It’s easy to feel like the future is always arriving.
It’s the age of AI, headlines blare; the age of automation, of surveillance capitalism, of remote work, of distraction. Before that, the age of social media, of the internet, of information overload and big data. We live in a flood of prophecies, the age of ages, drowning in news and takes and things to know.
Why add to this cacophony? In short, because we still have more to say.
Reboot was founded in 2020, and Kernel’s first issue was published in 2021. In these short intervening years, we — the core and founding teams of the first versions of the newsletter and magazine — have collectively graduated, landed jobs, quit jobs, gone back to school, moved across the U.S. and back. We’ve learned to live with Covid-19, seen longstanding publications shutter and resurrect, watched the tech industry go through an entire boom-bust cycle. SUSTAIN is as much about the content of this issue as it is about our decisions to keep going. If in Kernel Issue One we were dreaming something into existence and in Issue Two we were trying to do it right, Issue Three is for building something that lasts.
Continue reading Editor’s Note →
Fiction
Top O’ the World
by Liam Hogan
We make quite the pair. Kenny, a slender six-foot-six giant, a difficult-to-judge thirty-something years old. He’s a Ugandan...
Poetry
Algorithm Minuet
by Dana Chiueh
No Girls on the Internet
by Dana Chiueh
Electrodes
by Taffeta Chime
I picked up a plastic wrapper today
by Spencer Chang
Some things to be
by Alicia Guo
And In My Marrow, The Rungs of Faces Knocking as A Chime Against Pleasure
by Ojo Taiye
Magical Nature
by Ojo Taiye
Ones and Zeroes and Nones
by Ajah Hales
Visual Art
Trace
by Rebecca Mqamelo
Kaixi
by Rebecca Mqamelo
How To Choose a Star
by Alicia Guo
Sweet Incentives
by Frega DiPerri
Organic Envy
by Frega DiPerri
Nonfiction
Taking Business Personally: A Conversation with Charles Broskoski
by Meghna Rao
Meghna Rao is an editor and writer from Queens, thinking about diaspora and technology. Charles Broskoski is the co-founder...
Thank You, SBF
by Tony
When my uncle called in May 2021 to ask if I wanted to program for a crypto game called Dark Forest, it was an easy pass. I w...
Port Paradox
by Anson Yu
On August 28, 2021, Chett Chiasson looked out from his office in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Since 2010, he has occupied that...
“Democracy-Affirming” AI Could Make Things Even Worse
by Kevin Klyman
AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party...
MY GHOSTS REMIND ME OF A WORLD NOT YET MADE
by Raya Ward
I climbed a tree today and let it hold me in my grief. Tangled in its branches, I lay my head down, ear to bark, and listen t...
The Logic(s) of a Magazine: A Conversation with Michael Falco
by Jessica Dai
Jessica Dai is, among other things, Editor-in-Chief of Kernel Magazine. Michael Falco is Executive Director of Incite at Col...
The Strategies We Need
by Priya Chatwani
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science during the pandemic, I found what I thought to be my dream job:...
When the Computer is the Witness
by Christina Tuttle
I spent the summer after my sophomore year of high school bedridden with pneumonia, watching every episode of the crime show...
Climate Science Crystal Ball: Towards a Cyborg Climate Science
by Kyle Barnes
I’ve been trafficking in data. Petabytes of it: ocean temperatures, atmospheric halocarbon concentrations, Arctic sea ice ext...
Marked as Irrelevant
by Aina Z.
You’re hitting a wall with your code. It’s getting dark outside, but you have yet to find the solution even after stepping th...
Decision paralysis? Not sure where to start?
Past Issues
How do we get there?
Change requires an orchestra of players, instruments, and movements. We cannot achieve this alone. This issue of Kernel Magazine is filled with the people, tools, and ideas that together create movements that drive material change.
People
8 pieces
Tools
12 pieces
Ideas
10 pieces
Where do we go from here?
In a landscape dominated by either fatalistic views of technology or by optimism weaponized as hype, Kernel Magazine articulates an alternate vision: a critical analysis of technological progress and regress while still charting a path forward.
Past
3 pieces
Present
7 pieces
Future
5 pieces