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Trace

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This must have been after the last
 California wildfire.
 Everything that once stood with
 American poise fell
 to its knees. Out in the heat, I ran
 into Smokey, half-burnt

& thawing quick. I held his wounds —
 hands brushing on
 furs. Smokey says fire is the closest
 thing to lust, it consumes
 anything that its hand can touch.
 But there is something

wrong with absolutes. Isn’t lust the
 body’s way of surviving,
 of raising its drenched face to gasp
 for air. He says I
 mistake _tenacity_ for _survival_. While
 one tears when you

cut too deep, the other needles itself
 back in multiple ways.
 I think my Bear-friend got it twisted:
 Whatever fire takes
 it must return, clean & transformed.
 Remember the

poplars hastening to ash. The ore &
 its shimmering gold.
 As a kid, I saw shrubs decimate while
 a whole field burned.
 In spring, they came back again,
 manure underfoot

& better grown. Smokey thinks I’m
 missing the point.
 What about the climate. What about
 California & Brazilian
 Amazon. What about wildlife —
 everything that never

fully heals when the flames are out.
 _To consume_ is not to
 save. To consume is to set ablaze. We
 stand in silence
 afterwards, paws resting on hands.
 Perhaps this is how

the world would end: blood in the wild,
 burning trees, so many
 animals sizzling to death & in the
 middle of this, a poet
 writing a poem, even though it might
 never get to be read after all.

_Chiwenite Onyekwelu (he/him) is a Nigerian poet, with works published in_ Adroit Journal, Chestnut Review, America Magazine, Gutter Magazine, _and elsewhere. He was a runner up for the 2022 Foley Poetry Prize._

This must have been after the last
California wildfire.
Everything that once stood with
American poise fell
to its knees. Out...

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Before copyright, adaptation was the norm. Most famously, half of Shakespeare’s plays were adaptations of existing stories, a...

Abolish Canon: Centering Collective Fan Production

On receiving an unwanted Windows
update at an inconvenient time.

I return to my desk
and everything has changed.
It seems we...

On receiving an unwanted Windows update at an inconvenient time, All Thumbs


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

                                                                                   ***

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

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

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


Enrique Rodríguez is a frequent customer of Western Union and MoneyGram, both of which he uses to send cash remittances. At l...

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The next 30 years mark a unique period in humanity’s timeline. Actions we take between now and 2050 will decide the fate of billions of human beings. By 2050, we will know if we made the right decisions in the decades prior. We will have either set humanity on the correct trajectory to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, redistribute wealth, deliver justice, protect our ecosystems, and build prosperity for all lifeforms on our planet, or we will have caused ecological damage and immeasurable suffering for people and wildlife all around our world.

2020 was a warning sign from an undesirable future. While lockdowns caused global CO2 emissions to fall by 6.4 percent and granted a pyrrhic victory to the climate, the win was short lived. [According to Jeff Tollefson in Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3), by the latter half of 2020, emissions bounced back, and as the world wakes up from the hazy dream of COVID-19, emissions are rising to levels seen in prior years.

Continuing to emit greenhouse gasses at this level is untenable. Massive droughts, wildfires, and record high temperatures are affecting all seven continents. Not so long ago, these same “natural” disasters would have been viewed as once-in-a-lifetime events, but as heat waves roast Western Europe and the United States, we are learning that global warming does not care about borders.

Every choice we make is an opportunity to begin a journey towards a different future, where the resources for humanity’s nourishment and the health of our planet are abundant. Getting there, however, will require an immense transformation of the world as we know it.

## Dematerialistic Illusions

Starting in the 1970s, the Digital Revolution enabled the widespread use of computers and access to the internet. By the 1990s, the Commodore 64 and other personal computers had found their way into millions of offices and homes across industrialized nations.

That same period marked the rise of “dematerialization,” or the ability to produce more with less physical input. Computing and the digitalization of various parts of the economy made the effect seem larger than it actually was. _Imagine this! Soon all media and most services will become bits on a computer_, preached techno-utopians around the world. _Everything will be cheap and available to anyone with a computer._

This seemingly naive viewpoint actually has roots in empirical data. In the U.S., the consumption of non-renewable resources like copper and steel had decreased as GDP continued to rise. As researchers like Andrew McAfee point out, [burning coal and gas has gotten more efficient in the past decades](https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-natural-gas), resulting in less emissions for the same amount of energy.

Nor is it a stretch of imagination to see how digital technologies would lead to dematerialization. Consider the advent of streaming movies and electronic books. Rather than use fossil fuels to supply the energy for the production and delivery of these services, we could now use renewable electricity to deliver them.

Must it not follow that digital services would reduce waste and use less energy?

## The Jevons Paradox and the Lifecycle Analysis of Emissions

In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons observed a phenomenon that would plague the 20th and 21st centuries. Shortly after the invention of the steam engine, a machine intended to make coal more efficient, [coal consumption counterintuitively increased](https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/jevons-the-coal-question). Rather than doing the _same_ with _less_, industry learned to do _more_ with _more_.

> Rather than doing the _same_ with _less_, industry learned to do _more_ with _more_.

The Digital Revolution suffered a similar fate. Despite optimism in digital technologies to reduce emissions and make the world more efficient, greenhouse gasses and material consumption continued to rise. Techno-utopians made two oversights when envisioning a material-free (or at least, material-minimal) future.

The first was the specter of the Jevons Paradox. Widespread computing did not create a world in which Netflix replaced AMC or Amazon replaced Barnes and Noble. Instead, it created a world where people stream more movies _and_ go to theaters, own both personal libraries _and_ Kindles. Echoing the same observation made by Jevons in the 1860s, increased efficiency did not lead to a decrease in net consumption — it only made _more_ consumption possible by _more_ people.

The second critical oversight was forgetting the many sources of emissions of digital technologies, which includes manufacturing and disposal. Computer manufacturing takes place all over the world. Oils for plastics are piped from the Middle East, lithium for batteries are mined in Chile, raw materials then are shipped to China to be processed and assembled, and the final product is flown back to the U.S. to be sold and placed in the hands of consumers.

Every step in this process generates emissions, and increasingly sophisticated manufacturing techniques for more powerful devices push emissions higher. In _Patterns_, [Freitag et al.](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100340) find that manufacturing, on average, accounts for 50 percent of the emissions generated for a personal computing device, depending on its lifespan before its disposal.

These observations conflict with the “green” vision that techno-utopians and modern economists had for digital services. Digital services can only significantly lower the emissions for a given activity if they replace the physical activity entirely. This means a world where Zoom calls replace most flights, and not a world where there are Zoom calls _and_ flights.

## Outrunning the Rebound Effect

Despite all the ways that digital devices produce emissions, their direct overall contribution to global warming is shockingly small. Freitag et al. find in the same _[Patterns study](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100340)_ that in 2020, digital technologies accounted for an estimated 2.1 to 3.9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This figure roughly captures the emissions generated by the manufacturing, use, and disposal of servers, personal computers, and smartphones.

This emissions figure is contrasted by digital technologies’ social and economic influence. For example, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have a [combined market cap of over $5 trillion](https://companiesmarketcap.com/). Big tech companies facilitate a vast amount of economic and social activity, yet surprisingly, their emissions remain relatively minor.

One explanation lies in the extraordinary energy efficiency gains seen in data centers over the last decade. [According to the International Telecommunication Union](https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx), between the years 2010 to 2018, the number of individuals connected to the internet nearly doubled. This has led to data center workloads increasing sixfold, internet traffic increasing tenfold, and data center storage capacity increasing 25-fold. Yet, [analysis published in Science by Masanet et al.](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba3758) showed that the electricity usage of data centers increased by only 6 percent.

At least for data centers, it seems that a true decoupling between material inputs and useful outputs has manifested. Research and engineering continue to improve compute, cooling, and energy efficiencies, with the ultimate effect of providing more with less. These efficiency gains can hold out for a few more years, as millions more become connected to the internet.

Another explanation for digital technologies’ small emissions footprint is the industry’s heavy investments in renewables. According to [Google’s 2022 Environmental Report](https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2022-environmental-report.pdf), since 2017, the company has purchased enough renewable electricity sources to match the amount of electricity it uses during its operations. Similarly, several big tech companies have banded together to invest [$925 million in carbon capture technologies](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/big-tech-investment-carbon-removal/629545/), the largest investment of its kind to date. Depending on how carbon accounting is done, these investments and purchases can push the emissions generated by tech companies downward.

Digital industries have managed to narrowly avoid the Jevons Paradox in the 21st century. By combining R&D, carbon offset purchases, and renewable investments, tech companies can continue to grow, increasing the amount of computing devices and services provided in the world, while reining in their emissions…

… Or not. What this analysis lacks is a hard look at how these technologies impact external industries. How can we think about the emissions that are enabled by digital technologies, but not directly caused by them?

## Technology is Not (Carbon) Neutral

In May 2020, Greenpeace published [a report](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/oil-in-the-cloud) documenting the ways in which cloud computing service providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have aided fossil fuel companies. The use cases vary from making the transportation of oil more efficient to building out machine learning models based on seismic data to find new oil sources. The consequences were all the same — oil was easier to pull out of the ground.

This is not the only example of how tech influences industry and consumer behavior in harmful ways for the environment. For example, booking flights became dramatically easier due to software improvements, causing a subsequent increase in emissions generated by the aviation industry.

We cannot entirely scapegoat software for the aviation industry’s emissions — airlines and airplane manufacturers must ultimately reduce flights or find ways to make flights more environmentally friendly. But it seems naive to ignore the role that digital technologies play in enabling these emissions.

Our understanding of how technology companies have shifted consumer and industry behavior is still quite small relative to its true scope and scale of transformation. Only recently has some of the data been made public to understand how technologies like social media and smartphones have impacted human behavior. Similarly, researchers and politicians have only recently begun holding technology companies accountable for the harms they have caused to our social and political systems.

Just as we attempt to hold tech companies accountable for social and political harm, we must also hold them accountable for the ecological degradation they enable. We cannot let companies like Google make promises to reach net-zero emissions by 2030 while still holding contracts with fossil fuel companies. We must reconcile the improvements that digital technologies bring with the equally real destruction that they can cause.

## Beyond Digital Greenwashing

Our current economic and political systems incentivize the production and use of fossil fuels. Cheap, abundant, easily transportable energy has been the lifeblood of the 20th and 21st century. Governments dole out land permits to drill for oil, provide subsidies for natural gas, and are hesitant to buck the status quo. How can we guide industry leaders and politicians towards investing into renewables, research, and resilient infrastructure?

Part of the answer lies in digital technologies. While the power of computation can supercharge resource extraction, the reverse is also true. Computation can help preserve the Earth and reduce resource consumption. For example, satellite imagery combined with computer vision has [helped identify illegal fishing operations](https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/06/08/2458326/0/en/Emerging-technology-gives-first-ever-global-view-of-hidden-vessels.html) harming ecosystems. Machine learning models can [increase the efficiency](https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40) of heating and cooling data centers. The key here is to align technology with missions and goals that seek conservation and sustainability, instead of narrow-minded growth.

We can also borrow from Silicon Valley’s playbook. Venture capital firms and Big Tech companies invest heavily in sustainability startups, many of which are attempting to scale experimental technology. As with all startups, many are expected to fail. But only a handful of them need to succeed to have a meaningful impact on emissions.

These investments signal that there is a growing appetite for combating climate change. In [a story from _The Atlantic_](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/big-tech-investment-carbon-removal/629545/), Nan Ransohoff, the Head of Climate at Stripe, says, “We are trying to buy ourselves time to get the right policy mechanisms in place to take this market where it needs to go.” Maybe, just maybe, tech companies and VC firms leading the way in these renewable investments and experimental technologies can give governments and politicians the push they need to follow suit.

The appetite for sustainability work is large and growing in the tech space. Employees and organizations see the value in rapidly reaching net-zero emissions and finding ways to accelerate net-zero efforts across other industries. The next step, with which tech is ever-so-familiar, is scaling up these projects to deal with the grand scope of emissions.

## Beyond Techno Fixes

The emissions figure for the digital tech industry paints a picture that is both hopeful and grim. Despite the industry’s massive influence on commerce and society, it has managed to keep its direct emissions relatively small. Freitag et al. estimates annual emissions to be around 2.3 gigatons of CO2 and the [IPCC WG3 report](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SPM.pdf) estimates that solar and wind energy alone could reduce emissions by two to four gigatons of CO2 by 2030, as the industry strives towards net-zero emissions. Given that tech companies are at the forefront of investing in renewable energy and experimental carbon capture technologies, I am hopeful for a net-zero world for our digital infrastructure.

At the same time, this means that even if the tech industry solves the issue of emissions internally, those changes will be nowhere near enough to prevent a climate catastrophe. The other 96 percent of greenhouse gas emissions comes directly from industries such as agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. And as much as digital technologies may make these industries more efficient, it is unlikely to be enough to completely draw emissions down to net-zero.

> What we need is a Sustainability Revolution — a revolution that changes the core values in our political, economic, and cultural systems to protect the shared wealth of our natural commons.

The [Exponential Roadmap Initiative](https://exponentialroadmap.org/), an organization supported by European politicians, CEOs and the United Nations, calls for using “exponential technologies [to] help dramatically reduce energy, material, and waste.” But we know that this cannot be the only change. The past few decades alone show us that efficiency gains typically lead to more net consumption, not less.

What we need is a Sustainability Revolution — a revolution that changes the core values in our political, economic, and cultural systems to protect the shared wealth of our natural commons.

Writers and activists like Naomi Klein and George Monbiot have spoken at length at what this new system may look like. It could be a world where our energy grid is solar-powered, distributed, and cooperatively owned, where open-sourced software and hardware help manage the system’s complexity without centralizing power and wealth. A world filled with public luxury, in the form of gorgeous parks, theaters, and infrastructure, and where everyone would be satisfied with [private sufficiency](https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/private-sufficiency-public-luxury-land-is-the-key-to-the-transformation-of-society/).1 Whatever form this new system takes, at its core it will value sufficiency, longevity, and sustainability.

## We Build the Future

Digital technologies have given the gifts of connection and education to humanity, while requiring relatively few material inputs. But just as a teenager must mature, so too must the tech industry grow wiser and more responsible for its actions. It must consider not only the impact it has now, but the impact it will have for generations to come. No longer can they avoid accountability under the guise of trying to create radical abundance in an always almost-here future.

Digital technologies have inherited the practices of previous industrial revolutions: exploit labor, concentrate power, and ignore externalities. Centuries of experience have taught us that this is not a sustainable mode of operation. Even in the digital realm, we cannot escape the fact that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Though the window to change our emissions trajectory is rapidly closing, it remains open. We must build a future that acknowledges planetary limits. It is time for us to seize this moment.

1 George Monbiot gave a talk in October 2020 where he coined the phrase “private sufficiency, public luxury.” He describes how unjust and unequal property rights has created a world that protects the ultra-wealthy and frames poverty as a personal failing. Monbiot goes on to argue that individuals embedded in Western cultures need to stop seeing themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” and instead fight for systems that create a floor for quality of life that no one should fall below.

_Tommy Bui Nguyen (he/him) is a software engineer based in Chicago, IL. When he's not at his desk writing code, you'll find him outside running, bouldering, or enjoying a cup of coffee and a book._

The next 30 years mark a unique period in humanity’s timeline. Actions we take between now and 2050 will decide the fate of b...

Digital Transformations, Environmental Degradation


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Aja watched the island float for just a single heartbeat, and then it sank. Like the others before it, reeds and grasses swal...

Chinampa


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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**Encomium To The Sky That Pulls Me Through Wonder**

You forge my tongue into a robot just to bless
 <indent1>my incurable dialect with
 euthanasia,</indent1>
 it sounds pretty good as a demo & does not

<indent3>provoke plosives from rebellious aspirates.</indent3>
 <indent3>It demands more than hyperoxia</indent3>
 <indent2>to call out the puff from a sky drunken with oxygen.</indent2>
 <indent2>You smuggle a black cat</indent2>
 <indent3>into my crude canines just to teach me the dentition</indent3>
 <indent3>of a black panther.</indent3>

To you, this is all it takes to morph a black cat into a jaguar.
 <indent1>To you, a body drugged with wild oncogenes</indent1>
 <indent1>is the closest thing</indent1>
 to a spellbound that ignores boundaries like a fascinated sphinx, like a

<indent3>multipurpose cyborg. Any sharp lyric that could not make it</indent3>
 <indent3>into the mainstream songs</indent3>
 <indent2>should pass as an interlude; no chap should be wasted</indent2>
 <indent2>on the road to stardom,</indent2>
 <indent3>no heirloom ropes the ancestors dearly to my neck</indent3>
 <indent3>ore than the cowries</indent3>

you make out of my thumbnails. I’m beginning to cherish
 <indent1>every modest purpose you knit from my forsaken systems —</indent1>
 <indent1>the way it brightens</indent1>
 the cackling stars into huge galaxies with a dual-edged laughter

<indent3>breaking out of my wrecked mouth. You publish yourself chiefly</indent3>
 <indent3>in me as a marinated body</indent3>
 <indent2>where the year is always so young & full of tomorrow,</indent2>
 <indent2>where cyborgs earn</indent2>
 <indent3>a heart of their own to make themselves worthy of feelings</indent3>
 <indent3>& love.</indent3>

You grant me this purpose & it feels like an answered prayer,
 <indent1>to call me useful & bring it to birth, to pull me through</indent1>
 <indent1>the pool of wonder</indent1>
 & mold me a star amongst the twinkling fireflies.

**Selfless Machine**

There’s so much blade
 on the fist of a country —

so much scissors on the
 hands of blooming laws:

How many times will I start
 with furious naked wires

on my teeth? An egalitarian
 cosmos on my animal heart?

There’s a saintless way of
 excavation: a premonition

of the past taking tolls
 on the future & outlawing

my rocket from batching
 into the space with a lamp

only to end up discovering
 that god is a vacuum feasting

on our echoes. I practice this
 to understand the thing pulling

us under laws. What grows
 a rock in the ignorance of magma?

What walks on water in the oblivion
 of weight? If I had earned the odds to

save the dinosaurs from rebellious
 asteroids — if I had such grace of

pull in this world, don’t you think
 I would make our space selfless &

beautiful before a loyal cause
 blessing our websites with cookies?

_Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan (he/him/his) is a speculative writer of Izzi, Abakaliki ancestry; a Medical Laboratory Science student whose works have been nominated for the Forward Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Best of The Net Award. He was the winner of Write About Now’s Cookout Literary Prize, and has been published in several magazines and journals._

Encomium To The Sky That Pulls Me Through Wonder

You forge my tongue into a robot just to bless
my incurable dialect with
eu...

Encomium to the Sky that Pulls Me Through Wonder, Selfless Machine


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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    cw: police, mental illness, inpatient hospitalization`

It’s 3 a.m. I’m waiting for my cup of Shin Ramyun in the microwave. Whispering into my headphones mic, I talk to two people I met a week ago through a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online) video game from my childhood, Maplestory.

Maybe the reason why the usual social anxiety disappears is because I’ve never met these people before. We get to know each other in Discord “voice chat”, which means we communicate through audio, not video. We bond over in-game quests and weddings in our tiny avatars. We take edibles which results in us losing a treasure hunt in a Christmas celebration with our virtual guild.

Even though I’ve never met any of them in real life, I realize I care for them as friends. There are things we already have in common — Asian Americans from NorCal or SoCal who learned to find community in Maplestory and raves. We send pictures of boba in #real-life-pix, and I watch the video journey of Mott’s newly adopted dog Rila. We create a role called “Assigned Furry” so that we can get instantly notified if Mott goes live in VC and streams his nightly walk with Rila.

Friendship is hard to maintain in virtual times, but on Discord, you can at least have a shot with communist sailor moon memes, crying cat emoji reactions, and roasting each other about your Spotify history.

Moments of virtual joy like these gave me space to heal in a time when I desperately needed to. In times when talking to close friends came with guilt and shame from a health crisis earlier that year, strangers on the Internet became my late-night companions and secret confidantes.

---

In _We Do This ‘Til We Free Us_, Mariame Kaba writes:

“Self care is really tricky for me because I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other.

How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people who are not just our prayer warriors but our action warriors who are thinking through with us? Like, I’m just not going to be able to cook this week, and you have a whole bunch of folks there who are just putting a list together for you and bringing food every day that week, and you’re doing the same for your community too.”

---

In a virtual time, community care webs rely on tech in order for people to all participate, no matter where they are. Recently, I've been inspired by the question of “how can we co-opt technologies to build a more beautiful world?” ([#001: Building Better Realities](https://thecreativeindependent.com/library/software-for-artists-book-building-better-realities/)). Tech can open the door to a more beautiful and accessible future that challenges capitalism, ableism, and racism, especially when it’s created by us and for us ([#BUFU](http://www.bufubyusforus.com/)).

> I don’t believe in self care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other.

Tech as a way of healing is still new and strange to me. I’ve always had a difficult relationship to tech — my time as a former software engineer meant that I became quickly disillusioned with corporate and “CS for social good” tech that focused on capitalistic individualized solutions instead of recognizing the systems that discarded my experiences as a disabled person.

The “hacking” mindset that I first found exciting would haunt me as I realized that I could never “hack” my way into feeling cared for in those environments. During my time in tech, I realized so many parts of me were unwelcome. I learned painfully while undergoing harassment that no corporation would care about my well-being or safety. I turned to community organizing and disability justice as a way of finding hope, healing, and care with communities that understood the harms that the version of tech I had known had glossed over.

---

I never realized the power of virtual community care until my loved ones did it for me. Because of COVID, inpatient hospitals did not allow personal visitors. In general, inpatients are required to give up our personal devices, and are not allowed access to technology at all. This meant two weeks for me of isolation from my loved ones, except for five minutes at a phone booth shared between 20 people if I was lucky enough to get a slot.

As someone who relies on technology to care for myself and keep in touch with my friends, especially the disabled neurodivergent ones that I can’t always be physically with, being forcefully prevented from using technology means withholding the forms of care that feel closest to me.

When I left the hospital, an act of community care that I will always remember is when one of my closest friends created a Google spreadsheet for my friends to sign up to call me. Recovering from an intense manic episode meant entering into an equally intense depressive episode. By recognizing that I didn’t have the capacity to reach out for support and instead reaching out to each other on my behalf, my friends made me realize that a crucial part of community care is creating a care network of who I can turn to when I need support and comfort.

---

The Detroit Community Technology Project believes that communication is a fundamental human right. They define community technology as “an alternative vision of technology in which communities and neighborhoods have direct control over their digital communications, allowing for greater self-determination and power over their shared digital voices” ([Community Tech Handbook](https://detroitcommunitytech.org/sites/default/files/librarypdfs/TeachingCommunityTech.pdf)). Community technology might be digital justice coalitions, community radio stations, makerspaces, community mobile phone networks, and community storytelling platforms.

Tech and the internet have the ability to transform our communities, especially by giving our marginalized communities spaces to shape the future they envision. Seeing community initiatives flourish virtually during the pandemic has given me hope for us to take care of each other instead of depending on the broader institutional channels that fail us.

---

After one too many shrooms trips, my mania eventually entered into psychosis. By definition, psychosis is a state where “thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is _lost with external reality._” During my psychosis, I remember feeling terrified that the police were coming after me. The paranoia consumed me to the point where I stopped sharing my location with friends and unplugged all my electronic devices. The mindset behind this was to not be sent to inpatient psychiatric treatment, where COVID spread at alarming rates similar to other carceral institutions like prisons.

Community care for me during my state of emergency wouldn’t have been possible without technology. The rare moments when I felt comforted in such a state of terror were when my friends FaceTimed me — from Chicago to Seattle to Fresno. Hearing my friends’ voices and seeing their faces were when I felt grounded in external reality, even if fleeting. I found out later that my friends had created a group chat to decide how to best support me — containing my best friend from high school, my college friends, and friends I had met during my gap years who shared my diagnosis.

I never thought I would be grateful for _whitepages_, the site that my high school friends used to find out our targets’ street addresses for Assassins, but it allowed one of my best friends to directly fly and show up at my front door. The feeling of hearing a knock, expecting the brutish voice of a police officer, and instead hearing the warmth of a close friend’s is indescribable.

---

Every time I see a police car, hear a siren, or see the never-ending news cycle on police brutality, I physically and psychologically tense up, reminded of the horrifying reality that cops are considered the first responders to my disabled friends and me when we’re going through a crisis. Due to traumatic encounters with police in my past, I experience paranoia and psychosis specifically around law enforcement during my manic episodes. There will never be enough words to describe how terrifying it is to feel that you can be attacked any moment in your only private space, especially in a time of crisis when all you need is care.

Through our existing institutions, the go-to way of checking in on someone is called a “wellness check”. What this actually means is that you call the police to the door of the loved one you’re worried about. These “wellness checks” that rely on violent state institutions from the police to carceral institutions disproportionately cause harm to disabled BIPOC folks.

This past summer while I was going through a crisis, I was heartbroken to realize that some of my friends kept wanting to call the police (and eventually did), because there was no other option that they knew of. It was hard for me to separate the pain of feeling betrayed by my loved ones in a time of protests that swept the nation against police brutality, and the failure of our current reliance on police and incarceration to provide “wellness” for disabled folks.

When thinking about abolition, radical reimagination of a future is what I dream about and want disabled perspectives to be a part of. I want a “wellness check” where we do not rely on harmful state violence. For me, tech allows me to think of speculative futures where checking in on your friends centers our need for community-centered care that prioritizes the agency and safety of those most vulnerable.

> I want tech that heals instead of harms. As in — tech that brings joy and care to the people I love and care about in a world that fails us.

Even if it’s as simple as being able to brew tea or prepare food for your friend virtually, this is the tech I dream of that allows us to be compassionate for each other. I want something that my friends and I can use to express our love for one another and uplift each other in a world that constantly wants to weigh us down. What I dream of is the concept of a virtual grassroots infrastructure of developing care webs. Automation in this context would save energy of care providers so that we care for each other in a sustainable way.

I want tech that heals instead of harms. As in — tech that brings joy and care to the people I love and care about in a world that fails us. This makes me hopeful for a more beautiful and accessible future where we believe in collective liberation for disabled communities.

---

One of the lessons I didn’t expect to learn from tech was how it would bring technologists into the grassroots movement in innovative ways. Technologists are able to facilitate communication in ways that allow us to care more for each other.

When college went virtual for the first time in spring of 2020, this immediately exacerbated and exposed gaps in learning, from students who did not have stable wifi access or safe residential environments. As a disabled student registered with the Office of Accessible Education, I was grateful enough to have access to academic accommodations. However, academic accommodations are classist in that they often require a diagnosis to determine eligibility, a diagnosis difficult to obtain without financial ability in our current healthcare system. Additionally, academic accommodations failed to support disabled students in virtual environments by not addressing the barriers we faced in accessing the help we needed.

In CS102, an introduction to data programming for humanities and social sciences students, I watched students who had never written a line of code in their life experience enormous pressure as they were expected to learn SQL, Python, R, and even machine learning in 10 weeks with barely any support from the teaching team. I watched through Facetime as my friends wrote fifty-line programs without hitting the run button once and didn’t know how to debug because no one had ever shown them how to write print(“poop”).

Open sourcing software is a practice I’ve always admired. One of the only things I love about coding is how communal it is — copying “collaboration” is encouraged on sites such as Stack Overflow and GitHub because it saves everyone time and energy. It’s a form of practical application-based education for people of all levels to be exposed to creative projects of programming. What I also love is that it encourages people to collaborate, with the idea that anyone is encouraged to contribute no matter their background or experience.

Disability justice has taught me that organizing centers care. Racial and disability justice means understanding how our intersectional identities allow for powerful solidarity. As someone who couldn’t physically be at demonstrations, I wanted to advocate from my keyboard because digital organizing is important to disabled organizers. Over Facebook messenger group chats, our organizing coalition _Who’s Teaching Us_ brainstormed ideas.

I was inspired by the OSS model to “open-source” an email template drafted to professors advocating for classwide academic accommodations for Black, FLI, disabled, QTPOC students. Using Google Docs and Google Sheets, we released the email template along with the emails of professors and administration. We also created a spreadsheet where students could input classes and their professors’ responses — and direct energy at professors who were ableist and racist. This was a spontaneous campaign, but I was amazed and touched by how many different communities reached out.

“One isn’t born an organizer, but becomes one.”

For many, it was their first time organizing, because they had never seen themselves as being part of a movement before. In order to reach over 220 professors and classes, this campaign relied on students from all different disciplines, from engineering to medicine to humanities, who collaborated under the idea of community accountability. This model empowered people, especially those with technical backgrounds, to see how they could contribute, whether it was managing the Google Doc to prevent people from hacking and trolling it, or organizing the spreadsheet for further clarity.

This campaign wouldn’t have been possible without technology, when students were all over the world and we could only communicate with each other online. We created Facebook messenger group chats so that we would update each other and add people who were interested in getting involved. We used Twitter threads to amplify the ableism perpetuated by certain professors in order to gain wider public support, which also resulted in alumni reaching out directly to share their own experiences being denied accommodations from the same professors going back decades. Through technology, we connected with communities that held us in solidarity — their powerful stories allowed us to connect to a broader movement in which we were not the first, that ableism has always been so prevalent and invisibilized by academic institutions. We used Google Drive as a platform to share this template with students from different schools, since movement building is largely dependent on knowledge sharing. The online infrastructure built for this campaign allowed for a lower barrier of entry for people who didn’t have as much organizing experience.

Movement tech, with its belief in strengthening grassroots organizing through technical training and tools, empowers all of us to care for each other in unique ways. Digital organizing gave me the personal hope I needed to ask for help when I didn’t have the capacity to do certain tasks, as organizing is just as much about taking care of each other.

---

We can build a more inclusive and accessible movement if we creatively use technology. I once was at a Chicago rally where it was 95 degrees. I watched people faint and show classic signs of a heat stroke. Although a shocking 10,000 people showed up, there were so many more who couldn’t be physically there. We need to recognize that instances of “offline” organizing have their limits. Virtually, we open pathways so that all people can participate. Even streaming over platforms like Facebook and Instagram Live allow people to feel present.

---

I want to be part of the virtual future where care work is more accessible for us and our loved ones. While it is so rewarding, providing community care can be exhausting. Realizing that I also need to receive care is a lesson that I will always treasure. Accessibility is central to the movement, and there are ways that tech allows us to be better at it.

If we rely on tech companies to save us, they will harm us. When we create the space for and trust communities to care for themselves, we dream up worlds that heal in ways no technocrat could have imagined.

with care,
theresa


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_There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it._

As a child, Minja wished for a world where the stories her father read aloud to her every evening would come alive and that she would live in a land of magic and perilous adventure. She still looked forward to every visit home, though now that her father’s eyes had gotten weak with age, she was now the one doing most of the reading. But with how busy she was, she often couldn’t afford to squeeze any more time out of her schedule.

Even though their days of barely scraping by with enough food on the table were years behind them, her father’s apartment still looked like a Spartan prison cell. _The Genie would change that_, Minja thought, as she gently slid a present wrapped like a golden lamp under the picture of a Christmas tree. Technically, the Genie wasn’t scheduled for public launch until mid-next year, but being a CEO did come with certain special perks.

When Minja visited again a few months later, her father looked almost a decade younger. The previously bare walls were now filled with Kandinskys, his favorite artist. There were actually enough utensils for the two of them!

Her father had never seemed happier.

---

Jackson was enjoying her second lunch break when an email suddenly arrived on her phone. Groans came from all directions as she read the subject line: _Upcoming Changes to Our Company Direction_. So the rumors were true.

Strolling down the hallway, she cocked her head, listening carefully for the source of the noises. Sobs from the second floor? Was it Billy? Umstral? Maybe Anderson. She had always suspected he was a secret crybaby. Jackson grinned as she realized the blurred sounds meant that it wasn’t just one man crying.

Clad in a crimson dress with her flaming head of red hair, Jackson blazed through the hallway like a cleansing fire, inferior chaff fleeing her presence. She marched into Jane, the managing partner’s office. It was about time that someone culled the meek around here. _I’m the best you have, and you know it. Let me run advertising._ Jane nodded sadly, her mind clearly elsewhere. _You can have Billy’s old desk._

Jackson nearly burst out in a dancing spree right then and there, but she regained her composure before she made a fool of herself. She was the new queen! Once upon a time, the _Deep Learning Playboys_, as Billy called his team, reigned king in the office. They and their automated advertisements — the kind that used the latest advances in artificial intelligence to crunch private user data and run hyper-targeted ads while users were swiping on Tinge — were great at selling impulse buys but rarely ended up truly changing a person’s true desires. She was glad her cousin’s Genies were turning them obsolete. True change of desire. That was the goal now. The statisticians and computer scientists — they were out. Scriptwriters, designers, artists — her people — were back in.

Under Jackson, a new age of sales and marketing would begin. In the days of old, an annoying advertisement would interrupt your interactive hologram for a few seconds to show you a product you didn’t really want. In the coming new age, advertisements would no longer interrupt the show — no, no, the advertisement _was_ the show.

Long ago, when her ancestors had somehow still been captivated by noninteractive two-dimensional screens, a popular show called “The Queen’s Gambit” had caused interest in chess to skyrocket. In college, Jackson wondered if she could make a career in the nascent holovision industry, and she had — because she was damn good at her job. A few years ago, a surprise eruption of a supposedly dormant volcano in Michigan had blanked the nearby farms in ash, rendering the soybean crop unusable. Jackson was brought in by a clever Japanese executive to help spin this fiasco into a new line of “smoked” miso paste.

She created a miniseries about a chef whose life quest was to create the perfect miso soup, trying out thousands of ingredients before selecting only the finest materials worthy of his masterpiece. The fact that all brands featured were clients of hers was, of course, a total coincidence. Miso paste sales skyrocketed the week it was released, prompting severe shortages, which led to even more mania as newspapers shamelessly published warnings that it was a once in a millenia opportunity for this limited run of “smoky” miso soup.

Gone were the days where ads used only tricks and half-assed attempts to shill a garbage product. The old frauds had dressed up river stones as gold, imparting them with just enough magic that some fool would pick them up only to find it an ordinary rock. In their place, she stood an alchemist, turning unwanted products into pure gold.

Jackson smiled, thinking of volcanic ash, her stepmother’s awful burnt stew, a lonely childhood on an Arkansas farm — and of the millions she would soon control.

---

_I’m sorry, that’s just not possible,_ Minja replied, trying her best to keep the annoyance out of her voice. Glancing at her watch, she sighed as she realized she was probably going to be late for dinner again. _Our user data is encrypted — even for employees. We can’t access anything without the private key._ Jerry merely grinned, not even a trace of disappointment on his face. He fished into his pocket for a small brass key and waved it at Minja. _Good thing we have Little Vlad’s private key_!

Minja’s jaw dropped. What kind of halfwits did the FBI hire nowadays? Did this idiot seriously not realize that she was referring to cryptographic keys, not physical ones? She opened her mouth to speak, but he continued before she could butt in.

_This morning, we used this key to unlock the front door of Little Vlad’s apartment. My colleagues were able to unlock his laptop and extract, among other things, a string of strange letters and numbers we were hoping you could decode for us._ He unfolded a single sheet of paper and laid it on the table before Minja. _Sorry it’s all in paper form,_ Jerry said grinning even wider than before. _We’re still a bit old-fashioned in government._

Minja gritted her teeth as she typed each of the 256 characters from the sheet of paper onto the computer one by one. “X…8…w….v…3.” She was definitely going to be late for dinner. For a moment, she regretted designing such tight privacy protocols for her Genies. But no, this guy was just trying to get on her nerves. An eternity later, Vladimir Insli’s profile unlocked before her.

Scrolling through his purchase history, Minja reminisced on her own college days. Subscriptions to Netflix and Jacobin. A pair of AirPods Max 6. Orders of MCAT study guides, textbooks on physical and organic chemistry, and protective lab equipment told Minja that Vladimir was probably pre-med. She raised an eyebrow at a large recurring vodka purchase. Alcohol was still illegal for those underage, but the Genie was very clever about getting around that restriction. But Minja’s stomach churned as she realized why the FBI had wanted information on Vladimir. Bleach, steel ball bearings, pressure cookers, nitric acid. Reading her expression, Jerry’s grin grew to truly enormous proportions.

Vladimir had been one of the beta users of the Genies, having gotten access as a gift from his older brother Hudson — Minja’s college friend and the first engineer at Aladdin — for his seventeenth birthday. He loved the product so much that he had joined Aladdin as part of its first intern class the next summer. Minja remembered what he was like: a young, ambitious man ready to take on the world. What had happened to him?

_Don’t worry. We stopped Little Vlad before he could do anything childish_, Jerry said, snapping Minja back into reality. Jerry was staring directly at her, not a trace of his idiotic grin left on his face.

_But next time, it will be up to you._

---

He stood in the river, relaxing as the water pulled the grime from his skin. But even after years of washing himself every day, he still felt dirty, defiled by memories the river was unable to take away from him. He felt the old hot anger rise in him even now, pushing past the chill of the water.

That day … years ago. Minja had announced at all-hands that Aladdin had decided to secretly flag potential terrorists after one of their user’s Genies was suspected of helping him create explosives. The other employees had burst into thunderous applause, one lone man excepted. Burning with rage, he had stood up and screamed an impassioned plea against thoughtcrime. “My brother didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t build a single bomb! All he did was wish — a wish his Genie encouraged! And now, we’re going to break our sacred oath of privacy and betray our users to the deep state?” The woman sitting next to him shifted herself away ever so slightly.

He let his anger wash away with the river. _As a man thinks, so he does become_, he recalled the Master telling him. But he still felt the shame of having helped create Aladdin, and for what had happened to Vladimir. For a while, he had believed as Minja did, that they could bring heaven down to Earth by granting every human’s every wish. Now he knew better.

What Minja (nor that stranger in his past) had never understood was that it was never fulfilling desires that mattered, but shaping them. The fiends in Plato’s cave, the Lotus Eaters of old, the fools in World State London — legends and stories were full of warnings against surrendering yourself to your basest desires. And Vlad ….

He hadn’t thought twice about Vlad’s breakup. Everyone goes through heartbreak, don’t they? But the machine, this demon that he had helped summon — it had latched onto his brother’s anger, nurturing it until it blossomed into evil. It wasn’t Vladimir that did those things. It wasn’t him!

> How could you expect people to not change under the spell of a magic genie?

And though Minja had promised, in every speech she made about Aladdin, that their Genies merely fulfilled wishes without shaping them, he knew it to be a lie, even if she didn’t yet. One simply could not use a tool that powerful and not emerge a changed man. A man who just won the lottery might find himself acquiring a taste in exotic Japanese whiskies, upscale cheese bars, paragliding over glaciers — worlds not even in his dreams before he struck gold. And if a few fistfuls of money can warp your desires, how could you expect people to not change under the spell of a magic genie?

Enough was enough. He left Aladdin (Aladdin asked him to leave, what’s the difference) that afternoon. He resolved to find his own path forward alone, but the damage had been done. Even he hadn’t been able to escape Aladdin entirely. He still clung to his Genie, not as a tool to succumb to the temptations of this world—no, of course not—but rather as a mirror to show him that he had not yet reached nirvana. The elders had chided him, claiming that _one could not cleanse a temple with a dirty rag._ But had the Buddha himself not said to _work out your own salvation, depending not on others_?

He emerged from the river, clean of dirt but not of other stains. He wasn’t ready yet, but one day, when the Genie told him he was sufficiently pure of heart, he would return and save civilization from its desires.

---

Minja knocked nervously on Katherine’s door before entering her apartment. The report had been definitive about the source of the issue, but she didn’t believe it … couldn’t believe it. Her mind flashed back to her father. She remembered his adulation of Matisse, of Cézanne, of Escher and Basquiat and Mondrian too. And yet, only one artist’s prints decorated her father’s apartment now. Better than the blank whiteness that used to adorn those walls, but nevertheless ... she had to see for herself.

Katherine had been part of an experimental group of beta users who allowed Aladdin near complete access to their life in exchange for large monetary compensation. Even Minja herself had jealously eyed these penthouse apartments Aladdin rented out for them free of charge. But now, Minja’s stomach wrenched as she entered the living room and she wasn’t sure if it was from the stench of cat droppings that littered the room or the sight of Katherine, who sat perfectly still except for her eyelids, staring at a holovision projection of thousands of kittens scurrying all over the room.

Her research team’s report suggested that what social media had started in the early twenty-first century, Aladdin’s Genies had sent into overdrive. Catering to a user’s every desire was easier if the Genie could predict them in advance. Yet normally, prediction of every human whim was impossible even for an AI as powerful as Aladdin’s Genies. And so, to better serve their users’ needs, Genies were gently nudging them to become more predictable over time. In severe cases, they ended up like Katherine.

Unable to bear the sight any longer, Minja fled the apartment. Hudson had been right after all, that bastard, though for all the wrong reasons. She had to do something, anything to fix this. Perhaps she could change the Genies? Her mind flashed back decades, to when she was just a young girl desperate to prove she could make a name for herself, when she was just starting to create Aladdin. Her first attempt created a genie that catered to what its user wanted to want, not what they actually wanted. It had flunked. In retrospect, the reason was obvious. User case studies identified unused gym memberships, unread subscriptions to The Economist, kale that went bad in the back of the fridge. What the user wanted to want was, almost by definition, not what they wanted.

She had always sworn, to herself and to anyone who would listen, that Genies merely catered to a user’s whims without shaping them in any way. It wasn’t just an ethical consideration — it was a survival tactic too. As Aladdin grew, the same men who had snubbed her back when they thought her nothing more than a diversity admit now returned with requests that she use her newfound power over desire for their benefit. Sometimes, they cloaked their request in noble language, asking her to _revitalize American pride_ or _encourage healthy eating habits_. Other times, they resorted to threats, bribes, flattery — sometimes even temper tantrums. Her favorites were the egomaniacs like her cousin blabbering about how they wanted to give users a choice — to choose whatever they were selling, of course. She had always refused, citing her oath.

> Aladdin would birth a future — a triumph of desire — where the old gods no longer reigned.

But now she knew that her Genies never merely catered to their master’s whims in the first place. Minja grimaced at the gravity of the realization and what she had to do now. If the Genies could not help but warp their master’s desires, then at least they could push their users towards complex, nuanced goals. Goals indescribable in simple language; goals worthy enough to be held by a living, breathing human. Genies would not assume you were the person you desired to be anymore and that your desires were static. They would help you walk the journey there. Thinking about the future of Aladdin, she felt more alive than she had in many years.

In her garden, wheat and weeds would grow alike. A person with noble desires would find themselves supported just as much as a person with evil ones. Aladdin would birth a future — a triumph of desire — where the old gods no longer reigned. Wealth, power, status, even ability itself, would soon all bow down before the new queen.

If that meant that the public would crucify her once they found out that she had abandoned her old principles and was now actively using the Genies to warp user behavior, so be it. Her father had always told her to never let the perception of others prevent you from doing the right thing. If the cost was living the rest of her life in ignominy, she would gladly pay the cost.

And if that meant that people like Vladimir, people with seeds of evil in their heart that Genies would carefully nurture, would be driven to commit heinous sins?

So be it.

---

Three years after Hudson’s disappearance, Vlad still checked his mailbox every morning for a letter that never came. Today, as usual, the mailbox was still empty. But as he stepped back inside to take his routine mid-morning nap, Vlad was startled by a surprise holovision broadcast projecting a crowd of angry newscasters all over his living room. He initially cowered away, then realized that they were not here for him. Instead, they hurled insult after insult at a lone figure standing defiantly in the center, each insult animated to appear as a stone that exploded upon arrival into the corresponding subtitles. The figure was Minja.

_You stand accused..._

…_of inciting division and hatred in humanity._

…_of personally arranging the murder of a would-be whistleblower._

Vlad hazily recalled that some conspiracy theorists were still speculating that Minja had Hudson murdered right before he blew the whistle on Aladdin. But as much as he hated the woman, Vlad didn’t believe that she had murdered his brother. Hudson _had_ been acting strange before he disappeared. He kept talking about returning to nature, the horrors of industrialized society, escaping from the shadow of Mammon. Ironic, how their parents had always worried about his mental health but it was Hudson who had snapped first. Vlad guessed that he actually had gone through with whatever plan he had. After all, he had given away all his money before he disappeared.

He had never puzzled out why Hudson’s money had come with a strange stipulation that he either give up his genie or never upgrade it again, especially given that the vast majority of his wealth was still in the form of Aladdin stock options. It was a bit annoying never getting any of the newer features, but compared to several billion dollars, it was a rather small sacrifice.

Minja stood silent amid the carnage. When the jeering slowed, she simply said: _I recant nothing. I am ready to face the consequences of my actions._ At this, the newscasters restarted their onslaught of words against Minja with an even greater fury.

_...of assisting crimes of torture, human trafficking, and money laundering._

…_of aiding and abetting terrorists._

Vlad’s heart raced at the mention of terrorism. But a few seconds later he relaxed again. The media had long forgotten about his stunt, especially after several high-profile cases where the terrorists had succeeded.Once upon a time, he had yearned for fame and fortune, but nowadays, Vladimir wanted nothing more than to never enter the limelight again.

_…of encouraging and condoning genocide._

…_of supporting enemies of the state, both domestic and abroad._

As much as he enjoyed watching Minja’s downfall, Vladimir’s eyes started drooping. He turned away from the holovision and was surprised to find a needle already prepared for him. Even after all these years, he was continually amazed at how his Genie seemed to understand him better than he understood himself. He smiled as Minja and his other worries faded into white.


There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

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Triumph of Desire

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

The future is full of colour.

The future is where we make good on the promises we made to ourselves and others, and pause to look back on dreams from past selves. It’s where we arrive. The future is where we find our new selves when we’re with one another. Where there’s enough food, shelter, time, and serotonin for everyone. Where safety and comfort enable bold experiments in new ways of being. We learn from our neighbors in the natural world how to coexist symbiotically. We learn to be present, both here and there. In the future, there is acknowledgement of our histories, the remembrance of harm so that there is healing. There is peace and abundance. In the future, we are thriving rather than surviving.

The future is a garden, full of spaces for bodies to rest, and to joyfully work. Flowers and people bloom in ways that are true to themselves. Queerness is read as a beautiful, not terrifying, thing.

The future is slick with expectations — all the _tomorrows_ we’ve promised ourselves — so tell me, what are the seeds you’re planting today?

The future is where the sandcastles we build don’t get washed away so quickly.

The future is where we don’t need to prove anything in order to be worthy of life and love and care, a world where people find support outside of individual relationships.

The future is an unrolled complex system. We cannot predict it, nor can we control it. But we can give it small nudges. We cannot reap the rewards — only hope that someone else will, in the fullness of time. In the meantime we must choose to live instead in the fullness of our space, pushing ourselves to nudge the trajectory of the world more potently. We live with purpose, so that the future has purpose.

The future is where we are free to learn and grow. Our systems support this instead of constraining us to the status quo.

The future is where understanding hides; it reveals itself gently as we advance ever closer to time’s singularity point.

The future is no morning alarms, untimed walks through the forest, and not measuring the hours worked or words written. We have ways of rewarding those who sustain us, those who take care of us, and those who push our thinking forward, and “work” is reframed as time spent in the common social project.

The future is community-based, abundant, playful, warm, and generative, full of love, compassion, care, and joy.

The future brims with potential. It is pluralistic, messy, and beautiful.

The future is a debt to the past even as it’s a creditor to whom we owe the present.

The future is mutually owned, beautiful, open air. It’s large, endless, fast, unknowable. You could never see all of it, and it’s full of conflict and tension. It has spaces growing and burning, peaceful and chaotic, barren and sprawling. While there’s more pieces to it than you could ever touch or feel, the parts you can, that you know yourself, are also limitless. It’s a bit like New York City, or the ocean, or a human body, but larger and more diverse, its pockets all so different from one another. The future is exploring all of this, and loving, creating, and worshipping small parts of it, for as long as you wish.

The future is filled with trees in spaces once razed, after we successfully studied how to attain given ends with minimum means. The future is filled with goal setting that is largely internal, rather than external goals that demand more resources from the world. We seek mastery directly instead of its proxies.

The future is what we make of it.

The future is built interaction by interaction, tool by tool, concept by concept, hand in hand.

The future is full of good friction, the kind that involves effortful application of our attention and
energy, like that required to practice a new skill or finish a work of art. It is also undetermined: statements about the future are only as true as we are willing to argue, build, and fight towards them.

​​The future is the cup of coffee that tastes like music, a journey to the faraway lands that is slowly revealed and revealing, empowering yet freeing, and we must wander the forest full of possibilities.

The future is now, old man!

The future is beautiful in its vastness. So much to see, watch, learn, play with, talk to, enjoy, soak in, cry about, laugh at/with. There’s not enough time to explore it all, even if we spend all of eternity doing it. That’s what the future is. Maybe that scares some people, that we’ll never be able to do everything or know everything. But it gives me hope — hope that we will learn to stop trying to optimize everything in the future and to enjoy the present a little bit more.

The future is wonderful and kind and messy. It is so full of splendour.

The future is abundant for everyone.

The future is one where time no longer circumscribes our dreams. Dances will never need to end, loved ones do not die, and everything is possible. There will be abundant cake for everyone, and the cake will not be made with violence.

The future will be co-authored by all of us.


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

The future is full of colour.

The...

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