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

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Hello Jasmine! We enjoyed our conversation and are excited to offer you a term sheet.”

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;My podcast drones on in my AirPods. The interviewer discusses how engineered pandemics more infectious than COVID-19 will disrupt the supply chain and wreak more destruction by an order of magnitude. His voice is low, steady, and comforting. The natural pauses between his phrases are engineered out so that each word smoothly elides into the next.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;After a few seconds of debate, I duck out of the stream of fellow passengers pouring out of the airplane, tuck myself into a corner tightly against the wall, and free my thumbs.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The email contains a PDF file with delicate letterhead that says the company I started three months ago was worth more than eighteen million dollars. Holy shit. I scratch my head and feel a dull blueness develop at the base of my tongue. I can’t tell if it is dread, excitement, or the caffeine tablet I took while waiting for the plane to dock.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I look up, expecting to see my fellow passengers standing stock-still, gaping at me, faces stretched with incredulity, admiration, even envy. But no, the stream of passengers has thinned to a trickle, and everyone is busy deciphering their own small screens. I wonder what missives have landed in their inboxes.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Over the last week of fundraising, I have become unnecessarily paranoid about infosecurity, all too aware of how information is treated as currency in fundraising. The airport’s Wi-Fi is neither reliable nor secure, and my phone is about to run out of battery. I quickly take a screenshot of the term sheet, festoon it with cartoon exclamation marks, and send it to my mentor, a female founder who has raised several rounds from Sequoia. I open up the screenshot after it sends successfully and squint at it. The obscene numbers have not changed. This digital picture-in-a-picture stabilizes my reality. I turn off my screen to preserve my phone’s battery, but the after-image of the file stays with me, gently but insistently etched into the corners of my vision.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is my first time in Cancun, and I learn quickly that I cannot expect amenities like charging ports in public spaces here. As I push my luggage cart through the winding corridors, my mentor, as well as other founders who are advising me on the raise process, try to call me. My phone dies in the middle of a call just as I emerge from the airport into a moist darkness, surrounded by tall palm trees, an early birth into a strange world. I turn in a few circles to orient myself. I search for a power outlet to no avail, digging through both my suitcases in the exit foyer, and finally return to the taxi area, where I plead at a sequence of desks for a charger. One lady takes pity on me. I prop my laptop open on the counter and text an investor who I am supposed to call later that night that I need to cancel. Riding double dopamine waves from the term sheet and cancelling the meeting, I let myself be exploited by the attendants at the taxi counter for what I learned later was more than four times the usual price. The taxi driver tries to point out local landmarks as the city flashes by. I leave my suitcases just inside the door to my Airbnb and find a $3 burrito a few minutes away. I scarf it down so quickly that I still feel the warmth of it in my throat when I fall asleep.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is the spring of my twenty-second year. The world is caught in the throes of a global pandemic. I have retreated from the land of dreams, magic internet money, and robots to shelter at home with my family. Then, on this stopover to Cancun, I conditionally become a millionaire on paper.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It is nearly four more days until I have a proper meal again, as I zoom between different cyberspaces. An alien petitioner on pilgrimage for digital alms to build digital tools to produce more digital alms. My family has packed me a half-full Kirkland container of pistachios. In Mandarin, we call them “happy nuts.” I crack open pistachios between calls, and shells of happiness pile up to the left of my webcam.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Every morning, I wake up and apply a thin layer of sunscreen. When I was younger I read dermatology papers obsessively and now wore sunscreen every day. This is the only part of my self-care routine that persists for the next few weeks, even as every other semblance of normality dissipates. I develop strange red triangles under my eyes that remind me of the face paint on the Joker in a card set I had once lost. I take all my video calls perched on a storage stool in front of a large mirror. It is a setup for admiring one’s face, not for digital fundraising marathons. In between video calls, where I watch my face alternate between excitement and seriousness, I rest my eyes on my reflection in the mirror, gently smooth cream over the rough red skin, and feel my face burn.

> If one must imagine Sisyphus happy, then one must imagine entrepreneurs happy, these glistening heroes of the American imaginary.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Late in the night, I scroll through articles of smooth-skinned and smiling young people under headlines with obscene numbers. If one must imagine Sisyphus happy, then one must imagine entrepreneurs happy, these glistening heroes of the American imaginary. I imagine myself as the subject of one of these articles. I imagine myself happy, the skin under my eyes smooth. Other than the happy nuts, I don’t have time to eat. I think of holy female anorexics, who fasted so that they might see God, and wonder what I am fasting for.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All my communications move to text or Signal in an effort to consolidate my information streams. Founders, mostly the male ones, encourage me to raise at a higher valuation, to get aggressive, to play things fast and loose. Founders, mostly the female ones, warn me to be careful. I do reference checks with founders, on the venture capitalists that offer me millions, as I’m supposed to, staying mostly on-script. I try to beam my questions to them, like some request for shaktipat: Is the investor a good person? Are they the sort of person you want to line the pockets of? Are you happy when you wake up? I hope that these founders feel the subtext in my questions. I mine their answers for potential subtext, alternate readings, anything at all, and come up blank.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Mexico has not yet solved the last-mile connectivity problem. I fight with the Wi-Fi gods to no avail. Questions from investors arrive in drips and drops, smiles frozen midway in strange grimaces. Sometimes, they ask where I am, and I apologize profusely. It is bad timing on my part, I say, to move to Cancun in the middle of a raise process. I wonder if they feel like they are talking to a glitchy cyborg.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I test out different spots in the house for calls. While speaking with a partner at one of the world’s top seed funds, their smiling face suddenly freezes on my screen. Shit, shit. I swear under my breath, turn my video off, and decide to try a space outside. I remember that the hallway right in front of the balcony had done well during a cursory internet speed test. I step outside barefoot onto the small balcony, close the door behind me for privacy, then sit down cross-legged on the red tile. The face begins to move again and then freezes yet again. I test the door, and realize I have locked myself outside. I am beyond the worldly grasp of connectivity and cannot do anything about it. I close my laptop and relax into fifteen minutes of something almost like peace.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I grew up telling stories, and I am in my element as I tell stories over and over again. Stories about myself and my upbringing. Stories about the company’s metrics, and stories about where the company is going. Past, present, and future layered on top of each other in a complex wheel, births and deaths and reincarnations and re-imaginings. Every call, I leave feeling that I have made a successful case: the one and only conclusion, both necessary and sufficient, of my story was that I would start the most successful AI-powered marketing company the world had ever seen.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;One of my last video calls with the top tech venture fund in the world is taken outside by the pool, with the sun streaming behind me. I feel like a fiery angel, executing the algorithm of how to raise a successful seed round as if it were a divine mandate from the universe.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I wonder if investors would have been so excited about handing me millions of dollars if they had met me in person, without the armor of the Zoom blur feature and Wi-Fi delays. On good days, I am five foot three. On bad days, the red triangles under my eyes are terrifying. In person, I wouldn’t have been able to hide the septum ring that was just thin enough not to show on video calls—it catches the light obviously in meatspace.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As more and more term sheets come in, I feel the same nervous excitement I had at the airport. But now, I am bone-tired. It is the sort of tiredness that makes me want to lie in the sand and bury my neck there, along with all the other humans patiently awaiting oblivion.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There’s one investor I’m quite excited to meet. I pace around my room steadying myself before our call. I’m ready to weave my story, having already woven it a dozen times today. But he cuts in before I can finish my monologue.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Why are you doing this?_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I answer, and he repeats the same question. Each time it feels like the emphasis rests on a different word. _Why_ are you doing this? Why are you doing _this_? Why are _you_ doing this?

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The question of the company itself falls quickly behind us. He speaks of airdropping teddy bears all over the African continent that carry essential nutrients inside their bellies and can simulate real human hugs. I tell him about my dreams of being a writer, of the immense burden and gift of my own subjective experience, of being constantly overwhelmed by the beauty and ugliness of what I perceive. He laughs a silvery, ringing laugh that makes me understand what Hesse meant when he described the laugh of the immortals. He sold his first company a decade ago, and is now merely outrunning death, but he is no longer afraid of it.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I never see this person’s face. I prefer to keep it that way, to remember them as a disembodied voice in the ether, entirely free.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I hang up and fall asleep. I dream a dream I’ve dreamed many times: the trip I’d take my dad on if I were rich. He loves _Les Miserables_; it is the only movie he has watched multiple times. We have dinner somewhere in Tribeca, somewhere where the menu doesn’t have prices, then take a yellow cab up to the theatre, the biggest in New York. When the curtain comes up, my father begins to cry immediately. I watch him out of the corner of my eye with something like curiosity. By the time the third death happens, I am frustrated with myself that I have not yet cried. At intermission, I hug my dad, give him my tissue pack, and go to the washroom to inspect my face. I try to make myself cry, and instead red triangles bloom under my eyes.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I wake up and call my sister. I tell her about all the term sheets. I don’t tell her about the dream. I talk quickly and seriously, not letting her interrupt. At the end, framed as an afterthought, I tell her that another potential path has emerged—an acquisition. I spell out that path more hesitantly. It would mean that I could leave the company, while she would have to stay on. It would mean I would be free to pursue other dreams to which this particular project had originally only been instrumental, before it had started to fill up my entire life. While I wait for her reply, I watch the moon outside my window. It is large and bright. I always have to watch my mood when the moon fills my vision like this.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Big sister, you don’t sound so well. I worked on this company with you because I wanted you to be free, in order to be well. That was the whole point. I love you. I trust you to do whatever you think is right.”

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Oh.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It was as if some missing pin had been slotted into place, cleanly dismantling a massive and indestructible mental construction. As the construction imploded, it screamed. _But you’ve already convinced so many people to support you. You could be happy doing this, maybe, starting a B2B SaaS company and telling yourself you’re saving the world._ A different tack: _You need to amend your morals; if in fact small is beautiful then it should be enough that you are able to salary people you believe in._ A final swipe: _what kind of storyteller are you, then, that you convinced so many others and not yourself?_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The skyscraper of justifications and counterarguments fall all at once, cleaving possible futures in its wake. Ones in which I keep telling this story, where my self-concept becomes even more inextricably tied to that of the company. These futures play across my mind, miniature films. I watch myself play a successful prophet for the religion of my company. I watch as various successes lit up my eyes but not my soul, and failures scarr me permanently, as I remember this moment and the choice I made, and what that says about my values. I watch as I stop going to bookstores, because seeing different variants of the common critique, “the best minds of my generation are consumed by improving click-through rates”, becomes so painful that it almost drives me insane.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The morning sunlight paints the insides of my eyelids soft red. I am awake again, and ready to work. I have to tell new stories now in response to new questions, but these stories feel more true.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Why do you want to sell the company now, when it’s doing so well?_
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Because I don’t want to spend my youth on this problem. It doesn’t make me come alive._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Well, what do you want to work on?_
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_I don’t know. I’d like to go back to school perhaps, and write for a bit. Oh, and music. I miss that a lot. I think it’s quite likely that I will start other things, as a serial planter of seeds. Some might look like companies._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Why were you going through a fundraising process, then? And what changed your mind?_
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;_Because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. That’s the story I was told, and the one I told myself.. I learned a lot from telling the story, most importantly that I didn’t want to live this exact one. There are so many other stories to tell and inhabit. The moment when I finally understood an equation on a chalkboard. The glint in my father’s eyes as he tells me about how he knelt at Tiananmen. How I tenderize the piano with my hands, and how it tenderizes me._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At the height of the GameStop frenzy, I have a strange, terrifying realization. What if I was being catfished? The deal had been miraculously timed, and everything had been going almost too smoothly. I texted the acquirer. _Can I FaceTime you very quickly?_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His face matches his profile page on the firm’s website. Smiling, smooth-skinned, clearly wealthy. _Great, I just called you to verify you had a face. Thanks. Bye!_

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The man would tell me later, after the deal closed, that he thought the interaction had been very funny. An unprecedented event, he chuckled.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The deal is finalized on Chinese New Year. I fold dumplings with my housemates, most of whom work in crypto. For Chinese people, dumplings are a sign of prosperity. They ask me if I am rich. I shrug. They all think fiat is fake anyway. But I do say a small prayer inside as thanks for my salvation, for allowing me the road less travelled by.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It’s been a few months. Not much has changed. My friends talk of impending war, predictions around the timing of the next pandemic, and sketch their plans for the apocalypse. I joke that my praxis is non-instrumental time, what the young people call “hanging out”, after a decade of being painfully on. I have space to breathe.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I do often think of the constructions and stories I built, and how easily they might have remained unfelled, growing deeper and deeper roots into the very inner sanctums of my soul. How could I have come so close to harming myself in this way, to offloading my thinking to templates and playbooks? How could I have not allowed myself time to think? How did I get so close to executing other people’s algorithms without judgement, taste, or real pleasure?

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sometimes, I look at my face and touch my scars. Sometimes I talk to my friends who are just beginning their careers in technology, and I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them. _Please, please keep reminding yourself who you are and what you’re fighting for. Or else you might grow at supernatural speed into a beautiful tree, and everyone will admire your flowers and your fruits, but you will know that in growing so quickly you have become ungrounded, have lost any real driving principle, have lost your roots._

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Most times, though, I stay quiet. I think, one day I’ll write a story about this. I think about all the ways that people who hope to impress some beautiful dream upon the world yet end up caught up in side quests justify the work they’re doing. I hope that when they finally make it, finally free themselves, that they do not retreat from the world into fancy villas, tired and jaded.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I am careful now to avoid blithely following algorithms, and I am wary of putting off the practice and pursuit of transcendent value. I try to think about, and talk through with friends, options that aren’t explicitly on the table. I think about how humanity has always been searching for the answer of how to be, what to do, what stories to tell in the face of seeming apocalypse. I feel the light behind my face, bright and moon-like. I choose to lift my head.

---


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

      “Hello Jasmine! We enjoyed ou...

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present


## Escape into Cyberspace

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## The Power of Blockchains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Subverter of Laws, but Agent of Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Blind Bounties

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Blind Machines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Distributed Sovereignty

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


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

The future is full of colour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future is what we make of it.

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

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

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

The future is now, old man!

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

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

The future is abundant for everyone.

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

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


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

The future is full of colour.

The...

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, far under one percent of the history of the planet. Further shaving down that fraction of a percent, modern civilization only formed 6,000 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution began under 300 years ago. The internet, in its initial form as ARPANET, is 53 years old, and the World Wide Web is 33. By every standard possible, we are only in the nascent stages of history.

Yet, when the past is all we’ve ever known and the future only lies in our imagination, we often forget the expansiveness of this timeline — our memories are short. Counter to our intuition, our bedrock institutions are contestable, and the processes that seem so deeply entrenched now can be reconceived in a myriad of ways. The future may look nothing like the world as we know it.

The news of yet another computer vision application built for state surveillance or developments in robotics technology militarized for autonomous weapons may lead us to cynicism. But every technological development, both in existence and yet to come, has the potential to be co-opted: nuclear power, social networks, genetic engineering. We cannot let this render us helpless.

As technologists, we have a responsibility to own our role in the technological transformation of our generation. We can chip away at structural problems through the tools we build or the policy that we implement, all without throwing our hands in the air in a rejection of technology _or_ claiming that any of these strategies are panaceas. Kernel Magazine is a project in world-making.

Kernel Magazine situates itself between two ends of a spectrum: on one end, a fatalistic vision of the irredeemability of technology; on the other, optimism weaponized as hype where venture-backed bandages are presented as all-encompassing solutions. In opposition to these two extremes, Kernel analyzes technological progress and regress, while earnestly charting a path forward. Cultural change cannot occur without political change; social change cannot exist without infrastructural change. Change requires an orchestra of players, instruments, and movements. We cannot achieve this alone.

To that end, this issue of Kernel Magazine is filled with precisely that — the people, tools, and ideas that together create movements that drive material change. Last year, our inaugural issue asked, _Where do we go from here?_ We know the future we want: a society of abundance where we are not just dividing a pie equitably but also the entire size of the pie has increased, where the market is not the sole determiner of value. Accordingly, in this issue we ask, _How do we get there?_

Our authors suggest answers: platforms can prioritize and protect their content creators with preemptive moderation policies; the open source community can hold its dependents accountable through equitable and representative governance; we can resituate tree planting as not a silver bullet but rather one vector of a climate response. Perhaps consumer culture can be appropriated for civic engagement, we can create new layers of governance that can lead us to a healthier political environment, and we can organize for legislation that protects workers from harassment and discrimination. Let the current moment not drive us to despair, but rather to action.

In our second issue, we place our authors in discourse and debate through deeply researched essays, personal narratives, poetry, fiction, and art. Our virtual expansion pack includes podcasts and audio recordings of our authors, published community responses, and more. As a publication by and for tech workers, our analysis is informed not just by theory, but also by our own experiences building, working with, and being affected by tech. But we do not profess to know all the answers, so we invite you to join this conversation — Kernel is not just a magazine, but also a community of people seeking answers.

Kernel Magazine is an honest articulation of how to maintain hope in our future and how to increase our agency in achieving it. I am truly beyond excited to share this with you.

Towards a better future,

<img style="float: left; margin-top: -30px; margin-bottom: -20px;" src="2/liu_signature.png" width="300" height="50">
 

Emily Liu \
_Editor-in-chief, Kernel Magazine_

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

                                                                                   ***

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

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

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


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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 perspective that a better storyteller would address swiftly and with care. Sorry.) See, she had hatched this idea — absolutely unfounded — that I was a poet, some sweet-lipped sonneteer of sorts. And it didn’t matter that she was just some dime-a-dozen white girl, I didn’t want to disappoint her. Call it a side effect of scaling the city on my father’s sinking shoulders, I couldn’t submit to that new wave we-owe-each-other-nothing mantra that my boys exhaled every Saturday night in that smoke-infested basement over on Everett.

Baba would slap the back of my head if he heard that chant. _I’ll send you back if you keep talking this nonsense_. You can’t take Baba too seriously when he says shit like that. He was always sending back. Returning. Traversing the ocean just to arrive, soaked, in Barisal to meet his mother, whose protruding lower lip hadn’t moved for the better part of the twentieth century. Nowadays, Baba could hardly stand to be back himself, his body two decades shriveled by the New England rain and taking the equator-set heat personally. He spent most of his time _back_ wiping sweat off his thick furrowed brow, tipping his head eternally downward toward the motherland. I watched him wander forehead-first beneath the glowering gaze of his mom for two months last summer and could hardly imagine him shipping me anywhere. The old man was too mixed up to do that, too afraid of dissolution. Petrified that all this cross-continental travel would tangle his roots so terribly that the poor plant would strangle itself while enduring yet another random pat-down by a portly TSA employee. No matter. Here or there, I was just a sum of what I owed other people. (Approximately.) And I owed the white girl poetry.

She had asked me for a simple thing really, just describe a few pictures to her decrepit grandma over in Beacon Hill. The old lady had recently gotten one of those memory enhancing surgeries, and it seemed most of her friends disapproved. Left her high and dry as they went down and deteriorated. Poor woman was halfway blind and wholly lonely, her granddaughter explained. I had almost shrugged her off — my own Ma had been the same way since touching down on the tarmac in 1986 and no one read _her_ nothing — when the girl mentioned slyly that her family would pay me for my services. So really, it was the promise of big bucks that got me to drag my sorry ass to the T on an overcast Sunday morning. Late and huffing it across town with my decade-old backpack that reeked of last night slung over one shoulder. The past had a way of sticking to me, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

I knew it was that day on the beach that doomed me, that time I stared at the wind flirting with the sand instead of holding her hand like she expected me to. When she brushed back her bangs (you know the type) and glanced up at me with those wide, dejected eyes, I knew I had to say something. Somehow soften the blow to her glass-animal ego. But all that tumbled out was a half-hearted haiku about the stars looking like pin holes overhead, some supernova sitting pretty on the other side of the sky. Of course, this convinced her right then and there that I was a poet — you know, helplessly in love with the world — because what was love but paying close attention? I’m not entirely to blame. This whole mess began with her assuming that I brought _love_ to the beach to begin with. Carted it around in my back pocket, waiting for the perfect moment to point the arrow and shoot. It never crossed her mind that I didn’t place my thumb on her chin and press my lips against hers because I just didn’t want to kiss her. To be fair, I should’ve known how desperately she would cling to her own fundamental lovability. We all kind of need to believe that crap.

Anyways, it was a straight shot from sand in my shoes to soaking my sneakers on her grandma’s doorstep, hand wrapped to reveal a constellation of stretch marks unspooling across my knuckles. It was this little map of seventeen years’ worth of repeated motions like the way I gripped a doorknob or pen or anything else, long and tubular. I was standing there, staring at my dry skin, when the door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman with a smile reminiscent of retail. I watched my words wash over her face as I explained that I was there to see some old lady, that I was her granddaughter’s friend. At that, her eyebrows jumped up like fleas, the same way Ma’s did when I toted Kevin McAfee off the school bus and through our front door sometime in the first grade. _Why do these white kids want to be friends with you_, they asked wordlessly. _How dare you betray us like that?_

The hallways snaked around in a labyrinth formation, and I followed the woman — Bina, she said softly when I asked — through every twist and turn. She sounded like Ma did on the phone, pressed so close to the receiver like she was scared the line would swallow up her words. Still, I got the lowdown as we walked. Born in Mumbai, last in a long ass line, and been working for decades with the same lady who had her on lock now. Couldn’t ever catch a break. The story sounded all too familiar; Ma and her friends repeated its fugue and every variation whenever they crowded around our kitchen table for tea. They sat there for hours, spinning the same stories until the sun set and it was time to return to their own husbands who, like Baba, sat on their respective couches with their eyes glued to the tiny TVs that displayed yet another loss for the Tigers. Bina mentioned no cramped kitchen, no cricket on the television. Just this family and this house, which, as she explained, was old enough to demand proper nouns and definite articles. This is the O’Henry dining room, the Peterson living room, this is the Paxton drawing room where the Jrs, the IIIs, and every son thereafter tapped the end of his cigar over a crystal tray and laughed at our crumbled dreams in the ash. (I took a few creative liberties with that last one.)

Eventually, we arrived in a sitting room where photo albums waited on a circular side table, stacked high and spread wide. An overpopulated metropolis of memory. At the heart of the sprawl sat a microphone, worth more than I would get paid for the whole lousy afternoon. For a second there I considered swiping it on my way out. The old lady wouldn’t miss it, she could hardly see. Bina must’ve seen the deliberation in my creased forehead because she warned me not to touch anything before leaving to retrieve the woman from the bowels of the building. It was all too familiar. She regarded me with that twitching half-stink Ma’s friends did because I reminded them a bit too much of their own worthless American sons. I certainly looked the part, squat trunk and limbs like overgrown branches. I had inherited Baba’s height (short) and his nose (large), but something had gone awry in transit and left my features stark instead of hazy like his. Baba’s blurriness was incredible. I swear, every well-meaning white man that walked through the doors of Zaid’s Spice Bazaar — unfortunate name, but it worked — said something to the effect of _oy, have we met?_ (They hadn’t. Baba took care not to meet people.) Meanwhile, I stuck out in every horrendous class photo with my two caterpillar eyebrows that inched closer towards each other until the fifth grade, when they finally kissed. Can’t rule out environmental factors for my conspicuousness; in Eastie I had no historical airbrush effect. The first time Baba took me back to Bangladesh, I wandered the streets in a stupor, eyes meeting the hips of thousands of strangers who looked like me. I wondered if Bina’s kid, the fictional one I was sure I resembled, felt the same way when he went home.

I began to flip through the photos, directly disobeying Bina’s orders to keep my hands to myself. All things considered, it was a fairly straightforward job; I just had to sit with the woman and describe what I saw. For that, twenty-five an hour, which was more than I had ever been paid bussing tables at Don Juan’s — minimum wage (twelve dollars minus tax plus tips here and there) — or helping my parents with the shop — family discount (nothing). The albums were arranged to approximate chronology, starting with frayed film from ye olden days. Lots of stiff family portraits and grim smiles. WASP in the most traditional sense. I thought the surgery was supposed to prevent this kind of thing, create some sort of mental cloud that was always updating, retrieving, caught between then and next. Like a Facebook album but in your frontal lobe. Or cerebellum. Wherever memories sat, collecting dust.

Baba came barreling home from the shop one day clutching a broadsheet in his palm that pronounced just that. _I found it I found it I found the answer,_ he practically shouted. Ma, skilled at ignoring him, returned to her stitching without batting an eye. He charged to the couch and shoved the advertisement in my face.

It looks like she’s getting a lobotomy, I said, glancing at the women on the page whose brain appeared woefully exposed. Poor branding if you ask me.

_Always Mr. Funny Man_, Baba admonished. _She’s getting a computer in her brain. That way, she never forgets._

Forgets what.

_Everything_.

I glanced up at the sound of creaking floorboards down the hall. Bina had returned, her left arm linked with a woman who bore closer resemblance to a tortoise than a person. The pair hobbled at half speed and I was caught wondering at what distance it would be appropriate for me to say hello. Bina shot me a look like _don’t you start with some stupid shit,_ the look of aunties everywhere, so I kept it quiet and pulled out a chair instead. The screeching of the legs scraping the tiles echoed through the room, which was somehow worse than the silence of their viscous steps. Figures. The lady sat down without saying zip, her standing-to-seated motion closely resembling a crumple or centerfold. In old age, gravity just happened to you. When I introduced myself, she made an indistinguishable yet dismissive noise before instructing me to _get on with it already_. I didn’t expect any less; she had overpaid for the right to be rude. She folded her hands into her lap and leaned back in her seat as I read the inscription of the first album loudly into the microphone. I looked over at her, frail and swaddled in a thick knit sweater, eyes closed and mouth slightly ajar as she took each slightly labored breath. Damn lady was asleep, or close to it. I didn’t really mind, it made my life all the easier. I began with _Martha’s Vineyard 1942._

We didn’t have many photographs from the 1940s. Wasn’t anybody’s fault. When they came to Boston, Baba stuffed his suitcase with self-loathing and Ma brought the fuel for twenty years of resentment, or more. The past was swept across the ocean. Instead of pictures Baba offered stories, small as a nickel turned over between his front two fingers. Baba running through rice paddies as a child, chasing some animal that would be impossible to me now. Lying prostrate on the flat rooftop with his brothers, talking shit while staring up at the black velvet sky. _Ay_ _Zaid_, Ma would say, whipping his thigh with whatever towel she had on hand. _Let go of that nonsense. We’re here now._ I wasn’t convinced. Rolling off Baba’s tongue, the past was vibrant. Slick. I too was afraid to lose it. _Be careful,_ he said while we stood, backs pressed, in the same cramped aisle of the shop. _Pay attention or home will slip right through your fingers._

That’s what it was all about, right? Holding on so tight you nearly suffocated the damn thing. That’s why the old lady paid so well to listen to me describe it all, though for all she knew I was just a smudge that could talk. I guess that’s why she got the surgery too, even though it sounded like they just stuck a small computer in your mind and fed it memories. I heard rumors you could even program a personality, and some old folks’ homes just left their elderly dozing in front of sitcom reruns until the computers emerged a knock-off Jerry Seinfeld. Everyone hobbling around on canes and in wheelchairs, wildly gesticulating, nitpicking the women they want to sleep with. But Baba wanted the surgery to become more himself. As if machinery and memory could withstand the erosion of assimilation and time. Soon after he found the ad, he started collecting data packages online. For only $19.99 he could buy the complete works of Zahir Raihan consolidated into 98 megabytes, digestible in less than one minute. The down payment on the procedure was hefty, sure, but after that it was smooth sailing. It was like buying a second house. It was like the American dream. (So he proclaimed to Ma, who had taken to wearing headphones whenever he was around. The picture of a happy marriage.)

I wondered if the old lady wanted the surgery. She didn’t seem to be one to execute her desires, snoring the afternoon away. I supposed it didn’t matter if she was awake; the computer was always listening. After a few pictures I found a rhythm. I started with the background because it was easiest. Usually, it was a blank canvas with a few watercolor clouds, but once in a while they caught something interesting. Once lightning cut the photo in two, a dendritic splinter in the South Dakotan sky. Then I described the people, what they were doing, where they were going, where they came from. Whose hand they held, whose eyes they searched to meet. When someone was unlabeled, I would nudge the lady and ask politely if she could please tell me who they were. Like she was doing me some big favor. More often than not she just shrugged. I made them up.

Every ten minutes or so she would grunt noncommittally and after the first hour, I stopped bothering to decipher what she meant. We made it pretty far — _we_ being a loose descriptor — and I felt like I had a pretty good sense of the stranger next to me after a few hours like this. For instance, I learned that her husband was classically handsome, the kind that went out of fashion a few years back. He was probably a good-for-nothing, or, at least, good-for-something-but-not-for-her. Over the years I watched money trickle from her side of the family into his jetted pocket. Still, he appeared in maybe fifteen photos, tops, after they got married. Her scrawled notes in the margins kept track of his absence. I refused to dwell on it, mainly because I didn’t want to sit there feeling bad for the old bat. I try not to make a habit of pitying the more fortunate. I liked her son though. He had this dopey grin that always got me. Sheepish but aware of the effect he had on the camera. I couldn’t get past the idea that he was glancing back over his shoulder to look at me personally, shooting me that cross between _I dare you_ and _don’t even think about it_. I knew that look. For years, I practiced it daily in the bathroom mirror while Baba shouted from the other side of the door, _If you clog the toilet again I will take the plunger and shove it up your —._ Anyways, he stopped showing up in photos around the time his sister had kids, including the girl that got me the gig. Before he disappeared, the son got this sort of sickly look, the kind of frame that reminds you that people are just skin and skeleton. Bodies bumping against each other, bruising one another, forcing the puzzle pieces to fit. After 1992, he was gone.

The photos from the past decade were the hardest to stomach, like if I had just been born a bit better or at least differently I could’ve had it too. Expansive backyard, summer as a verb. The grandkids were always mid-motion. Half-laughing, jumping, tumbling to nowhere in particular. From the way they took up the frame, you could tell their mom thought they were the center of the whole ass universe. In the deepest place I had, I knew that kind of love was no good. All that white woman sun could do was bake a bag of street trash. Release the stink onto the world. But in the shallower water, where I stood treading, I wanted it. Flipping through the hyper-pixelated shots of school plays, I just wanted to be loved as unexceptional. Or at least, I wanted someone to zoom in to find me in the rafters.

Behind us, the sun nearly set the sitting room ablaze with its late orange glow. I shook her forearm lightly, just enough to get her attention and pause her afternoon daydream. I thought of Baba, standing, his feet blistered from hours spent in the store shuffling from foot to foot. Rocking back and forth just to stay awake. The old lady smacked her lips together as she awoke. Time’s up, I said. She looked back at me blankly. Her face betrayed no recognition of her family, of the past. I wondered if the computer in there was doing anything at all, or if it was all some nasty front for an otherwise uncouth brain operation. In the end it didn’t matter. I suppose it was all just stories we tell ourselves, fiction upon fiction endlessly amassed. Baba, arms outreached, reaching for a time he could no longer not touch. I wanted to ask her if she was happy, if the illusion of holding on was somehow better than facing the act of letting go. I extended my hand across the table to turn off the microphone but was stopped by her frail grip on my forearm. Fingers eroded by time. Wordlessly, she placed a check in my hand. The memory machine grew smarter as it was fed more data, so the ads said. Your brain evolved until truth and nostalgia became enrapt in each other. Inseparable. Undone. The lady nodded toward the microphone and I saw Baba bidding his mother goodbye. Again and again and again. I retreated from the recording button and cleared my throat.

_Anabelle Johnston (she/her) writes about cohabitation and community, physical and otherwise._


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


I first discovered afrofuturism during one of my first years of university through the short film Afronauts, directed by Nuot...

Afrofuturism: From a Lens to a Portal

Do you still use our words —
astronaut, colony, alien,
lift-off?
I, old Earthbound,
listen for you in the night,
dream you fl...

Space Sisters

Ideas

It’s easy to feel like the future is always arriving. _It’s the age of AI_, headlines blare; the age of automation, of surveillance capitalism, of remote work, of distraction. Before that, the age of social media, of the internet, of information overload and big data. We live in a flood of prophecies, the age of ages, drowning in news and takes and things to know.

Why add to this cacophony? In short, because we still have more to say.

Reboot was founded in 2020, and Kernel’s first issue was published in 2021. In these short intervening years, we — the core and founding teams of the first versions of the newsletter and magazine — have collectively graduated, landed jobs, quit jobs, gone back to school, moved across the U.S. and back. We’ve learned to live with Covid-19, seen longstanding publications [shutter](https://reallifemag.com/about) and [resurrect](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/books/the-believer-mcsweeneys.html), watched the tech industry go through an entire boom-bust cycle. _SUSTAIN_ is as much about the content of this issue as it is about our decisions to keep going. If in Kernel Issue One we were dreaming something into existence and in Issue Two we were trying to do it right, Issue Three is for building something that lasts.

---

But _SUSTAIN_ isn’t (just) about us. _To sustain_ means to _cause_ or _allow_ something to continue; to keep alive; to suffer (damage); to support (emotionally). _Sustenance_ is the thing that sustains; _sustainability_ is a property that describes the possibility of limitless continuity, to the vanishing point of the future.

I should say that _sustainability_, these days, often refers to the environment — how we might survive or mitigate climate change. To be clear, this issue of Kernel is not primarily about climate. Still, it’s impossible to think about how to keep anything going without also considering this ecological backdrop, carbon ticking into the atmosphere.

In other words, _sustaining_ requires flexibility, a willingness to revisit past principles to accommodate a changed present and a changing future. When discussing this issue’s theme with friends and colleagues, the word _maintain_ kept coming up. But to me, _maintenance_ implies stasis, an almost-technocratic endorsement of the solutions we have today. Maintenance and maintenance work are, of course, important. Some of the core principles — refusal to jump ship for the new, shiny thing; respect for the past, and its lessons for the present — are worth preserving (maintaining, even). But sometimes to _sustain_ (an ideal, a movement, a path forward) also requires a refusal to _maintain_ (an unjust institution, harmful norms, the status quo).

All that to say: I’m interested in what _SUSTAIN_ implies about agency. To _cause_ continuation is active; to _allow_ it is passive. To sustain an injury means that something has been done _to_ you; to sustain someone else means that you are doing something _for_ them. This issue of Kernel Magazine is about this question of agency, which means it’s also, fundamentally, about how we live together, about how we decide to participate in the world around us.

---

This issue is loosely organized in three sections: _The System, The Individual_, and _The Collective_. How do we name the systems we are working within and against? Can we “[trace their edges](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/ghosts-world)”? How might individuals [find the agency](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/stack-overflow) afforded to them within these systems? How might they [demand more](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/top-o-the-world)? And how might individuals come together — across differences — to accomplish something together, greater than the sum of its parts? We need to understand the systems in order to contextualize our actions within them, but lasting change comes from moving together.

The pieces in this issue exemplify where I think tech writing, and tech criticism, must go.

We should be more willing to be wrong, to make mistakes, to entertain a wider range of possibilities. Maybe there exists a range of fractional truths, of fractal truths. A healthy — sustainable — space of intellectual discourse is one where we hold contradictions together, to seek among them not resolution, but consilience within the tension. To extend an environmental metaphor: if a habitat requires biodiversity for stability and longevity, then an ecosystem of ideas requires a plurality of perspectives. We should think of disagreement and dissent not as symptoms of “error” or “incorrectness,” but as the variations that protect against dogmatic monocultures. So consider: _Perhaps [we should be suspicious](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/democracy-affirming-ai) of “democracy-affirming” AI. Despite everything, crypto — both the industry and the technology — [might still be good](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/thank-you-sbf), actually. Quantitative climate models, these data-driven tools which profess to predict the future, [aren’t the only way to understand](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/climate-science-crystal) the environment. And even those who work at Port Fourchon, the site of the 2010 BP oil spill, [aren’t necessarily the enemies](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/port-paradox) of the climate movement._

We should also be willing to be prescriptive. Of course there’s a critique for any proposal, and of course there are systemic issues at play. (_A spectre is haunting tech criticism…_.) But analysis and nuance need not be paralyzing. Instead, we should understand that the complexity of the forces that made the world we see today — forces as vast as capitalism, imperialism, anti-blackness, patriarchy, and more — is precisely why their persistence should not immediately disqualify any proposition for action. We should try a lot of things and a lot of them _will_ fail, but we shouldn’t not try just because _some_ are going to, because we don’t know ahead of time which are going to work and which aren’t. We plant more seeds than could possibly all grow, but the failure of any individual seedling to flower is no referendum on the rest. _Might higher standards for [computer animations used in legal trials](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/computer-witness) alleviate their most dangerous characteristics? What would a tech ecosystem look like if it was filled with people who “[took business personally](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/charles-broskoski-interview),” who were manifesting specific visions into the world rather than just trying to get rich? How would incentives shift if tech companies really had to make money from day one, and [if all workers had a say](https://www.kernelmag.io/3/tech-coops) in the direction of the business?_

---

_Are we there yet?_ It’s a trick question, because I suspect we will never be “there” — the horizon of a perfect world. And yet that’s no reason not to try. For all their differences, community organizers and tech founders have at least one belief in common: _The future doesn’t just arrive; it has to be built._

So words, by themselves, aren’t enough. We may speak and write new possibilities into existence, but to translate possibility into practice requires, well, building. Real people — you! — doing real things, in the world. When I say that _SUSTAIN_ is about agency, I mean this not just in a theoretical sense: I mean this for you, too. From here, it’s choose your own adventure. Choose wisely, and remember, you’re never doing it alone.

With love,

<img style="margin-left: -20px; margin-top: -10px; margin-bottom: -20px;" src="3/dai-signature.png" width="200" height="50">
 

Jessica Dai

_Editor-in-Chief, Kernel Magazine, Issue Three_

It’s easy to feel like the future is always arriving. It’s the age of AI, headlines blare; the age of automation, of surveill...

When my uncle called in May 2021 to ask if I wanted to program for a crypto game called Dark Forest, it was an easy pass. I was saying no to the picture I had of crypto: a wasteland of financial speculation, criminal activity, and squandered energy. He tried to soothe my concerns: “Don’t worry about the scammy stuff. Porn drove the rise of the Internet, and speculators will do the same for crypto.” This wasn’t very convincing, but I was still curious to see what the hype was about. The programmer in me wanted to understand the technical underpinnings of crypto, and the political enthusiast wanted to understand why the Securities and Exchange Commision and the Chinese Communist Party were both going after what I considered a fringe libertarian project.

To my surprise, everything I touched in Dark Forest was exciting. My uncle and I started a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of players and conducted some novel coordination experiments. Our most famous [project](https://web.archive.org/web/20230614211301/https://astralcolossus.xyz/) was a smart contract that allowed individual players to combine their points and receive a proportional amount of the prize trophy. Our code used the transparency of a blockchain to let players from all over the world verify that their contributions would be counted. On one memorable day, players from China, Spain, Australia, and Serbia flooded into our Discord server to contribute to our new collective. To me, this was proof that blockchains could be useful for organizing and coordinating across borders, not just for speculating on coins.

But speculation was still a driving force behind the popularity of the game. Venture capitalists started sending us DMs on Twitter. I was even invited to move to Hong Kong, where a “crypto whale” wanted to work with us on an East Asian version of the game. However, in May 2022, the tables turned with the infamous Terra/Luna [crash](https://archive.is/MKsDI), which wiped out the life savings of many and caused the value of other cryptocurrencies to nosedive. The fallout from Terra drove major crypto firms to bankruptcy and exposed Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) fraudulent bookkeeping. Law enforcement stepped up as well, recovering stolen Bitcoin and placing sanctions on services that anonymize cryptocurrencies. Our game wasn’t immune to the crash either; disheartened players stopped responding in Discord and community donations dried up.

> To me, this was proof that blockchains could be useful for organizing and coordinating across borders, not just for speculating on coins.

Amid the chaos, I have witnessed two extreme reactions to these events. There are the skeptics, who say this year shows why crypto is nothing but trouble; and there are the maximalists, who continue to insist that any regulation is authoritarian overreach. My past two years in crypto have shown me that both of these positions are wrong. To the skeptics, I say that crypto is innovative and necessary, and to the maximalists, I say that there are legitimately harmful uses of the technology that need to be curtailed. To understand my position, we must start from the basic principles underlying the technology.

## _Why crypto(graphy) matters_

Before _crypto_ came to mean _cryptocurrency_, it referred to the mathematical field of cryptography. Cryptography has a long lineage, from schemes for scrambling Julius Caesar’s secret messages to the German Enigma machine in World War II, but we’ll pick up the story with the invention of asymmetric encryption in the 1970s. In asymmetric cryptography, two different “keys” are generated: a public key and a private key. The public key is made widely available to others, while the private key is kept secret and known only to the owner. The keys are mathematically related in such a way that data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted with the corresponding key from the pair. Furthermore, it is computationally infeasible to derive the private key from a public key. A typical private key is 256 bits, which means an adversary would have to roll the dice 2256 times to be sure of finding the key. To put this number in perspective, a computer that could do one billion dice rolls per second would still require more time than the current age of the universe to check every key.

> In a world where governments have orders of magnitude more resources than ordinary citizens, asymmetric cryptography stands out as a tool that treats all people equally.

In many systems, both physical and digital, an attacker has an easier job than a defender, because a defender must defend against every possible attack at all times. We remember the Trojan Horse, not the ten previous years the Greeks spent trying to break into Troy. Asymmetric cryptography, in contrast, is one of the few systems where the defenders have a massive advantage. If I encrypt a message with my friend’s public key, I know with near certainty that only my friend will be able to decrypt its contents, using her private key. Anyone wanting to access that message, including the government or military, would have to steal my friend’s private key from her computer or compel her to share it with them. This is quite possible, of course, but it requires more effort than simply scanning the messages of millions of people [à la NSA](https://web.archive.org/web/20130731050902/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data). In a world where governments have orders of magnitude more resources than ordinary citizens, asymmetric cryptography stands out as a tool that treats all people equally.

![Comics from XKCD on security and privacy with two men talking. The first is a crypto nerd';s imagination and the second is what would actually happen.](3/article-images/thank-you-sbf/1.png)

Bitcoin’s primary innovation was to make possible a database of information with the same fundamental property as asymmetric cryptography: It is significantly easier to maintain and defend than it is to attack or corrupt. This property is achieved by offering economic incentives for honest participants, and building in extreme redundancy by having every computer in the network maintain its own copy of the database. This database looks like a chain of transactions — a blockchain — where each new transaction contains a reference to the ones that came before it.[^1]

Blockchains created the ability to have _digital scarcity,_ to ensure that a certain piece of data is unique. Although file sharing is at the heart of the Internet, there are objects which cannot be copied without limit. Social Security numbers, votes, and money are some examples where scarcity is necessary. This is different from _artificial scarcity_, often seen in luxury goods like Birkin bags, whose supply is intentionally constrained to increase demand. Bitcoin, the blockchain, enforces digital scarcity for bitcoins, the cryptocurrency. There is a clear protocol for when new bitcoins are minted and they cannot be duplicated. Over time, bitcoins grew in value as people realized that they could trust Bitcoin to accurately track the ownership and supply of bitcoins.

A few years later, Ethereum was born out of a realization: instead of just storing a ledger for bitcoins on a blockchain, you could also store and interact with computer programs. A transaction previously consisted of sending money from person A to person B, but now person A could interact with program C. These programs are called smart contracts, because they are agreements (contracts) that can enforce themselves (smart). A popular analogy for a smart contract is a vending machine: _If you give me one dollar and press A2, I will give you Swedish Fish_. Once the dollar is received, the machine gives out the candy on its own. Smart contract agreements extend far beyond purchases, such as _If you are a member of this club, you can vote_ and _If you contribute points to the team, you will be rewarded_. Anyone who is skeptical of the proposed agreement can examine the code and verify the logic for themselves, although this does require some technical knowledge.

These new cryptographic tools provide a crucial check on the increasing concentration of power in our institutions, lower the barrier for people around the world to work together, and are sometimes just a more efficient way of doing things. With cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, people can directly exchange or store value and enforce agreements with a similar degree of protection as sending encrypted messages. We can now send money to anyone in the world without central bank approval and create binding, trans-national agreements without a legal system. When Paypal, under pressure from the U.S. government, cut off payments to the watchdog organization WikiLeaks, donors could instead use Bitcoin to send their support. In 2019, when Argentina prevented its citizens from buying more than $200 U.S. dollars per month, people purchased stablecoins (a cryptocurrency designed to avoid volatile price swings) rather than keep their earnings in devalued pesos. The uses of smart contracts include the ability to take out a loan without a traditional credit score and transparent governance systems for voting and budget approval.

To fully realize the benefits of smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, we must also be prepared to deal with the antisocial uses of these tools as well. There is a strong political tradition in crypto that opposes regulation of any kind, stemming in part from the anti-state position of Bitcoin’s early adopters. My view, on the other hand, is that because crypto has been and will continue to be abused by bad actors, we need a viable regulatory framework.

## _Why regulation matters_

There is a fundamental tension between the autonomy of an individual and the health of a collective, especially when the individual’s actions affect people other than themselves. For example, there can be the right to bear arms, but mass shootings cause intense pain and suffering to entire communities. The primary double-edged sword with cryptocurrencies and blockchains concerns financial privacy.

Basic financial privacy is a good thing, but complete financial privacy enables a host of antisocial behavior from money laundering to tax evasion. Our laws address this tension by mandating privacy in personal banking, but still allowing the IRS to access records during audits. We are still figuring out the legal framework for privacy on blockchains, but important steps forward were taken this year.

It is actually difficult to hide financial records on blockchains. The history of every transaction is public, so if a wallet receives stolen funds, law enforcement knows that wallet is associated with criminal activity. Centralized exchanges for swapping fiat and crypto routinely bar wallets suspected of criminal activity from transacting. In a famous [case](https://web.archive.org/web/20220214110449/https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-a-young-couple-failed-to-launder-billions-of-dollars-in-stolen-bitcoin), a couple that stole over five billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin were caught six years later; they never managed to launder their money through an exchange. Their wallets were so tainted that they resorted to buying Walmart gift cards and gold, a tactic that resulted in their capture.

On Ethereum, it’s possible to implement a service called a “mixer.” These are smart contracts that enable users to deposit funds from one wallet into a common pool, and then withdraw the same amount from the pool into another wallet — with no direct link between the two. This provides financial privacy for users who don’t want their complete financial history visible to everyone, but also enables money laundering. The most popular mixer is called Tornado Cash (TC), and it was used by a North Korean hacker group to anonymize over $400 million in stolen funds. In August of 2022, the US Office of Foreign Asset Control announced that US residents could no longer use the service, and that any wallet that interacted with TC moving forward would be flagged as suspicious.

The Tornado Cash sanctions demonstrate the ability to mitigate antisocial behavior while still maintaining the strong guarantees that crypto provides for individual rights. Although the TC smart contract cannot be taken down directly,[^2] ordinary users stopped using the service because, for most of them, there was a direct link between their bank account and their crypto wallets.[^3] This made the mixer less effective, because privacy depends on a large pool of potential withdrawers. For users still seeking privacy, developers proposed modifications to TC — such as Know Your Customer requirements and deposit limits — that resemble safeguards in the traditional banking system. The key difference, however, is that users prove they are _not_ on a list of flagged wallets in order to deposit. This proof keeps the user’s identity private, while verifying that their activity is licit. Individuals still have financial privacy tools at their disposal that the government cannot take away, but criminals laundering large sums of money can no longer hide behind law-abiding users.

## _Looking forward_

Speculators, cover your ears: the market crash and sanctions of the past year have been good for crypto. VCs are [leaving](https://web.archive.org/web/20230728005335/https://www.ft.com/content/4cfd2711-315e-40bd-8ea6-1b818f65e5d8), frauds like SBF have been exposed, and regulation is starting to reign in antisocial behavior. The honeymoon phase of “crypto will make everyone rich and remove the need for governments” is over. Instead, we are figuring out where crypto can enhance existing functions in society (voting), provide viable alternatives (stablecoins in the face of devaluation), and create new mediums for Internet-scale coordination (Dark Forest).

Beyond the technology’s specific use cases, crypto has a set of values — equality, transparency, access, and privacy — that set higher standards for our politics and institutions. Many human organizations in the crypto space are starting to reflect the qualities of the technology they are building on: All of the Ethereum code is open-source, meetings discussing network upgrades are public, and privacy is respected by allowing people to apply for jobs under their online handles.

> Crypto has a set of values — equality, transparency, access, and privacy — that set higher standards for our politics and institutions.

I see a potential future where we demand similar practices from institutions outside of the crypto world. In turn, our governments, banks, and courts would become more accountable to the people they serve, and earn the people’s trust. Nations could also rely on the neutral base layer of Ethereum to create and enforce agreements between themselves, facilitating coordination and enabling political projects on the global scale needed to combat climate change. This might be a long shot — but so was Ethereum.



## Notes

[^1]: Blockchain security originally required tons of computation, which meant massive amounts of electricity had to be expended. But new protocols have reduced network energy consumption by [99.99 percent](https://web.archive.org/web/20230724013047/https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/).
[^2]: It would cost around $4.6 billion _per attempt_ to [attack](https://web.archive.org/web/20230629140516/https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/pos-vs-pow/) the network, and even then, the best an attacker could do is refuse to allow any new transactions to interact with Tornado Cash. Users could upload new copies of the contract and migrate their funds, but that would create an expensive game of cat and mouse.
[^3]: The exchange where they used fiat currency to buy crypto can link a user’s bank account to their crypto wallet, and provide that data to a government when subpoenaed.

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The System

You’re hitting a wall with your code. It’s getting dark outside, but you have yet to find the solution even after stepping through a debugger for the 400th time. Staring up at your ceiling, you feel like giving up. You open another can of caffeinated beverage, which may as well be poison at this point, but it’ll help you persevere through the night and find a beautiful, original solution.

Just kidding.

You copy and paste the error message into the search bar. The top search result, from Stack Overflow, graces you with its presence.

_Voilà._ The genius of those who came before has once again saved the day.

---

<img src="3/article-images/stack-overflow/1.png" alt="Question that asks the difference between JS and java">

If you’ve coded anything more complex than “Hello, world,” chances are that you’ve encountered Stack Overflow, a website used by developers to ask questions about programming. The site has expanded to form a network called Stack Exchange, consisting of nearly 170+ other forum-based websites in any category one can think of (e.g., space exploration, retrocomputing, and bioacoustics). Stack Overflow alone has over [24 million questions and 35 million answers](https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questions), eight times the size of the English Wikipedia.

Stack Overflow was founded in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, two programmer-writers who wanted to create a free version of ExpertsExchange but, in Atwood’s own words, “without all the evil.” ExpertsExchange was known to restrict answers behind a paywall, but Stack Overflow would offer everything free of charge.

Fast forward 15 years. Now, for any common programming error, you’ll likely find a Stack Overflow post that explains how to fix the problem. What may initially appear as a helter-skelter Q&A website has, over the years, transfigured into a de facto programming encyclopedia.

At first glance, Stack Overflow may seem like a utopia, an impossibly altruistic one: Anyone can create an account, ask a question, and read answers for free. But make no mistake. As you begin to learn about the culture of Stack Overflow, you realize that moderation can be tear-jerkingly strict. One dreaded flag is “Marked as duplicate. This question already has an answer here,” which links to another question. However, even if the already-answered question is relevant, it often does not serve as a reliable replacement; the need for a new question is not obviated.

Because of the number of questions in its 15-year history, most common errors and bugs already have plenty of discussion, significantly raising the bar for what kind of questions can enter this selective space, contributing to a culture in which not everyone feels welcome to ask a question. There is an appeal process, but a question marked as duplicate often attracts discouraging comments about its (or the asker’s) worthiness, akin to sharks that have just smelled blood. (“Did you even try to Google this before posting?”) Facing an audience so keen on finding faults makes Stack Overflow a more daunting place than it needs to be. The website’s tagline may as well be: “There _is_ such a thing as a dumb question.”

---

<img src="3/article-images/stack-overflow/2.png" alt="Question that asks the difference between JS and java">

Stack Overflow is well aware of its reputation. When you sign up, the subject line of the introductory email reads: “Your friendly, fear-free guide to getting started.” In 2019, the website also introduced “Unfriendly Robot (UR-V1),” a machine learning model designed to indicate unfriendly comments. Trained on real flags raised by members of the community, the model showed some potential. However, UR-V1 developers [made it clear](https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/04/09/the-unfriendly-robot-automatically-flagging-unwelcoming-comments/) that it would never replace human moderators (though it’s unclear which specific human trait — meanness, perhaps? — that UR-V1 wouldn’t be able to match.)

However, even if Stack Overflow can feel like an intimidating, strictly-for-professionals space, it has good reasons for pursuing exactly that. Stack Overflow has become a source of truth for the entire software industry. There’s a common sentiment about Stack Overflow that when someone answers a question, they aren’t just answering that single person’s question — they’re answering it for everyone who is going to stumble across the same question in the future, whether that’s tomorrow, or years later.

In fact, Stack Overflow’s characteristically unwelcoming environment was perhaps exactly what propelled its success. In her book _Working in Public_, Nadia Eghbal, describing the challenges of maintaining the quality of open-source software projects, writes: “If large numbers of low-quality contributions are becoming increasingly common, there may be substantial management challenges in the future.” By ruthlessly filtering out repetitive and unhelpful questions, the website has remained high-quality and useful, allowing it to preserve its encyclopedic nature.

While cultivating a strict environment has allowed Stack Overflow to maintain its caliber, this doesn’t come without a cost — in this case, a deluge of criticism and complaints about its culture. And it’s clear that some policies are gratuitously strict. One policy worth noting is the prohibition of pleasantries. If users added phrases such as “hello” or “thank you” into their submission, the post would often be edited by moderators to have them taken out. In one “meta” [post](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950/should-hi-thanks-taglines-and-salutations-be-removed-from-posts) from Stack Exchange, editors argued that such pleasantries were distracting and hindered the goal of sharing information as efficiently as possible (Atwood himself commented in agreement). Still, many questioned if an unassuming “Hi” really constituted “noise.” The pleasantries and salutations, while adding nothing to a post, don’t take away from it either. (An answer isn’t confusing if someone adds “hope this helps!” at the end of it.) If it’s going to be barely noticed, I’m not sure if enforcing such a rule does anything other than reinforce Stack Overflow’s culture as being draconian.

> There’s a common sentiment about Stack Overflow that when someone answers a question, they aren’t just answering that single person’s question — they’re answering it for everyone who is going to stumble across the same question in the future, whether that’s tomorrow, or years later

In an essay titled “[The other side of Stack Overflow content moderation](https://medium.com/@sotiriosdelimanolis/the-other-side-of-stack-overflow-content-moderation-2a5d4fbe9c17#6c41),” S[otirios Delimanolis,](https://medium.com/@sotiriosdelimanolis?source=post_page-----2a5d4fbe9c17--------------------------------) a content moderator on Stack Overflow, offered a typology of questions he deemed unhelpful. This ranges from broad, opinionated questions; posts deemed to reflect insufficient research effort; undescriptive titles; and a host of other reasons. And while Delimanolis claims that the moderators aren’t doing this because they are “out to get you,” the extent of the moderation can lead users to believe that that’s exactly the case.

But the culture that made the Stack Overflow of today is unlikely to make the Stack Overflow of tomorrow. And the fact that the sharpest criticism comes not from outsiders caviling at Stack Overflow but from longtime contributors may be a testament to its need for change. It isn’t uncommon to see top-level contributors mentioning Stack Overflow’s toxicity as one of the reasons that caused them to ultimately stop interacting with the website. See, for example, Michael Richter’s “[Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow](https://web.archive.org/web/20131231174339/http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/)” and Jason Sachs’s “[My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow: Arthur S., Arthur T., and the Soup Nazi](https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php).” Both Richter and Sachs have thousands of points in “reputation,” Stack Overflow’s point system, and have reached millions of users with their contributions (on their all-time leaderboard of over 700,000 users, Sachs is #449 and Richter is #5476 — in the top 0.7 percent despite having not posted at all since 2011). This loss of established talent, combined with the scaring away of new users, together result in a “community” that mostly passively clicks on a question to find the answer they need and then closes the tab.

> But if other platforms with a different — non-diabolical — culture offer what Stack Overflow does, then why stick to a place that is no longer the rare commodity it used to be?

Unlike 2008, competitors abound. Features like GitHub’s Issues tab, open-source forum systems like Discourse (created by none other than Atwood), Reddit, and, of course, ChatGPT, threaten Stack Overflow’s position as a programming resource par excellence. These other websites fill in the gaps that Stack Overflow leaves open. AI technology doesn’t judge your simplistic questions; GitHub Issues integrate well with a team’s existing GitHub codebase; and Reddit and Discourse, with their large user bases, give rise to a kind of organic — somewhat unstructured but undoubtedly useful — wiki.

Stack Overflow’s commitment to purity has served it well. But if other platforms with a different — non-diabolical — culture offer what Stack Overflow does, then why stick to a place that is no longer the rare commodity it used to be?

---

<img src="3/article-images/stack-overflow/3.png" alt="Question that asks the difference between JS and java">

Still, Stack Overflow has enduring popularity, at least in software. Why is it that a resource like it — a centralized, global resource to ask questions — is not as common in other industries? Stack Exchange’s other forum-based websites are nowhere near as popular as Stack Overflow. The reasons are many, but here I offer two: replicability and the “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) principle.

The comparative ease with which developers can replicate each other’s problems, which is rarely the case in other disciplines, is intrinsic to programming. Under the same environment, bugs are easily — and often provably — reproducible. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Scalpel Overflow where neurosurgeons dish out surgical tips, given the vastly different number of parameters and levers when it comes to human physiology, not to mention the uniqueness of an individual’s medical history. Additionally, many programming questions have verifiable and correct answers. (For example, the answers to “How to sort a list alphabetically in Python?” can be verified, whereas the answer is less obvious for, say, “How can the principle of transitional justice apply in light of the peace agreement between the FARC-EP and the Colombian government?”)

DRY, meanwhile, demands that you create a function for the routine you’ll be repeating, and, for example, that you use a well-maintained cryptography function instead of rolling out your own implementation of “Math.random.” Having a repository of questions and answers, in which duplication is discouraged, is a natural extension of the DRY principle — someone’s had this exact problem before, and there’s no need to come up with its solution again.

So, despite how unwelcoming a place Stack Overflow can often be, we’d be sorry to see it go away. Atwood wanted to build Stack Overflow “without all the evil,” but little did he know that it’d be beset by another kind of evil. Without a due exorcism, it’s possible that Stack Overflow will become a relic, all the more so as the likes of ChatGPT are ushering in a new paradigm of programming. There is no doubt Stack Overflow will continue to exist, but users may come only to scour for a solution — from a set of increasingly outdated answers as the community shrinks — while never contributing any of their own, just like a visitor to an immaculately preserved ghost town.

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<pre class="body-base whitespace-pre-wrap">
An evergreen whose leaves have
begun to shine too bright & sway
too freely. As if they were told
to do so, manufactured constraint
on my breath. Sometimes there is
beauty in the world that flakes away
when you look closer, a veneer
staged for actors to tell stories
elementary ones, conflict, love &
a hero’s journey which ends in
unfailing happiness. Balloons filled
to the brim with bright yellow helium.
Picking up trash might be part of mine.
Performative environmentalism is good
for coping. I don’t care for the greater good
rather the otherworldly, a conch
in the desert, a lily pad floating
atop a snowy apex, a bright red
flag with a reflective underside,
big capital letters plastered
against the lining of my soul.
</pre>

I picked up a plastic wrapper today

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were not meant to be. I wish

to be lucky, enough

for the red I am wearing.

For random() to

always return me

to you. To b...

Some things to be

The Individual


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

**Michael Falco** is Executive Director of Incite at Columbia University. They play a leadership and project design role on several projects, including as interim managing editor during the relaunch of Logic(s) Magazine.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

## _From Logic to Logic(s)_

**Jessica: How did Logic become Logic(s)?**

Michael: In December 2021 our Editor in Chief Khadijah Abdurahman produced a special issue of Logic called _Beacons_, which was an opportunity to do something a little different than what Logic had been doing at the time. There was creative fiction, there was poetry, there were visual essays, and it was primarily with Black, Asian, Queer individuals. It gave platforms to people who are engaging in technology, many of whom were outside of academia.

Around that time, Logic was thinking about closing up the magazine operation; they were ready to put their energy into something different, and in the midst of those conversations, Khadijah proposed taking it over, moving it to Columbia where she had worked with Incite since 2019, maintaining its mission and values, but also thinking more critically about engaging voices that are outside of the normal discourse around tech. All of this with the goal of really investing in people, supporting them not only in the development of their pieces, but also in the development of their careers. She also wanted to ensure we focused on the global south and linked with orgs doing on-the-ground work across the globe.

I should be really clear: we’ve very much been rebuilding the plane mid-air. The former Logic team has been tremendously supportive, and they built a really impressive organization. At the same time, we started fresh with an entirely new editorial process, including fact-checking, a new editorial team, and a new way of development-editing pieces and compensating people. Our team is growing so much and it’s been so fun building out the team with so many talented people.

**Why the name change? With the parentheses-s? I read this as having a plurality of people speaking, a coalition of voices, and less of a single, idealized, "true” logic.**

Your read is exactly right! Of course, it was also important that we kept the name to maintain continuity with Logic Magazine, its brand recognition, and our commitment to its founding mission, which is also why our _supa dupa skies_ issue is number 19. Second, as you say, adding the “(s)” represents what we are doing: representing a multiplicity of viewpoints and logics to deepen the conversation around critical tech, not just implying there is a singular solution or vantage. So the name reflects our effort to elevate perspectives outside traditional tech discourse that offer new ways of thinking and approaching the problems of today.

## _From Knowledge to Action_

**So there’s the continuity from old Logic of — we want to talk about tech, and we want to talk about it critically. What’s the vision for the role of Logic(s) moving forward?**

What we want to do is to create spaces for people to be together, to think together, to dream together. We think of the magazine as one mechanism for actually doing that — both for the writers and in its creation by our staff.

In our first editorial note, we really emphasized getting rid of the dread of just recounting that “the sky is falling” — that these are apocalyptic times that we can’t do anything about. We wanted a dynamic magazine that creates room for people who have been impacted by tech in all sorts of ways — whether they’ve found community through it, or organized against it, people who are incarcerated and surveilled inside and outside of prisons. We wanted to create room for possibility, and also highlight the exciting things that are coming out of the organizing space. We want to make room for creative expressions, for people who have the capacity to imagine beyond the constraints imposed by existing structures and institutions.

**You have a very specific vision for what kind of content you want to cover. Something we think about is — as a magazine, we’re producing words, knowledge, not physical action. How do you think of knowledge production in relation to a broader project of justice in a material sense? How do you think about bridging the two?**

As someone who came to academia in a roundabout way, the way that some within universities conceive of “knowledge production” has always been so interesting to me and a little divorced from the on-the-ground processes that influence and move people. Often it feels like — we can design a study, then run it, it’ll end up in a peer-reviewed journal, someone will use it, and we’ll have some impact. That’s a very passive way of thinking even if it can reflect so much work and energy.

So how do you move knowledge to action? You have to start with — where does knowledge come from? Who can speak authoritatively about any given subject? If someone wants to understand the implications of low-wage work on a gig worker, you can certainly design a study on that person’s life and their freedom of movement, on how they’re surveilled, on how they perform the functions of their job. If done right, it can influence policy and the future course of study.

But to do that you need to start from the experience of that person, what they know from having lived that experience, what it feels like to have hours cut short or to not have insurance or not have access to a bathroom or for their every movement to be tracked and parsed in search of greater efficiency, the precarity that comes with all of that. They hold so much expertise and understanding of how these structures work and how they feel. When you start from there, you realize reducing people to categories for study may be efficient for producing “results,” but it cleaves off any possibility of understanding the textures and unknowable possibilities for an individual’s life that only come from direct engagement and personal investment—listening more than speaking.

Academia has a financial incentive to say that, you know, there’s a methodology and a process for creating knowledge, and to do that you need to pay for an education, get their credentials, keep the work sealed within the walls of the university, and so on. But that can’t be the only — or even best — way to say something meaningful to enact change. Universities are important and essential to knowledge production, with profound resources and capacities, but consequently they often diminish — and sap resources from — other important sites of knowledge, other repertoires for inducing change. So part of the challenge is removing ourselves from that orientation, and figuring out ways to privilege, fund and engage with ideas that surface outside of ourselves, and to do it through bureaucracies not always designed to work well with outsiders.

**Many readers won’t have the first-hand experience that your writers do. What do you hope your readers come away with, and what do you hope they do within their own spheres of influence?**

For me, I hope that readers think critically about the structures they work in, that they may be reproducing. Some — not all — of our readers have the ability to alter their conditions of work, the contracts they enter into, the systems and products that they create — even in the day-to-day of designing an A/B test, for example. As with the old Logic, we’ll continue to think about the way that labor is structured within — and well beyond — the tech industry: the university, manufacturing, all sorts of places.

Separately, there’s something really powerful about storytelling, and the ability to share experience. It’s hard to ignore, for example, the story of what it’s like to be locked in a box, to write a letter, to have that letter scanned, for the cost to be carried by your family that is already struggling to support you, for them to now be surveilled too, and to have a delay in the receipt of that information that further frays your connection to others, and what that does to you personally. And, by the way, what it means to be told that these systems are justified, all-knowing, that they’re rational — to do this under the guise of, for example, trying to stop contraband from entering prisons, even as we know that’s not what it’s really about; that it’s about expanding surveillance beyond the walls of prisons. So I think in reading those stories, I hope that folks get a deeper sense of the long tails of what tech is putting into the world, and the unintended consequences that reverberate out into the particulars of people’s lives. I should say, too, as more people get involved in the magazine, there are going to be so many more possibilities for what we can achieve in the pages. It’s so exciting to be part of that.

## _Activating All Parts of the Self_

But also, the magazine is an object. It’s a physical object. We’re really proud of it. It’s very beautiful. We’ve switched from a more book style to a full color magazine.

**That’s so funny. We’re switching the other way.**

Oh, really?

**We started with 8.5 x 11 and now we’re going to 5.5 x 8.5.**

What was your rationale?

**For us, it was partially because printing and shipping, the big magazines are really expensive** — Yes, ma’am — **Just changing the size, even with the same number of pages, cuts the printing cost more than in half.**

The physical object is important. The magazine format lends itself to allowing people to design inserts, visuals, “how-to” explainers, and to design and think in color. It just made sense for us to make the shift.

With a magazine like this, there’s a challenge of audience. Because we do have pieces that are profoundly, undeniably academic. They come from ethnographic research, quantitative research, really rigorous ways of thinking about and trying to understand how things operate. These pieces need to stand alongside fiction and poetry and other pieces that activate a different part of your mind. It helps that at this point, we are all technologists. We are all connected to technology through our work. We are all implicated in its processes and logics — we all have something to say about the tangible ways technology contributes and intrudes into our lives, our relationships, our artistic and professional practices. So, if you are looking to create new ideas and visions for tomorrow, we have to make room in our pages to engage everyone in this dialogue and we have to think more expansively about who we are writing with and for.

At the same time, we’re thinking about the ways that people learn, the ways that we’re motivated, the ways that we’re inspired. It isn’t just through an academic text, it’s also through the arts, fashion, storytelling, poetry. Our responsibility is to create something that activates all parts of the self, that makes you feel something about the topic and the interconnectedness and asymmetries of our experiences and perspectives. If you put a poem that really hits and resonates alongside a piece about incarceration or a piece about indigenous technologies or how the blueprint for modern computing came from the plantation — it just _does something to you_. It lights up a part of your thinking, and you end up internalizing the implications of the essay very differently. It’s hard to describe. When you go to a show and you’re just floored by what it is you experience — that’s what we want to create.

**It _is_ a different form of knowledge production, but I almost feel icky calling it that — “the academy” is always trying to\_ \_make things legible as knowledge production.**

---

With this project, I think a lot about legibility from the perspective of administration and the academy. There’s a certain type of approach that generally makes sense to them, a funding process that makes sense. University bureaucracy imposes a host of obstacles that attend to a very specific person, hierarchical structure, and way of working. Those paint-by-number processes aren’t meant for the nuances of a person’s life. Legibility is one of our real challenges. Who is reading this and how do they understand the project — and how does the university understand it?

So what are we doing? We’re creating a magazine that doesn’t look much like a traditional academic publication — and we don’t want it to look like that, even as we think academics will find tremendous value engaging with it. We’re seeing how things can fit together. A piece that’s maybe more strictly academic can really resonate if it’s standing alongside a fashion centerfold where the designer is thinking critically about, for example, who gets resources and who doesn’t. But that is our challenge. I think that’s the same challenge as finding an audience: how do you make something that resonates? How do we use the pages of our magazine to queer the tech space and reclaim it from capital and the tech-bro mindset? So part of the work of legibility is being seen and understood at least enough that you continue to exist — as a queer person this is the struggle we face all the time, living in worlds and structures that don’t look like us and so try to actively bend us toward their will.

**I really like this point about flipping legibility because it’s also about accessibility — having this range also means that the entire magazine is more accessible to a much wider range of people. Maybe someone doesn’t care about the academic stuff, but they’ll enjoy the poetry, or maybe someone hasn’t had a lot of background in art, but the more academic work can be an entry point for them into the entire package.**

Exactly. And it’s fun, it’s playful. We’re still thinking, how do we do calls that reach people that are outside of ourselves and outside of our networks? Those are things that happen with time, and they happen, as you say, through different mediums. But it’s not just mediums within the magazine, but also beyond it. Our fashion designer, Bones, did a show on Pride, and it was an opportunity for him to think about the topics and themes in the magazine that he discusses. And at the same time, it was an opportunity to open the doors to an underground club to 60 queer, gender-nonconforming and trans people during Pride, to celebrate, to enjoy each other, to enjoy a show, in this unending moment where our community remains under assault and at risk of erasure. That was also a way to sit with the ideas that reside within the magazine, but in a much more visceral, lived-in way.

## _Logic(s) as Community Investment_

**Earlier, you mentioned the idea of Logic(s) as a community-building project, maintaining a commitment to the people you’re working with. What do you mean by that?**

To the point of legibility, and defining impact: it’s hard to know ahead of time what kinds of ideas readers will be influenced by. What you _do_ know for sure is about the people you interact with, the people you support; you have an opportunity to really shape that relationship. And those individuals, if they’re treated with respect, if they’re compensated in a fair and transparent way, if they’re given the room to create and think, and then to also get feedback and the opportunity to improve, if they have the opportunity to produce something that nobody else would ever commission — those investments in _people_ are how you can actually feel impact.

“Impact” is a loaded term because foundations, for a long time, were obsessed with it. _I_ was obsessed with it, creating metrics that would astound whoever read our proposal. “What is the impact of this study?” They want to hear concretely that this touched 25, or 100, or 1000 people, that it influenced a policy that led to _xyz_ measured in _abc_ way, but from my own life experience, and from our own work, the impact that you have is not always as clearly measurable. They’re in the subtle things like treating people with dignity and respect, like taking their perspectives seriously, and helping them experience how powerfully Universities can marshal ideas and resources.

So the magazine is just one part of what we’re hoping to do; our real objective is to support a whole new set of individuals to create and to tell their stories — and to forward their solutions — and to invest not only in the development of their pieces but also in their ability to tell those stories and find those solutions. It means thinking about where they’re trying to get beyond the life of the magazine. That’s essential to us — we’re trying not to be extractive. Sure, somebody writes something for the magazine, they get money, we get a publication, everyone wins.

But the longer term commitments really require thinking about: how do we help this person tell the story the best that they possibly can? How do we dedicate the editorial resources to helping them flesh out that idea? How do we support them to capture what they need to, especially if they’re a creative or a producer of some kind? How do we help move their ideas toward solutions? And as we all know, tech has these very powerful networks that open up a lot of doors, so how do we leverage those for them? I’ve mentioned, too, the team we’ve been building. They bring so many visions to the work — so we also have to leverage and invest in that energy, and compensate at the same rates we give ourselves and other academic professionals.

Sure, we’re putting a magazine and ideas into the world, and we hope those ideas might transform and shift something — that our readers understand something new about technology. But materially, we know that we’re directly impacting our contributors, staff and collaborators. We want to help them get to where they want to go; we have the capacity to do that, and that’s really powerful. Our goal is for them to find other ways to keep telling stories, or tell new and different stories, and so we want them to leave Logic(s) with access to a network and a set of tools and validation of their work and ideas. That will outlive whatever we do for any single issue of the magazine.


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

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

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

on a rainy, empty street,

my electrodes glistening in moonlight.

My mind’s music melts me

like sugar in hot tea

on a De...

Electrodes

after Ama Codjoe

how do you describe a loose song you can’t sing anymore? most days I want to take
pleasure in sparrows and splashed sunlight. I wake as if surprised my lover is still there:
the great record of touch, I have been dragging around for years. what is faith but a
different prayer? like butterflies landing on flowers to sip nectar before moving on again
— it happened otherwise — but still my only desire is not to go away — and that’s the hard
labor of falling. I drink pina colada and watch the snow fall outside. most of my decision
have been wrong: you come in from a cold place and sit in another cold place. what it must
feel like to not yet have it — the hope of recovery — a counterbalance for the long nights
and short years running out. when the women leave me, I swim in the public pool. a body,
I’ve read can sustain its own compression, but in a world of heat, liquidity and
magnificence. I wish I could stop bringing myself to the bay window of my child’s room.
in my dream, my father checks my forehead for pyrexia: my grandmother’s flame passed
down unabated. the news called it a dove, or trees, or fog. I called it a voice gone missing.
there are no right words for this restless lake, in which I drank deep. maybe it’s true, there
was something in the water wriggling, something alive.

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

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

Magical Nature

Organic Envy

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MY GHOSTS REMIND ME OF A WORLD NOT YET MADE

How To Choose a Star

The Collective

The future is uncertain. With every passing week it feels like the range of possibilities for what it may hold has expanded, a deep sea fish’s jaw distending and opening to reveal a great divergence. We witness in each moment enough predictive evidence to make the case for impending utopia and unavoidable collapse, enough datasets and stories and demonstrations to incontrovertibly prove whatever mutually exclusive outcome you’d like to vindicate. Better, perhaps, to admit that we don’t know what the future holds.

Acknowledging uncertainty does not mean admitting defeat. The uncertain nature of the future is not a flaw to be corrected or calculated away, but its saving grace. We need the future to _not_ be fixed―to remain tenuous and underdetermined, wrapped in clouds. It is only through this cloud of uncertainty that we can have hope―the hope that the problems of the past are not preordained to recreate themselves in the future, the hope that we can _beat the odds_.

This is the fourth issue of Kernel, reaching readers like you very close to the fourth anniversary of Reboot’s founding in the categorically uncertain days of April 2020. I write to you now as the fourth editor-in-chief of this magazine and the first to get involved long after its founding; it’s a small shift that feels in its own way like a monument, a sign that we have weathered some of the storms and shocks of the early days of this “running a magazine” thing. There is more to be done―there’s always more to be done―but at heart I feel lucky to be here, lucky to have a here to be at, and lucky to be able to share it all with you.

---

This issue’s theme is _LUCK_. Here, we ask a slightly more esoteric question than those asked by the first three issues: _What are the odds?_ When we talk about the intertwined concepts of luck, chance, and probability, we can’t help but talk about the ways that their technological manifestations have shaped and been shaped by our world. We live in a probabilistic world―not just because there are laws of probability underlying a scientific understanding of the world around us, but because we, the individuals that make up that world, are increasingly aware of those systems of probability, these chances laid bare in the digital and intellectual infrastructure of our time. We swim in seas of data, of percentage chances and odds corresponding to seemingly every facet of our daily lives―from values as seemingly minor as chances of rain to ones as weighty as mortality rates.

When the social theorist Ian Hacking wrote _The Emergence of Probability_ and _The Taming of Chance_ in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it was still possible to imagine and even remember worlds in which probabilistic thinking had not yet become the dominant mode of thought: a world where chance had not yet been tamed. Those books, which cover a vast swath of time beginning in the Renaissance and landing at the doorstep of the twentieth century, are a sort of pre-history of our modern world. We now see luck as something of an emergent property, a trick that we collectively play on ourselves as we read patterns into the fluctuations of a stochastic world. What does it mean to take luck seriously―to look these fluctuations in their face and make meaning out of them?

We’ve divided this issue into two halves: Tails and Heads. Like most dichotomies, this one is false―but it’s useful enough for our purposes.

_[The long] Tails_ follows how digitally-mediated chance has spilled over into the world at large. This spillover has played a hand in shaping everything from the way we use the internet as a [“Serendipity Machine”](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/serendipity) to how we organize our labor, building the infrastructure to seize upon fortunate [moments of connection](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/labor-luck). These are stories of navigating the growing pains of a soulless but vital system of [financial technology](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/debt-engine), of struggling to integrate [grief and our statistical intuitions](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/adieu), of [natural disasters](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/earthquake) in near future forecasts, and speculative visions of bodies [taken apart](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/disassemania) and [manufactured once more](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/manufacturing-bodies).

_[In your] Heads_ captures the ways that that chance has wormed into our internal processes. When we stare into stochastic algorithms for long enough, our own thinking starts to reflect them. These stories ask us to become kaleidoscopes, gazing into the fractals of identity. We’re shaped by the successes of [startups](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/chaos) and our plots to reverse engineer that luck; we’re made all too aware of the [fragility](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/executioner) of our [creative practices](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/ang) in the face of AI. We use algorithms as tools for [divination](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/oracles); we manipulate our own language [to evade and appease](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/algorithmaxxing) algorithms in turn. We let our lives [impossibly intertwine](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/night-train).

In between these two sections is an interlude, thoughtfully composed by Jess Zhou, our poetry editor, on [poetry, technology, and Palestine](https://www.kernelmag.io/4/poetry-editors-note). That, too, is a piece on probability, on statistics of loss and ranges of possibilities. Peace and liberation can also feel like ways of beating the odds.

---

Making a magazine is an inherently lucky thing. There are so many little points of chance and serendipity that had to align _just so_ for any of this to exist at all, let alone in the form that it has taken to reach you. The same is true for nearly every ambitious, uncertain endeavor―be it a startup, a union, or a work of art. This is all to say that when we ask _What are the odds?_ we are not asking as dispassionate observers but as actors on constantly shifting ground, trying always to grab onto those points of chance and run with them.

Good luck!

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

_Editor-in-Chief, Kernel Magazine, Issue Four_

The future is uncertain. With every passing week it feels like the range of possibilities for what it may hold has expanded,...

A Bedroom in Las Piñas

Algorithmic Field Painting #1

The Serendipity Machine

San Francisco Earthquake circa 2030

Soulless Debt Engines

A Labor of Luck

Two Poems

For D—my love, my best friend, my closest reader,
and the remarkable family that made him.

With gratitude to K and B, in w...

a bid, adieu

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

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

Disassemania

Guide to Manufacturing Bodies

(in your) HEADS

## _[poetry]_

This is somewhat about poetry—how the poetry of a people plays a vital part in countering the propaganda of a militarized state and its allies that normalize the flattening of human life, in a figurative, and horrifically, literal sense.

Dr. Refaat Alareer was a beloved teacher who taught poetry's revolutionary potential to his students; after his targeted assassination, Alareer’s poem, pinned to his Twitter profile at the time he was killed, went viral online and was translated into over 40 languages.

“I don’t know what became of his body after the bombing of his house,” Mosab Abu Toha wrote of Refaat Alareer, “whether his glasses got smashed, whether his soft fingers were clinging to a pen or a flower he asked the world community to send to Gaza.”

What does it take for our figurative speech to become literal? _To die along with a collective is a mercy_ is a comforting Palestinian proverb about collective disaster, [Fady Joudah writes](https://lithub.com/a-palestinian-meditation-in-a-time-of-annihilation/), one first heard as a child.

“To live the experience of collective death in real time, however, is, despite my words, unspeakable,” he wrote. “For this Palestinian proverb to become a Palestinian reality devoid of metaphor is a definition of genocide.”

Within the Palestinian liberation movement, [poems have served as tools of resistance](https://time.com/6554381/poet-palestine-gaza-war/), documenting cruelties inflicted under the recurring violence of occupation; forming vessels to carry memories, hopes, and dreams into the future, to live past the writer, who has sometimes already eulogized themselves.

“Poetry can't stop a bullet. Poetry won't free a prisoner. And that's why we need to do the political organizing work as well,” [George Abraham said](https://time.com/6554381/poet-palestine-gaza-war/) in a recent interview. “But if we can't imagine a free liberated world in language, how can we build one?”

## _[software]_

This is somewhat about software—how the experience and witness of mass death is instantiated technological infrastructure.

We witness, unfolding on our newsfeeds, [unprecedented death](https://jacobin.com/2023/12/israel-defense-forces-gaza-palestine-civilian-death-casualties-women-children-journalists-war). Through the actions of the state, informed by a “Gospel” of artificial intelligence (with all of its biases and imprecision), Palestinian lives are fungible: within the mythos of data-driven decisions, they are [targeted indiscriminately](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1218643254?ft=nprml&f=1218643254). There are other distinctions made, of poets, journalists, and others whose voices travel too far.

“The Israeli killing of the family of Jazeera reporter Wael Dahdouh on October 25 was not part of indiscriminate madness,” Joudah wrote. “They know how to assassinate. One pundit on Israeli TV said of the incident, ‘Today we knew what the target was. Tomorrow is a different target.’”

Summer Farah, who shared her work with us for this issue, also reminds us in [Electric Literature](https://electricliterature.com/palestinian-poets-on-the-role-of-art-in-fighting-genocide-gaza-palestine/): “This work is, in fact, a matter of life-or-death; literatures can set the stage for the attempted annihilation of a people, and it is our responsibility to point to it.”

So this is somewhat about poetry and about software—both tools unto themselves, formed by the hands that use them. An AI system can manifest from the desires of a state; poems can manifest from the experiences of a people. Poems prophesize; targeting software streamlines the dropping of bombs into a question of not _if_, but _upon whom_ and _how often_.

If we lose sight of the systems of dehumanization that circulate words and ship code that set the conditions for the killing of a people at scale, if we overly fixate on a piece of software rather than the apparatus it is but a tool of, we have been distracted from the human choices responsible for the killing of entire families.

Software then, in its laundering of responsibility, can function as propaganda.

And whether indiscriminate or targeted, with intention or without care, bombs fall, people die.

## _[repose]_

_What’s the use of poetry?_ Jorge Luis Borges famously retorted, “What’s the use of death? What’s the use of the taste of coffee? What’s the use of me? [What’s the use of us?](https://books.google.com/books?id=5tA4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=%E2%80%9CWhat%E2%80%99s+the+use+of+death?%E2%80%9D+he+replied.+%E2%80%9CWhat%E2%80%99s+the+use+of+the+taste+of+coffee?+What%E2%80%99s+the+use+of+me?+What%E2%80%99s+the+use+of+us?%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=98thqsZWPK&sig=ACfU3U21Zi7XRG5v-HCb8LJROjB4uLLIEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQ--qux--DAxUqD0QIHTPQAaAQ6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CWhat%E2%80%99s%20the%20use%20of%20death%3F%E2%80%9D%20he%20replied.%20%E2%80%9CWhat%E2%80%99s%20the%20use%20of%20the%20taste%20of%20coffee%3F%20What%E2%80%99s%20the%20use%20of%20me%3F%20What%E2%80%99s%20the%20use%20of%20us%3F%E2%80%9D&f=false)”

At the time of writing, [February 8, 2024, AP News reported](https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-02-08-2024-4707b906773fe8cd127d6ba2d706a9e8) a Palestinian death toll of 27,840 people.[^1] We are sending this magazine into the world as we enter the fifth month of a war on Gaza aided and armed by the United States, whose formation is also contingent upon the displacement and elimination of an entire people, and the fifth month of the call for permanent and immediate ceasefire. We hope that by the time you read this, through collective action, these conditions [future perfect tense] will have become / [prophetic perfect tense] became true.

We don't know what will have happened by the time you read this. In conversation with Jacob, I’m reminded of the sustained responses to fast and slow violences (beyond literature, there is the longstanding organizing pre-dating October 7; [countless protests](https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2023-12-05/ty-article/.premium/more-than-1-million-americans-participated-in-protests-since-oct-7/0000018c-3bda-d11b-a3bf-fffbed7b0000); blockades of transportation, shipping, and manufacturing infrastructure; [South Africa’s genocide case in the ICJ](https://jacobin.com/2024/01/south-africa-icj-isarel-gaza)), the need to keep trying in the face of low odds that we mistake for deterministic inevitability. In the space of indeterminacy is possibility, outcomes still unfolding and affected by how we act.

What are the conditions that construct what we know to be luck, chance, probability? And when we talk about tools: surveillance software, state propaganda, revolutionary poems, methods of e-sim distribution, missiles, strategies of families splitting up to shelter in separate locations, or otherwise, who wields these tools, and how do they shape these conditions?

## _[response]_

If there are things we can take away from crafting and experiencing poetry and software alike, it is that we can still act in the face of perceived inevitabilities. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives,” Audre Lorde wrote. “It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”

Without protecting and tending to our desires, hopes, dreams, which emerge from our interconnected shared and differing pains, we give up the range of possibilities for our futures.

As Mahmoud Darwish asked in his “Penultimate Speech,” “Won’t you memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?”

How will we pool our mis/fortunes, and coordinate across our varied capacities and positions to change them? What seems to be the stochastic mysteriousness of what moves us may lie in the simple fact of how we have more in common than we had imagined, in, as I heard articulated by the School for Poetic Computation, our shared desires for futures that refuse the perpetuation of “violent dispossession that has brought us together in this way.”

“…it’s me who seeks to build with others through my writing, by inviting them in with my words,” Farah wrote.

Poetry is a kind of technology, a social infrastructure of vessels (media, if you will) that are of the writer, giving form to feelings that are indisputably y/ours. These vessels, poems, are also of its future readers, too. When we listen closely, we hear the churns of their internal dream logics, how they might meet and transform our own.

And when you are transforming, what will you build?



## Notes

[^1]: By figures, this war is unprecedented on many fronts. [In December, Branko Marcetic laid out statistics in Jacobin](https://jacobin.com/2023/12/israel-defense-forces-gaza-palestine-civilian-death-casualties-women-children-journalists-war), enumerating the numbers of journalists, medics, UN workers killed; a rate of destruction approaching that of carpet-bombed German cities in World War II; a death rate of women and children that surpasses that of past wars. The number of Gazan children killed by Israeli forces from October 7 - December 28, 2023 ([8,663](https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/28/photos-gaza-children#:~:text=More%20than-,8%2C663,-Palestinian%20children%20have), reported by AP News) surpasses the amount of children killed in past world wars, as recorded by [Annual Reports of the UN Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict](https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un_documents_type/secretary-generals-reports/?ctype=Children%20and%20Armed%20Conflict&cbtype=children-and-armed-conflict) and aggregated by [Save the Children](https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-3195-children-killed-three-weeks-surpasses-annual-number-children-killed-conflict-zones#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20last%20three%20Annual%20Reports%20of%20the%20UN%20Secretary%2DGeneral%20on%20Children%20and%20Armed%20Conflict%2C%20a%20total%20of%202%2C985%20children%20were%20killed%20across%2024%20countries%20in%202022%2C%202%2C515%20in%202021%20and%202%2C674%20in%202020%20across%2022%20countries.%20In%202019%2C%204%2C019%20children%20were%20killed.) (in 2022: 2,985 children were killed across 24 countries; 2021: 2,515 in 22 countries; 2020: 2674 in 22 countries).

\[poetry]

This is somewhat about poetry—how the poetry of a people plays a vital part in countering the propaganda of a mili...

Poetry Editor’s Note

INTERLUDE

Algorithmaxxing

Oracles in the Machine

Televisit

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Chaos Theory

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Issues

Table of Contents

The System

The Individual

The Collective