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

e-raced

Alexandria, Egypt. 40 C.E.

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

Opus

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

What is Technology?

past

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

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

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

      “Hello Jasmine! We enjoyed ou...

A Guide to Options at the End of the World

cw: police, mental illness, inpatient hospitalization

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

a love letter to virtual community care 🌱💞

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

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

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

Beyond + Escape: A body in pain and computation

Arrive —



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

a tour of ‘here’

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

Fast Food Education

present

Escape into Cyberspace

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

Unstoppable Mechanisms

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

hypnopompia

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

As a child, Minja wished for a...

Triumph of Desire

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

A Conversation About Crypto

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

The future is full of colour.

The...

The Future Is

future

We are at the beginning of history.

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

Editor’s Note

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

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

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

all the better to see you with

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

Cultural Resistance to SESTA/FOSTA: Reflecting on Community Curation

self portrait (with/without)

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

on days like today i dream of futures past

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

Passions, Platforms, Politics: A Conversation with Rosie Nguyen

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

Transubstantiation

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

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 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...

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, a...

Abolish Canon: Centering Collective Fan Production

On receiving an unwanted Windows
update at an inconvenient time.

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

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

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

Chinampa

Many episodes of the classic high school sitcom Saved by the Bell follow a similar plotline. The central character, Zack Morr...

Lighten the Load of the Nation-State

One of the greatest violences of capitalism is the myth of its immortality: the persistence of the idea that “it is easier to...

Virtual Violence: Vectoralist Class Warfare and Abstract Antagonism

Slow rise of jawneckbellytalon shudders into the bald slant of pixelated sun. Fluffed leviathan exits nest rendered in 720p....

Condor Nest Livestream #923

The Vestal Fire

At the heart of the Forum Romanum lay the sacred fire of Vesta. Kept alight by the Vestal virgins who mainta...

Seeing the Invisible

Encomium To The Sky That Pulls Me Through Wonder

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

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

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

Afrofuturism: From a Lens to a Portal

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

Space Sisters

Ideas

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

Thank You, SBF

Trace

I’ve been trafficking in data. Petabytes of it: ocean temperatures, atmospheric halocarbon concentrations, Arctic sea ice ext...

Climate Science Crystal Ball: Towards a Cyborg Climate Science

No Girls on the Internet

Kaixi

Algorithm Minuet

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

When the Computer is the Witness

Ones and Zeroes and Nones

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

“Democracy-Affirming” AI Could Make Things Even Worse

The System

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

Marked as Irrelevant

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

Top O’ the World

Sweet Incentives

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

Port Paradox

I picked up a plastic wrapper today

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

Charles Broskoski is the co-founder...

Taking Business Personally: A Conversation with Charles Broskoski

were not meant to be. I wish

to be lucky, enough

for the red I am wearing.

For random() to

always return me

to you. To b...

Some things to be

The Individual

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

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

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

on a rainy, empty street,

my electrodes glistening in moonlight.

My mind’s music melts me

like sugar in hot tea

on a De...

Electrodes

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

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

Magical Nature

Organic Envy

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science during the pandemic, I found what I thought to be my dream job:...

The Strategies We Need

I climbed a tree today and let it hold me in my grief. Tangled in its branches, I lay my head down, ear to bark, and listen t...

MY GHOSTS REMIND ME OF A WORLD NOT YET MADE

How To Choose a Star

The Collective

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

This is a print hypertext piece best experienced in the physical magazine; get your copy here.
See a video of Chia's performa...

A Bedroom in Las Piñas

Quantification has become a normalized fixture of life, and geotracking is carried out with our tacit consent. Randomness i...

Algorithmic Field Painting #1

In the first TikTok that I can recall watching, a teen girl was using a mirror effect to pretend to eat her disembodied, floa...

The Serendipity Machine

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

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

San Francisco drivers are batshi...

San Francisco Earthquake circa 2030

My phone lights up with an urgent message: “You are getting into the danger zone. Pay your overdue loan of KSh.11,404.47\[^1]...

Soulless Debt Engines

It’s July 13, 2023 on a hot Florida day. I’m on a Zoom call with the rest of the bargaining committee of Code for America (Cf...

A Labor of Luck

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 lo...

Two Poems

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

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

a bid, adieu

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

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

Disassemania

This text first appeared as a short piece commissioned for an exhibit by Taryn Simon for the Prada Foundation.

Preamble

The...

Guide to Manufacturing Bodies

(in your) HEADS

\[poetry]

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

Poetry Editor’s Note

IT WILL BE PINK

Originally published in LitHub.

the moon is pro-palestine

Originally published in Voicemail Poems....

INTERLUDE

There is no organization. There is no manifesto. In order to optimize your content for the algorithm, or “algorithmax,” the c...

Algorithmaxxing

Think of the computer, not as a tool, but as a medium.

—Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre

If you are reading this, this i...

Oracles in the Machine

The weatherman is never / right / about this part of Setauket / but when we hang up / the backyard is white / six inches by e...

Televisit

Or: On Modern Serendipity, Tech Twitter, and Luck as Agency

In another universe, sunlight drips through an open window. I am...

Chaos Theory

The 2008 economic crisis and global backdrop of struggles by 2011 renewed possibilities for thinking totality, materializing...

From The Totality Cantos

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

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

Dating Your (Potential) Executioner

I lean my head against the window and watch the landscape blur past. Outside, I don’t see cobalt rivers and wheat fields, but...

On a Night Train Through Cyberspace

(the long) TAILS

Rules are the invisible architecture of social existence. Some boundaries they create are porous and negotiable, others rigid...

It was a cloudy day in June, cool for the season, and I was trying to read my email, though “read” had taken on a meaning I h...

Standard Practices

“Are you sure it’s out?”

In tennis, if the ball touches any part of the line, it’s called in; otherwise, it’s out. Growing u...

When Machines Started Calling the Shots

I am REALISTIC. I am CAUCASIAN. I am in my 20s. I have GREEN eyes. I have LONG BLACK hair. I am PETITE. My breast size is MED...

AI GF: POV

Sometimes mathematicians give their theorems cute names. The birthday paradox. The traveling salesman problem. The four-color...

Playing with Matches

Towards the end of 2023, I became increasingly interested in the ways that explicit images operate online. I was single and l...

Good Damage

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), sometimes referred to as “Wi-Fi allergy,” is a claimed sensitivity to electromagnetic...

Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity

A file tells a story. Its first few bytes, which appear to be random letters and numbers, spell out a file signature, or “mag...

A History of the Moving Image

Here are the rules of the game.

You can only travel preordained paths — from 1 to 2, or 1 to 3, depending on your choices. I...

Horror Game

Terms and Conditions of Services Manifest

EFFECTIVE FROM: Sunrise

ESTIMATED READING TIME: From rock to pebble

We are glad...

Issues

Table of Contents

Regulation

Generation