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

e-raced


## Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

## Lancashire, England. 1812.

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

Something would catch us. Hurt us. Hang us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, I had a terrible knot in my stomach—

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

_"My lord, we found them."_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Yamanashi Prefecture, Chubū, Japan. 1990.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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


Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

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

Opus


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

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

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

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

## Technology as a Path to an End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Distinguishing Technology from Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Works Cited

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

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

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


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

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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. Whispering into my headphones mic, I talk to two people I met a week ago through a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online) video game from my childhood, Maplestory.

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

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

with care,
theresa


cw: police, mental illness, inpatient hospitalization

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

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

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

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

Her father had never seemed happier.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So be it.

---

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

_You stand accused..._

…_of inciting division and hatred in humanity._

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

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

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

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

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

…_of aiding and abetting terrorists._

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

_…of encouraging and condoning genocide._

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

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


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

As a child, Minja wished for a...

Triumph of Desire


_Kinjal Shah is an investor at Blockchain Capital and co-founder of the Komorebi Collective, which invests in female and nonbinary founders in crypto. She can be found on Twitter at [@\_kinjalbshah](https://twitter.com/_kinjalbshah)._

_David Phelps writes on Web3 at [davidphelps.substack.com](https://davidphelps.substack.com/)._

_Jasmine Wang is the cofounder and Editor-in-Chief of [Kernel Magazine](https://twitter.com/kernel_magazine?). She can be found on Twitter at [@j_asminewang](https://twitter.com/j_asminewang?lang=en). Disclaimers: her personal holdings in crypto are viewable at jasminewang.eth. She was part of KB4 in [kernel.community](https://kernel.community/), and has received an honourable mention from Gitcoin’s call for public goods proposals. She is also an angel investor in a few crypto startups still in stealth, which are not mentioned here._

---

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

**Jasmine Wang (JW): Let’s start with how you became interested in crypto.**

**Kinjal Shah (KS):**
I was working at Fidelity and I was put on a project that forced me to go deep down the rabbit hole. What compelled me to say I want to do this full time was a chance to fix everything that's wrong with our existing financial infrastructure, and do it in a way that would by default be more open and inclusive and transparent. That's really what I wanted to see and I was like, this is going to be the future of how we get to that.

**David Phelps (DP):**
In 2017 when I read about Bitcoin and Ethereum, I never really understood Bitcoin. But Ethereum made a lot of sense to me. And I really saw it as the future in 2017. I had a failed company that I'd started that was doing auto pay and auto billing for freelancers. Freelancers have to handle all the pieces that are not the reason they got into the business in the first place. But trying to do that at scale, with credit card fees, was just totally infeasible. So I got into crypto as a way to disintermediate the credit card industry and really allow for more permissionless payments from anyone to anywhere in the world. That was the really big part of the discourse in 2017; there wasn't discussion of the ownership economy, it was really just about disintermediating big institutions to have easier financial transactions.
Now my overall narrative would be more around ownership and collectivization.

**JW:**
I was first introduced to crypto via the RadicalxChange community in 2019. It's a movement focused on mechanism design whose founder, Glen Weyl, has collaborated extensively with Vitalik Buterin and co-authored a paper on quadratic voting, among other mechanisms. My interest in crypto originated in its political and governance promises.

**JW: Were there any moments that you felt skeptical of crypto? Was there any hesitancy?**

**KS:**
I've had so many. When I got into this space, it was 2017 and I got introduced to Web3 via Bitcoin. Bitcoin made a lot of sense to me. I grew up in a family where having gold passed down generation over generation is important. I never fully got it but my parents have their jewelry and their gold bars in a safe somewhere and I'm going to get that one day. So the concept of store value in a digital sphere made a lot of sense to me. But when I started seeing all these ICOs happen [in 2017], that was a really big moment for me, where I was asking myself, do I want to enter a space where it feels like so much of it is just about making money?

The second piece is this internal battle of being one of very few women, or very few people of color, in the room and you don't see those people around you. It's like, should I be building up a community that doesn't represent me? So I found myself in this position where to do what I want to do, I have to climb up the ranks in the world that doesn't look like me. I'm devoting a lot of my time trying to figure out how to bring others up. So that's a constant battle of, it’s not skepticism about the technology, but it's skepticism about how things can go awry, when you don't build with that inclusivity in mind.

**DP:**
[For] a lot of people outside the US, this is not something that's accessible, this is something really intimidating. I think that [it] took me a long time to internalize that. Over time, it did make me very aware of the ways that my missionary advocacy for crypto can fall into very traditional, I think even colonialist, white guy tropes of wanting to be the savior of the rest of the world with something that benefits you the most. As exciting as it is to talk about the ownership that we're gonna have over our data, we're also talking about owning entire protocols. And those are privatized, mostly in the hands of American venture capitalists, who are crowding out anyone else from being able to invest in them. So I think that that's the thing I'm most scared of right now — that our discussion of ownership and the power of ownership is also very much masking the ways that ownership is in the hands of very few very powerful people will benefit the most from it. Democratizing opportunity doesn't actually democratize access.

**JW:
I completely agree. It feels like in order to make money in crypto I need to enter gated communities for curated information strategies. This makes me hesitant about investing capital in the space, because in order to succeed I need to implement strategies that I don't feel on board with ideologically. So much of the emphasis in crypto is being early on a project and being able to buy in before other folks and doing some sort of information arbitrage. Does that feel like a correct assessment to you?**

**KS:**
This entire space is so early that a lot of the information arbitrage is really a factor of — the markets are not efficient because we don't have enough capital, we don't have enough players. It's an inefficient market and people are taking advantage of those arbitrage opportunities. The thesis behind being early is just to say that if there's a little part of the world that you know, and you spent a lot of time in and it doesn't feel like a lot of other people spend a lot of time there but you want to bet on it. You should be able to do that and reap the benefits of that. That's the conversation about being early and [it’s] less about “I'm going to make 1,000x if I'm like the second person in.” That's more of the Ponzi model that I hope to see less of.

**DP:**
Carlota Perez has this distinction between productive value and financial value, where productive value is when you get value from the things you actually produce because they have meaning in the world, and financial value is when you get value because of arbitrage opportunities and speculation and market manipulation, and sometimes the boundaries between these things are blurry.

One of my frameworks for crypto — that I think is both a very good thing and a very negative thing at the same time — is that I think it democratizes collusion. Anyone can get together and create a Discord and drive up prices on NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and do wash trading, raise up those prices, to the point that everyone is just trading with each other without losing any money of their own. This is definitely a form of market manipulation. But so is everything that involves buying with money. It's just a question of the degree and power and who's being affected by that. What if instead of using the term “collusion,” we used the term “positive sum”? Now we have this way where anyone can get together and they're able to support each other in their community, and they're able to build value for one another. There's a real opportunity for communities to come together, create their own social token that has no value and give it value. I think it's a huge improvement over what we've had before.

**JW:**
I’m fascinated by the way crypto is leveraging language. Like within quadratic voting, you need to conceptualize yourself as an individual actor and not talk to other people about how you're expressing your preferences. This is known as colluding [and] you can't collude, that messes up the system. But there's also another term for this, which is coalition-building, which is a different framing. People are reinventing vocabulary to reorient ourselves to systems and their possibilities, and there are both dangers and opportunities there.

**JW: Which is to what degree is collective ownership the goal? Do we need to think beyond current concepts of ownership?**

**KS:**
I have a couple of somewhat related points to get to the answer here. First is defining what ownership means when you're collectivizing it, and understanding the rights associated with ownership and the level of involvement. Joining a DAO where you're one of 1000 people probably implies a different level of ownership than if you're one of 15. And then the other question for me is, when does collective ownership make the most sense? Does the value of this entity grow because it is owned and supported by multiple people? Does collective decision-making make sense? I don't think I buy the theory that everything should be governed by crowds of people. So trying to delineate where the boundaries are is super important because I don't think ownership should be taken lightly.

**DP:**
One economic model I'm obsessed with is Roblox’s [an online gaming platform] economic model. They give you all the tools you want and they give you all the land you want to build. Then you monetize, based on what you do with that. It's not even collective ownership — it's really no ownership. I just think we need to be careful that ownership is not in a zero sum system, and the question is about what you own the system you're in, and whether your ownership is taking away that right from someone else or whether it's enabling for someone else. One of the really powerful experiences I had was when Ameer [Suhayb Carter] started Crypto Cookout, where the goal was to buy Black CryptoPunks. As a white person, I asked him, should I participate in this? Do I have a place here? And he was like, absolutely, because you're helping support Black equity. By contributing to win that auction and putting in whatever money I had, I was also helping Black ownership in some ways. It's the first time in my life I've actually felt like I was an ally.

**JW: At Kernel, we're interested in the role of media in getting people excited about technology, and help them orient critically and actionably to those emerging technologies. I'm curious if there were any particular pieces of media that made you interested in crypto and if you have any thoughts about how crypto’s narrative is portrayed in the media.**

**KS:**
There's a deluge of information out there. Starting in the right places can lead to different outcomes. A lot of what I spent time reading early on was like Nick Szabo’s writing or the Bitcoin white paper. Mostly very old school blogs that were talking about this technology and the potential use cases. Today, if you want to get into the Web3 space, a lot of it is on Twitter or YouTube or podcasts, and all of those resources are great, but I think going to the fundamentals and starting with some of the historical information is a good idea. Because I did that, I always had this grounding that allowed me to form my opinions early on, and take each new piece of information and measure it up against some of the early writers and thinkers of the space. More broadly, the media portrayal of crypto has been extremely hyperbolic. I'm just disappointed in how much headline-driven reporting continues to be emphasized. I wish we could have reporting that is more focused on the people, the community, and the conversations that people are having and less about things like the underlying financial price.

**DP:**
The arguments that Marx’s Das Kapital makes in terms of how we create value out of thin air are really relevant to crypto. I think Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are always on my mind, especially works like _Ubik and The Dispossessed_.

**KS:**
I try to point people away from Twitter as the first place to go. There's so much context behind what people tweet that you don't really know, like you don't know if they've invested in a project, you don't know if they are best friends with this person. A lot of that comes from time and experience, and I just don't know if [Twitter] is the place for a beginner.

> My biggest worry is that it turns us all into constant seekers of upside.

**JW:**
Tweets lack so much context. The point of long form content is so different from a tweet. You have space to posit an entire world that is alien to the reader and make them feel at home in it, and thereby unlock it as a possible world to strive towards. Whereas on crypto Twitter, I feel like there are so many different memes that you’re supposed to extrapolate a worldview from by yourself, and project your own hopes onto. I would love to see more explicit long-form articulation of people’s different philosophies and hopes for crypto. But it’s difficult to create spaces for reflection when things are so fast paced.

**JW: One could claim that the tokenization of things strips them of some intrinsic value. Are you two worried about this, or about hyper- financialization more generally?**

To elaborate, Vitalik just published a paper in response to Nathan Schneider's article critiquing the limits of cryptoeconomics. His concluding sentence resonated with me: “Blockchain-based contractions have a lot to offer that other kinds of systems do not. On the other hand ... _blockchainized_ should not be equated with _financialized_. There is plenty of room for blockchain-based systems that do not look like money, and indeed we need more of them.”

**KS:**
I think one of my biggest concerns about hyper- financialization is that it implies that wealth and financial assets make you valuable. We're creating this culture where when you consume something, you have this assumption that you've already also invested in it because why would you spend time consuming something that you're not owning a piece of. It basically means that you need to have enough capital to be able to show that you're serious about supporting something or consuming something.

When you think of everything as a market, it does dehumanize it. It does turn it into a game of numbers and it's very difficult to separate your success from financial success. If I were to think about how crypto could go wrong, my biggest worry is that it turns us all into constant seekers of upside, and that measurement is done primarily through financial means, and we lose this ability to understand and benefit from social capital gains or meaningful contributions that come in different ways.

**JW:
There's a difference between a market economy versus a market society. The world that I'm worried about is one where we relate to all others through a lens of potential upside. There are ‘others’ that we understand to be ends unto themselves, intrinsically worthy, like other humans. Some people might feel like animals are intrinsically worthy, or trees or water are intrinsically worthy, and we shouldn't financialize those entities. Applying this lens to everything feels really alienating.**

One example I would give here is that in Sino culture, there is this important notion of filial duty, where because my parents took care of me, that when the time comes, as required, I will take care of them, as well as taking care of my children who will take care of me. This idea of reciprocity has so much beauty and virtue in it that would be lost if we approached it in a quantified financial way. For example, we could try to work out how much my parents spent on me until, say, I was financially independent, or even one step further, how much that money they would have earned if they deployed that as investment capital instead, or how much of my future earnings it entitled them to. If we did that I’d personally feel none of the intrinsic honor that comes with being a good daughter or a good steward. I think many people today would find applying this financial lens to their most intimate sphere uncomfortable, but I think those boundaries could shift culturally as we introduce this language and technological affordance to financialize our relationships with other objects.

> We need to think about the ways that permissionless is not enough. We need to be intentional in community-building

**DP:**
The counterpoint would be that we already are hyper-financialized. Our data and identities are already being monetized by corporations constantly, and everything we do is creating and generating gigantic amounts of actual financial value. And what we're really talking about is taking that back for ourselves, and saying like we should have the right to the financial value that we're already providing to all of these systems that are able to take advantage of it. A really simple example is if advertisers want to pay what they call customer acquisition costs to acquire the customer, those will go to the customer.

Then so much of the world we currently live in has often misaligned incentives, or even just a spectrum of incentives. The idea is that we can create these structures where we all co-own. I would like to think that there actually can be great emotional benefits to working in this kind of space, and that having aligned incentives can actually create better relationships. I would much rather not have dominant power with an organization where I'm not building sustainable relationships, I'd rather share all of that power. So I agree that there's an absolute danger here of financialization but I would like to think that the models we're building will actually create much more meaningful relationships.

**JW:** **What do you think are the most valid critiques of crypto? What could people do about those things? And what things are you excited for?**

**DP:**
I’m really excited about creating permissionless environments where anyone can build. Permissionless meaning anyone can go out and take anyone else's smart contract and then create their own version without having to ask permission and everyone gets monetized. But the other side of permissionless environments is you have to have those skill sets, resources, and time to do it. Those are all privileges and those will correspond to economic privilege in a non Web3 world, and I think as excited as we are about building Web3 we have to remember that if we're not intentional, it will just replicate the structures of Web2 and have intergenerational economic inequality that compounds over time. If you're not actively working to change the previous system, you're just inviting it in. We need to think about the ways that permissionless is not enough. We need to be intentional in community-building, and support making crypto much more accessible to the people who really need economic opportunity.

**KS:**
My other main critique of the space is that we put too much emphasis on speculation. [People in crypto] often say that investor protections, in the United States at least, are harmful.. I think the speculative behavior of crypto is part of the culture and it's very playful and it's really fun. But it's sometimes at the expense of security, so I think if you're looking to join this space, and thinking about ways to improve upon it, I would focus on how we make this more of a secure environment.


Kinjal Shah is an investor at Blockchain Capital and co-founder of the Komorebi Collective, which invests in female and nonbi...

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

Ifeoma Ozoma is the founder and principal of Earthseed, a consulting firm advising individuals, organizations, and companies...

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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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Whores Will Rise came about because they did just that. Held in September of 2018, the exhibition “Whores Will Rise: Protest...

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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...

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They aim to build the metaverse, these bright-skinned white-teethed boys. They
 talk breathlessly of frictionlessness, and I think about your skin against
 mine, swallow. They carefully enunciate the t in community, and I
 wonder if they would take my hand if I asked, and march until
 morning comes, dew-stained cheeks and spent lungs. They
 dream of a future free of flesh and history. I know that
 these weights give me form. Am I flawed, that I do not
 wish to be god, formless light fed through wire?
 All I pray for in the next world is that you
 are beside me when I wake, to have tea to
 brew even if I forgot to prepare for the
 apocalypse properly. I was too
 busy watching you move the
 air around you. If you gods
 can simulate this light
 at the base of
 my spine
 call it
 genesis.

_Jasmine Wang is a writer and technologist, searching for a home near some ocean for her grand piano. She is based in the cloud._

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

For so long I had thought product design...

Drawing Rectangles

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

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Prison Phones and the Problem with Profits

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How many trees does it take to save the planet?

It depends on who you ask. In 2019, a team of researchers led by Francois-Je...

Trees Won’t Save Us

A grid of digitally rendered cross sections of trees in brown and sepia tones

Tree rings can tell us much about the passing...

Growing Narratives: Passage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On receiving an unwanted Windows
update at an inconvenient time.

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

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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 s...

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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...

Creating the Photogenic City

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

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

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

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

## Dematerialistic Illusions

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

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

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

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

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

## The Jevons Paradox and the Lifecycle Analysis of Emissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Outrunning the Rebound Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Technology is Not (Carbon) Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

## Beyond Digital Greenwashing

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

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

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

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

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

## Beyond Techno Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

## We Build the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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Chinampa


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Selfless Machine**

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

so much scissors on the
 hands of blooming laws:

How many times will I start
 with furious naked wires

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

There’s a saintless way of
 excavation: a premonition

of the past taking tolls
 on the future & outlawing

my rocket from batching
 into the space with a lamp

only to end up discovering
 that god is a vacuum feasting

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

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

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

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

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

beautiful before a loyal cause
 blessing our websites with cookies?

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

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eu...

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Do you still use our words —
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 lift-off?
 I, old Earthbound,
 listen for you in the night,
 dream you flicker behind the moon,
 imagine your DNA
 flowering in the endless sky.
 Our machines
 of fire and paint,
 wood and metal,
 plastic and radio waves
 surge and shudder
 when your eyes catch the spark
 of a new star.

_Julia Travers (she/her) is a writer, artist and teacher in Virginia, U.S.A. She grew up near the Chesapeake Bay and now lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Find more of her work with Fish Publishing, Rattapallax,_ Whurk Magazine, Ecological Citizen, _OnBeing/ American Public Media, and on Twitter @traversjul._

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<pre class="body-base whitespace-pre-wrap">
When I was a netizen, I thought about bound feet
at least five times a year. I drank soup
off Chinese TV following the recession’s
march through several continents
I stole migrant foodways to rebrand as weight loss miracles
It’s been three suns since I remembered the specific oppression
of pretty feet and F size clothing
and arguments to each other’s mirror
about knee highs on our specific racialized 15 year old legs
Our great grandmas wore size fours, too expensive to walk

When I was a netizen, I wore an avatar for a body
customized and dressed by a white mouse
emoji girl: black hair, regular feet
and the internet was dense with my body
its echoes bigger than its footprint

When I was a netizen, I got to keep my face
to put whitening cleansers on
and K-beauty lip stains
and Euroamerican colors
and foundation shades named purity grace and
healthy, which was mine
But I was an American. Safe
ill-marketed to, loving / enough
of the global neocolonial machine
and sex tourist teachers
and universal healthcare
and deferred payment apps holding my hand at the crosswalk
from the 7-11 to the helmet shop
Grown up flower girl, still scattering accounts like ashes
over the graveyarded webs we could call home

We lived and died by narrative convenience and marketing
searching for reflections in unkind interpretations
is there strength?
in us always being seen as each other, in each other
We mourn ourselves by our walk
but can no longer tell them apart
</pre>

No Girls on the Internet

Kaixi

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

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

2.

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

3.

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

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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 and CEO of Are.na, an online Montessori school for adults.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



## Notes

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

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“When did you first start disassembling yourself?” Dr. Hallopeau asked.

“I can’t remember,” I responded. “Maybe that sounds evasive, but I’m not lying.”

All my memories are scarred by disassembly. Even now, in my regular session with Dr. Hallopeau, I am scratching at one of the biosensors implanted in my pointer finger. The skin is starting to pull back, barely revealing the metallic pins embedded between flesh and bone.

Disassembly is always a gamble. Every few scratches I could flick the pins just right and receive a pulse of soothing pleasure down my forearm. A synesthetic blend of sound as color. But most scratches led to pain. A burning from raw, wet tissue suddenly bare to the harsh conditions outside the body. That is the simple cycle of my compulsion—an endless loop between temporary euphoria and inevitable anguish.

Dr. Hallopeau noticed the tic, softly inquiring, “What are you thinking about right now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, equivocating, “It’s hard to explain.”

“Why don’t you try?” Dr Hallopeau responded.

She began to smile, casting a genuine warmth that was evident even through the intermittent desync of her hologram. A ray of sun amidst the icy digital winds. She wanted me to get better. But she had also seen me erode over the years. Several of my bio-augmentations were now permanently exposed, emanating a verdigris from the metal into the surrounding skin. The tell-tale sign of a disassembliac.

I must be disappointing her.

“You know how it goes, Dr. Hallopeau, it always starts the same. Yesterday I finished a long day of remote piloting. Could not get the feeling of sweat and dust and heat off me. The taste of sand in my mouth. Had to take a long shower.”

The sadness of the night returned with the telling of the story. Dr. Hallopeau was taking in the description with a dutiful nodding.

“But then I was alone with no plans for the evening. I could hear the other families in the building laughing and having a good time. I knew I should go outside, even wrote myself notes all over the apartment. Go for a walk, get fresh air, drink water, whatever, but I just couldn’t escape.”

“Thought I would check the Feed for a little bit to take the edge off,” I continued, “you know the Feed’s motto, ‘all the content you could ever want, all the time.’ Before I knew it, I was dosing. That empty-headed feeling took over. Like my brain was replaced with a bowl of the thickest, grossest, cement-flavored pudding you could imagine.”

“Then what happened?”

“My hands started to roam. I didn’t want them to, but they made their way up to my head and I started pulling, looking for imperfections.”

Even describing the process started to summon that unmistakable urge to disassemble. I wanted to close the connection with Dr. Hallopeau, rush to the bathroom, and go all out on my implants. Tweak the wires of the engineered eyes, randomly shuffling and editing the wavelengths making up my enhanced visible spectrum.

At times I told myself that there was a higher purpose in the disassembly. A kind of bodily scrying that was required to unlock new experiences—hidden colors like Jupiter sapphire or the subterranean emotions of Calvinic depravity. But there were other aspects to the compulsion that were more practical. Pulling circuits until I passed out. Rubbing pre-chain coins against silicon to fuzz the biolinks on the central nervous system. Total temporary disassociation that removed any anxiety, fear, or worry.

“Why do you call them imperfections?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a word I came up with. You know, the raised lines and bumps and tabs on the implants. The engineers try their best to hide it, but those imperfections are still there. Something about it, I can’t keep away. The touching turns to rubbing, and then the rubbing evolves into biting, scratching, pulling, and worse. Anything to get the implants out, you know…”

Dr. Hallopeau shifts in her seat, betraying a clear discomfort as we broach the bodily specifics of my disassemania. Yet she has lasted so much longer than any of the others. I remember the first, Dr. Francis, who helped me through my earliest episode. It happened one night when I was nine years old. Managed to bypass the child locks on my ADOLINK. Spent the entire night parsing low fidelity adult content on some of the rougher corners of the web before it was completely scrubbed. A classic case of ‘Feed Overdose’, not that the medical community had a clinical name for it yet. By the time my parents came to wake me up I was huddled in the corner of the bedroom, digging several small divots into my scalp in an enclosing circle around the cranial implant. Could not focus for weeks after that night. Dr. Francis had recommended machine-assisted EMDR plus a limited memory wipe. My parents hoped the night was a one-off incident. That the urges and the memories would dull with age. _Soon you will be on your merry way_, Dad had counseled. Sixteen years later I am having the thousandth version of the same conversation.

“Where did you go just now?” Dr. Hallopeau inquired.

“I’m sorry,” I responded, “couldn’t get out of my head.”

“It’s alright,” she reassured, “you’re back now.”

Dr. Hallopeau paused, adjusting her notebook before continuing, “So, why do you want to remove these imperfections?”

Her question glided past me. My focus was back on exposing one of the pins on the biosensor. I could feel that a pin was bent. Did my scratches do the bending, or had it been installed with a slight bend? I needed to check the crookedness. But the last scratch was too much. I dislodged the pin entirely and the titanium tore flesh on the way out. A small teardrop of blood was collecting in the crevice of the install location. My nerves started to scream. A familiar rhythm of pain was beginning.

If I was lucky a little pain would be the least of my worries. Sometimes the blood and bodily fluids could interfere with a damaged implant, forging unpleasant hallucinations and phantom sensations. Usually, the only remaining choice was to close your eyes, clench your teeth, and rip the implant clean out. Hard shutdown. But I could not carry out the emergency surgery in front of Dr. Hallopeau.

Trying to concentrate on the conversation, I offered a halfhearted explanation. “I don’t know, it’s complicated. There’s that nanosecond where it feels so good to remove the implant. That moment of release—when the capacitor splits from the board, when the wire comes loose, when I finally remove what feels like an alien inside me. That feeling of dislodgement, a release…” I trailed off again.

Dr. Hallopeau left the silence open, waiting to see if I would continue.

I was scratching harder at the remaining elements of the biosensor. The broken base of the pin jutted sharply out amongst the muscle fibers in the third digit. Each flick drew the shroud of disassociation further. The room seemed to shrink and darken. All my possessions were swallowed by the darkness brought on by disassemania. Soon it would be only me and the hologram of Dr. Hallopeau.

“Like when the stores switched completely over to bio-aug’ payments. Everyone was so excited,” I exclaimed, “but all I could think about was where they were going to install my tech and how I was going to dig it out.”

Dr. Hallopeau nodded. She had seen me that week. I had tried to excise the new implant with my nails. The engineers had done a fantastic job—a nearly clean seam embedding a penny-sized chip into the anterior surface of the radius. But the imperfect line between machine and body was still there, barely noticeable. Or maybe not. I could have been feeling a vein roll over the bone. I had to check for myself, so I moved on to excavating with stainless steel tweezers. I managed to get the whole implant out without a visit to the emergency room, and stored the remains of the implant in a plastic bag. The hardest part was the look the other customers gave me as I passed the bagged implant over the scanners at the grocery store.

Sensing my sadness, Dr. Hallopeau asked, “What about the habitat reversal therapy? Have you been practicing our exercises?”

She was trying to move the conversation along.

“Yes and no. They work for a day or two, but something will come along, something at work, a new bird to fly, and I start disassembling again…” I responded, growing agitated.

The last scratch at my biosensor had suddenly sent waves of uncontrollable fire shooting up my arm and into my shoulder. I shoved the damaged hand under my thigh to dull the throbs.

“Why don’t we try one of the exercises?” Dr. Hallopeau proposed, as if on cue.

“Okay, okay...”

“Take the scratching hand, ball it into a fist, and squeeze for sixty seconds. I’ll count out loud. You just follow along.” Dr. Hallopeau instructed.

I listened to Dr. Hallopeau enunciate the numbers. With each passing second, I squeezed harder until my entire arm was taut. She was never going to get all the way to sixty, I was sure of it.

I lost her voice somewhere around fifteen or twenty. My rapid breathing brought me back to summer runs in the park with my older sister. Towards the brink of exhaustion one of us would point to a distant bench to mark a spontaneous finish line, encouraging a final sprint. After one of these races, we ended on a bench overlooking a small field where children were playing on artificial turfgrass. One of my arm bandages was spotting red. Staring at the bandage, she asked, “Why do you do it? Why can’t you just stop?” I looked back at her and smiled. Her own implants were undetectable, a suite of corporate-sponsored productivity tools that kept her connected to the mainframe. She had never come into contact with the raw Feed.

I came back to the session with Dr. Hallopeau shouting my name. Gasping, I unclenched my arm.

“How long did I make it?” I asked between rasping breaths.

“We made it about thirty seconds. Are you okay?”

I sat silently, feeling my face warm from embarrassment. Thirty seconds could feel like an eternity in the Feed. I had glimpsed hundreds of images and words in less. With a full minute I could parse thousands of content blocks on a hyperscroll. And how much damage could I do to myself in such a short amount of time? At least expose a few wires, unearth a subcutaneous connector, maybe even rip out a small chip, depending on the implant.

Thirty seconds was nothing in the face of the hours and days of unsupervised isolation to come. An ever-eroding will to change was the only thing that stood between me, the Feed, and more disassembly.

“How are you feeling?”

“I feel ashamed. Pathetic. Worthless. What hope is there if I can’t even make it a minute?” I cried, losing control of any ability to measure my responses.

Dr. Hallopeau did not respond to the outburst, trying to maintain an austere medical demeanor. The conversation came to a standstill. Without thinking I brought my left hand up to my mouth and started gnawing on the edge of a smart tip finger cap. The saliva coated the cap, sinking into the connections at the edges, making me feel like my feet were submerged in a warm bath.

Dr. Hallopeau broke the silence with a rare misstep that sent me over the edge.

“What if we increased your medication? People with severe cases are eligible for up to double the regular amount of clomipramine. Though we would need approval from the Government Medical Office, of course.”

I broke down, tears streaming down my face. Dr. Hallopeau took on a regretful expression, “It was just an idea. What’s wrong?”

Through choked sobs I tried to find a few truthful words, “I don’t want more pills! I don’t want more harm guards! They’re never going to slow down the Feed. I just want to get better.”

A memory from my time at the Academy returned to me. A rudimentary harm guard coated my left arm. It was a flexible metal glove that covered from the tip of the fingers to the middle of the forearm. The harm guard was supposed to withstand any attack of disassemania. One particularly stressful night—after the Feed swelled in reaction to a political event, an election or assassination or something—I was determined to get the glove off. I turned the minifridge in my barrack into a makeshift disassembly station, plying at the glove with knives and tools of various sizes. When bunkmates returned I was passed out, surrounded by streaks of blood running down the side of the makeshift workbench. Later they told me that there was a clean meat cleaver on the floor. The memory shifts as I try to hold it. Quicksilver fragments that refuse to be contained. I remember waking up in the campus hospital, surrounded by nurses, school administrators, and the barrack director. A doctor comes to the foot of the bed and holds court, telling me how lucky I am that none of the implants were damaged.

“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” I continued, wiping the dribble from my nose.

“What do you want? What would make you happy?” Dr. Hallopeau asked, her warmth returning.

I contemplated responding with what Dr. Hallopeau wanted to hear—a safe answer that would allow our session to conclude with the usual relief from hard-fought catharsis. We were at those difficult final minutes of an appointment where the emotional faucet let loose over the past hour had to be artificially closed. Dr. Hallopeau needed a response that signaled I was okay, that she did not need to arrange the mandatory 48 hours of observation for high-risk patients.

I flashed to a later-in-life meeting with Dr. Francis. More than a decade had passed since the first episode of disassemania. I had just graduated high school and was traveling to Academy Basic Training. We ran into each other at the airport. I called out to her with a proud smile as I was on an exceptional six-month streak without any disassembly. We talked for a few minutes. I told her how well I was doing, how things were looking up, and more. She smiled and nodded, as she had always done, but she never said my name. It eventually occurred to me that Dr. Francis did not recognize me. Her eyes betrayed that vacant stare of someone running an assisted memory search. I could not blame her. Who was I? Merely the thousandth patient with the same diagnosis. I wondered if Dr. Hallopeau and I were doomed to suffer the same fate.

I searched for a few remaining shreds of self-composure, gathering myself and staring directly at the hologram of Dr. Hallopeau.

“I want to get better. Stop disassembling. Try to be a good person, help others, see the world, that kind of thing. Get out of this city so that I don’t go crazy with loneliness. Stop piloting, or at least stop piloting for the government. Get the tech removed—properly—and settle down somewhere. Maybe even find someone to share each day with. Yeah, I don’t know….”

Saccharine, but Dr. Hallopeau took the bait. Maybe she knew I was lying. Maybe we were stuck in a boot loop without any chance of ever reaching the home screen. Or maybe our session was just out of time.

“Those are wonderful aspirations. Why don’t you write them down in your journal, and we can talk more about them at our next session?”

“Yes, Dr. Hallopeau, that sounds great.”

“Excellent. And remember, there is always tomorrow. The future is ever brighter.”

With that pronouncement we began the regular concluding ritual. Dr. Hallopeau smiled and waved with one hand, discretely moving the other in an attempt to close the connection. Her initial motion commands did not take. After a few awkward moments her hologram finally vanished. The chair she had projected onto seemed more empty than before.

Alone once more, I listen to the garbled giggling and conversation of the neighbors through the wall. A stiffness creeps up my neck, urging me off the couch and into the kitchen to stretch. Opening a cabinet, I provide my retinal scan to the electronic pillbox and dry swallow two purple hexagons. Staring out the kitchen window I manage to catch the last moments of sunset and contemplate what to do next. Turning back towards the dark interior of the apartment, I try to avoid lingering on the magnetic rack of knives hanging above the oven. Another night with no plans.

I could never tell Dr. Hallopeau what I really wanted. Sometimes I did have hopeful thoughts about how I could change, the person I might become. Maybe I could show the world what I looked like without disassemania. Pristine implants, unchewed fingers, and an intact scalp. I could be the poster child for the newest and greatest biomod. A blissful smile accompanied by corporate Muzak.

But in solitude the real desires surround me. They call for a complete disassembly. Start with the eyes so that I can no longer see the Feed. The hands do not need sight anyways—they know the body innately. The dismemberment continues until all flesh and technology have been painstakingly removed and laid out on the ground. Each piece is arranged exactly where it should be. I am left as a wraith above the pieces, haunting the strange reflection of my former self.

Perfect self-disassembly. Then I would finally be free.


“When did you first start disassembling yourself?” Dr. Hallopeau asked.

“I can’t remember,” I responded. “Maybe that sounds...

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