Are.na. It’s a very personal business, meaning that it is something I want to see in the world; it is a tool that I would personally be devastated if it were to not exist.

I think we have so many examples of assholes starting businesses, and if they’re the majority of examples, we’re only going to have shitty businesses. I want to see people with very specific perspectives and opinions on how to manifest things into the world. More people should take business personally.

**You’ve only ever crowdfunded. Were you tempted to take traditional VC money and grow faster?**

Yeah, when we formed a new C-corp it was in the middle of the [early 2010s] startup boom, and so many people were raising money on nothing. I even figured that we could try raising a little. We tried to apply for accelerators, but nothing ever felt right. It all felt off brand, you know?

We got a [grant from the Knight Foundation](https://knightfoundation.org/articles/20-ideas-receive-support-knight-prototype-fund-media-and-information-projects/) in 2016. It was $35,000, which wasn’t much, but it was wind in our sails. And that money felt on brand.

We started to ask ourselves — what wouldn’t we be embarrassed by? That became our guiding star.

**So it took a series of small yeses and nos to help shape Are.na into what it is today.**

Exactly. The set of decisions that helped us develop what we wanted to do. We would talk to people — VCs, accelerators — and I think it never worked out because we didn’t want to do anything embarrassing. We didn’t want to feel bad or make a decision that felt wrong.

**When did you cross the threshold into being comfortable enough with Are.na to sustain yourself?**

So recently. I stopped doing freelance work to offset my salary two years ago.

It was hard getting to the place where we are now, where we feel comfortable. And I’m really happy we did. It feels so much better than if we were on the hook for something, or working with someone we didn’t like.

**How do you measure Are.na’s success since you’re not following the traditional startup growth playbook?**

We’re pretty in-touch with people. If someone writes in to help, it’s either me or Daniel who’s answering the email. We have a Discord where people tell us about what’s going wrong. I run our social media accounts. All of this makes our surface area of being connected to people very large, and people can express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction easily. So we always have a gut feeling about whether things are going right or wrong. But also, the only metric we really pay attention to is revenue. For us, it’s the highest bar. It sounds crass, but if someone is willing to pay for Are.na, that’s huge. Sometimes, we also track page views. No demographic or location. We don’t have time for all that.

**But certain things — personalized feeds, maybe — help manage larger platforms as they grow, right?**

It’s funny, I’ve never bought the idea that personalized recommendations are a response to growth. I feel like that’s an excuse to build an endless (addictive) content stream that’s financed by ads. Because we grow at a slower pace than most social platforms, and because we are fairly close and available for feedback to the people who use Are.na the most, we can do this more organically, for now.

End-experience wise, I really can’t imagine a world where something like an algorithmic feed is the best response for many more people using Are.na, because it really kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing. My feeling is that algorithmic feeds are just disrespectful; they disregard all the nuance in taste a person has. For applications with heavy personalized recommendations (I’m thinking about some streaming services, or even TikTok), I would personally be so much happier and interested with a truly random output.

To date, the biggest product change we’ve done with growth is to make sure the infrastructure can perform with increasing load. That was a large amount of work. We started it because people were complaining about slow load times, and we experienced it ourselves, as users.

**Do you ever worry that a much faster competitor will come in and make the same thing and beat you to it?**

No, not at all. The reason the quality has remained so high on Are.na is because we grow slowly, and we have the patience to do that. And that’s why I think we can be in this for a long time: the primary goal is not to to make a shitload of money.

Having a strong point of view about this type of thing is a meaningful differentiator. A lot of other platforms are diluted; their ethics do not translate to their product choices. People who discover Are.na are like, _wow, finally, something with a different perspective than Facebook._ I’m old enough to remember when the internet was like school, when there were plenty of places that would help you think and grow. Even though Are.na has grown, the way that people are thinking on there is still so interesting. The places where people’s gazes are pointing to are fascinating.

The goal is to be _good_. You know? That bar, for what “good” is, keeps going up. And for us, the only way to be good is not to grow fast. That’s just how it is. We’re not really interested in becoming like Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram.

**I think it’s a foreign idea for people to hear that they don’t need to just go with an erratic, crazy pace of growth. I like your [roadmap](https://www.are.na/roadmap) — your next steps are mostly just ways to make people who use Are.na happier.**

Yeah, exactly. Why can’t there just be more normal, functioning small businesses on the internet? Why does it have to be this narrative of _we’re going to be billionaires and start a dynasty of unhappiness_? Why can’t we just keep our expectations at realistic, human-scale levels?

I know we’re not for everyone. But the people who are attracted to Are.na in the first place are those who care about that type of thing. And I think that will eventually make a big difference.



## Notes

[^1]: “Active users” considers people who interact with a piece of software over a set time.
[^2]: Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is a common metric that subscription businesses use. It’s the predictable income they’ll make from monthly subscriptions.
[^3]: Del.ici.ous was founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov. It raised a rumored $2M in April 2005, and was acquired by Yahoo for a rumored $15-$30M by December 2015. After exchanging hands several times, the company was acquired by Pinboard in 2017 and subsequently shut down. It’s currently read-only.
[^4]: J. Stuart Moore co-founded IT consulting firm Sapient in November 1990. In 2014, Publicis purchased Sapient for $3.7 billion, or $25 per share.
[^5]: K-HOLE was an artist collective operating 2011-16, issuing trend forecasting reports that mixed parodies of consumerism with personal observations about culture. These reports eventually landed them with work for big companies like Coach and MTV. K-HOLE invented the term “normcore.”

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

Charles Broskoski is the co-founder...

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

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<pre class="body-base whitespace-pre-wrap">
1.

Goldenrods follow the data centers where the personas
live and lounge. Twenty puffs of carbon for an email,
stoking more wilderness by the season. Inside, a tangle
Of girlhood: ketamine therapy, Betterhelp, Tom and James
want to adopt your child and give them a much better future
than you ever could, with big city enrichment activities
egg donation, Mirena IUD, eyelid and lip tuck,
they are waiting, patiently, with their shiny yellow jaws
for you to tell them who you are.

2.

In 2049 the Internet Archive opens its jaws and swallows me whole
with its pulsing retroactive memory. Today I can only glimpse
the feeling of its cage: this vision of California, a funhouse
where my networked existence chases me like a shadow
and the streetlamps light my face for capture
by bounding box. Call it an information need.
Washing my face with a water that knows my name
and insists I’m spelling it wrong. In Oklahoma, there’s a girl
I feed with every search term. I hold her, my arm’s-length reflection.
All day the hallucinations talk to themselves in rooms
I enter only sideways, in packets, like a shadow.

3.

As a user, I’m a liar and a puppeteer.
One keypress on main and I’m undone, three years
of incognito a mere trail of sales leads. She pirouettes,
selling new algorithmic diagnoses, plasma donation,
worse things for money. For this hunting ground
I may hold someone’s hand through the phone.
I may taste the pleasures of being wanted and seen.
I may surrender myself, delicately, in this theater
while my violent reproductions dance and dance.
</pre>

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In 1970, the economist Thomas Schelling produced a profound insight into racial segregation using nothing more than some colo...

e-raced


## Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

Passing wearily through the Great Library, I stared in awe at the thousands of scrolls towering around me. Dust had accumulated on them, and I could gather faint whiffs of ash about. I imagine that the place was livelier before the tragic siege that saw most of the library decimated. Nearly everything learned by man, packed into the greatest facility made by man, needlessly destroyed by the ignorance of a single man. The true culprit could be none but the cruel hands of fate, though I cannot fathom whether it was just.

The great scholar Heron glided in front of me as I followed him through the halls. The two of us arrived at a small room, dimly lit by a few torches. I presumed that Heron wanted to speak to me about my day in his class. As I trudged through the doorway before him, I was greeted by rhythmic creaking and thumping, soft and steady.

A narrow wooden box about half my height lurched partway into the light, stopping around three paces ahead of me. As I reached out to pull it closer, it receded into the darkness. As if synchronized with the waves on the shores of Alexandria, the box repeated its swinging and I failed to catch it at the doorway, yet again.

Was Heron pulling this box somehow? But he was not moving. Was it magic? No, likely not. Maybe there was an animal inside the wooden box, pushing it and purporting magic to the untrained eye. But what was an animal doing in Heron's study?

Heron set a small flame down and caught the box, tilting it in the process. I braced myself for the imminent scurrying and chaos.

Heron chuckled. I saw no animal at its base. Was this really magic?

Four thin pillars protruded from the corners of the box’s base, supporting a smaller platform. On top, six statues circled an effigy of Dionysus perched in a roofed shrine.

The box strode forward again. The statues danced around the deity slowly, perfectly harmonious. I had never seen statues move, especially not with such grace.

Heron removed a panel from the base. Inside were wheels with ropes tied around their axles and an assortment of other discs seemingly affecting one another's trajectories. This box must be moving itself; if not through magic, then through some other divine process!

No doubt it was Heron who built this. No other man could plan such a thing. Acting on its own, as if imbued with ichor. Am I in the company of a god?

I am not a man of the sciences. I knew Heron was a renowned scholar and that many loved him dearly. I did not know why the likes of military commanders and government workers were infatuated with a man who rarely showed his face. Nor did I understand what was so great about his class. Today I lost ten hours in front of some paltry piece of papyrus, staring at lackluster lines, sorry shapes, and sloppy symbols. The other students seemed to take no issue with playing the role of the dishonorable Sisyphus, chained to their benches and slaving away at this madness. Heron allowed us to leave only after one brave scholar completed whatever the task was, though it was not nearly quickly enough.

Seeing this spectacle, though, I may finally understand what these powerful and honorable men are thinking. They are not merely in love with Heron; they revere and worship him, for he must be the mighty god of the forge.

Instinctively, I started to kneel before Heron. Memories of stories told in days past washed over me. Talos, the bronze giant exsanguinated by Jason and Medea, who cleverly pinpointed the vulnerability in his ankle. Aetos Kaukasios, the eagle who fed on Prometheus's liver until it was slain by Heracles. Pandora, who unleashed suffering on mankind. Beings made, not born, from ingenuity and techne.

A sharp pain woke me from my submersion in nostalgia. Heron glared sternly as his arm retreated into his robes. I should not have kneeled. To bow to another man in such a manner would be to disrespect myself and the gods.

Heron urged me further into his study. I noted a cauldron filled with water, propping up some sphere and standing above a bundle of twigs. He handed me the torch and I set the bundle ablaze.

Heron stepped over to the wheeled sculpture and started loading more statues into its center. Meanwhile, an open scroll on a table caught my attention. There were some lines, some symbols, and a circle. This was the same arrangement we saw in our class today! Did he somehow use this to devise one of his contraptions? Did he think I could match his wit in class? He overestimates me and my simple-minded ilk, though now I wished I could be that one peer who completed the exercise.

Suddenly, there was rattling by the fire. Above the cauldron, the ball was spinning! Heron crowed like a child, reveling in this display. Then he released his hands from the wheeled box once again. The doors at the center of the box opened and suddenly I could see ships on water. They were being approached by a bronze statue. I laughed — I could do nothing else. What in the world was I witnessing? What else could he make? How far could this go?

> If we were to create it, could we, like fate, destroy it as we please?

As I exited the premises, those scrolls towering around me looked heavier. All that gripped my mind were those old stories of fantastic creations.

Those toys — automata, as Heron referred to them — moved on their own. Were they alive? Heron instilled something in them. They were animated.

Can we all create life in such a way? Is such agency not worthy of divine wrath?

If we were to create it, could we, like fate, destroy it as we please?

---

## Lancashire, England. 1812.

I could not stay still. My teeth chattered to the point where I thought I would chip them. Something was going to go wrong.

Something would catch us. Hurt us. Hang us.

I watched the head of the sledgehammer come down on the frame with great fervor. The clang was deafening. I thought the whole thing would shatter completely, but it only became malformed.

_"Help, would you?"
_
I had just joined this group a few weeks ago, so I could not refuse. They would not look kindly upon fear.

With continued trepidation, I mustered the strength to lift a hammer and pounded against the contraption too. After a few more strikes, the thing was absolute rubbish.

My chest bore a seemingly endless chasm. I had expected some sort of catharsis after finishing. But I was now an accomplice, and there was no turning back.

As we slid away silently, I snuck a peek at the pathetic wreckage that lay there. The needles on the floor looked like they were creeping toward me, preparing to prick me ten thousand times.

Those worthless scum. We were fine without them. They could not outperform us at our best. We would get rid of them all. They were only made because the country is engulfed in war. While our soldiers fought their battles, we would fight ours, and both our parties would win.

Still, I had a terrible knot in my stomach—

Another bang, more thunderous than the last. Another one. Another one.

_"Aye, we're done. Out of here while we have the chance, my friend."_

---

That scene lingered in my mind as I warily walked home in the chilling rain. I thought about the famed Captain Ludd, our muse and leader. No one I know had ever seen him, but we revered him as the embodiment of hope nonetheless. He was the first to punish machines.

The first instance was in a fit of rage when his father rebuked him for squaring his needles improperly. I wondered how he felt when he annihilated his first frame. Was it exhilarating? How did he avoid punishment? Was he really so brave?

I passed in front of several lodgings whose doors were collectively arranged like a half-moon. In front of one of the doors sat a family in rags, washing their child in the sky's piss. At the door closest to me stood a disheveled young lady, her skirt torn near her thigh. The water trickling down her cheeks seemed thicker and slower than the raindrops on mine. Yet another poor girl who gave herself up for scraps. But what stood out most about her was the dirty, mangled shawl draped around her shoulders — unmistakably, it was lace.

I am a lacemaker by trade. I have not picked up a needle in a while, but it is still what I know best. I could tell that the girl's shawl was borne by an abomination.

That machine I assisted in banishing earlier was a stocking frame, and could have been the creator of that shawl. A friend once told me that the man who invented these frames did so out of spite for his lover, who loved knitting more than she loved him. It seems rather cruel that this contraption was made by such a petty dud, and even more so that I suffer now as a result.

After another kilometre I arrived home, hopping over the gaping hole in the wooden floor by our door. Somehow the drumming of the rain drowned out the incessant wailing emanating from my child as I moved inside. My wife looked pale. My stomach moaned pitifully as our eyes made contact.

I choked. Her eyes looked so desperate, and I had come home empty-handed once again. I knew getting into this would heighten our suffering. But I feared just as desperately. If nothing was done about those machines, I would have no chance at helping us. I laid down drowsily, and as my eyes shut, stocking frames flashed in my mind, followed swiftly by mounds of mechanical rubble.

---

As our ensemble of cloaked frame-reapers descended upon the factory for the umpteenth time, I could still hear the lively cheers of our men back in the hideaway. We felt so powerful, even though we could boast so little.

As we rounded the back entrance, I almost tripped. It would have been nice to have torches, but the risk of being seen was too great.

Yet, a few counts later, a flame burned bright. We had all agreed that bringing any light was risky. So who was it?

_"My lord, we found them."_

A horde of feet shuffled into the room. Torches lit up around us in sequence. Our group had eight — too many to escape stealthily but too few to push through the opposition at the moment. Then more light pervaded the darkness, and my stomach churned violently at the sight.

In the center of a massive group, there was a short man in foolish attire. He stepped forward. I had no idea who this Lord Fopdoodle was, but his face certainly did not exude kindness.

While he stepped, a thought struck me harder than I did that first stocking frame. These men… red coats? White breeches? What the hell were these soldiers doing here? Should they not be in America? France?

I must have looked like sliced gammon. I was livid. The country is at war, but we would waste our precious soldiers on some measly machine maulers? Why can they not just go win the war already? Remove their citizens from this miserable existence?

This was irrational. I was bewildered. The chasm from before reappeared and sucked my mind in whole. My throat tightened up once again as I choked at the thought of my wife. Was all that time spent pummeling machines wasted?

The uniformed soldiers looked mechanical, as indistinguishable as machines. I knew they were simply following orders. I knew the monarchy would not bend. But it still felt as if a blade pierced my back.

Lord Fopdoodle was about to speak, when a sickening thud erupted. A soldier toppled as the head of an Enoch's hammer receded.

This lone animal who swung his hammer sent the room into a frenzy, chaos ensuing. Torches were thrown. Rifles were drawn. They swarmed us and overcame us with sheer quantity.

Blast it all! My feet seemed encased in frost, but I could not end up as an example. That draconian Destruction of Stocking Frames Act was still in effect. I would certainly be executed just for my involvement here.

As the torch flames dissipated, the darkness that flooded the vicinity befriended me. Those stupid soldiers could not see us anymore. It was time to flee.

I pushed through in as inconspicuous a manner as I could and darted. I did not look back, even to the screaming of my brothers, likely bleeding out or awaiting their inevitable fates at the hands of the monarchy.

---

This routine was rather dull. I thought slipping the thread through the needles would feel like my old lacemaking days, but this was truly arduous and mind-numbing. Admittedly though, this was much less stressful than sneaking around breaking frames.

After escaping the factory, I pondered and pondered. My wife's desperate eyes obtruded my consciousness. It was time to be useful. Nobody would come to a lacemaker who charged more than the shops, but someone would want a lacemaker to help operate frames. I would have to learn to work with them, even if they threatened to draw blood from my fingers every day. No amount I lose would compare to the pooled blood of my fellow Luddites, who were reprimanded mercilessly.

> I offered them my livelihood, and they offered me the opportunity to live.

These machines were inevitable, and stooping to this level was better than perpetual futility. All I had to do was meet them halfway. I offered them my livelihood, and they offered me the opportunity to live.

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Yamanashi Prefecture, Chubū, Japan. 1990.

I slumped into my chair, ready for lunch. I had just finished writing a warning statement for an employee who had accused the office directors of the unfair termination of our factory workers. He was quite daring for raising his voice at our superiors like that.

My company produces industrial robots that help with manufacturing in factories. It is supposedly growing quickly, despite the fact that we do not have many clients. I often brag to my friends about the futuristic nature of the work that surrounds me, but it is actually not as exciting as it sounds — the stationary robots only repeat the same few motions thousands of times, though I am sure neither the engineers nor our marketing team would appreciate my saying that.

The belligerent employee hypothesized that management was studying factory workers' habits in order to replace them with those machines. However, from my experience over the years handling much of this speculation, I know that employees often jump to these unfounded conclusions from an executive’s single off-handed comment.

But what if that truly was the management’s intention? My stomach grumbled as I pondered this.

I unpacked my bento, took out a bottle of green tea, and began scarfing down my food. I pulled out a company logbook to write a report on the incident. Due to my work schedule, I have to eat while I work, and one of my worst nightmares is dropping crumbs onto my logbook — I would have to rewrite everything.

I kept thinking about what that employee said. Factory workers have an abnormally high turnover rate, such that sending all their termination letters has been painfully tedious. Factory managers tell me they terminate workers to "reallocate costs", but I am not sure if this is true. Regardless, it is not a good idea for me to bring my suspicion up to my superiors, lest they think I distrust them. Either way, I could not imagine factory workers being replaced anytime soon. The robots were too boring to do that.

Right now, the robots are capable of simple, repetitive machine work and basic movements. I do not know how far they will go. I joined this company mostly because they offered to pay well. My job application was very typical; I also mentioned watching Astro Boy with my brother as children and had read some of the Asimov stories in school. I guess that was enough when it came to my understanding of robots.

I cannot imagine a robot trying to do my own job. How would it understand employees' emotions? Could it make the right judgments about a situation when faced with multiple conflicting points of view? How would a robot go about laying off employees? While I do not get paid as much as many of my colleagues, I know my job is important enough to keep around.

What scares me most, actually, is quite a trivial matter. Their presence is off-putting. Robots and mecha in cartoons and anime seem friendly and sometimes endearing, but real life is a different matter. I once saw a picture of Gakutensoku, the first robot made in our country. It was human, but not human enough. It looked alive, but not alive enough. Its vexing visage was uncanny, with bulging eyes and comically large ears. I hope robots keep their metal arms and stay as cute machines. They should not look like us.

This spate of thoughts flooded my mind until I realized that my nightmare had come true. I had dropped some of my pickled carrots onto the logbook. I would have to rewrite this whole thing. If only I could instead take breaks to eat.

I walked to the cooler and grabbed some napkins nearby. While wiping up the carrots carefully, I also bumped the box. The remaining rice spread out over the carpet. さいやく!

It is so difficult to pick out grains from a carpet. I wish I had a vacuum nearby.

But even better than a vacuum? A small vacuuming robot. I do not know how far the grains spread, but a machine would find them easily. I could imagine one with a cute digital face, like _^\_^_. In fact, an ideal robot would not have knocked down a bowl of food in the first place. It would boast perfect precision, and it would need no breaks. Holding my skirt, I knelt to clean up the mess.

---

My husband was not home yet, but my nine year-old son was here. On the TV, some mecha anime called _Gundam_ was playing — my son was obsessed with it.

I could see a big blue mecha shooting missiles at a seaweed green one. Lots of explosions and violence. Much more exciting than our stationary arms, but the thought subsequently sent chills down my spine. If we were to ever create such destructive machines, I would hope we can destroy them before they cause harm.

Then again, we are building these robots to help us. Why should we destroy them as we please? Who says we can do that?

I imagine Doctor Tenma disposing of Astro Boy, his own creation. Is that morally just? Our potential war machines may become sentient someday. But even if they are not, is it right to end lives we worked so hard to begin? Even if the most emotion they display is akin to those of a bunraku puppet — should we?

One day, a robot will serve me in a restaurant. One will make clothes for me. One will drive me to work. One will vacuum my messes. One may even perform for me on a stage. They will be just like me, but more precise in what they do.

So instead of worrying about fighting them eventually, whether it be for our jobs or our lives, I think we should simply support them and build them further.

---

Let them thrive in our world, supporting us with their existence as we seek the truth of our own.


Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

Passing wearily through the Great Library, I stared in awe at the thousands of scrolls towering a...

Opus


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

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

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

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

## Technology as a Path to an End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Distinguishing Technology from Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Works Cited

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

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

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


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## Escape into Cyberspace

Having spent years interacting with founders and managers at large tech companies, I cannot escape the sense that implicit in much of the tech sector’s relationship to government and its perception of the world beyond software generally, is an almost-conscious belief that software, more than a new firmament of communication and commerce, is the foundation of an alternate political order biding its time until the death of its host.

The cryptocurrency community, in particular, has made this nervous whisper its battle cry. Not so deeply buried in its Telegram chats surge dreams of seceding from existing financial and political hierarchies. Aspirations of building alternative forms of governance pervade the community: a distributed banking system, decentralized autonomous organizations, and governmentless membership-based states. Within this community the contradiction of decentralizing power through software is most self-evident too: dreams of leveling the existing top-down financial hierarchy are mixed with get-rich-quick schemes and crypto-nobility fantasies. Advocates for decentralization learn just enough about the existing theory of monetary policy and inflation to confidently denounce it. With a missionary’s zeal, they prepare for a financial cataclysm that they find themselves beginning to hope for.

> Advocates for decentralization learn just enough about the existing theory of monetary policy and inflation to confidently denounce it. With a missionary’s zeal, they prepare for a financial cataclysm that they find themselves beginning to hope for.

Blockchains will become an increasingly prevalent engine of human commerce, governance, and identity. However, decentralization itself will not ensure democratization of the power that these inventions redistribute.

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## The Power of Blockchains

Governments are, in essence, sets of rules enforced over a population that permit and forbid actions among and between their constituents. Although many governments enforce rules that either explicitly or in practice are written by a subset of the people they govern, the aim of democracy is to spread the influence over how these rules are determined as widely as possible.

In the world of software, large platforms controlled by for-profit corporations set the rules on computer servers that they control and then offer others access to. Because the corporations need to generate revenue, the websites they operate and host are proprietary, meaning they alone have the power to invite, and thus charge, others to access the pages and services their scripts create. Control of the code (as intellectual property) and of the only computers allowed to deploy it mean that these companies have sole authority to set rules of how that code is used and changed, ranging from design choices to content moderation policies and censorship.

What is novel about blockchains is that they enable the creation and operation of programs whose state is maintained and updated by a disparate ecosystem of computers distributed throughout a network that pool their power together. As the line between who sets society’s rules and who writes the internet’s code becomes blurrier and blurrier, crypto-evangelists see themselves as fighting for the equivalent of democratic control of the means of web-hosting and operation.

The important innovation that blockchains made possible, using several clever tricks of cryptography and distributed computing, was the creation of distributed virtual computers. These machines are “decentralized” in the sense that they are collectively operated across many servers owned by anonymous groups of individuals who do not know each other, and who cannot unilaterally halt or change the virtual machine’s operation.

The sets of rules that govern contribution and collaboration with these virtual machines are called “protocols.” These virtual machines are still capable of hosting applications, but the services they offer can only be changed if a majority of the servers that constitute them agree to proposed edits. In this way, the services they offer are governed by a collective of individuals who have chosen to contribute their resources and power to the operation of virtual machines that they do not individually control. The most famous blockchain protocols are, of course, Bitcoin, a decentralized ledger of transactions, and Ethereum, a general purpose decentralized machine that can execute other programs (sometimes called “smart contracts”).

Any mechanism that charges for access to the network, censors or blocks individual participants, or gives insiders and special interests an advantage must be baked into the distributed virtual machine at its creation. In practice, many blockchain developers seek to design blockchain applications whose rules will be perceived as just and fair, in part because doing so attracts constituents to join their collective virtual machines. The ideal is often, as Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, puts it, “credibly neutral” mechanism design, meaning protocols that represent a static commitment to a set of rules that are transparent, difficult to change except through democratic pressure, where everyone plays by the same rules, and no one is singled out for advantage or disadvantage.

Processes for creating and enforcing laws and rights in the pre-crypto world function as a sort of protocol as well. Many institutions in America are designed with elements of credible neutrality in mind, notably the notion of private property itself and the US Constitution. One large chunk of any government’s power comes from its ability to control what individuals are permitted to make contracts about. What services can they offer to each other? What can they pay each other for, or buy from each other? Blockchains offer a proof-of-concept for a world where contracts are self-enforcing and governments are stripped of the right to determine what can and cannot be sold. While we may welcome this in places where we consider governments overly restrictive, democracies too will be affected. And what democratic institutions cannot control, they cannot ensure will remain democratic.

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Subverter of Laws, but Agent of Power

When thinking about the way society might change as blockchain applications gain wide adoption, it’s helpful to first dispense with the cultural baggage of avowed cryptocurrency promoters. It’s not uncommon for a new technology to result in the opposite of the future that motivated its early adopters. The internet itself was at first heralded with utopian optimism, which now, in many places, has been retracted.

One example, in the case of blockchains, might be the idea that drawing on decentralized resources necessarily decentralizes power. It is easy to find instances of scenarios where blockchain applications in fact centralize power, even while doing tremendous good.

One of the leading applications of blockchains, both in the form of Bitcoin and via a category of so-called “stable coins” that maintain a fixed peg to (usually) the U.S. dollar, is as a protection against devaluing currency in countries experiencing rapid inflation. In these countries, the existing system of paper money is usually somewhere between risky and worthless, with central banks that are incapable of approving new spending or printing more money without directly devaluing their currency by a corresponding amount. In the worst case, such countries undergo periods of hyperinflation where the local currency more than halves in value each year, totally wiping out millions of people’s savings and livelihoods.

These countries are generally low-resourced, racked by generations of colonialism, foreign financial exploitation, and in-fighting. However, by coming to depend on cryptocurrencies, these nations’ people lose a vital aspect of their sovereignty — their financial independence. Where in the past their central banks might have shaped local monetary policy so as to stimulate local industry, production, and economic vibrancy, their people have now come to depend directly on what, in some cases, is essentially a pass-through vehicle for US dollars, extending the US Federal Reserve’s global reach.

While many blockchain protocols aspire to distribute influence democratically, most projects in the space are, at least to some extent, business plans, as opposed to totally selfless creative work. Because of the get-rich-quick environment surrounding blockchain technology, the potential for centralized benefit for a system’s creators and early backers is often integrated into the protocol design intentionally. An essential problem that many companies building blockchain applications have is that they must simultaneously build a protocol that is decentralized, transparent, and accessible to all, while financially rewarding themselves, the creators, and the investors and developers who believed in them early on. That is, even though they must build in such a way that no centralized actor can interfere with the system once it’s deployed, they intend to get rich and must add an element to the design that facilitates this. Notably, they cannot offer equity like a traditional startup, both because there should be no private stream of future revenue if the application is truly decentralized, and because doing so would be an SEC securities offering, with all of its requisite paperwork, and now their get-rich-quick scheme has turned into a get-rich-not-so-quick scheme.

A tried-and-true way to do this is to create a token that acts as a sort of license to use the decentralized application, which must be included with each transaction, and thus increases in value as the value of using the network goes up. Another is to make a token that has some governance value in the network, tying the number of coins owned or staked to voting power in the actions that a system takes or the changes that are adopted. The more money you have, the more sway over the network’s rules you have. In this way, control of decentralized applications isn’t especially different from control of a contemporary corporation, where voting power is proportional to stock ownership: in both you are assigned governance power equal to your financial heft within an ecosystem. Although there are crypto projects that have attempted to move in a more democratic direction, systems of governance that implement “one person, one vote” remain the exception in the world of decentralized applications.

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Blind Bounties

The worst-case risk posed by poorly designed decentralized applications is deeper and more dangerous than the threat of extending and entrenching existing inequities. The isolation and independence from the will of any individual person or coordinated groups that makes these applications possible also presents a profound risk to human values. Once built and designed towards some goal, decentralized applications blindly create financial incentives for humanity that humans respond to, towards goals designed into a protocol at the outset. These invisible ethereal machines cannot be turned off once set into motion. Blockchains threaten democracy because they allow the creation of mechanisms designed to achieve objectives that no democratic process can interfere in, and provide financial incentives and coordination to achieve these objectives. The same technical qualities that put them outside of the reach of bad governments and authoritarians make them unaccountable to even the most benevolent and democratic societies.

There are already practical examples of this tension between the incentives that decentralized applications offer to individual actors and the common good of humanity. The “mining” that powers the decentralized maintenance of the Bitcoin ledger is actually extremely power intensive computation, performed in massive computing centers, requiring huge amounts of electricity. Each of these computers is competing to be the server that processes the next entry in the Bitcoin ledger in return for a financial reward. Although the exact number is unknown, _The Economist_ estimates that these transactions could consume as many as 450 Terawatt-hours annually, more than all of France, despite processing a miniscule fraction of the world’s transactions.

It’s easy to think of this as being an instance of a new technology or fad that has a hidden and disturbing environmental cost, not unlike the large upfront carbon footprint of electric vehicle batteries, mobile phones that require manganese mines that devastate the environment, or Canada Goose jackets that cause immense pain to farmed animals. In each of these latter instances, unrestricted markets have created an incentive to perform some harm against the environment or other species for financial gain. The only response is regulation, and in some cases targeted taxation, of what products are manufactured, and if the public harm is overseas, regulation of what is consumed.

However, the problem in the case of Bitcoin is much more fundamental: the price of Bitcoin, and the rewards for mining it, mean that a decentralized bounty exists for consuming vast amounts of electricity that no individual government can shut down. A poacher illegally hunts for ivory because a rich foreigner with loose ethics will pay them. A bitcoin miner consumes massive amounts of carbon because the Bitcoin protocol itself will pay them. In this way, we can see that decentralized applications, when designed poorly or adopted beyond the scale they were intended for, can incentivize well-meaning humans to take actions that are misaligned with society’s wishes as a whole.

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Blind Machines

To see what could go wrong in the future, it’s important to understand how complex the programs that these decentralized applications operate could become. One still nascent area of crypto innovation is the world of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. DAOs are blockchain-based organizations that, designed to achieve a specific purpose, operate by a set of smart contracts that their members interact with. DAOs might operate a platform or facilitate a certain type of exchange (providing bank loans, for example), using groups of smart contracts to conduct the complex operations of their organization, almost like an automated corporation.

Looking forward, we can imagine decentralized autonomous organizations building decentralized applications that no one in particular leads or takes responsibility for, but that exist and persist all the same.

Imagine if Facebook had not been built with Web 2.0 centralized software, but instead inside of the world of decentralized applications (dApps) and DAOs. Since there would be no need for private revenue, our social media dApp, thankfully, would have no ads. However, to stimulate its creation, its creators offer a financial reward in the form of a token required to access the platform to anyone who improved the codebase such that the number of users increased. Although the example is hazy, it should be easy to see why this simple proxy measure, built-in to incentivize improvement and adoption, eventually becomes misaligned with what the rest of humanity really wants from the application. The headless organization might persist, incentivizing changes to make itself more addictive, without any financial incentive to extract a monetary benefit for itself, but also without any human accountability to mitigate its harms. By turns, the same features that make these mechanisms divorced from the capitalist system of financial incentive-making simultaneously shield them from our legal system of justice.

One company in the blockchain industry is attempting to build a fully decentralized hedge fund that would reward individuals who contribute information that the fund could then use to beat the market while trading. The idea is to allow individuals to propose trades to a computer that continuously executes them if they are proven to make money in a marketplace, be it crypto or traditional financial markets. The system subsequently compensates those who had submitted profitable trades with stake in ownership of the fund.

It’s interesting to play forward what might eventually happen if this setup were to succeed. Such a hedge fund would essentially function as a corporation without human decision-makers or supervisors. As the corporation grows, its increasing financial influence might come into some sort of tension with the welfare of society as a whole, as corporations often eventually do, requiring regulation or legal changes to its business practices.

What if the state, and the rest of society, tried to intervene? Of course, this automated corporation’s property rights on traditional assets would today be granted and maintained by the state, and governments could strip such a headless corporation of its legal ownership if its growth was causing problems for the rest of society. However, over time blockchains might undermine democratic oversight of property rights themselves, as ownership of crypto-assets cannot be stripped from individuals by the collective except in unusual circumstances. We also might try to restrict its ability to transact, executing the trades on which it makes its money and accumulates influence, but this too is increasingly being decentralized through smart contracts. Most aggressively, we could place legal restrictions on mining, or operating, the blockchain that executes the automated trading algorithm. However, most blockchain protocols offer larger incentives the fewer people there are mining them, so the nature of markets might mean that banning mining of a particular protocol only pushes its mining beyond the reach of the law.

> Where the state loses power over private action, whatever we mean by “democracy” will lose power too, unless we can embed that meaning in the way that these protocols work.

In this way, the transition from corporations to their decentralized autonomous equivalent removes the key point of leverage that governments, and thus democratic institutions, have to influence and constrain the activities of private actors: the enforcement of contracts themselves. Insofar as blockchains provide an ability to transact without a trusted third party that mediates what is legitimate and what is illegitimate, they will make the state obsolete as an enforcer of who owns what and what types of trade are allowed.
Where the state loses power over private action, whatever we mean by “democracy” will lose power too, unless we can embed that meaning in the way that these protocols work.

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Distributed Sovereignty

Blockchains offer an unprecedented chance to distribute and coordinate the power of information technology. If society can safely transition from software and corporations constrained by law and the threat of force to decentralized organizations and services, entirely new types and sizes of democratic institutions may be built, distributing power to operate critical internet services directly to those who use them. Achieving this will require a culture of democratic commitment among those who design the governance of blockchain applications, as well as the foresight to ensure that blockchain applications are ready to serve marginalized people whose continued political representation is most tenuous during times of political change. If this world is successfully navigated to, blockchains will make the promise of government by the consent of the governed realized more fundamentally than it ever has before.


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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)

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![A digital painting of a focused woman sitting on the ground and drawing a rectangle](2/drawing_rectangles.jpeg 'Drawing Rectangles')

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

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

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


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

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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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![A grid of digitally rendered cross sections of trees in brown and sepia tones](2/treerings.png 'Tree Rings')

Tree rings can tell us much about the passing of time, their shapes and thicknesses telling us stories of the past. They represent time, growth, and nourishment. Reading a cross section is, however, also an interpretation. The memories we carry can be written and rewritten depending on how we craft our stories — in sustaining our rings, we grow our own narratives. _Passage_ follows the thread of history as tree rings over time. They are malleable, affording the self a new vision of the past as lines thicken and intersect, weaving felt emotions and happenings into fresh narratives.

_Alicia Guo (she/her) is an artist and computer science student at MIT thinking about HCI, co-creativity, and tools for artists. She loves cooking, museums, and finding ways to turn spaces into places._


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**On receiving an unwanted Windows**
 **update at an inconvenient time.**

I return to my desk
 and everything has changed.
 It seems we can never
 take pause to inhale,
 tethered as we are to a tsunami,
 tossed by the wake
 of its ever-widening rings,
 carried far from a languorous
 stillness, away from the datura’s
 violet bell unfurling underfoot,
 the perfume of rain-soaked leaves,
 and hosts of golden mushrooms
 rising in the morning dew.
 Drowned by 5G waves,
 our neurons are stupefied;
 Our flesh grows pallid
 as we hide from the star.
 In the absence of silence,
 our questions
 are lost.

**All Thumbs**

I wanted to tell you
 About the snowy white bat
 And its gold rush
 Through the twisting figs,
 Or of the cicada’s husk
 Ripening in the dark loam,
 But your opposable thumbs,
 Which had once given us the world,
 Persisted in an ignorant dance.

_Robert René Galván (he/him), born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His collections of poems are titled:_ Meteors, _Lux Nova Press;_ Undesirable: Race and Remembrance, _Somos en Escrito Foundation Press;_ Standing Stones, _Finishing Line Press; and_ The Shadow of Time, _Adelaide Books._

On receiving an unwanted Windows
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It seems we...

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_After Gina Apostol_

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

$0.99 store in Tracy / I gravitate toward cute stuffed toys / or pens / or diaries / I love / having

leftovers from a large meal / fridge bursting at the seam / in what our families / promise is love / I

watch the sunset / and think of ghosts / who wouldn’t be / happy / with the storm brewing inside

/ my palms / a storm / I tend / daily / collage as fragments / meaning I love the wind / as it

caresses / each windmill / and kisses Lola’s flowers / and the hush of papers / from an open

book / fragmentation as memory / because I love the still / between 12am and 1am / right when

my virtual Cebuano class ends / because they’re based in Melbourne / and there’s a time

difference / before I even set down my headphones / I know / Lolo is sleeping. / I step outside to

grab my books / and journal / and Lolo is snoring. / Memory as love / as I tiptoe toward the main

bedroom / stepping over the creaky floorboard, / but never before whispering / goodnight.

_Keana Aguila Labra (they/them/she/her) is a Cebuana Tagalog Pilipinx genre & genderfluid poet & writer in diaspora. She works to provide a safe literary space for underserved & underrepresented communities as the co-Editor-in-Chief of literary magazine_ Marías at Sampaguitas _& the co-Founder of the BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ focused publishing press Sampaguita Press. She is also the Assistant Director of the Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate Program alongside Director Janice Lobo Sapigao, a fellow of the Kearny Street Interdisciplinary Writer's Lab cohort summer ’21, & served as one of the Honorary Santa Clara County Poets Laureate of Oct. ’21 with Lorenz Mazon Dumuk._


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

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

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

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


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my incurable dialect with
eu...

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astronaut, colony, alien,
lift-off?
I, old Earthbound,
listen for you in the night,
dream you fl...

It’s easy to feel like the future is always arriving.

Fiction

Poetry

Visual Art

Nonfiction

Past Issues