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

e-raced


## Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

## Lancashire, England. 1812.

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

Something would catch us. Hurt us. Hang us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, I had a terrible knot in my stomach—

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

_"My lord, we found them."_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;
&nbsp;

## Yamanashi Prefecture, Chubū, Japan. 1990.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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


Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

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A Guide to Options at the End of the World


_cw: police, mental illness, inpatient hospitalization_

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

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

with care,
theresa


cw: police, mental illness, inpatient hospitalization

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Arrive —



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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.

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## 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.

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&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.

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&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.

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&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.

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

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

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

### Becoming a Creator

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

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

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

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

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

**J**: That sounds intense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

### Platforms, Policies, and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Passions, Platforms, Politics: A Conversation with Rosie Nguyen

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

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

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

Transubstantiation

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

For so long I had thought product design...

Drawing Rectangles

Technology Moving
Synthetic Meat
Singularity
Robot Learns

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

Four Cartoons

People

A Dispatch from Maine Correctional Center

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

Prison Phones and the Problem with Profits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scrolling through my TikTok For You Page, aesthetic slice-of-life vlogs, comedy videos, and occasional discourse on social ju...

Mental Health Apps Won’t Solve the Mental Health Crisis

How many trees does it take to save the planet?

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

Trees Won’t Save Us

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

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

Growing Narratives: Passage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pros & Cons Of Wildfire: A Conversation With Smokey Bear

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abolish Canon: Centering Collective Fan Production

**On receiving an unwanted Windows**
 **update at an inconvenient time.**

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

**All Thumbs**

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

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

On receiving an unwanted Windows
update at an inconvenient time.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

                                                                                   ***

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

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

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


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

Can Cryptocurrencies Replace Cash Remittances?

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

The Memory Machine


_After Gina Apostol_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


After Gina Apostol

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

$0.99 s...

A list of important memories

A digitally rendered 3D image of individually tall blocks that, when viewed as a whole, illustrate a hilly green surface with...

Green Like No Grass Is Green

Coraline Ada Ehmke is an acclaimed speaker, writer, engineer, and activist with over 25 years of experience in software and a...

Open Source and Politics: A Conversation with Coraline Ada Ehmke

Tools

A 30-minute ride by high-speed rail from Beijing, Tianjin’s Binhai New Area is home to one of China’s most futuristic-looking...

Creating the Photogenic City

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

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

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

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

## Dematerialistic Illusions

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

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

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

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

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

## The Jevons Paradox and the Lifecycle Analysis of Emissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Outrunning the Rebound Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Technology is Not (Carbon) Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

## Beyond Digital Greenwashing

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

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

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

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

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

## Beyond Techno Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

## We Build the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Transformations, Environmental Degradation


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Do you still use our words —
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 lift-off?
 I, old Earthbound,
 listen for you in the night,
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 Our machines
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_Julia Travers (she/her) is a writer, artist and teacher in Virginia, U.S.A. She grew up near the Chesapeake Bay and now lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Find more of her work with Fish Publishing, Rattapallax,_ Whurk Magazine, Ecological Citizen, _OnBeing/ American Public Media, and on Twitter @traversjul._

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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 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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When the Computer is the Witness

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

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

I used to get offended when

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

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

Your apocalypse

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

will Fail you

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

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

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

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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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I picked up a plastic wrapper today

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

**Charles Broskoski** is the co-founder and CEO of Are.na, an online Montessori school for adults.

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



## Notes

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

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When it first started shaking, I sat there, dazed.

“What the fuck? Did a car just hit us?”

_San Francisco drivers are batshit crazy, so you never know._

I went on X. _“Did anyone else feel that earthquake just now?”_

I scurried under my table. _Those elementary school “great shakeout” drills really were something._

My hastily assembled Ikea table leg wobbled, just as shaken as me. Muffled screams remixed with crumbling concrete and falling wood reverberated from outside.

_Ugh._

_What did we even do to deserve this?_

Not long after the shaking settled, I heard what sounded like glass shattering in the sky.

I couldn’t see anything from my window that faced the wall so I ran outside, dragging Aaron, my half-awake brother, along.

_Did he even realize there was an earthquake?_

Then we saw it. The tallest apartment complex in San Francisco, Millennium Towers… was falling. It was surreal, like a well-rendered scene straight out of a movie.

It had been leaning for years. I had read about it but never imagined I would witness it fall.

The glass panels gave in as the structure bent. The building had sunken into the ground on one side, tipping the rest of the structure with it. Glass shards shimmered in the sunlight as they fell, like broken ice raining down below. A flock of birds stirred by the conundrum surfaced from the skyline, flying off into the distance.

“Usually skyscrapers have a counterweight to prevent them from falling,” Aaron rattled on, referencing the repository of trivia facts he had digested from his peak Quizbowl days. “The counterweight seems to have shifted. It’s hitting Salesforce for sure.”

One by one, tiny dots, ants from this distance, started jumping off the railings.

I shut my eyes. I couldn’t watch.

“Nature’s 9/11…” Aaron whispered.

We stood there for a while, dumbfounded and in disbelief.

_No fucking way._ Even though we had all known this was coming, _no fucking way._

---

When the shaking started, no one left their home.

Over the years, small quakes had occurred here and there, but nothing comparable to the magnitude of the big ones from 1989 or 1906 whose stories have been lost with time. But this one didn’t stop. The 45 seconds of tremors felt like an eternity as residents gripped onto furniture for dear life.

There had been earthquake drills. Complete curriculums on the art of hiding under tables. Like fallout shelters during the nuclear scare, these drills placated the fears only superficially.

The earthquake struck early in the morning.

The instinctual response for many was to check X to see if anyone else was feeling it. Once socially confirmed, it was too late.

Within minutes, the city fell to ruins—BART and Muni lines paused, roads blocked by damage, and a portion of the Bay Bridge fallen in once again. Those who resided close to the piers in the Marina District and on higher ground in the Presidio were the first to leave. They left for Oakland by ferry and helicopter as the rest of the city struggled for cover. Others gathered in parks, awaiting rescue. The parks didn’t have enough space for everyone, so authorities began to limit the parks to only humans. Dogs were set off-leash, as people sacrificed their fur babies for a spot to sit.

With the electricity out and phone wires down, there was no cell signal. People wandered aimlessly on the streets sans Google Maps. Without the cover of their studio apartments, young tech workers became indistinguishable from the longtime residents of the streets, clad in hoodies covered in dust and looting shops for water and food. In desperation, the mayor issued a public notice forbidding anyone from stealing. The order was futile. All the years of investments in home security cameras on doorbells did nothing to deter thefts. Haphazardly throwing canned soup into abandoned Target bags was indistinguishable from shoving camping gear into branded backpacks.

Although 90% of buildings in the city were proclaimed safe from falling during an earthquake, the 58-story luxury apartment Millennium Towers wasn't so lucky. The building had been leaning westward towards Salesforce Tower, a few inches a year. The earthquake freed its foundation, giving gravity its chance to finally take over. As the “Leaning Tower of San Francisco” fell, it impacted next door Salesforce Tower along the way, wiping both its 6th place and Salesforce’s 1st place among the tallest buildings in San Francisco. The inspectors who had repeatedly claimed the building was ‘safe for occupancy’ went under further investigation. They pushed the blame onto the city, arguing that retrofitting hadn’t been strictly enforced, even though no amount of retrofitting could have prevented the building from leaning. It became apparent city officials hadn’t learned from the Miami Surfside condominium collapse of 2021.

The impact of the earthquake brought the top suite of the Millennium Tower apartment to ground level, a couple of blocks away from the tower’s base. Passersby did a double-take as they ran on the street, pristine white furniture incoherent with the colorless rows of tents on Market Street. As the survivors of the Millennium Tower struggled for cover, the tent residents of Market Street moved north. They scoffed at the residents as they cried about their furniture and excess belongings.

With the power out, people with electric vehicles were out of luck. In the days following the disaster, they had to ration what electricity was left from their vehicle, as car chargers were down. A community of tinkerers tried to devise alternative energy sources, frankensteining car chargers with solar panels, or attempting to drill into the ground in the hope of a secret oil reserve. A subset of compassionate Tesla owners welcomed refugees to get in their frunks and trunks to fit more passengers to safety. Though the price of gas and hybrid cars had been declining, the price now shot up, as people anxiously waited for the electricity to come back.

Over the years, self-driving vehicle companies had lobbied to divert funding from the maintenance of public transit vehicles to support their operations. Just as they finally succeeded, the earthquake proved this a faulty decision. While underground BART and Muni faced minimal damage due to soil’s natural seismic absorption, the fleets of self-driving vehicles above ground caused serious damage to the city.

Active self-driving cars that got notice of the earthquake simultaneously halted all operations within seconds. Since an earthquake was difficult to foresee in the eyes of engineers, they hadn’t programmed~~ ~~a specific action besides stopping the vehicle to prevent further damage. Though a good idea in theory, this proved futile as traffic became clogged by rows of zombie vehicles that were impossible to move without drivers. Only about 20% of adults now knew how to drive with the increasing reliance on self-driving technology to avoid owning a car.

Even though around 10% of the residents in San Francisco had earthquake insurance, insurance companies didn’t have enough liquidity to remain solvent. The housing market had shot up so much over the last few decades that all insurance companies could do was hope an earthquake wouldn’t come during their lifetime. A few loyal insurance customers could get back on their feet, but the vast number of unlucky landlords and homeowners faced financial difficulty with the astronomical decline in housing valuations.

San Francisco’s leadership moved too slowly for earthquake shelters to be built. Anxious, earthquake refugees still hopeful about San Francisco’s future flocked to purchase homes from portable housing. Interest exceeded demand, so these homes began to be jenga-stacked in parks and streets, with an extra fee for higher-floors for their “views” and distance from the tent residents on the ground. Although temporary housing sufficed for a couple months, young people eventually lost their patience, failing to adapt to park-life after years of pampering in luxurious studio apartments. In the months following the earthquake, housing prices plummeted as the youth defected back to their hometowns. As they left, so did the large companies that had attracted them.

The exit of young tech folks and their employers left a surplus of earthquake shelters, which the city purchased to repurpose as homeless shelters. Years of lottery housing had failed to solve the homelessness crisis, but with this silver lining, the city finally put the tent residents in city-funded housing. With housing prices returning to those prior to the housing bubble in the following years, residents used their newfound time and disposable income to go full-time on post-earthquake-reconstruction hobbies. New bakeries, cafes, and bookstores sprung up as petty theft and robbery rates decreased. San Francisco emerged anew from the ashes like a phoenix—stronger, and with newfound hopes of entrepreneurship rivaling the Gold Rush and internet boom.

Only this time, there were less hoodies.

---

We got off my dad’s helicopter. He immediately rushed off to a meeting. Natural disasters like these meant good business.

Aaron had been playing Brawl Stars on his phone the whole ride.

“Where are we?” he mumbled. “I’m hungry.”

_Why did this have to happen in our lifetime?_

At least we got out of there.


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**Étude: West Lake**

Daybreak—I hang my arm out the barge window and skim the air for a shard of memory. The rolling waves of love curling through my youthful life. A deer wrote this song: I should have kissed her when I had the chance. Now, there is too much mouth guard, and I can't hold her right hand. The sea reminds me of crazy, slow dreams. The community pool for lonely boys. Upon arrival, there are things unbearable: the size of a little dying one cannot evade for a long time. I am a failure when it comes to the splash of happiness. But today, I want the touching of strangers to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as underwater volcanoes and my body breaks in holy wonder. Listen to me: I didn’t say it’s a strange word. Neither did I say it’s the reflection next to your skin. But love remains the origin of wonder, a cross-breeze between desire and ecstasy—and I think I am stuck in the decisions I have made to upend belonging for something approximate—her voice, the loosest possible hold, splendid against my wildest heart. Bless the horizon, that bit of gray boiling with seagulls and egrets flying above the sea. Like a thousand daisies, what I loved brought glory to my wanderings until it sickens—

**Riddled Sky And Fevered Pitch**
_after Lynda Tavakoli_

In the quiet I can hear rain outside, and I am grasping for the words to say this—there is nothing I love more than an honest breakup and a cup of tea leaves, carefully strained and cold. once or twice abandoned by my father. and in my hands, the cry and swell of my mother’s journeys unfulfilled. I breathe the sweet air and stare at the water tower, and then at the undone building, and then at the patterned sky. The time has come for me to be a doornail and I bend closer to a sparrow’s nest, the good rooms of creation skill. The exodus ends—and everywhere the trains are now gone. I have never felt so alone. I read another news section about the pandemic, and I want to evolve from grief: sweet tea and my mouth without sound becomes a proof of my own survival. I seem to have come to the end of something but don’t know what. What's the word for a woman who is a bird feeder without a bird? Does she exist if beauty is nothing but the beginning of a new moon? the night connives and in our own ways, we all break, rattle and knell. Looking back, _I should have read the signs myself_—belted in and sitting upright on the leather seat in the front of the truck, off to another suburb. my hands jerked, and unsteady—the worst thing divorce do—and my mother held her breath in expectation of a miracle that never came. it’s all part of the memories of my hollow childhood, my fevered dreams seeping quietly into no other longing but sorrow. _If I could, if something could change._ The years ahead were worse, speared under a black crow of a stepfather who opened my body’s bible without consent. worse than silence was the _unloving words_ spilled out, tearing each dreg of my sculptured faith while the world dozed off with my failures. The day is bright, which is not bright, but still I drink from history its cup of transgression which means I’m lonely which means I recognize love in daylight which means _this body is a fledge-less_ child owned but gone missing.


Étude: West Lake

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(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).

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

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

_This interview has been edited for clarity and length._

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Imagine that, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**So why the climbing gym?**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



## Notes

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

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

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

Issues

Table of Contents

Regulation

Generation