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

e-raced

Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

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

Opus

As technologists, our work involves acts of immense power, and society both admires and fears these acts. This power is a rec...

What is Technology?

past

“When organizers imagine a world without poverty, without war, without borders or prisons—that's science fiction. They're m...

From the non-ideal to the ideal: what technologists can learn from activists

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

      “Hello Jasmine! We enjoyed ou...

A Guide to Options at the End of the World

cw: police, mental illness, inpatient hospitalization

It’s 3 a.m. I’m waiting for my cup of Shin Ramyun in the microwave. Wh...

a love letter to virtual community care 🌱💞

I came into college as a baby “social justice warrior” planning to major in ethnic studies and become a professor. I was deep...

take back the future! the progressive case for techno-optimism

The day after I hit my head, I took the train to Kendall Square in Cambridge, where I was meeting a friend near MIT. It...

Beyond + Escape: A body in pain and computation

Arrive —



Tour Guide (TG):
Welcome. I hope your travels here went smoothly. I will be your guide on today’s tour of here. B...

a tour of ‘here’

Speed and scale are redefining industries: fast food changes what we eat, fast fashion changes what we wear, and now, fast fo...

Fast Food Education

present

Escape into Cyberspace

Having spent years interacting with founders and managers at large tech companies, I cannot escape th...

Unstoppable Mechanisms

170 bpm. binaural isochronic tonal embeddings. alpha and beta waves ranging between 8 hz and 27 hz. i’m working on a brainwav...

hypnopompia

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As a child, Minja wished for a...

Triumph of Desire

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A Conversation About Crypto

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

The future is full of colour.

The...

The Future Is

future

We are at the beginning of history.

In the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence, humans have been here for 200,000 years,...

Editor’s Note

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Urgency and Agency in Technology Policy: A Conversation with Ifeoma Ozoma

When my boyfriend, Rel, told me that there was something about his friend Kathryn, that she could see him in a way he wasn’...

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Cultural Resistance to SESTA/FOSTA: Reflecting on Community Curation

**self portrait (with/without)**

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

**untitled.py**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

self portrait (with/without)

With neatly diced fruit tucked into earthenware bowls. Without a real conversation
as my parent...

on days like today i dream of futures past


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

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

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

### Becoming a Creator

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

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

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

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

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

**J**: That sounds intense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

### Platforms, Policies, and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Passions, Platforms, Politics: A Conversation with Rosie Nguyen

They aim to build the metaverse, these bright-skinned white-teethed boys. They
talk breathlessly of frictionlessness, and I t...

Transubstantiation


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

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

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

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


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

For so long I had thought product design...

Drawing Rectangles


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

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


Technology Moving
Synthetic Meat
Singularity
Robot Learns

Phil Witte is a cartoonist and humor writer. His cartoons have app...

Four Cartoons

People

A Dispatch from Maine Correctional Center

The trees thin out on my drive from downtown Portland to Windham, Maine, a small t...

Prison Phones and the Problem with Profits

Prison Phones and the Problem with Profits: Can an upstart tech nonprofit take on the $1.4 billion prison communications industry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Before copyright, adaptation was the norm. Most famously, half of Shakespeare’s plays were adaptations of existing stories, and Dante’s _Inferno_, infamously Bible fanfiction, is at this point canon. It is in our nature to engage with cultural artifacts by creating, and that’s why fandom is so prolific despite its ambiguous legal standing in our profit-driven, IP-centered world. Fandom blurs the artificial lines we’ve created between producers and consumers and is a return to our undying instinct to create collectively and without restriction.

Despite its existence outside a legally-anointed canon, fan production — which encompasses fan-created games, movies, music, comics, zines, art, and most notably in the U.S., fiction — remains a massive engine of global cultural production. As of April 2019, Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the largest online repositories for fanfiction, hosted [32 billion words](https://twitter.com/ao3_status/status/1117535084486246401) of fanfiction. For comparison, English Wikipedia hosts only [4 billion words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia) of content. Comiket, a biannual marketplace exclusively for selling self-published fan media, is [the largest fan convention in the world](https://qz.com/1332228/san-diegos-comic-con-has-nothing-on-tokyos-comic-market/).

Why does fan production matter at all? There’s a lot of fan work, but isn’t the vast majority really… amateur? Sure, but that’s the point. Raw realized creativity challenges the notion that we have to create “good” media according to some arbitrary metric of artistic merit. Fan production’s anonymous and community-centered nature reserves a space for creative engagement outside the pressures of appealing to a mass cultural market. From [slashing](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203855430-23/slash-fic-re-imagined-texts-queer-commentaries-commentaries-richard-berger) the [all-male cast of the Three Kingdoms](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24886590) to [queering the heterosexual relationships of the original Star Trek](http://queergeektheory.org/docs/Lothian_QFS.pdf), fandom has traditionally been the only space to explore queer and non-masculine narratives outside a patriarchal and heteronormative canon.

> Fan production speaks to our unrelenting desire to create, socially.

Stringent copyright laws have created a frontier outside profit-driven cultural production for fandom to flourish beyond. Tied together through the shared experience of a piece of media and barred from legal legitimization, creators have self-organized into decentralized communities, from independent music groups dedicated to rearranging Touhou soundtracks to collectives of Genshin Impact fanzine artists, all focused on transformative cultural production. These second-order creative spaces provide an example of how community-centered cultural production can exist outside, and actively resist, the confines of a hyper-capitalist media market.

---

Fan creators have always been on a legal precipice that necessitates an incentive to create other than for profit. In the U.S., fanfiction is generally understood as “[fair use](https://web.archive.org/web/20090905205526/http://www.tushnet.com/law/fanficarticle.html)” of copyrighted material, which permits transformations of work like critiques or parodies. Though a few cases have established that fanwork can be sold under fair use, this is still relatively shaky ground due to the power asymmetry between independent fan creators and copyright holders. Whether media falls under fair use is litigated on a case-by-case basis, and lawyers are too expensive for the typical fan creator. For instance, FUNimation, an anime streaming site, states that commercial fan art sales are [copyright-infringing](https://animecons.com/news/post/1481/funimation-announces-stance-on-fan-art), but that they will allow it, and they choose to threaten or actively issue takedowns only when it pleases them.

Fan-made media like music and fanvids are also subject to the aggressive copyright-scanning algorithms implemented by platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Copyright infringement is one of the few things digital platforms can be held liable for if they don’t respond to copyright takedown requests. To avoid liability and maintain profit viability, digital platforms build and maintain massive [systems for multimedia content censorship](https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12165194/youtube-content-id-2-billion-paid), themselves becoming co-opted into the copyright oligopoly held by Hollywood media conglomerates. This is entirely by design; accidental takedowns are simply treated as collateral damage to an otherwise functional system. This is also why we no longer see fan-made videos or music videos on ad-driven platforms like YouTube; almost all multimedia fan creations outside of original animations are susceptible to the copyright takedown engine.

The prevailing understanding across fan creators is that by eschewing mass distribution and mass profitability, they can avoid the scrutiny of large conglomerate copyright holders, and in the U.S., have their work more likely to be classified as fair use. But even so, fan work can still get into legal trouble. If there’s anything mass media conglomerates fear more than copyright infringement, it’s porn. Fan work is notorious for being very NSFW, internet shorthand for “not safe for work.” For example, _50 Shades of Grey_ started as a _Twilight_ fanfiction, the _dojinshi_ (Japanese fan comic) subreddit is filled with exclusively porn, and [a legal case](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html) recently drew mainstream attention to the _omegaverse_ genre of literary erotica, which was born in “Supernatural” fanfiction communities. Even though fans might create mostly non-explicit work, the horny stuff can be more popular, and [thus more visible](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16876518). It’s often the explicit nature of fan work, more so than the copyright infringement itself, that gets it in trouble. Many copyright enforcement letters and even copyright-based [arrests](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=347620) throughout fanwork history are sent as a [result](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Letters_to_Star_Wars_Zine_Publishers_by_Maureen_Garrett) of [moral panic](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Restricted_Section) over fan-made porn. Infamously, in 2020, China’s Great Firewall started blocking visits to AO3, citing “pornographic materials,” subsequently [wreaking havoc](https://chaoyang.substack.com/p/jokerfied-fandom) to mainland Chinese fandom communities. Such moral panic further pushes fan creation out of mass media circles and into independent and decentralized distribution networks.

But it goes the other way, too: especially in the U.S., creators generally eschew profit as a motive for both ideological and legal reasons. Creators might generally agree that profit is not a primary incentive, but fans [have always argued](https://fanlore.org/wiki/How_Fanfiction_Makes_Us_Poor) over sustaining a gift economy versus fighting to further the commercial rights of fan work (and thus, legitimization of fan labor in the cultural market). In 2007, a company called [FanLib](https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanLib) gained popularity as a for-profit archive for fan works. The company partnered with copyright owners of popular fandoms and offered to compensate fan writers for their time. It was subsequently met with a large amount of skepticism and concern from fan communities. This event, among other dissatisfactions with existing fan work platforms, instead [spurred](<https://fanlore.org/wiki/An_Archive_Of_One%27s_Own_(post_by_astolat)>) the ongoing collectivization of fan creators and lawyers into the _Organization for Transformative Works_ in 2008, which runs AO3 and works to maintain the status of fan work as “fair use.”

Some point out that fandom communities in laxer [copyright environments](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=347620), and in particular, fan (_dojin_) creators in Japan, do not entirely forgo profitability. Japan’s independent _dojin_ production scene is incomparable to any other fan market due to its sheer size — as evidenced by the size of Comiket, the largest _dojin_ market-turned-fan convention with over [half a million visitors](https://qz.com/1332228/san-diegos-comic-con-has-nothing-on-tokyos-comic-market/#:~:text=From%20August%2010%2D12%2C%20around,fan%20convention%20in%20the%20world.). However, [only 15 percent of sellers](https://fanhackers.transformativeworks.org/2012/06/10/how-much-money-do-doujinshi-creators-actually-make-some-statistics-from-comiket/) at Comiket turn a small profit, and the vast majority of sellers break even or lose money. Most importantly, _dojin_ distribution remains largely decentralized and independent of mass media distribution. Like in the U.S. fanfiction gift economy, though _dojin_ creators participate in markets, they actively forgo mass financialization.

Outside of outright stealing fan works, many media companies have also begun to understand fandom as sources of promotional value. Canon creators often engage productively with their fans, with many creators coming from fandom communities themselves. Similarly, it is common for fan creators to enter “canonicity” using their fan work as a launching point, the most famous example being _Fifty Shades of Grey_. There is a long-term risk that these content producers will find a way to fully co-opt fan creators into their economic model. But for the time being, it seems like fan production continues to be inscrutable to large media companies other than as promotional consumers, easily activated with some low-hanging [queerbait](https://gizmodo.com/thats-bait-1845593202). In this corporate vision of fan content, the line between the canon creator and the fan consumers is still clear; it’s just that it has become permissible for one to occasionally cross into the role of the other.

In contrast, in fandom, as a creator, the lines between “producer” and “consumer” are broken down. In _Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity_, David S. Roh [describes](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt19704tx) how authors from Comiket booths were familiar with each other and continually exchanged zines, sketches, and readings of each others’ work. Creators within a small fan community make for each other and with each other, building off each other’s work and ideas to generate new pieces of media. Within a fandom, theories, images, or ideas from other fan works become long-standing traditions — effectively “canonized” within these spaces.

Fan production is an ongoing process, based in communities that continually imagine and alter their own canons. The way a community evolves a canon is as varied as the reasons people become involved in a fandom. Some fans create as a motivating way to produce and practice a particular art; many fandom communities are also built around mutual mentorship and learning. Many fans also create as a form of critique, as they might find the originals lacking in various ways. Fans who found a particular ending frustrating might invent their own, alternate ending; fans who object to a particular way a work encodes certain social mores might seek to disrupt them.

However, communities around fan creation are not perfect, and many are rife with problems. Like many Internet-based communities, fandoms can be weird, [toxic](https://gizmodo.com/when-fandom-is-the-problem-1835695031), and often gatekeep what it means to be a fan, counter to the mythos that fandom is welcoming and open to everyone. U.S. fandoms are notoriously [overwhelmingly white](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119237211.ch19) and [bad at engaging with race](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119237211.ch20) as well as international and transcultural issues. Academic fan studies [tend to focus](https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1737) on U.S.-based experiences of media and fan production as well, despite the global nature of English-speaking fan communities. Copyright law may have helped create a space for non-profit cultural production, but within this space, communities need to be built in an intentional way to engage with critique and avoid inheriting the inequalities that are already present in the mainstream.

---

Fans continue to dominate pop culture. Media companies have a hand in this, encouraging passive social media fan engagement that centers, promotes, and gatekeeps canon, while largely ignoring the fan creators that they inspire in the process. As long as there is a canon, communities will continually imagine and alter it. Fan production speaks to our unrelenting desire to create, socially. It will continue to flourish despite the growing influence of copyright.

> If we want to look towards what community-based cultural production might look like at a massive scale, we have to look at fandom.

These communities are resilient, too. After the recent banning of AO3 in China devastated many global fan communities, it made me truly appreciative that the archive existed in the first place. Not only has AO3 been an entirely pragmatic move against the threat of future copyright takedowns, but it has also been an ideological force against advertisement and platformization in an age plagued by both. Amazingly, fandom communities continue to largely resist mass financialization.

[Internet economists ](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/the-internet-we-built-that.html?src=dayp)have long been fascinated with [open-source and Wikipedia editing communities](https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/jopp_235.pdf) as alternatives to capitalist modes of production, but not enough outside fan studies have looked to [fan labor](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10870&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1659567078378993&usg=AOvVaw1JmmCX9VtlwBnGNuyFvbVE). If we want to look towards what community-based cultural production might look like at a massive scale, we have to look at fandom.

_Mona Wang (she/her) is a recovering open source maintainer and femslash artist. She is also currently a Ph.D. student researching computer security and tech policy._

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

**All Thumbs**

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

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

On receiving an unwanted Windows
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

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I was the only one who could do it, she had said. (I, in this situation, referred to me, which raises questions of perspectiv...

The Memory Machine


_After Gina Apostol_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


After Gina Apostol

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

$0.99 s...

A list of important memories

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Tools

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I spent the summer after my sophomore year of high school bedridden with pneumonia, watching every episode of the crime show _White Collar_. I now associate sickness with procedural dramas — those whodunnit TV series that introduce a crime then solve it in the same episode. Watching these shows, I undermine my own standards for what makes “good” media. Instead, plot twists irk me. I crave predictability, the swaddling certainty that evidence leads logically to a perpetrator.

For most of us, television is the most vivid reference for what happens in the courtroom. Jurors raised on crime shows expect damning visual or forensic evidence, a phenomenon called “The CSI Effect.” Beyond Hollywood productions, however, the perfect illustrative evidence often does not exist.

It _can_ be generated, though. Increasingly, attorneys turn to computers to create the missing visual evidence that will help them win their cases. The results are legal animations: computer-generated videos that illustrate an expert’s testimony or a witness’s description of an event.

These animations become visual aids to help jurors understand and remember the facts of a case. When used as tools to communicate testimonies, animations improve comprehension and decrease court time.

Still, something else — something more insidious — is happening when we view an animation. As computer-generated exhibits, animations lend a technical authority to the specific, often seductive, narratives they depict. Even though animations reproduce testimony, the experience is now mediated through a computer. The computer has become the witness.

---

On a large screen beside the jury box, the animation begins: Jennifer stands in her living room, realistically rendered with wire-rimmed glasses and animal-print pajamas. Her husband, Michael Serge, enters the room, gun drawn. A bright blue line extends from the gun through Jennifer’s torso, showing the trajectory of Serge’s first shot. Serge then fires into a wall before aiming again at his wife, now cowering on the ground. Another line, this time fluorescent green, depicts a final shot through Jennifer’s body. The screen turns black. An eerie silence grips the courtroom.

This 2001 murder case marked the first high-visibility use of animations as evidence, with members of the local legal community attending the trial to spectate. “They watched my client execute his wife,” Serge’s defense attorney later said. After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury found Serge guilty of first-degree murder.

Within the courtroom, animations are _demonstrative_ evidence, meaning they are meant to aid the jury in understanding other evidence or testimony, but they are not evidence in their own right. To create a crime scene animation, a developer first gathers data from sources such as police reports, witness interviews, depositions, photographs, and expert investigations. She then decides the composition of each frame and renders it on the computer.

In an evidentiary sense, animations exist as a foil to simulations, the more scientific, more stringently-defined category of computer-generated exhibits. Simulations must use verified data and approved software to perform analysis. A car crash simulation, for instance, might input raw data about a car’s weight and speed to recreate the collision. Once admitted as evidence, a simulation is treated as _substantive_ (or “real”) evidence and may be used to establish the facts of a case.

Animations, by contrast, are inherently subjective as reproductions of witness testimony. In Hinkle v. City of Clarksburg, a case involving a police standoff where a man was shot to death, the defense presented an animation showing the victim raising a shotgun towards the officers, though additional evidence of the victim’s body location, the timing of gunshots, and another officer’s testimony all conflicted with this animation. The court allowed the animation because it was “designed merely to illustrate [the defendant’s] version of the shooting.”

Animations point to two shades of truth that may conflict: truth as what factually occurred and “truth” as perceived by a witness. This softer, more subjective form of “truth” captures one version of the story, often a perspective deliberately chosen for persuasion. Animations therefore enable different sides of a case to construct coherent, convincing narratives in support of their arguments.

> Animations point to two shades of truth that may conflict: truth as what factually occurred and “truth” as perceived by a witness.

Developers aiming to produce these narratives illustrate a tension between the fact of evidence-based animations and the fiction of film and entertainment. During cross examinations, developers argue that animations are not “movies,” with all the artificiality and melodrama that this distinction suggests. Instead, they emphasize animations as grounded in scrupulously-collected data, making them as legitimate and “objective” as other forms of evidence.

Still, developers reference Hollywood films to lend credibility to their animation techniques. Michael Schumaker, who worked with George Zimmerman’s defense team, bragged about using the same technology as the movie _Avatar_: For his animation, actors in motion-capture suits reenacted the events of Trayvon Martin’s death. Jason Fries, creator of an animation for the Van Dyke trial, compared his process of measuring the crime scene with lasers and drones to the techniques in _Toy Story_ and _Monsters, Inc_.

It shouldn’t be surprising that animations are successful for many of the same reasons as films. Animations, like films, often make emotional appeals by focusing on the experience of those involved. In Salvator v. ValueJet, a case involving a plane crash, an animation allowed jurors to experience the “terror of the three and a half minutes it took [the defendant’s] plane to fall from the sky.” To quote Brian Stonehill, a media studies scholar, legal animation “works on a visceral level that quite easily bypasses skeptical, rational faculties.”

> Here is the wizardry of animations: their ability to tell a story, to frame it as objective, and to do it all without the viewer even realizing.

---

This last part, the unconscious convincing, is essential. Jurors are often unaware about the effects of animations on their judgements. In a study by Meghan Dunn, Peter Salovey, and Neal Feigenson, mock jurors who were influenced by animations later self-reported that these displays were not important to their verdict.

Given the differences between court cases and the importance of context for juror decisions, research on persuasion is challenging. Existing studies show conflicting results: while multiple psychology studies observed changes among participants who viewed animations (more damages awarded, more acquittals), another study found no effect.

More conclusive studies focus on what kinds of animations persuade, and researchers agree that perspective can drastically influence juror opinions. In a 1995 study, participants saw either an animation of a plane crash from the cockpit view, an audiotape and written transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, or a reading of the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder. Mock juries who viewed the animation instead of the voice recording provided significantly lower ratings of responsibility for the flight crew. Researchers suggest that this difference may be due to empathy from viewing the simulation from the pilot’s perspective. In 2014, another study led by different researchers replicated this finding, with participants who viewed an animated sequence of a car collision reporting significant differences in their judgments of culpability based on the perspective of the animation (overhead, facing, or internal).

This is grounded in the Actor-Observer Effect, which describes the tendency to attribute the behavior of others to internal causes and attribute the behavior of ourselves to external, situational causes. A study on videotaped confessions found that participants rated confessions as genuine when viewed from the suspect’s point of view and coerced when viewed from the detective’s point of view.

The effects of animations are magnified in situations for which jurors lack direct experience. In the same study by Dunn, Salovey, and Feigenson, animations of a car crash did not affect mock juror decisions. For a plane crash, however, viewing an animation changed jurors’ judgments of responsibility. Researchers suggested familiarity with the subject matter as an influence for this discrepancy.

Most unnerving, though, is the fact that animations can mislead. In a 1997 study, mock jurors determined whether a man’s fall from a building was an accident or suicide. When jurors only saw the fall, judgements were consistent with physical evidence. However, when animations depicted the man running and jumping from the building in addition to the fall, jurors ruled the death a suicide, even though this conflicted with physical evidence. Alarmingly, the animated (demonstrative) evidence led jurors to disregard the physical (substantive) evidence.

---

The persuasive power of animations may be wielded unequally if only one side can afford this evidence. Today, animation firms quote prices starting at 1,000 dollars — a significant investment for a non-essential visual aid. The final cost may be much greater depending on the complexity of the display. Moreover, the costs of animations are felt by both sides. The opposing side may be pressured to develop their own animations or settle due to the inequality in evidence.

Often, specialized software is necessary to create animations, and the developer’s credentials may be examined when the animation is presented as evidence. This means specialized firms are often hired to create animations. Even if a litigant had the technical skills to create an animation, it might not be accepted by the court. Animations therefore remain out of reach for those with limited budgets or time, such as people represented by public defenders.

Unsurprisingly, this technology recreates and exacerbates already-existing inequalities. Still, legal animations create an entirely different form of inequality in the courtroom: though Americans tolerate a legal system that allows litigants to pay for better attorneys, animations introduce opportunities for people to pay for better _evidence_.

> Animations therefore remain out of reach for those with limited budgets or time, such as people represented by public defenders.

---

Animations prove to be a slippery, often-inaccessible form of narrative construction. As seen by their use in police brutality trials, the reliance on this technology can lead to perverse consequences.

Following a low-speed reckless driving case in Brunswick, Georgia, police officers shot Caroline Small, a white woman, eight times. For the subsequent case, the Glynn County Police Department created an animation of Small running into officers with her car. The animation explained their decision to shoot, but the scenario was impossible: Small’s car was stuck in a ditch, with another officer’s SUV blocking her path. A Georgia Bureau of Intelligence (GBI) agent called the animation a “grossly inaccurate” picture of the crime scene. Still, after viewing the animation, the grand jury failed to indict the officers. The animation allowed the police department to manufacture their own truth, effectively covering up murder.

The perspective-altering ability of animations benefits officers during the legal process. In an era of ubiquitous cameras, police brutality is often captured on video by dash cameras, bystanders, or security footage. Yet, when these cases go to trial, the defense frequently uses animations to illustrate the situation from the perspective of the police officer.

This is illustrated in the murder trial for Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald, a Black man, 16 times in 2018. In one view in the animation, the camera appears to hover over Van Dyke’s shoulder while his gun aims at McDonald — a scene resembling a third-person shooter video game.

The prosecution noted multiple inaccuracies in the defense’s animation: McDonald is shown moving from 39 feet to 13 feet away from Van Dyke in four seconds (a speed the prosecution found unfeasible) and is depicted in all-black clothing (he actually wore jeans). The defense also argued that a dark red line highlighting McDonald makes him appear taller than in real life.

Other omissions in the animation heightened the impression that Van Dyke was in danger. The animation does not show Van Dyke’s bulletproof vest or the other officer trailing McDonald. Further, the animation only shows Van Dyke shooting McDonald five times, ending when McDonald hits the street without showing the remaining (11) shots fired. The animator testified that he only included the bullets he could track, an omission that fails to communicate the absurd number of shots made by Van Dyke. In this sense, the animation is not incorrect but incomplete. Yet, the omission works in their favor: At the end of the animation, if these additional 11 shots were shown, would jurors find Van Dyke’s actions justified?

Look at the controversial cases of the past few decades, and many feature animations on the side of the defense. We know the names of the victims: Rodney King, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Jacob Blake.

These animations attempt to show events before witnesses’ cameras began filming, creating a narrative that cannot be disproven with other video evidence. In cases of police violence, the defense may have special abilities to develop the animations: unlike the opposing side, they have access to resources and the ability to defend the perspective. In cases where the police officer fatally shot the victim, an opposing animation from the point-of-view of the victim is impossible. No witness testimony can accompany an animation from this perspective, so it would likely fail to be admitted as evidence. Instead, the defendant holds the power to construct a narrative.

Legal animations reflect contemporary animation technology, including the uncanny realism of humans. While most animations use generic, crash-dummy figures to represent those involved, police brutality animations often create life-like models with people’s specific attributes. For many of these cases, this is a reminder that the perpetrator is white and the victim was Black.

> The realism of animations suggests that creators aim to represent not just the crime but the specific people involved. But should this be the case?

Often, the realism and perspective choice advances a troubling portrayal of Black victims, routinely humanizing the perpetrator while dehumanizing the victim. This is seen in the video game-like portrayal of Van Dyke shooting McDonald. Though not an example of police violence, the Zimmerman case also exemplifies the unequal portrayal of a white perpetrator and a Black victim. In the animation, Martin and Zimmerman appear as semi-realistic figures. At times, the viewer can see a side profile of Zimmerman’s face, while Martin’s face is always obscured by a black hoodie. Only Zimmerman is made available for empathy.

The realism of animations suggests that creators aim to represent not just the crime but the specific people involved. But should this be the case? All animations are strategic, and in these cases, their purpose is to make the victim seem more dangerous, therefore justifying the officer’s use of force. In this light, the videos become stomach turning. The figures are not just animations but effigies, used to discredit someone dead in favor of their killer.

---

What could fix the worst of computer-generated evidence?

The most direct solution is to prevent faulty animations from entering the courtroom. This involves clarifying and tightening the standards for legal animations. Currently, animations must meet the foundational requirements for any demonstrative evidence (authenticity, relevance, fairness), but federal admissibility rules cite no specific considerations for evidence created by a computer. This leads to inconsistencies in how judges rule on admissibility of animations, with judges themselves seeking greater guidance.

Given their increased persuasive effects compared to other forms of demonstrative evidence — like charts, drawings, or diagrams — animations merit special guidelines. These should include consideration of the realism of the display or the inequality if only one side presents animations. Additional guidelines could also codify language for attorneys to reference when opposing the admission of evidence.

Beyond policy-centered approaches, hope may be found in other applications of this technology. The visual investigations group SITU Research creates computer-generated evidence for civil rights and racial justice cases. Using a hybrid of animation and video evidence, SITU has worked with various civil liberties groups to reconstruct police repressions of peaceful protests in Charlotte, Portland, and The Bronx.

This kind of analysis is only possible with animation technology. Much of SITU’s work involves sifting through video evidence to determine when and where police actions occurred, then synchronizing evidence from multiple perspectives to show the full scope of police movements. These animations help to untangle what happened and elevate the voices of those who experienced the event, rather than relying on those in positions of power (who otherwise shape the narrative). In this light, a total ban of computer-generated evidence becomes not only unreasonable but potentially harmful, preventing a coherent narrative that can lead to better accountability. This also highlights the potential for pro-bono work by those with the correct technology and sufficient skills to make animations.

These measures achieve important work to address the current situation of legal animations. Still, more is needed. As animations converge to more and more realistic imagery, they require greater study and scrutiny, specifically in the context of race. This must come from academics across disciplines (law, psychology, media studies, ethnic studies), along with journalists and other practitioners.

It’s important to note that these solutions do not address the technology itself, but rather how it is used. On a technical level, work to improve the animations will improve the power of the tool, regardless who wields it; in some ways, this only increases the disparity between those with and without access to animations.

Still, technologists can exercise a wide latitude of control over their creations, including choices about perspectives and degree of realism. The “fairer” animation may be one that is less polished, less coherent. These technical choices won’t solve everything, but can be a starting point. Building a better world can mean building less, or knowing when to stop.


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

When the Computer is the Witness

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

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

I used to get offended when

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

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

Your apocalypse

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

will Fail you

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

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

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

Ones and Zeroes and Nones

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

“Democracy-Affirming” AI Could Make Things Even Worse

The System

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

Marked as Irrelevant

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

Top O’ the World

Sweet Incentives

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

Port Paradox

I picked up a plastic wrapper today

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

Charles Broskoski is the co-founder...

Taking Business Personally: A Conversation with Charles Broskoski


were not meant to be. I wish

to be lucky, enough

for the red I am wearing.

For random() to

always return me

to you. To be formless, genreless.

Miscellaneous

always. To be willingly

categorized. I give you

consent to filter for me in

search for the message that made your

home online. To be a factory of

permissions. Maybe it isn’t so bad

to keep lost sites in our hearts.

To be a stronger vessel for my heart.

To be kept.


were not meant to be. I wish

to be lucky, enough

for the red I am wearing.

For random() to

always return me

to you. To b...

Some things to be

The Individual

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

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

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

<div class="text-center">
Dancing by myself

on a rainy, empty street,

my electrodes glistening in moonlight.

My mind’s music melts me

like sugar in hot tea

on a December Thursday,

and the only things anchoring me to reality

are your fingers laced in mine.

 
When the lightning strikes

and the EKG jumps for joy,

for something to give the doctor to think about

Will you

be with me?

 
Will you

Dance with me?

</div>

on a rainy, empty street,

my electrodes glistening in moonlight.

My mind’s music melts me

like sugar in hot tea

on a De...

Electrodes

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

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

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

Magical Nature

Organic Envy

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

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

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

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

## _What is a tech cooperative?_

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

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

## _Cooperative Business Models_

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

## _Psychological Safety_

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

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

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

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

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

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

## _Working Through Conflict_

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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



## Notes

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

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From The Totality Cantos

**Shira Abramovich** is a researcher and translator based in Montreal, QC, Canada.

**Sean Michaels** is the author of _Do You Remember Being Born?_, a story of AI and poetry. He is also the author of the novels _Us Conductors_ and _The Wagers_, and founder of the pioneering music blog [Said the Gramophone](http://www.saidthegramophone.com/). His non-fiction has appeared in _The New Yorker_, _The Guardian_, _McSweeney’s_, and _Pitchfork_. Sean is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Grand Prix Numix, the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he has been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Peabody Awards, and the Prix des libraires du Quebec. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal, Canada.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

---

I first encountered Sean Michaels in a rock climbing gym—not climbing, but launching his newly-released novel, _Do You Remember Being Born?_. Sipping seltzer on crashpads, watching a few younger attendees climb up the overhangs, I listened to Michaels read a conversation between the book’s main character, an elderly poet named Marian Ffarmer, and the book’s AI, Charlotte—and had the eerie feeling that such a conversation, conducted through text chat, could be happening now, or perhaps even tomorrow morning. Whether the parallels to our current technical reality are by luck or by foresight, the novel has struck a chord—Wired recently called _Do You Remember Being Born_ “The definitive novel about art in the age of AI,” naming it one of the best books of 2023.

Fictional depictions of AI have ranged from helpful to malicious, but one of the striking things about Charlotte is that she seems gentle, tender even—fitting for an AI that writes poetry, and even more so for a novel that winds up being, at its heart, about art, labor, family, and relationships. Marian Ffarmer, a 75-year-old poet, has dedicated her life to her poetry—a choice which has resulted in critical acclaim, if perhaps not financial stability, and which has required the sacrifice of most personal relationships. Now, with her son struggling to buy a house, she accepts a lucrative offer from The Tech Company, an unnamed hotshot in the AI space, to write a collaborative poem with Charlotte, their newest AI which specializes in writing poetry. To Marian, it feels like selling out, sacrificing the solo poetic voice she has worked so long to craft—but it is also a chance, perhaps her only chance, to give something tangible and lasting to her son.

I sat down with Michaels on a snowy Montréal afternoon to ask him more about his process, about technology, art, and labor, and what he hopes technologists and artists might take from the book.

---

**Shira Abramovich: When I first heard about _Do You Remember Being Born?_, I was struck by how Charlotte, the AI interface in the book, is so similar to the LLMs we’re seeing now—I thought, “wow, when did he start writing this?” How did the idea arise?**

Sean Michaels: The first seeds were in 2019, when I strayed across the website TalkToTransformer.com. GPT2 wasn’t really open to the public, but this was a little web app—it was a text box you could write a few sentences in and then it would continue your text for a sentence or two. And I was pretty staggered by it. It wasn’t consistently coherent. It wasn’t smart in the way that LLMs in 2023 are, where their quality is measured on accuracy and knowledge. It was really just, on a prose level, able to continue a train of thought or take it twisting into grotesque and interesting ways. And it was really the first time I had encountered a text bot that felt like anything other than a random word generator. Here was something that seemed kind of magical and bewildering and better than I could understand how it might work, better than I could imagine it being, and I was really provoked by it.

That ended up mixing with the idea of a poet in the near future working with some later generation of such a thing. But the book was definitely always imagined to take place in the future. In fact, early drafts had a first page that said “five years from now.” It went from five years to one year and then at some point, I said, let’s just cut that and be vague, because the book does take place in the future. Charlotte, the AI of the novel, is kind of, in a hand-wavey way, a more general AI. She’s not, strictly speaking, a large language model. But still, I thought, by the time publication comes, this might have happened the week before.

**Yeah—it was also interesting that it’s a conversational chatbot in the book. That’s what we've been seeing this year.**

Imagine that, right?

**In a [previous interview](https://interlocutorinterviews.com/new-blog/2023/12/21/sean-michaels-interview-do-you-remember-being-born-penguin-random-house), you talked about the story of the poet Marianne Moore that led you to choose a Moore-like figure as your poet. I was wondering if you’d retell it.**

Sure, I’ll tell you. When I played around with these things, it felt a bit like going on a date, going on a walk with my potential executioner. Here’s this cool technology that might also spell the undoing of an area of human endeavor that I treasure. And so there was something kind of dirty about it.

Those thoughts ended up getting into an interesting dialogue with the story of Marianne Moore that I had read around the same time. She was a great 20th century poet, a contemporary of T.S. Eliot. She was a celebrated poet from a young age, worked for decades, but only became famous in her older age, partly because she was a character. She was full of _bon mots_ and wore a tricorn hat and cape and would go on late night talk shows and throw the first pitch at baseball games and write liner notes for Muhammad Ali. And as a result of that, she was approached in 1955 by Ford, who asked her help naming their new car. To me, it was a perfect encapsulation of that thing. Almost all of us play along with and are complicit with capitalism and industry, which we don’t necessarily ethically or even aesthetically like, but the opportunities can be tantalizing and curiosity-provoking—much like working with that AI.

It’s like, _should I_? Is this good for humanity, for me to do this? Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. But it seems like a fun project. So Marianne Moore leaps at the opportunity to name a new car—who wouldn’t want to name a major pop cultural institution? And yet, it’s not like we feel like Ford is a good on earth. And so I thought there was something similar in the way that a poet would say, oh, of course I’ll work with this AI. It’s too tantalizing a prospect to refuse, especially if it comes with a check. That, I felt, was an interesting parallel there—how readily Marianne Moore sat down at the table with the man from Ford and how easily my fictional Marian might sit down at a table with the software.

**I really like the phrasing “date with your executioner,” and I did think it was interesting that you didn’t really go into some of the moral or ethical issues we’ve seen crop up this year—for example, the copyright stuff around whether artists should be compensated for models that are trained on their work. Was it a conscious choice to not address it?**

It wasn’t a conscious choice. I mean, it just shows to what extent I was unconscious of the moral issue of it. My opinion on this is that the moral repugnance, the kind of instinctive recoil that many artists have, has less to do with the idea of AI somehow subsuming their work and more about a giant rich company secretly scraping their work in order to create a product that earns hundreds of millions of dollars for them and their shareholders, and not for the people whose work is adopted. It feels like a separate question from the technological one, so when I started working on this, I had no moral qualms about the idea of feeding it in my work, certainly in my software.

In a world without money, where everyone is okay, would it be wrong to create software that could write poetry that’s nourished on published human thought? In my opinion, no.

**Yeah, that reminds me of a quotation by Ted Chiang—“Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us.”**

Yes. And in the book, that was one of the reasons I wanted to make it an issue with her son and housing, to make this really manifest. You have this manifest inequality and precarity in life that’s implicated in any question about large-scale technology.

**Yeah, I found that part of the book really tender, and it was so interesting to me that a book that was about this powerful AI would lead to a book that is so much about caring for one another.**

I wanted to write a book that was fundamentally about labor and inheritance and parenting and poetry and art, using AI as a metaphor for some of those topics rather than the other way around. At its heart, Marian is afraid of, and has resisted, collaboration all through her life, and I thought her being confronted with an AI was an interesting way to manifest the idea of opening her life up to disruption and collaboration.

**I actually wanted to ask you about collaboration, because it winds up being a really important thread in the book. I was curious what it was like, collaborating with the AI as you were writing, and how you work with collaborations in your writing practice generally.**

I don’t collaborate much. I’m a solitary writer. This book is about a collaborative poem, which itself isn’t that common as a form. But this book is, in a certain way, a collaborative novel because of the technology use, which is even rarer, and I understand why. In our culture, there’s a tension between that cultural desire for Capital-G Capital-W Great Works of art and what kind of artistic practice is more likely to lead to a happy life. There’s a healthier mode of life that is about documenting your life of art through products—let’s say, works—trying to make works that are imperfect, but that show the work that you’ve done. Making more good things, I think, leads to a happier life and a life in more equilibrium than where you hide away in search of greatness.

This is a totally lofty conversation but I think in fact, art is improved by interference, by all the noisy things that come into life. Meeting people of all ages, older people, younger people, less experienced, more experienced, artists—that really nourishes your work in surprising ways.

I hadn’t planned out the whole arc of the novel. I was writing, and I realized—I don’t know how this ends, nor how it should end. Should my poet succeed at creating a masterpiece with an AI? Should she fail? Is that more important? What’s the out? What’s the exit? What do I believe? And without wanting to give spoilers for their readers who haven’t read it, I found myself thinking more and more about how the thing I was sure of is the idea that bringing other people into exploring a choral version of art or of human progress—that, I feel, can be generative and nourishing—the other kind of generative.

**I came to your book launch, which was in a rock climbing gym, and I am told that this isn’t the first time that you’ve hosted a literary event in “unconventional” spaces. You also had the audience participate in interesting ways—I was curious how and why that became a thing that you did.**

The community I merged into in Montreal when I was a younger man was the indie rock music world and it was, you know, a little bit of a scene. I saw the way that being part of a healthy scene was this engine for creativity and for human flourishing. It’s really important to me to feel embedded in a community and then for people to feel embedded in a community with me in that reciprocal way. I don’t want to be dislocated or removed from context. I want to be part of the geographical scene that I am in.

Then I thought, what kind of event, what kind of book launches, could I hold where my community is going to be interested in manifesting? Because something at a bookshop draws on a certain kind of person who will show up, and maybe not a wider audience.

**So why the climbing gym?**

There was no direct reason. I was trying to think of a space that felt like it could hold many types of people, that could host an encounter that would feel memorable.

**I thought it was funny, personally, because there’s the tech bro archetype. A lot of tech bros really like bouldering.**

Yeah, right, exactly. Well, at my book launch, the only tech bros bouldering were under the age of seven, I think.

**One other thing that I wanted to ask you about was the process of creating that AI character in the book, learning about AI and so forth. What was it like for you and how did you go about it?**

It's been a kind of odd process as someone who is outside of that world. Particularly over the past few years. When I came into it in 2019, I was like, what is this weird thing? I'm a very amateur coder, but I know the Internet, I’m very online, I know how to follow instructions. But there was no centralized place to go to understand how to do these things.

I ended up getting a few different grants to get help to come up to speed on some of these issues from the Canada Council for the Arts and from the Quebec equivalent, the CALQ. I was able to hire Jasmine[^1] to consult, to teach me how to get access to GPT, and then how to use it intelligently. Later, another grant allowed me to find engineer Katie O’Nell to actually build a poetry bot. I discovered that GPT2 and especially GPT3 were really pretty good at literary creation and lyricism, copying my writing style, by giving it as large a prompt as possible, in a way that ChatGPT is terrible. GPT2 and GPT3 were good at this lyrical style mimicry, but cannot do poetry. None of these things can. They’ve just been trained wrong into conceiving of poetry as this rhyming doggerel.[^2] And anything that’s not rhyming doggerel, it doesn’t understand. You say _in the style of ee cummings_, it still gives you _There once was a woman from Panama…_ You say, _No, no, like this,_ and give an example. And it still says _Ohh. Gotcha._ _There once was a woman from Panama…_

So I found it was impossible at writing in this poetic voice that I had in mind for Charlotte. And so Katie and I decided to make this janky thing. What we ended up producing is pretty slow, not public facing, and it loses the plot really, really quickly. But what it’s able to do is that you give it a short prompt to a few lines and as it starts to riff in such a way that frequently generates interesting phrases, interesting little twists of mind, which are the things that got me excited about AI in the first place—not the ways that it gives me a predictable accurate answer, but instead gives me a surprising imaginative one with speed and limitless inexhaustible energy.

In the past year and a half there’s been such a push that what we need from artificial intelligence is reliability, when what I want from artificial intelligence is a panoply of voices. Can each be different? You want your weird little creature that will perk you up in the morning. You want the less-weird creature that corrects your mistakes. You want the one that will book your plane tickets that’s never weird at all. You want this strange thing that rereads your work, and in the voice of a depressive Virginia Woolf tells you how to make it better. And then the one that reads your work in the voice of a manic, I don’t know, Bukowski or something tells you what to make it better. I think that variety would take away a lot of the fears that we have of blandification of writing and replace it with something else, even as I still feel the same worries about the negative impacts AI would have even in that world I’m describing.

**Is there anything in particular that you would hope a technologist would take from the book, and anything in particular that you might hope that writers or creatives take from it—are those different things?**

I have two thoughts initially. One isn’t exactly what you asked, but I would love for technologists to take from my book that artists really don’t make much money. I really get the impression as I’ve touched more into the AI world [that] even creative people in AI really have no understanding of the economics of almost all the art that they consume in the world. Some of people’s favorite writers and poets and painters and musicians definitely live on less than $100,000 a year, and may live on less than $50,000 a year, and small amounts of money can really have transformative effects on people's careers. You know, Marian Ffarmer, the poet in my book, is willing to basically mortgage her soul for $70,000 or $80,000 because, for a woman who’s in her 70s, it’s a life changing amount of money.

Also, there are certain kinds of entertainment products that can be engineered and optimized, but there’s a lot of art that deliberately or inherently resists that optimization. It’s not solvable. There isn’t a correct answer. I like that it’s a problem where you can’t just take the measurement or poll people or train and do a probabilistic thing and say, well, in 85 of 100 universes, this is chosen as the best answer, thus it is the best. It’s like, no. And I think that's an important lesson to learn.

Besides that, I would ask [technologists] to play around and experiment and consider the intersection of the human and creative and the weird machine tools. That intersection is really interesting and in the history of humanity has resulted in so much interesting stuff—from the invention of cement and the way that allowed different kinds of architectural creations to photography, to pigments and dyes and paints. The history of humanity is a history of humans using technology in really exciting ways. My most beloved technologies are, you know, the ones that keep people from dying, but also the ones that humans can use in extraordinary and generative ways. And I would like technologists to think not about how they can shut down, have less and less human input, but how they can help humans be more expressive. Similarly, I think that artists should be curious about any tools that make those promises. Because who knows what’s around the corner?



## Notes

[^1]: Jasmine Wang, editor-in-chief of Kernel 1.
[^2]: "Rhyming doggerel" is the rhythm and rhyme that is commonly seen in nursery rhymes and children's songs.

Shira Abramovich is a researcher and translator based in Montreal, QC, Canada.

Sean Michaels is the author of Do You Remembe...

Issues

Table of Contents

(in your) HEADS

INTERLUDE

(the long) TAILS