writing on Winston Hearn (the third)

Political Imagination

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:01:38 -0500

Everything, broadly construed, continues to be pretty terrible. Every week this administration threatens or commits new war crimes, kills many innocent people, harms the citizens it is sworn to protect, and generates more chaos than seems possible to track. It’s a lot. I tell all my friends: it is absolutely reasonable to be overwhelmed, sad, frustrated, depressed, and more in light of all the horrors. What’s important to me, though, is to not feel hopeless; to fall into the belief that all is lost and no better futures are available.

I thought I’d write a quick post on how this discipline of hope is working for me these days, both as a counter to the constant stream of horrors and also as an invitation for comrades to make space for dreaming the better futures we could still inhabit.

Lately I’ve been reading to understand what the fuck we (the US) are doing in Iran. I think it’s best understood as: the Trump administration felt emasculated as various domestic political defeats piled up so they did some gender-affirming warfare that was extremely short-sighted and has fucked the entire oil-supply for the world for the foreseeable future. (complete sidebar but I must say it: gender-affirming care that follows medical standards of care has an almost 0% regret rate. affirming one’s gender via geo-political fuckery has much higher rates of regret. trans people are not an enemy! the cis-dudes in charge of the country are) It looks like because of this war, Iran will have a stranglehold on a significant portion of the oil and natural gas supply chains moving forward, which is generally understood to be really bad for the rest of the world (including us, the ones who attacked them).

This news might be less scary for the US except that this administration also hates renewable energy sources and has spent the past year undermining all projects that expanded our solar, wind, and other renewable energy infrastructure (most recently agreeing to pay $1 billion to cancel an in-progress wind farm), so our current reliance on oil and gas is locked in for quite awhile. This news comes on top of so much other awful shit; I could fill a book summarizing all the increasingly heated attacks on immigrants, citizens who are brown and black, queer people — specifically trans people. This, along with the institutional destruction, is ensuring that when the Trump administration is defeated (electorally or otherwise) the United States will no longer capable of functioning as it has for the past few decades.

This overall weakening and destruction is a cause of great harm and I do not want to spin it otherwise; this presidential administration has truly fucked up the US’s future in ways we still don’t fully understand.

But in this guarantee that things are no longer capable of functioning as normal is also space where I think we can cultivate a great deal of hope. I am trying to cultivate my own hope, through imagination.

The US has an extremely conservative, slow-to-change political system. The shape of our constitutional republic ensures that the windows of possibility are very small; any given Presidental term is facing steep odds of convincing enough of Congress to make big changes. There’s a reason that the significant moments in our history of progress or regress are connected to geopolitical events (World Wars) or intense domestic events (Civil War, the civil rights movement). The right set of circumstances have to be in place in order to reduce the obstacles preventing radical change.

It’s my perspective that the period after Trump, whenever it begins, will be such a period in the US. A period when big change is not only possible but necessary; because the country will be dealing with all the chaos and destruction that the Trump administration leaves behind.

The futures we can build (just as there are many presents today, depending on which part of the US you live in; how much money you have; how your various identities intersect, there will be many futures) in that period are already being imagined today, and this is a point where I find cultivation of hope becomes so important, because the terrain for what that future will look like in reality is going to be competitive.

In the US today, we are not only facing the authoritarian right wing (which is the Republican party writ-large, as evidenced by Congress’s complete abandonment of any responsibility or authority in light of Trump’s whims), but also a powerful centrist contingent, represented by much of the democratic party (specifically the leadership of Schumer and Jeffries). The centrist contingent seem to be focused on defeating Trump by returning things to the way they used to be. I believe you can see this most clearly in the way that a unbelievably large portion of the US population really fucking hates ICE and abolishing the agency is now a very moderate position politically, but it is still mostly unthinkable for the centrist Dems in congress. They are focused on useless reforms like body cameras (which ICE already wears) and forcing the agency to obey laws which are already in place and which the agency is already supposed to be following.

This portion of congress is technically liberal but completely unfit to meet the moment, which means that when the Trump era comes to an end and the country looks to determine what happens next, those of us with big dreams of better futures will not only be fighting the authoritarians trying to continue Trump’s work but also the centrists who think that returning to the pre-Trump status quo is a perfectly desirable goal. They will still have power, and still be incapable of meeting the next moment.

I believe—hope even— that the pre-Trump world is a completely unacceptable vision for the future for many Americans. And so the challenge is if we do not want the authoritarian or centrist visions for the future, what do we want?

What do we want?! This question feels so ripe right now, so generative. This month I am celebrating a year of living in Minnesota, which means that in my first year here I experienced what felt like the strongest expression of US authoritarianism yet; when the Trump administration deputized ICE to become a terrorist gang wreaking havoc across an entire state, decimating the constitution and legal rights to due process under the bullshit rhetoric of “law enforcement”. But in that horrific set of circumstances, I also joined in a community-wide act of political imagination that felt revolutionary beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

In the first few months of 2026 (and still ongoing as I write), Minnesotans imagined what futures they wanted to live in and then collectively built them in real time. As some neighbors sheltered in place and fought to avoid masked paramilitary gangs seeking to kidnap them, the neighbors who were not targets stepped up. We built mutual aid networks that delivered groceries to thousands of families. We figured out ways to transport neighbors to medical appointments. Veterinarians created clandestine networks to ensure pets were taken care of. There were thousands of acts of kindness wrapped in legitimate danger to all parties. We rallied people around the country to help us pay rent for the neighbors who went without work for weeks or months. This was all on top of the hundreds if not thousands of people who patrolled the streets seeking to intervene and stop the kidnappings.

I can’t get this community uprising out of my head because almost literally overnight Minnesotans decided that the normal rules of how the world works were optional, ineffective, and ignorable.

The United States typically operates under an individualist logic that says housing, food, and other necessities are earned through work. We intermediate all of this with money, and that is why there is this assumed logic that working hard earns you a comfortable life. This logic is so pervasive that it can be hard to see, it is the air that we breathe as a country. Yet even though it is unseen, it exists, and as the uprising in Minnesota showed, it is optional. We—everyday Minnesotans of all backgrounds and class—chose a different way of working, and it was and continues to be wildly successful. We ignored the rules of money and hard work, of capitalism and individualism, and instead focused on need and capacity, collective safety and communal abundance.

We overcame the limits of capitalism and imagined better options.

What I want to make clear is that this collective response was a collective act of imagination. Specifically, of political imagination—a collective reimaigining of how the world should work.

The period after Trump’s disastrous administration will offer so many opportunities for similar political imaginations; for addressing the many catastrophes we will inevitably be dealing with. These catastrophes will demand political responses, which is to say they will demand collective responses because individuals will not be able to address them. Politics being—as I understand it—the process of collectively determining how we want things to be.

In that period, we know that the right wing will be useless; they are on board with the Trumpian project. So the battle will be between the centrists, who are fighting to return to some impossible-to-regain past, versus some large portion of the US citizenry who want better futures.

But better how? That is the question that demands political imagination, and does not require us to wait to start.

The war on Iran at this point guarantees that oil will be expensive forever more. That’s terrible for us now, because we are so reliant on it. If we can’t (and shouldn’t, for climate change reasons) make it more affordable, how do we expedite the process of making it unnecessary? That is not simply a question of transportation. It’s a question that affects so many dimensions of life; oil is the core ingredient for plastic, which we are possibly even more dependent on than gas.

There are many many people already dreaming these dreams, imagining these futures, exploring these challenges. I hope to write about more of them soon, but you don’t need me to find the ideas.

The main thing I was thinking about today, that led me to write this blog post, is the urgency I feel that dreaming big dreams about worlds we could inhabit, or our kids could inhabit, is wildly important. Talking about those dreams, refining them, figuring out what they are overlooking, all of this is work we can start doing now. Dreams are free, as a friend of mine likes to say.

Cultivating political imagination is an act of hope. It reminds us that even though the institutions and centers of power in our world are currently captured by dumbass evil humans; that is not a permanent state. The future has not occurred yet. The dreams you imagine and the beliefs about how the world should be you develop based on those dreams will inform the actions you take in the future. They give you new stories to tell, new futures to paint, new invitations to extend to your neighbors.

Before January 2026, I could not imagine that thousands (millions?) of Americans would choose collective well-being over personal safety. I did not think we had it in us. That was a failure of imagination on my part, and I will never again fail to believe in that possibility, thanks to my comrades here in Minnesota. I was wrong about what was possible, and it genuinely encouraging to find out just how wrong, even the circumstances were horrible.

Right now, we don’t fully know what catastrophes are coming and we definitely don’t know how hard it will be to fight them. But we can start imagining the worlds we want to inhabit, start imagining the ways we wish to remake this dumbass world, so that when we’re given opportunities to change things we have a strong vision of what changes to make.

I despise this administration and all of the horrors its leaders are sowing upon the world. The harms are real, and will not be diminished by our imagination. Please don’t take me to be naive or a magical thinker. But I also think that the US is on the threshold of some opportunities for structural change that haven’t been seen in over a century. I hope we can collectively take advantage of those opportunities to make futures with far fewer horrors and harms. I remain firm in my knowledge that the future has not happened and no outcome is inevitable. Better worlds always remain possible.

For me, I am dreaming of days where we figure out how to reduce our reliance on oil and gas through embracing the riches we’ve already made for ourselves. We have so much to work with. A world beyond capitalism is not a world of feudalism or hunter-gathering; it’s a world that has all the knowledge and skills we have today, arranged in different ways. In ways that hopefully aren’t extractive, hopefully aren’t oppressive, and in ways that embrace all the creativity, beauty, and talents and intelligence of all the beings on this planet. For me, a daily practice of political imagination is one where I remind myself this fuckery will pass, and what comes next is up to all of us.

Notes From the Twin Cities

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:50:45 -0600

One single question was around my mind this morning as I took my kids to school in St. Paul and kept an eye out for ICE on the way.

Under what circumstances is it justified to deploy a flash bang grenade against a car with kids in it?

This question is a pretty easy test, right? The answer is clearly “there are no circumstances that would justify that.” And yet, last night the paramilitary troops invading the state of Minnesota deployed a flash bang grenade. Next to a car filled with kids.

There are a bunch of other tests that seem simple but the federal government is completely failing at the moment:

Do all people in the country have the right to due process and presumption of innocence?
Is it a crime to have brown or black skin?
Do law enforcement agents have complete impunity to terrorize any commmunity because they are whiny bitches?
Does the government have the right to knock down doors and drag people out of their houses because an armed man doesn’t like the look of the people inside?

In a functioning democratic country, the answers to these questions are yes, no, no, and no. If a country believes in freedom, and supposedly has built up a large set of norms and laws to perpetuate freedom, then the people who live inside that country are not at risk of being kidnapped, beat up, tear gassed, or shot in the goddamn face when they leave their houses. People do not shelter in place to avoid masked paramilitary forces in a free country.

They do that in a country that is not free. Which means, right now in Minnesota, we are not free. And since Minnesota is a state of the United States, the country itself is not free.

On the ground, here in the Twin Cities area, the vibe is not one of fear, but of anger. How fucking dare these assholes come here under the rhetoric of “law enforcement” and “safety” and fuck with our neighbors. No laws are being enforced. No safety is being created. The rhetoric is obviously bullshit. These people are here to terrorize and they are clearly enjoying their freedom to destroy our safety.

And so Minnesotans are rising up. Have you ever participated in disaster relief efforts? After a flood, or a hurricane, or a wildfire, or what have you? In those moments the scarcity mindset of capitalism falls away, and people collectively tap into a spirit of care, of generosity, of solidarity. Any need that can be met is, any help that is needed is satisfied.

Right now the Federal Government is the disaster, and ICE are the chaos agents, and my community is a beautiful defensive force that will not be defeated. In Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell she describes disasters this way:

The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. It also suggests that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change.

In Minnesota right now—despite the ongoing risks presented by untrained clowns who will deploy weapons of war against literal children when they get scared—the change has happened. Our true nature has been given a chance to emerge.

It is so fucking powerful and beautiful that I struggle to capture what it feels like, but here is a small attempt.

In the week since Renee Nicole Good was killed, we have risen up. Our local and state governments are not involved—they seem to be focused on the rule of law and can’t seem to integrate the fact that when ICE arrived and started terrorizing the community, the rule of law was no longer in force. In light of that, we are building the networks we need to exist, in real time, with as much kindness and care as we can muster through the anger.

There are patrols in every neighborhood, at every school, watching for the unmarked cars that suggest the paramilitary terrorists are coming. Those patrols are supported by people who can check tags, relay information, track in real time through trusted networks. When ICE agents get brave enough to step out of their cars, the community swarms to make their jobs difficult. Here is a video with no violence that shows just how this works. People materialize to witness, to confuse, to chase off. To protect everyone that they can.

There are others who cannot be in the streets in this way, who are focused on protecting those most at risk in different ways. Food and supplies being delivered. Care being offered. We are doing our best to ensure that everyone who the goons want to kidnap can shelter in place and still be fed and taken care of.

Still others are patrolling schools, because again, this is not a war zone, there was no danger here until ICE arrived. They believe that tear gassing school kids and abducting beloved teaching staff is part of their job. So we have to build school patrols, to ensure that our children can get to and from school safely, can eat meals safely, can still play safely. It is 10 degrees fahrenheit outside today and the kids should get to play in the snow and ice, but the government agents are denying them that joy.

Solnit continues in Paradise Built in Hell:

Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances [disasters]; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges. Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis. One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways: it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild. And it demonstrates the viability of a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making. Citizens themselves in these moments constitute the government—the acting decision-making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered. Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place.

Emphasis mine. Right now on the ground in Minnesota, the revolution has already taken place. We are not waiting for saviors. We are not waiting for heroes. We are strong enough on our own.

In between trying to talk to my kids about this, and participating in mutual aid efforts, and handling my own anxiety and stress, I keep wondering what exactly will get us out of this? Minnesota did not start it. The feds are the ones amping up the rhetoric and the actual violence. There is no peace to be had while they remain in our state, while they understand that they have complete impunity. There is no peace because the instigators refuse to let there be peace. Minnesotans aren’t able to diffuse the situation, only defend ourselves.

There will be no end to the violence until the invading forces retreat. That’s what it comes down to. We didn’t start this, and I’m not sure we can end it, but I can fully guarantee you we will see it through to the end. The revolution has already taken place. In between the tear gas, in between the ICE patrols and loud whistles and constant greetings of FUCK ICE, the revolution has already taken place. We love each other too much, we care for each other too much to let these fucker’s visions for the world succeed. The better futures we hoped to one day build are now present in every single act of defiance. I don’t know how this specific invasion ends, but I know that what we’re building on the ground is beautiful. I love us.

Poem: time to kill god again

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:04:43 -0600

i used to believe it was required of me
to look every horror in its face

to inquire of it
what made the evil at its heart

but after a long time in the company
of all the ways we have found
to destroy and harm and terrorize
all the life around us,
to kill and maim and betray

i realized there’s no need to be
so confused

whether god is revealed
within cathedrals
made of stone and glass
or datasets and matrix math

men are always inventing god
so that god can put men in charge
so that god can decide other people
aren’t as important
so that god can declare the world broken
so that god can tell the men to fix it
so that the men can feel free

to believe their desires fix the world

sooner or later
we will remember
seeds are not a metaphor—
not some elaborate lesson
designed to teach us a way forward

life creates more life
and if it cannot do that—

I Am Once Again Sitting by a River

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:02:02 -0500

we have flooded
that which is quite used to floods
only, we saw that which

as wasted potential
as inefficient
as uncivilized

so we tried to control
that which had needed no control
so we dumped whatever we no longer wanted
into that which—without needing control—
had always managed itself
so we made inhospitable to so many beings
that which had always had space for more

i am sitting on the banks of
that which we civilized through
dams dredges dumping
that which we demand serve our purposes
before and above any others

it does not feel unwild
it does not feel civilized

it seems to understand
that which believes itself to be in control
has not yet been flooded
with the lessons of time

Feral Tech

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:15:50 -0500

In the book Field Guide to a Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature, which I am currently reading, the authors theorize a category of nature that they label “feral.” Feral nature, as they describe it, is distinct from what we typically think of as “the natural world” because it exists, in part, due to human engineering efforts. In their words, it is “the state of nonhuman beings engaged with human projects, but not in the way the makers of those projects designed.” They expand:

Without the concept of the feral, it is too easy to fall into a dichotomy that only includes the wild and the domestic. Wild things are imagined as having nothing to do with humans; domestics are imagined as entirely under human control. In the patchy Anthropocene, many nonhumans (living and nonliving) are responsive to human actions without submitting even slightly to human control. It is this set of beings that we call feral. (p10)

The anthropocene is our current geologic era; where previous eras have been defined by global climate circumstances that create visible geological layers due to volcanoes or atmospheric conditions, this era is marked in the geological record by the global outputs of human civilization.

I currently work in the tech industry, a globally ambitious industry that currently feels like it is being consumed with a mania about “AI”, which (hopefully you know) means “Artificial Intelligence.” (When I first published this piece, I accidentally defined it as “Automated Intelligence” because that’s how I define it in my head. Whoops.) “AI” is inescapable in the industry, every product is adding “AI” features, and seemingly every person with power (those with executive titles or controlling investments in tech companies) is convinced that “AI” has unleashed the next generation of technology, something possibly even more radical than the digital revolution or the internet era, technology that is bringing us into futures that have filled science fiction dreams for decades.

I am rather skeptical of this current “AI” project, and as I read Field Guide to a Patchy Anthropocene I’m finding my thoughts continually turn towards this emerging tech and how we might best make sense of it. I’m going to try to think with the Field Guide, and a few other books to try and explore what future I think we are actually building with the current state of “AI”. I promise to swear a bit to make it more entertaining.

I’m also annoyed by putting “AI” in scare quotes so I’ll get a little bit more specific as a starting point. I have seen no proof that the current generation of “AI” is “intelligent”, and so I refuse to seriously call it “AI” because that brings with it all the scifi dreams that aren’t yet real. From this point on, instead of “AI” I will refer to this current tech as LLMs—Large Language Models—which are the foundational technology that many people refer to when they speak of “AI” or “Generative AI” in this era. Now I can drop the scare quotes and be specific.

Ok, let’s think with this Feral Nature idea and see what emerges.

What is Ferality?

The authors of Field Guide to a Patchy Anthropocene—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou—use their concept of ferality to examine the unexpected impacts of terraforming the earth. Specifically, they focus on humans operating under capitalism, which has grown so global in scale that it has touched nearly every part of the natural world in significant ways. The Field Guide authors are interested in better defining how the Anthropocene works and what exactly has changed.

Terraforming is a concept that (I believe—although to be honest I have not deeply researched) comes from science fiction. When we dream about space travel we imagine that there are plenty of earth-like planets that might be almost survivable for humans, if we modified their environment. This is terraforming—remaking the climate and terrain of a planet at global scales. It’s not that common, however, to refer to the civilizational engineering efforts of humans on Earth as terraforming, because the term is typically associated with as-yet-unexplored planets (Mars, and further out). I love that the Field Guide authors use the term; it’s also how I think about our impact on this planet.

It’s a helpful word because the sci-fi version of terraforming is taking something uninhabitable and making it habitable, and though that version of terraforming is still fictional, we are now quite aware in 2025 that it’s entirely possible to take a planet that is already habitable and turn it into something much less habitable (in the current arrangement of the world, it’s quite profitable to do so, as well) (although, as every investment opportunity will remind you, past performance is not indicative of future results). Anyways, I digress. What the authors of Field Guide do is draw our attention to the terraforming of earth, to understand the unintended consequences of colonial and capitalist enterprises.

Ferality, as the authors define it, is not a term intended to use for value or moral judgements. It can be applied to both things we believe are good and things we believe are bad.

Designation as feral does not indicate whether we approve or disapprove of a particular bit of feral action. Trees that grow up in an abandoned lot are feral—and wonderful for many ecological reasons. Pathogens that evolve resistance to antibiotics are feral—and terrible for the humans likely to die of infections. (p11)

What I find so interesting about their framing and theorizing is how they focus on the terraforming aspect of capitalism as the generator of ferality. One thing that capitalism incentivizes so well is scale, the need to take something useful on a small level, find a way to genericize or standardize it, and scale it up. This can be commodities, like cotton or wheat or raw metals, or it can be outputs of systems, like electrical power or water control systems or international shipping. The authors of the Field Guide point our attention to infrastructure, those somewhat hidden systems that help our economies scale and while remaining relatively stable.

Industrial capitalism has become a vast infrastructure-building program. Capitalism makes investments equivalently liquid, whatever their social and ecological effects. Thus, investors are encouraged to terraform distant lands for their projects, entirely disregarding the effects of these projects on local people and ecologies. (p. 103)

Here then is the idea I wish to jump off from in thinking about LLMs. The authors of the Field Guide explore the ways that vast projects of industrial terraforming create unexpectedly ideal environments for various nonhuman actors to thrive; often times despite our best efforts.

They explore this through various examples; the way that a plant called water hyacinth flourishes in placid water has become a problem worldwide, because humans have sought to control the movements of water through canal building, damming up rivers and straightening them, and other methods of significant engineering. In turn, water hyacinth takes hold and destroys all the human initiatives by reducing the flow of water, killing other species including fish and rice that humans rely on. Or they give the example of industrial cotton plantations, which allowed the boll weevil to thrive in ways it is unable to do so when cotton is interspersed with other plants (as in non-industrial locations).

Feral nature, as the authors describe it, is the nonhuman species that learn to thrive in the (eco)systems that humans engineer for other purposes, whether or not those species and their behaviors are desirable.

I would like to explore LLMs through this lens of ferality, because even though humans are engineering the tech, I do not think its release into civilization will go the way we want it to. I think LLMs are a technology ripe for going feral, and I don’t know how large our window is (or if it’s even still open) for containing the damage.

LLMs, In Brief, and why they are not “AI”

The math and theory behind LLMs has existed for a few decades but the current generation of the tech has a much shorter history; there is a 2017 paper from Google Research called Attention is All You Need that introduced the theories that underly the tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc that are currently being widely adopted. The key ideas that led to these tools is that given a large enough dataset, significant enough computational power, and the right training methods, you could create massive language models that can be prompted with freeform human language and will respond with a relevant, statistically generated output, based on the contents of the input.

In short, certain companies spent a shit ton of money building out massive data centers, gathering terabytes of data, and then, using the mathematical models (expressed in code libraries), trained their computers to generate text based directly on the inputs given by a user.

Before the introduction of this generation of LLMs, computers mostly only did what they had been explicitly told to do, via code written by humans. The software that humans used, whether it was apps on a computer/phone, or web-based interfaces like Google, Gmail, and Facebook all had user interfaces with specific buttons and features that allowed you to perform certain actions, and if you tried to do actions outside of what had been intentionally designed, you either were shit out of luck, encountered an error, or were a hacker and had some hypotheses about loopholes that exist. In general though, computers were narrow interfaces that required a user to build a conceptual model for what the interface was for, and how to use it, and if the interface could not do what the user wanted, they had to go find a different interface or they were shit out of luck.

Even search engines—best represented by Google Search— weren’t able to do everything. Google was a conduit to the world; you’d input your query and then click links to see if somewhere, someone had put the information you sought on the web. It was possible to strike out with a Google Search, whether it was because you were using the wrong language for the search or because the information simply was not available on the public internet.

Enter ChatGPT and its ilk which similarly provides you with a text input box. Only with these tools, when you put text into the interface, it doesn’t query a database to find relevant, extant results. Instead, it parses the text of the input, and generates a response in real time. It “talks” back to you. And it keeps “talking” if you keep providing more input.

Well, holy shit. Instead of a narrow computing interface, we now have wide interfaces. Wide open spaces, if you will entertain a Chicks reference. A user does not need to know how it works, does not need to understand it at all, a user just needs to input text—a prompt—and in return a tailor-made response is generated just for them.

Alas, however, though the computer can “talk,” thought it is very “happy” to help you with that question it is not conscious, it is not “thinking” it is instead generating. LLMs are bounded by all the data that went into training their models, and whatever mathematical relationships it “learned” from the training data.

Which means—and this is the hard thing for actual thinking humans to hold on to and grapple with—it does not actually “know” anything, it only has computationally derived associations and mappings between words and phrases that were present in its training data. This means the computer can continually string together words (so many words) but it is not capable, for any standard meaning of the word, of “knowing” if the words are true, or accurate, or helpful, or useful, or right, or wrong. The computer produces text, but the computer has no ability to judge/know/determine if the generated text is the right text. It is just the text that its Large Language Model has determined is the statistically correct output for the given input.

It doesn’t know anything. It can’t know anything. Which means it also doesn’t know what it doesn’t know—because that would count as knowing something. Which it doesn’t.

But—and this, to me, is the fascinating part about the moment we are currently in—the text generated by these LLMs is “right” a not-insignificant amount of the time. The results aren’t half bad! Well, ok, depending on the prompt and the subject matter, it can be half bad, but the other half is good, and wow, that’s not nothing.

And so, my goodness, this tech is blowing up. It feels unstoppable. Billions of dollars are being invested in it. Everyone with a stake is convinced we’ve entered a new era of human civilization. Which is why I want to think about the near future; about the next few years; about what might happen if the trends we find ourselves living within continue on their current trajectory.

Ferality is a fun word to say

In the Field Guide to a Patchy Anthropocene, Anna Tsing writes a few chapters exploring some feral species, and what she draws the reader’s attention to is how entangled those species are with human engineering efforts. Water hyacinth is a key example; it’s an aquatic plant native to the Amazon area with intriguing flowers that made it interesting for botanical gardens. I will not explore the full history outlined in the book, but the key information is that in its native habitat, it is subject to moving water and regular floods which keep it in check. It has evolved to take advantage of interims between the floods, when the water is quieter, to quickly grow and establish itself, so that when the next flood comes it can stick around.

In the past few centuries humans have started terraforming the world with large engineering efforts to control the flow of water, which we are so dependent on. We’ve dammed rivers, creating large reservoirs, we’ve also straightened them, we’ve built large holding ponds for various needs, we’ve even scaled up rice growing systems which involve regular flooding of areas with sitting water. Each of these engineering efforts around the world has created ideal environments for water hyacinth to flourish; and because we also brought the plant itself around the world because it has pretty flowers, it has had the opportunity to establish itself in so many of these places.

From a human and native ecosystem perspective, water hyacinth is a terrible thing to have around. It grows wildly fast, it clones itself, it hybridizes with native species, it removes the oxygen from water, it soaks up water itself and empties ponds and tanks. When water hyacinth encounters human engineering, it does whatever the fuck it wants, and that usually involves doing things that are counter to our purposes for the engineering.

Which is why the authors of Field Guide refer to it as feral. It takes advantage of things we are doing for its own purposes; but it never could have achieved those purposes without our help. We are incapable of modifying its purposes; it’s evolved too many tools and everything we might do (poison it, destroy the engineering efforts that host it, move away) lead to other significant consequences that we can’t afford. And so we are stuck dealing with it, as best we can.

I think this is how LLMs are going to work.

Before I can get to that though, I need to turn to the ways that technology is not simply a benign thing that we are fully in control of. I need to explore how new technologies have requirements, and those requirements make demands on how the world is shaped.

Ursula Franklin Strikes Again

When I read books about technology (and I’ve read a good bit of them), one of the first things I do is flip to the bibliography and see if The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin is cited. Invariably, it is not. I learned of this book from my friend Mandy Brown who said she learned of it from Deb Chachra who wrote an excellent book about Infrastructure (which absolutely cites The Real World of Technology) and perhaps that is not relevant to this post but it matters to me to cite and recognize that I’m always in conversation with others who are far smarter than me, even if they don’t know it.

The Real World of Technology

by Ursula Franklin

Copyright 1990, House of Anansi

Tech Industry, Cultural Analysis

(4th time reading)

The Real World of Technology is a book of essays which were first delivered as lectures. It was published in 1989. The writer of these lectures/essays is Ursula Franklin, who is a complete badass (the link on her name is her wikipedia page, it’s worth reading). In this book she outlines how technology functions in the world; the ways that we have a reciprocal relationship with it. We create technology, technology shapes us (and the broader world), we can identify how these patterns work, and—as she elucidates—we can understand those patterns to determine if the technology actually helps us build a world we want to live in.

In her book, she defines technology simply (and radically) as ways of doing something (p6).

One has to keep in mind how much the technology of doing something defines the activity itself, and, by doing so, precludes the emergence of other ways of doing “it,” whatever “it” might be. (…) I think it’s important to realize that technology defined as practice shows us the deep cultural link of technology, and it saves us from thinking that technology is the icing on the cake. Technology is part of the cake itself. (p9)

I read Franklin to be arguing that we must look closely at the technology we use to understand how the world works; that tech is not some independent entity that is entirely optional (the icing on the cake) but rather a fundamental ingredient in how the world works. Integrating this argument helps me ask much richer questions about the way any task is done, because I see that the technology available changes how I might do that task, and what other ways of doing it might be better or worse, and why. Consider microwaves—that modern convenience that now lives in nearly every kitchen. A microwave is theoretically just a fast way to heat things up, but because they exist, it is much easier to keep fully prepared meals on hand that are frozen. This means companies can sell frozen meals as easy conveniences, because they can assume that the technology for quickly bringing those frozen meals to edible temperatures is readily available. Microwaves, far from simply being heating devices, have introduced significant impacts into how cooking and eating work for many people, and by naming this we can start to ask about whether those impacts are net positive or net neutral.

Franklin’s small volume is utterly brilliant, as I skim through my marginalia there are dozens of points she makes that feel relevant to this essay. Alas, I am trying to stay focused, so if you get this far and her insights sound more interesting than mine, please do go read the book and forget this essay. I won’t complain.

One of the main reasons that Franklin takes on the project of understanding how technology works is to draw our attention to how much progress (the adoption of new technology and practices) happens in a very undemocratic way.

There is a lot of talk about global crises and “our common future.” However, there is far too little discussion of the structuring of the future which global applications of modern technologies carry in their wake. What ought to be of central concern in considering our common future are the aspects of the technological structuring that will inhibit or prevent future changes in social and political relations. (p42)

She argues that all technology “reduce or eliminate reciprocity” which is “some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication of interacting parties.” Reciprocity, in Franklin’s argument, is what in more common parlance now would be the existence of agency. Do all people who are impacted by new technology get a chance to understand the consequences of adoption and weigh in? Is actual consent (with full comprehension of what is being consented to) actually possible?

Franklin argues that “where there is no reciprocity, there is no need for listening. There is then no need to understand or accommodate.” This, from her perspective, has significant impacts on our ability center our common humanity. With this in mind, let’s turn to another book, all about the worldview of AI.

Knowledge Engineering

Diana E. Forsythe was an anthropologist who focused on AI—in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I told you that LLMs had a longer history than ChatGPT. She did ethnographic field work in the “AI” orgs of that era. Here’s how the editor’s intro describes it:

Studying Those Who Study Us

by Diana Forsythe

Copyright 2002, Stanford University

Tech Industry

In order to appreciate better what Diana was up against when she spoke clearly and honestly as an anthropologist, it is important to understand the position of AI during the 1980’s, when she began fieldwork. During this period AI enjoyed a highly privileged position both in the worlds of computer science an din the privileged worlds of defense funding. Millions of dollars were given freely by funding agencies such as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) or ONR (Office of Naval Research) to researchers in AI, especially at elite schools such as Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT. Very often the supported projects were “blue-sky,” that is, unconstrained by deliverable technology or any rigors of development. Under this aegis, many AI researchers were able to enjoy a freedom to range in their questioning across psychology, linguistics, history of science, philosophy, and biology, to name a few disciplines.

Into this elite world, Forsythe embedded, and took extensive notes. I think the intro frames up the story well, so I’ll keep quoting:

As in other scientific communities, AI researchers tend to think that they do not have a culture. They are instead “purely” technical. Diana insists that the technical is itself cultural and, furthermore, that AI researchers have a special kind of technical culture that is characterized by features such as technical bias; decontextualized thinking; quantitative, formal bias; a preference for explicit models; and a tendency to believe that there is only one correct interpretation (or reality) of events.

This is to say that Forsythe embedded in the orgs equivalent to OpenAI or Anthropic of her day, and she explored the belief systems that inform the building of AI systems. In this world, she found that the researchers and thinkers most excited about the potential of AI were also wildly ignorant about the problems they believed they were solving.

The overarching message in Studying Those who Study Us is that even decades ago it was very clear that AI researchers had extremely strong ideologies about what automation would do, and those ideologies run completely counter to the way the world actually works. At the time, the AI community felt that the problems they ran into were mostly around the size of datasets and the capacity of computing. They believed strongly that in the future, with larger datasets and scaled up compute, the obstacles would disappear, and AI would help solve a multitude of issues that were caused by our continued dependence on humans.

In the 80’s and 90’s, the hardest part about creating “AI” systems was obtaining data. The internet was still very obscure, we were not in the world of “big data” and the digitization of so much of the world had barely begun. So the researchers working in “AI” spaces had to build their training datasets manually, by interviewing experts, creating computer-readable data, and translating interviews and existing textbooks into machine readable format. Today of course, all of the major LLM companies are rapaciously obtaining every single byte of textual data they can—whether by piracy, scraping the web, and any other means available to them. They have automated what was previously—in Forsythe’s time—a very manual process.

I return to Forsythe’s insights today because the behind-the-scenes data acquisition is critically important for determining what LLMs can and cannot possibly do; and the fact that it happens without much public awareness means we miss critical information about the shape of the technology that is rapidly being deployed.

Because the “olden” days of AI training were so labor intensive, Forsythe was able to see exactly the belief systems that were shaping the technology. She recognized that there were significant assumptions being made by researchers about what learning is, what expertise is, and what data is necessary to automate a given task. She first establishes what we know about how human learning works:

First, knowledge is socially and culturally constituted. Second, knowledge is not self-evident, it must be interpreted. Messages are seen as having meaning because the interlocutors share knowledge about the world. Third, people are not completely aware of everything they know, a good deal of knowledge is tacit. Fourth, much knowledge is not in people’s heads at all, but is rather “distributed through the division of labor, the procedures for getting things done, etc.” Fifth, the relation between what people think they do, what they say they do, and what they can be observed to do is highly complex. And sixth, because of all these points, complete and unambiguous knowledge about expert procedures is unlikely to be transmitted through experts’ verbal or written self-reports. (p41)

From here, she contrasts the actions of the AI researchers. In the era before the massive training datasets available now to LLM builders, there was an entire category of AI research called “knowledge engineers;” people who were tasked with interviewing experts about their areas of expertise, to create “AI” training datasets. Forsythe finds in their way of operating a number of assumptions:

To knowledge engineers, “knowledge” means explicit, globally applicable rules whose relation to each other and to implied action is straight-forward. Knowledge in this sense is a stable entity that can be acquired and transferred. It can be rendered machine-readable and manipulated by a computer program. I believe that in effect “knowledge” has been operationally redefined in AI to mean “what can be programmed into the knowledge base of an expert system.” (p53)

With this insight, she concludes with the point that I think is deeply relevant to the current era:

The ability to decide what will count as knowledge in a particular case is a form of power. (…) The exercise of this power is to some extent invisible. (…) Once an expert system is built, it is all too easy for the user to take it at face value, assuming that what the system says is correct. Since most people who use such systems in business, medicine, or the military know little about how they are produced, they may not question the nature of the knowledge they contain. While system-builders know that every knowledge base has its limitations, they do not appear to be aware that members of the public may not know this. Possible misunderstandings on the part of future users are not viewed as their problems.

I will come back to these problems.

Feral Tech

Technology then, as Franklin helps us see, is not simply the tool we create for a task, but the entire process of doing the task, inclusive of the tool. Right now, we’re in this new era of LLMs with their wide interfaces, their seeming ability to generate relevant responses to almost any prompt, and what the proponents of “AI” are currently saying is that the tech is now so powerful that it can be used in every domain to change the entire world.

Welcome to the future, they say, where computers can take over so many tasks for us.

I believe that if we apply Diana Forsythe’s insights from an earlier era of “AI” to this current age of LLMs, and we think with the Field Guide author’s concept of “ferality,” we might really hope for the opportunity to deeply consider, in Franklin’s phrasing, “the technological structuring of our common future.” We might want to keep space open, wide open, for futures that are not so “AI” dependent. And from where I stand right now—I don’t think we will get that space by default. We’re going to have to fight for it. Let me unpack my thinking.

Ferality as the Field Guide authors define it, is the unexpected uses of human engineering and infrastructure. They focus on biological entities—plants and animals and fungi—for their examination of ferality.

I think the concept can be slightly bastardized as a way to think about the unintended consequences of broad adoption of technology. That not only can human engineering allow biological ferality to emerge, as the Field Guide explores, but also that technology itself can become feral.

I recognize that I’m bastardizing the concept of ferality from the book because the authors spend a good portion of the book making the case that we must treat nonhuman biological entities as actors in their own right. Nature does not exist in service of humans or only in response to humans; it exists for its own purposes and the many beings we share this planet with have their own agendas and ways of being. I am adamantly and philosophically against imbuing technology with any sort of will or autonomy; that’s part of the reason I use scare quotes around “AI.” LLMs are merely software operating on hardware, and without humans around to build the computers and generate the power for running the computers, LLMs will cease to exist. To put it another way; humans can go extinct and the natural world will continue on fine; probably even improve from some perspectives, but our technology will all fall prey to entropy, as it contains no will or innate biological drive to survive.

Acknowledging this, it is helpful to use Ursula Franklin’s insights to understand that when we create new technology, it reshapes us as well. Technology cannot be introduced without changing the world, and some technologies introduce quite unanticipated demands as we adopt them at scale. We are—in this current era—terraforming the world because we built a bunch of technology and became dependent on it and have in turn found it quite difficult to reduce our dependency on it, even though the demands of the technology are quite literally killing us.

I think fossil fuels are a canonical example of feral tech, as I am conceiving it. Coal, oil, and natural gas are foundational technologies that have helped us build the world we live in. They are the raw ingredients upon which we scaled up an entire electrified society, created plastics and other synthetic materials, and moved from an early industrial era to the globalized, digitized world that we now live in. But these gains have all come with horrible, feral costs, some of which we truly have no idea how to address. With every year, we are seeing climate change milestones coming more rapidly than worst-case scenarios previously anticipated, and even still we struggle to stop burning fossil fuels. It’s entirely likely—though coal dust was the original geological marker for the beginning of the anthropocene—plastic will be the main signifier in the geologic record. We have no idea how to get rid of it, it’s found everywhere on earth from the deepest part of the ocean to inside the placentas of pregnant people, and yet we continue to increase production every year.

Technological progress is thus never a neutral or even purely positive progression; there are costs and those costs can be literally existential if we adopt technology at scale without considering the impacts.

Feral tech is thus—as I conceive of it—technology that A) brings about consequences that would never be justifiable if accurately weighed in a cost/benefits analysis, and yet B) is so integral once adopted at scale that it becomes difficult to imagine a world without it. Feral technology escapes our control and requires us to adapt to its demands, even as we understand that the costs are unjustifiable and existentially threatening.

I believe that LLMs are such a technology, because they aren’t actually the Artificial Intelligence people believe them to be, and if we allow their largest boosters to keep promoting this deceptive framing, we are going to create a new world of technological ferality, even before we have dealt with the current one.

The Future we are Facing

To bring all this together, I want to think with Forsythe’s arguments in Studying Those who Study Us to try and imagine what the near future looks like if we continue on this path of treating LLMs as the science-fiction version of AI that they are definitively not.

A few decades ago, when AI researchers were building out cutting edge “AI” tools, the most intense labor in the field was in finding data upon which to build the “expert systems”. Today, AI researchers focus more on the training and design side of things, because we have mountains of available data. The data that goes into the training is generated from a broad variety of sources; all the books that have been digitized over time, all the reddit posts ever written, open source Github repos, so on and so on. The scale of this training data is so large that there is probably no one inside any LLM company who can credibly claim to comprehensively understand the information that is training the models.

This scale of training data—more information that any human could possibly sort through in a lifetime—is the reason that current generation LLMs feel so dang powerful.

Forsythe’s prescient, important ethnographic work is so useful because it helps us understand the assumptions that AI researchers make when they throw all this training data at the model. It shifts the focus from the outputs (talking computers) to the inputs (textual data available in digital form).

One of the key, hidden assumptions that LLM boosters make is that the information and data available in these vast repositories of training data is a comprehensive representation of human knowledge. You see this in the way the AI company execs talk about knowledge. Sam Altman refers to ChatGPT 5 (the most recent version as of this post) as “talking to an expert, a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything.” Which, in order to be accurate, assumes that all PhD-level information is encoded in ways that have been made available for training the model.

The makers of LLMs, as Forsythe pointed out decades ago, believe that expert knowledge is entirely constituted in the written output of their work. But not just this, they believe it across every domain. This is the reason that LLM products (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) all have simple text input boxes as their interface: the designers and producers of these products do not believe that there’s a reason to limit the ways that these tools work.

The assumptions of those promoting LLMs as they are currently and widely being deployed, is that they have been trained on—and thus can output—comprehensive, expert knowledge across all domains of human knowledge.

This is an extremely questionable claim on its face, and even more so when you consider what I quoted earlier from Forsythe about all the ways we know that learning and knowledge works for humans. A significant chunk of human knowledge exists in realms that live outside what we write or turn into data.

Education on the Edge of Possibility

by Renate Caine, Geoffrey Caine

Copyright 1997, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

Cultural Analysis

In the 1997 book Education on the Edge of Possibility, the authors Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine try to build a case for changing how our educational system works. In it, they catalogue the current educational system as an “industrial model”, which treats education as a factory model, and knowledge as a commodity:

Educators and education have as their primary function the delivery of essential information. The core commodity of education is the information that is to provide a foundation for success in life. In a sense, this information is detached from the minds of people and has an independent existence. Facts and skills are conceived of as owned by the system and warehoused in schools, where they are packaged and then delivered to students. (p43)

This paradigm of education is, they write, fundamentally flawed and completely inaccurate.

When asked “what is the desired outcome of education?” people amost automatically say something like “well-informed students.” Educators and education have as their primary function the delivery of essential information. The core commodity of education is the information that is to provide a foundation for success in life. In a sense, this information is detached from the minds of people and has an independent existence. Facts and skills are conceived of as owned by the system and warehoused in schools, where they are packaged and then delivered to students. (p43)

Writing nearly 30 years ago, they argued for a wildly different pedagogy. A “brain-based” model of education that treats all humans as active, full people.

In brain-based learning, educators see learners as active participants in the learning process. The teacher is not the deliverer of knowledge, but the facilitator and intelligent guide who engages student interests in learning. Students and teachers become partners in the pursuit of understanding. (…) Brain-based instruction begins witht he entire school and the child’s whole being. The brain is not divided into individual segments marked “feelings” or “cognitive development” or “physical activity.” Rather, active learners are totally immersed in their world and learn from their entire experience.

Learning, the acquisition of information and how to exist in the world, is not simply the acquisition of structured facts. It is not a download of information. It is an active process. Think back to Diana Forsythe’s descriptions of how knowledge works; it is embodied, it is complex, it is not simply a set of facts and information, there is a much broader social context that it operates within.

I think this is relevant, because as Forsythe points out, the entire field of “AI Research” including the current generation of LLM training is premised on the idea that knowledge is a bunch of facts. The current proponents of LLM based tools are trying to embed them in every single domain of human life that they can, as quickly as possible, because they believe that the tools make humans smarter. There are companies taking millions if not billions of investment, premised on the idea that LLMs are good for education, good for healthcare, good for the legal field, good for engineering, and so on and so forth.

We are scaling up “knowledge” systems that are fundamentally premised on horribly outdated models of knowledge.

Far from being an advancement of human civilization, the people trying to scale up LLM technology for their own benefit are trying to trap us in modes of learning and knowledge that we already know are failures. They are doing this because there’s a lot of profit available to them if they succeed. If they do succeed, which I hope is not guaranteed, I think we will unleash two types of technological ferality that, from my perspective, will cost us as humans far more than we will gain. That’s where I’d like to end this long-ass piece.

Ferality, Toddlers, and Distrust

There are two ways that I think LLMs will become feral, if we let the companies trying to institutionalize them in the world succeed. First, I think they will trap us in an outdated, self-defeating pedagogical model that replaces learning with information. And then, even more alarmingly, they will undermine our ability to trust any information at all.

The companies and orgs that are promoting LLM-based products today are eager to see them used for nearly any and all purpose, in the hopes that some of these uses will turn out to be profitable, or at least lead to enterprise contracts. Because of that, you can ask LLM chatbots just about any question you want, and they will generate a confident response. This can feel like magic. The chatbots almost never say “I don’t know,” because that’s not a statistically probably response to most text in their training datasets.

Suddenly, we find ourselves in a world where anyone can feel like an expert, because the talking computer can provide all the information on demand. We have fucking CEOs of tech startups feeling like they are on the cusp of Physics discoveries because the computer is talking to them. Also, we have lots of people suffering AI Psychosis because LLMs, by their very mathematical nature, respond to inputs with the most probable responses, which often looks sycophantic and or affirming, no matter what the fuck you put into the text box.

If you dig into pedagogy and learning, as with the above book Education on the Edge of Possibility one of the things that we have lots of evidence for is that learning is an active process, and a significant portion of it is mapping out what is right and accurate, by learning to determine—through the slow process of failure and iteration—exactly what is wrong or inaccurate. There’s a both-sides process for learning, and the people we often think of as “geniuses” are actually people who are very good at rapidly integrating new knowledge through small failures (or they are assholes who think that everything they don’t know doesn’t matter, both are possible).

Everything amazing that humans have ever invented, learned, or imagined, has been acquired through some version of this form of learning. We try shit, we fail, we iterate, we fail less. We then are able to teach others, and they can continue the process to keep pushing knowledge forward.

This is how human civilization—the good parts and the bad parts—has slowly come to be.

LLMs fuck up that entire process. The way they are designed currently; the way that the many large companies and powerful people want to deploy them today delivers the feeling of expertise, the belief that you have acquired knowledge, without any actual learning.

It’s the industrial model of education, writ large, institutionalized in large-scale systems, and cemented into place because it’s profitable.

The ferality of this tech—the undesired and yet completely unavoidable outcomes of the path the tech industry currently has us on—is that we are going to have millions of people operating on information that came from the talking computer but they are completely incapable of validating. “Expertise” without learning. Information without context.

The best corollary I can think of is a toddler; learning to walk without any knowledge of how to actually navigate the world. If you have ever minded a toddler for a period of time when they were awake and active, what you know is that they have wayyyy more capabilities than they know how to properly use. And so you have to watch them like a hawk, or keep them contained in environments where their risks of harm are minimized. Eventually they will gain enough experience to be trusted with less supervision, but it’s not an automatic process, and until such a time, well, pay attention.

I think the shitty pedagogy and false assumptions that underly the LLM boosters’ beliefs about how human knowledge operates will have similar risk profiles to unleashing a preschool class without supervision in Times Square. Lots of people will be harmed, in ways that we can’t even imagine, because those little fuckers are creative, fast, and have no idea what dangers they should be watching out for.

Which brings me to the second ferality, and my concluding thoughts.

LLMs, as they operate based on the current and expected near-future state of our tech, will generate confidence in humans who lack the expertise or knowledge to determine if such confidence is actually deserved. Those humans will then make decisions, take action, live their lives, based on the LLM-generated confidence. And unlike the hypothetical toddlers in Times Square, we (the people who share the same space with the newly confident LLM-fueled experts) will not be able to easily identify the rogue actors. The consequences of tons of “experts” making actions based on unfounded confidence is that reality will suddenly become wildly untrustworthy.

This is already happening in smaller forms, but the LLM companies sure are hoping we will treat each case as an individual failing and not see the pattern at large.

Lawyers are submitting briefs referring to non-existent case-law. Newspapers are publishing summer reading lists that include non-existent books. These are the examples where we can fact-check and see that the information provided by the LLMs has no bearing in reality.

There are going to be millions of cases where we can’t easily see that a person is confidently acting on information they obtained from an LLM that is inaccurate. They don’t have the expertise to validate the information, because they never actually learned the subject matter. They input a prompt, got back some text, and then made decisions assuming that the talking computer was accurate. Remember what Diana Forsythe said in the fucking 1990’s about AI researchers?

While system-builders know that every knowledge base has its limitations, they do not appear to be aware that members of the public may not know this. Possible misunderstandings on the part of future users are not viewed as their problems.

This problem has not been addressed. It has been ignored. And now we are facing a future where not only is this ignored problem still present, it is now scaled up to a global, general-purpose level.

Here, finally, we see feral tech in all its horrors. What does the world look like if every single person has access to a computer that will confidently answer any question on any topic, with neither participant in the transaction (the human, or the computer) being capable of assessing the accuracy of the answer?

I personally think that world looks horrifying. I think it means we will not be able to trust anything. I think—far from being an empowering world of human advancement—it is a disempowering world where everyone is left to their own devices, needing to fact-check all information, be skeptical of all systems, and to generally live in fear that novel risks are emerging every day because new “experts” are implementing systems flawed in ways they won’t understand until failure occurs.

It feels like dystopia.

Conclusion

This piece is way longer than I ever anticipated, and while I believe strongly this is an accurate read of the world we’re building, I also feel like I need to end on some other note than where I am right now.

So I’ll turn back to Ursula Franklin, because every damn time I pick up The Real World of Technology I find I had forgotten just how prescient she was. It’s a glorious book and—despite the fact that I have read it 6 or 7 times, and thus have “obtained” all the information it contains—I fully expect to continue learning from it throughout life.

In the sixth chapter of the book, she outlines a framework for how we might adopt technology, a checklist for considering technology. After that checklist, she says

In the real world of technology there are also situations in which, in fact, one does not know what to do. With every development new domains of ignorance are discovered which become evident only as the project proceeds. The emergence of domains of ignorance is basically quite inevitable.

Basically, every time we build new technology, we encounter unforeseen consequences. And that’s ok, it’s inevitable. However, it’s also instructive. We know that new technology will change us.

I have argued in this piece that we should think of some technology as feral, because it’s a useful idea for understanding that sometimes technology changes us in really terrible ways, that might be nearly impossible to undo. I’d suggest that creating large-scale systems that engender confidence where none is deserved is one of those technologies.

Franklin provides a suggestion that I think is very useful for how we can pushback on large-scale technological changes.

The initial direct experience of people is an important source of information. To marginalize or discard such direct evidence removes an important source of knowledge from teh task of decreasing the domains of ignorance. Possibly even more important is the implicit attempt to keep people from challenging technology by making their direct experience appear marginal and irrelevant. This is a form of disenfranchisement, and I see disenfranchising people as one of the major obstacles to the formation and implementation of public policies that could safeguard the integrity of people and of nature. This disenfranchising has accelerated since the time of the Industrial Revolution as governments have turned their attention to the blind support of technology and its growth at the expense of other obligations.

This feels, to me, like a very astute diagnosis of what is happening around LLMs right now. Yes, the tech can feel magical. Yes, it is cool that you can provide just about any prompt and get some sort of answer.

But the experiences of using the tech at work are mid and we need to say that. We need to push back.

I don’t think this is the full solution, but this essay is so fucking long, and I’d like to conclude it. So what I’d suggest is that you do not let anyone gaslight you into feeling like the tools are better than they are. If you have expertise or skills, take pride in them. If the LLM tools you have to use do a shitty, mediocre job at replicating your skills, please understand that not as a personal failure, but as an exemplary situation. You know what good is, and it isn’t that, and that means that the people promoting the tech feel like their potential wealth is far more important than actually creating useful technology.

I think that tech can go feral, but that is not a default state, and I’m not sure that LLMs are yet an example of feral tech. But I do think that’s the future we’re barreling towards, and it’s going to take work to avoid it. I hope that this piece helped you think through what that might look like, and pointed you towards some people who are suggesting other paths. Thanks for reading.

Stop Fucking With Trans Lives and Rights

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:59:10 -0500

I am done with anyone who wants to have “conversations” about trans people. Because nearly everyone holding political power in the US today seems to believe it’s up for debate whether trans people should get access to healthcare and have rights to pursue joyful, fulfilling lives. Republicans, starting around 2021 (after a failed attempt in 2016) have decided that trans people must be eradicated. But appallingly, many Democrats have started making it explicitly clear that they are willing to find compromise positions on this topic.

Democrats who treat any identity groups’ right to exist as “up for debate” deserved to be chased out of politics and made a pariah in public life. They deserve a toe fungus that never goes away. They deserve socks that never dry. They deserve to lose all of their friends, until such a point that they recant their positions and work to undo the injustices they are encouraging at this moment.

Many people who listen to these cowardly politicians are attempting to build consensus around the idea that trans ideas are “too politically contentious” and people on the left who wish to defeat the authoritarians must drop the politicians. There’s clear astroturfing happening on BlueSky, and I can only imagine it’s worse on the MechaHitler platform that used to be called Twitter. People will point to recent polling, suggesting that the issue is unpopular, as if that is an argument against supporting the rights of your fellow humans. As if it is a reasonable argument to say “this groups rights are unpopular so they don’t deserve them.” Fuck that shit.

If you’ve encountered this messaging, they will point to recent polls showing growing support for the horrific laws and policies that Republicans are proposing and passing at a rapid pace. Here’s the Pew Report earlier this year, where the entire analysis points to the fact that opinion on these questions is rapidly changing. These laws have gone from very unpopular to slightly less unpopular.

Cowardly dems would have you believe that trends are magical things that arise from the citizenry without any other reasons; that polls reveal the true will of the polity, and since we are democracy, we must listen! This is a load of horseshit, which this piece covers quite well (Archive link if you hit a paywall), including this astute summary:

But the most fundamental problem with polling is that the phenomenon it claims to record—public opinion—has no coherent meaning or existence. The polling industry resolves this conundrum by simply making “public opinion” synonymous with its methods: polls record public opinion; public opinion is what polls record. Skeptics could see this sleight of hand from the start. “Dr. Gallup does not make the public more articulate,” Lindsay Rogers, a political scientist at Columbia University, wrote in an early polemic against polling in 1949. “He only estimates how in replying to certain questions, it would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘don’t know.’ Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy, Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”

But even if we pretend like the polling is useful information, cowardly Dems (both those holding power and those helping them build messaging) are missing the true message of the polls, and I’m just utterly sick of it.

The polls show—and that Pew article above emphasizes this—that people’s opinions on trans issues are not fixed. They are moveable.

And right now nearly everyone in power has decided the best idea is to let Republicans determine where the opinions should be moved to.

I am desperate, genuinely desperate for the people with soft and hard power in the Democratic party to understand that they have immense power to stop this. That the polls are not saying “here’s where people are moving” but instead “here’s how you’re failing.” And I’d love them to stop failing. Yesterday.

There are a few people with Democratic power who are doing this, and part of my writing this small rant on my dumb website is to highlight the people with power who are using that power to push back against the Republican campaign to eradicate trans people.

Tim Walz, who is the governor of Minnesota (where I moved to this year!) has been a vocal champion of trans rights. In May, he gave the keynote at the California Democratic convention, where he drew a line I wish more were willing to fight for:

I’m just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected. That child deserves our support. Don’t worry about the pollsters calling it distractions, because we need to be the party of human dignity.

If the polls are showing us anything, they are showing that many people in the US are basing their positions based on what feels reasonable, which is a signal they get from the people in power.

Similarly, J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, has been vocal in his support. In March he gave a speech at an Human Rights Campaign dinner, where he said:

I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.

There are many others as well, this is the reason I refused to say “all democrats” anywhere above.

Here in Minnesota, Walz is merely the most public figure, but there are so many fighting for trans people (not just trans kids), from Rep Leigh Finke, to Attorney General Keith Ellison, to many more. They are vocal in their support and unwavering in the face of so much bullshit being spewed out by this administration.

I’m thankful for everyone who is fighting, and I’d like to end with my hopes, as one voter who is horrified at the ongoing injustices against trans people.

Trans people of all ages deserve a world where their identities are validated and celebrated. A world where healthcare is obtainable, is not surrounded by a bunch of paternalistic, insulting concern and questioning. A world where they are understood to be the experts on their bodies and their identities, and the rest of us are respectfully curious and celebratory. A world where trans joy flourishes everywhere.

That is the world I am fighting for, and I know many others are. I would like everyone in the democratic party, whether office-holding or consulting, to please consider the following ideas:

Republicans are not seriously concerned about trans kids or trans people. They are seriously concerned with obtaining and keeping power, and what they have figured out is that as long as there are culture war distractions to soak up all the oxygen, no one seems to notice that when they obtain power they use it to fuck over everyone they can. Right now everything is getting more expensive, millions are in debt way over their head, the US military is literally invading democratic cities, it’s unclear how our farms will survive this administration, amongst many other crises, and Republicans are more than happy to keep debates on the issue of whether or not trans people deserve to exist.

Republicans are focused on this, because it lets them fuck us all over. So please, democrats, please, stop letting them determine the framing of all issues.

Take the upper hand; you have it. Follow Walz’s leads: ask why the hell they are trying to hurt literal children instead of fixing all the issues. Why are they so focused on harming people different than them instead of paying attention to the actual crises that the government is supposed to be addressing.

You can both refuse to even allow trans rights to be up for debate, AND make an affirmative case for better policies and politics. I know you can. If you can’t, get out of the fucking way, your time is over.

To put it a different way, I’ll quote the iconic protest sign.

Democrats, respect my trans homies, or I’m going to identify as a fucking problem.

Two Book Recommendations

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:57:01 -0500

In the past week I finished two books that were extremely generative in my ongoing quest to make sense of this fucked up world we live in, and I liked them so much I want to write a quick recommendation post.

The first book is Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This is the third book of hers I’ve read and each one challenges me to rethink and unlearn so many aspects of life. I scanned in some highlights of the book on this page if it’s interesting to you.

The second book is New Dark Age by James Bridle. He seeks to grapple with the immense complexity that has arisen in a few decades as we networked the entire world, through the rise of computers, the internet, and vast data centers of computing power. The book pre-dates the current boom in AI by a few years but proves itself very prescient in terms of naming and sorting through the changes we’re seeing unfold in real time. My highlights from the book are here.

Both authors are writing to make sense of the world we live in, with the goal of improving our imagination and language as we attempt to construct a future. Bridle is writing to and from within the western concepts of the world. Simpson is writing to and from within the indigenous concepts. Their projects are not aligned, as one assumes the world we have built will continue on in some form, while the other (Theory of Water) imagines that this world can be replaced with something better.

New Dark Age

by James Bridle

Copyright 2019, Verso

Tech Industry, Cultural Analysis

My highlights

Bridle theorizes what he calls “computational thinking” “Computational thinking is an extension of what others have called solutionism: the belief that any given problem can be solved by the application of computation.” He explains that computational thinking “supposes - often at an unconscious level - that the world really is like the solutionists propose. It internalises solutionism to the degree that it is impossible to think or articulate the world in terms that are not computable.” His book is then an exploration of this argument, trying to explore different lenses to create language for the variety of ways that a vast, digitally networked world is hard to understand or analyze.

As he explores these lenses, he makes an observation which I find quite compelling:

Computational thinking insists on the easy answer, which requires the least amount of cognitive effort to arrive at. Moreover, it insists that there is an answer - one, inviolable answer that can be arrived at - at all. The ‘debate’ on climate change, where it is not a simple conspiracy of petrocapitalism, is characterised by this computational inability to deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty, mathematically and scientifically understood, is not the same as unknowing. Uncertainty, in scientific, climatological terms, is a measure of precisely what we do know. And as our computational systems expand, they show us ever more clearly how much we do not know.

Computational thinking has triumphed because it has first seduced us with its power, then befuddled us with its complexity, and finally settled into our cortexes as self-evident. Its effects and outcomes, its very way of thinking, are now so much a part of everyday life that it appears as vast and futile to oppose as the weather itself.

Bridle’s analysis and theorizing is very illuminating as we watch AI devour everything software has previously digested. But where Bridle looks at these systems and infrastructure as realities we must accept and make sense of in order to regain agency over our future, Leanne Simpson questions the premise.

Theory of Water is a beautiful book that you should read. Full stop. It contains deeply challenging ideas about ethics, about philosophy, about the fundamental ways the world works, but it contains them inside prose that reads like a memoir. No, like a story. I am trying to find fancy ways of saying things I should just state directly. Simpson writes ideas and philosophy that challenge the majority of the western culture I’ve been raised and educated in, without pretension. She is not concerned with making her prose acceptable to institutions or intellectuals, even though both should be engaging with her work. She is concerned with inviting every thinking person to think richly about the world and consider what futures we wish to inhabit.

To accomplish this, she thinks with Nibi, the Anishinaabe word for what we call “water” in English, although one of the key ideas in her book is that the Anishinaabe language does not function the same way English does, and so translation is never comprehensive.

She looks to Nibi, it’s many forms (snow, ice, steam, liquid) and finds transformations, generation, reciprocity, cycles, and so many other concepts to think with. One action of Nibi is referenced continually; “sintering”:

I discovered that nearly every day the snow was slightly different along the trail at Jackson Creek. I became fascinated by sintering. When a snowflake falls from the sky and lands on the earth, it immediately begins, or perhaps continues, a transformation as it forms bonds at temperatures below zero (this is not a melting process) with its neighbouring snowflakes or crystals to create the fabric of a snowpack.

Sintering is a joining. It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other. It is a process of changing from a singular, angular snowflake to a more rounded form of bonded crystals, or a snowpack— a denser, more compact, linked formation. As the snow sinters, it settles and becomes denser, stronger and soggier under the influence of gravity. Sintering is slow deformation.

And so Simpson sinters with Black feminists, other indigenous philosophies, artists, and the broader set of beings and living creatures in the world. She is not writing for me — a white dude with deep ancestral roots of colonization — but as I sit with her work, as I embrace the wisdom and ideas she explores with curiosity and openness, I find that her ideas are inviting. I don’t know what it means for me to desire to join into the world-making processes she finds in so many indigenous and Black radical communities. I don’t know, but I know I want to find ways to join in, because the world Simpson describes—one that her ancestors inhabited and thus is not some impossible utopian ideal, but rather a known way to inhabit the world that my ancestors have continually (yet unsuccessfully) sought to eradicate—is inviting.

Mashkiig, an overlapping of the terrestrial and water worlds, are sites of tremendous life. I think of the shoreline full of ducks, geese, ospreys and her-ons; fish, frogs and turtles; muskrats, beavers, minks and deer; mosquito larvae and dragonfly nymphs; lily pads and wild rice; and stagnant, decaying organic matter. I think of ecosystems that remove pollutants from water and get rid of 90 percent of water-borne pathogens. Ecosystems that clean the groundwater we rely on to drink. Ecosystems that sequester carbon and hold water like sponges buffering against flood-ing.

Capitalism understands otherwise.

In southern Ontario, between 70 percent and 90 percent of original wetlands have been destroyed-draining these worlds for farmland, settlement, industrial development and highway construction. On a planetary scale, we’ve lost one-third of global wetlands in the last forty-five years. The threats don’t stop there, though. Pollution, climate change and the artificial modification of water levels—like that which occurs in the management of the Trent-Severn Waterway—also contribute to the desecration.

Simpson, while thinking with Nibi, reminds me to pay close attention to the way the world works outside of how humans have changed it. Capitalism—built on racism, colonialism, patriarchy, petroarchy; oppression writ large—is a dead end system. It is a system in which all people cannot flourish, because the system requires many to suffer in order for a few to thrive.

I found both books generative, because they are attempting to grapple with the world as it is, not as we want it to be, or believe it to be, or need it to be. As it is. That’s a difficult task in this day and age, and each book improved my ability to make sense of things. In this way, the books are complementary.

However, I found the books most generative because of the ways they are completely incompatible. Bridle’s project is to think within the system that capitalism hath wrought; with an antagonistic, grounded skepticism, yes, but within it none-the-less. If this is the world we have to live within, he asks, what options do we have to reduce the horrors of the path we’re on. It’s a necessary question, and while the power structures that exist today remain in power, New Dark Age is a valuable book for thinking with.

Simpson’s book starts with the premise that everything capitalism has wrought is contingent, and the power structures that capitalism and colonialism has wrought are designed to occlude reality, to prevent imagination. Simpson does not ask “how can we improve things?” but rather “what does a world worth living in look like?” Her answers do not fit within the civilized world of western society, because that world tries to choke out the many other worlds that inhabit this planet.

In our knowledge system, the Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg share everything with all living things and their formations. We are deeply interdependent. We are intercommunal. We are but one form of life in a complex web of cascading lives. We are no more important—and many would say we are less important-than the other beings and systems making up the universe. We have no more “rights” than any other living thing in that web. We are not special, extra or excep-tional. We are not owed the lives of other living things.

We are not owed the planet.

We are not owed comfortable lives.

We believe this not for self-involved reasons-not because our continuance depends upon the earth being healthy, not because our lives depend upon this, even if they do—but because, ethically, who do we think we are? Who are we to place ourselves above all other living things, most of which we don’t understand?

Simpson’s short, brilliant book is not concerned with helping us make sense of capitalism, because capitalism is inherently contradictory and irrational. So, through the life of Nibi, Simpson invites us to imagine otherwise. “Together”, she writes,

we’ll dream and build worlds where we’ll call the aesthetics of abolition normal, and we’ll no longer have to envision liberation because we’ll be living it, and it will be all we know.

Motivation, Systems, and Power

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:42:49 -0500

Yesterday I was going through my RSS feeds and I read Charity Major’s latest blog post. It frustrated me so much that I am going to try and sort my frustrations here, in a sort of old-school blogging dialogue.

Up front I’ll position myself: I worked at Honeycomb for 3 years, and had quite a few calls and conversations with Charity. This post is written out of respect for her and based on knowing that she likes to be challenged in her thinking. That was an enjoyable aspect of working at Honeycomb; you could push back against leadership, and often to positive results. I left Honeycomb earlier this year, but I still have quite a few friends there and I think that the product is fantastic. I saw first-hand that Charity and Christine Yen (the founders) have put a lot of work into building a company that aligns with their principles.

Charity’s post is titled “Thoughts on Motivation and my 40-Year Career” and as she says up front, it’s memoir-esque. Embedded in her narrative there are some frustrating assertions and omissions that I find to be very common in the tech industry view of the world and I’d like to highlight what I see, as a counterpoint to her post.

The first thing that jumped out to me in the post is that it is internally self-defeating. Here is an assertion:

As a species we are both individualistic and communal, selfish and cooperative, and the miracle of capitalism is how effectively it channels the self-interested side of our nature into the common good.

Here is the very next paragraph:

Late stage capitalism, however, along with regulatory capture, enshittification, and the rest of it, has made the modern world brutally unkind to most people.

The “common good” is how we describe things that bring benefit to everyone. I can’t square the circle of how capitalism in one paragraph is turning greed into good, when in the next paragraph the same system has made the world “brutally unkind to most people.”

The next section, titled “If You Want to Change the World, Go Into Business” has the same issue. Here are two contiguous sentences:

For better or for worse (okay, mostly worse), we live in an age where corporate power dominates. If you want to change the world, go into business.

Logically, if the corporate world dominates things for the worse, then the suggestion one should go into business is an invitation to make the world worse. You are technically changing the world, but it’s hard for me to make sense of how that is “work worth doing” which is what Charity believes most people want to do (and I don’t disagree with her).

If I ignore the literal reading of the words, I do understand that her belief is that if corporate power is what is harming the world, then people with strong principles and good ethics are needed to reduce the harm.

What I don’t understand is how on earth one can have any understanding of complex systems theory and believe that.

The argument

As best I can make sense of the argument in the post (and I frame it this way to make clear I’m not trying to misrepresent her words; I welcome clarification), she is asserting a few things:

Jobs can be sources of meaning and liberation
Corporations are the dominant power source in the world
Having more ethical, principled people in business is good
So if you are someone looking to do meaningful work, you can go into business
This will improve the world

Her evidence for this argument seems to be that it’s proven true for her. Well, at least point 1 has.

As I make sense of the post, Charity is A) using her biography and career path as B) an argument about how the systems of the world work and can change.

And A, so far as I can tell, has absolutely no correlation to B.

Furthermore, it was frustrating to me to read the post—knowing how smart and curious Charity is—and not see any attempt to grapple with the systems that control the context that she’s thinking about, or how power impacts people in those systems.

Adding some systems analysis

The issue that felt most frustrating in Charity’s post was the naming of various systems (jobs, corporations, capitalism) without any curiosity about why they work they way they do, even as the post attempts to make an argument for how to improve those systems. So I’m going to attempt—in good faith and generous reading—to tease out the assumptions in the post about the systems we all live in, with the hope of showing how the assumptions don’t hold up to scrutiny, because I believe if you grapple with the systems we live with accurately, you might come to different conclusions about the problems that are shaping the world and the responses necessary to address them.

System One: Work

From the section titled “For Me, Work has Been a Source of Liberation”

It’s very uncool these days to love your job or talk about hard work. But work has always been a source of liberation for me. My work has brought me so much growth and development and community and friendship. It brings meaning to my life, and the joy of creation. I want this for myself. I want this for anyone else who wants it too. I understand why this particular tide has turned. So many people have had jobs where their employers demanded total commitment, but felt no responsibility to treat them well or fairly in return. So many people have never experienced work as anything but a depersonalizing grind, or an exercise in exploitation, and that is heartbreaking.

The first system that is very fuzzy in this post is “work.” You can see it in the first sentence above: “love your job or talk about hard work.” At the end of the section, a further clarification is offered “I worked a lot harder on the farm than I ever have in front of a keyboard, and got a hell of a lot less for my efforts.”

Two things are being conflated here. The first is “labor,” meaning the act of work itself. Writing code is labor, planting a garden is labor, assembling a car is labor, attending to a patient in a hospital is labor, washing your family’s laundry is work. Humans have worked since the beginning of time, since the mythical cave people days (or whatever our early evolutionary existence actually looked like). Importantly, labor happens in all sorts of contexts, whether or not a corporation is involved.

The second concept being conflated in “work” is the system many of us in the modern world operate under broadly called “waged labor.” This is the system wherein I trade certain types of labor for money, and in so doing have economic means to survive in the world. Waged labor is distinct from labor; you can do a lot of “work” without having a job.

This conflation is frustrating because it means that the same word is used to make assertions that don’t otherwise logically cohere. When Charity writes “I worked a lot harder on the farm than I ever have in front of a keyboard, and got a hell of a lot less for my efforts.” she is actively conflating subsistence labor that she had to do because someone else made her do it with paid employment that she pursued ostensibly of her own volition. These are not the same things!

With the two separate concepts of work vs waged labor in mind, let’s look at this these sentences again:

So many people have had jobs where their employers demanded total commitment, but felt no responsibility to treat them well or fairly in return. So many people have never experienced work as anything but a depersonalizing grind, or an exercise in exploitation, and that is heartbreaking.

What is being described here is the waged labor system, not all human work. In the second sentence, you could add the word “paid” before the word “work” and it would be slightly more accurate.

The question that is completely ignored in this post is “why have people experienced this?” I would ask more questions: Do we believe that people were in jobs that treated them so poorly by choice? Did they just not know better? Shouldn’t they have chosen better jobs, where their work was liberatory and meaningful? Why didn’t they do that?

Why exactly do so many people in the US and around the world have to work jobs that make them miserable and unfulfilled?

System Two: Capitalism

Later in the post, there is acknowledgement of capitalism as a system. In the section titled “We Have Lived Through the Golden Age of Tech” Majors asserts:

Late stage capitalism, however, along with regulatory capture, enshittification, and the rest of it, has made the modern world brutally unkind to most people.

It’s honestly hard for me to extract a working definition of capitalism from the overall post, so I’m having to infer a bit. I believe if I define capitalism as “an economic system prioritizing markets as the main mechanism for assigning value to products, goods, and services”, that’s probably not going to be too contentious. Where I start to get a bit more contentious is in determining what related systems are necessary to ensure capitalism is viable. My understanding, (and this is all me, nothing in Charity’s post) is that capitalism is also dependent on shared currency, which has (until like 10 years ago with the advent of crypto) been dependent on a government to exist.

(This high level definition elides a lot of necessary context, apologies to everyone I offend for the simplification)

Under capitalism, nearly every aspect of life is valued by money, and money is obtained in a variety of ways. For the vast majority of people living in the US, money is obtained through waged labor, AKA jobs.

With this almost hilariously simplistic explanation, we already start to answer the question of “why do people have jobs that suck?” The answer is they want to live; they want housing, and food, and healthcare, and maybe vacations and pleasure, and those things are obtained with money, which is currently broadly available only via waged labor.

As someone trying to grapple with systems, to “solve systems problems” as it were, I would think that the assertion “So many people have had jobs where their employers demanded total commitment, but felt no responsibility to treat them well or fairly in return.” in conjunction with the assertion “For better or for worse (okay, mostly worse), we live in an age where corporate power dominates.” leads to some very obvious questions, namely why does the world work this way? And what the hell can we do about it? And with the rudimentary explanation I just gave above, one might also ask “where does the money come from, exactly, and why is it that corporations have the most of it?”

System Three: Government

For all of recorded human history people have found reasons to join together in common causes, but it requires a government and a legal system to produce the strange collections of people and money we refer to as “corporations”. Government and business are intricately related, and how business works is in large part a function of the system of rules they are bound by, which are mostly created by governmental entities.

Businesses are also deeply reliant on government because for most of history governments have been source of money. This is a reciprocal system—just because a government creates money does not mean it has to be used for “business”. There’s a high-level system at work: a government needs to support itself, so it needs to generate tax dollars. In order to generate tax dollars, it needs the money to have value and circulate amongst people. So modern governments have found that supporting large-scale markets where people and businesses trade services and goods is beneficial for the nation.

The US government has also built a system where new money is introduced into the system through financial systems that incentivize economic activity (treasuries) and are business-friendly. They do not print money and give it out to citizens, they create money through financial instruments that benefit the entities in the country that already have money.

This arrangement of the world also means that governments have a lot of power over businesses, because the government is the source of the money the businesses exist on, and the definer and enforcer of the rules that make business possible.

Tying it all together

Towards the end of Charity’s post is a set of sentences that I found very difficult to make sense of:

Once upon a time, if you had strongly held ideals and wanted to change the world, you went into government or nonprofit work. For better or for worse (okay, mostly worse), we live in an age where corporate power dominates. If you want to change the world, go into business. The world needs, desperately, people with ethics and ideals who can win at business.

As best I can make sense of it, the argument is in some previous era, governments and nonprofits were the drivers of (positive?) change. But that era is over, and now the drivers of change is business. And yes, most of that change is bad, but that’s because the people who go into business have no ethics or ideals.

There is no evidence or backing offered for these pretty critical assertions.

Here is how I understand the ways that the systems above all relate to each other:

Governments define the overall system, because they print money and create the rules and systems that make business possible. Businesses grow and accumulate capital because the government has created rules and incentives that encourage economic activity. And because the government (especially in the US) has decided that markets are the best way to distribute and price nearly everything necessary for survival, in order for citizens in the country to survive, they need to obtain money, which requires them to trade their labor for money.

This, as best I understand it, is a fairly accurate description of the broad systems relevant to the context Charity is writing about.

To try and think through her assertion that “to change the world, go into business,” though, I think it’s helpful to bring into the discussion another thing her post gestures at but does not grapple with at all: Power.

Who makes the rules?

The lack of any grappling with how power operates in Charity’s piece was the starkest omission to me.

Even in her narrative, there is acknowledgement that in her career, acquisition of power has increased her agency, and this opened up the door for finding more meaning in work. That is great, I absolutely believe her that it’s true, but it’s not really an argument for how this can be true for more people, nor does it evidence any curiosity about the systems that determine why it is or is not true for a broader set of the population.

So, if one believes that despite how unpopular it is to say, jobs can be meaningful, I would think that the somewhat obvious next question is “why aren’t most people able to get meaning out of their jobs?” Charity’s post evidences no curiosity about that.

From my perspective, that’s because her position in the system has changed, and now she has just enough power in the system to be able to ignore that parts of it that are inconvenient to her argument.

In the US, employers have immense power over employees. Access to healthcare is tied to work (and a bill was just signed making that even more explicit). Employees have almost no power to determine the rules for how work is shaped. The vast majority of work in the US is at-will, meaning no matter how much a company or executive talks about belonging and caring and doing things differently, the company has a contractual right to fire any employee at any time for any reason. (There are exceptions to this. If someone is a founder, they own a significant enough stake in the company that it can’t just outright fire them. The other big exception is if you work in a unionized company, because then you and your colleagues have the right to negotiate the terms under which you are employed).

The fact that people exist in a world where having a job is not optional means they are required to subject themselves to the power of corporations. But as we saw above, corporations exist only because governments allow them to. There is a direct power relationship that business owners may not like, but exists none-the-less.

And that means if—as Charity says—we live in an age where “corporate power dominates,” that is because the rules are set up to allow that to happen. Corporate domination did not arise from nothing; humans changed laws, defined rules, and built regulations that allowed this to happen.

Corporate domination in the world is a result of human decisions and systemic changes. So if that corporate domination is causing widespread harm and misery, one might wonder if other human decisions could be made; if the system could work differently.

Conclusion

Charity is really smart, and is absolutely putting in the work at Honeycomb. I 100% believe her that she finds meaning and liberation in her work. And Honeycomb does some cool things—like being the only US corporation to have a non-executive employee on the company board. These things are important and I don’t want to dismiss them.

But they have basically no impact on the system at large. The system is so much bigger than one company with a few hundred employees. One company doing “good at business” does not actually impact the way that business works to address the issues of work being a site of misery, does not impact the domination that corporations have in our lives.

Towards the end of her post, Charity states her hopes:

I hope, perhaps naively, that we are entering into a new era of rebuilding, sadder but wiser. An era of building institutions with accountability and integrity, institutions with enduring value, that we can belong to and take pride in… not because we were coerced or deceived, not because they were the only option, but because they bring us joy and meaning. Because we freely choose them, because they are good for us.

I was a bit astounded reading that paragraph. Because right now, in July 2025 when she published this post, bills are being passed that will increase inequality despite it already being worse than it’s ever been in the US. The institutions of law enforcement and the US military are being used to round up non-white people around the country, regardless of their citizenship status or community connections. Trans people are watching as many states and the federal government attempt to deny their right to exist in any form. Corporations are so excited about shiny new technology that they are rapidly reversing what little progress has been made in the past few years to transition our energy system into something that won’t destroy the planet. The people in charge of the government—the system that corporations are dependent on—deny science, deny reality, and are actively working to destroy the economy that corporations rely on to make the money machines work.

Charity’s post frustrated me because it’s so disconnected from reality. Lots of people, in business, government, academia, and elsewhere want to change the world and impact it for good. But many other people could give a shit about the common good and a better future. And those people—the people who are “sycophants and psychopaths” in Charity’s framing—aren’t naive about the world or how it works. They have seized power and are using it for whatever ends they believe will profit them.

It feels worse than naive to ignore this. It feels willfully malicious. It feels, to me, like a self-serving framing that ultimately excuses one from engaging with the actual systems of power that might truly make the world better.

It feels bad to only critique, so I want to include my personal positions in this whole dialogue. I think accurately naming and understanding the system is useful because doing so makes it easier to explore the full range of possibilities available to us. We live in a world that makes nearly everyone feel precarious and anxious about their survival. I personally believe that’s because “as a species we are both individualistic and communal, selfish and cooperative, and the miracle of capitalism is how effectively it channels the self-interested side of our nature” into a belief that survival is a zero-sum game. I believe that the systems leading to this horrible reality are contingent, and can be changed, and I believe that there are so many better futures still available to us.

I understand that most people in the US suffer at work because since Reagan undid much of the labor protections that existed in the 1980’s, corporations have held all the power to set wages and define how jobs look. I know there’s a rich set of literature connecting the structural oppressions of patriarchy, racism, ableism, and protestant-work-ethic mythology to this system, as a way of making people feel that other workers are to blame for their suffering, rather than the bosses who control the money and hold all the power.

I also believe all of this is not fore-ordained, and could be changed. I believe the rules can be different, that work can be made meaningful, that precarity is not a requirement for civilization. We’re just going to have to find the political will to create that world.

I believe that finding the political will starts with accurately understanding the world, and that means we have to push back on power, in all forms, including and maybe most importantly our ever-present power to delude ourselves about the world we live in right now.

I find that these beliefs lead me to find meaning in a broad variety of work, and I believe that meaning can be made available to everyone.

Some Rough Thoughts Against Automation

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 08:56:37 -0500

the biggest appeal of AI at the moment seems to be that it is a new frontier for making money. that it will increase productivity, allowing access to new value and new profits.

there are uses outside of this; in biology and research, but those are not the things generating billions of investments. those are the less lucrative uses with a clear value proposition and no possibility of revolutionizing the economy.

I think i am deeply concerned with the widespread, fullscale, no guardrails implementation of AI because we have no idea what it looks like to undo a world where it’s load-bearing.

and in this moment of rising fascism and far-right politics, we are truly fighting to determine which futures viable, and which worlds are still possible. climate change is happening, whether or not you want to believe it, whether or not you want to address it, whether or not you care. it’s in progress, and we are actively seeing changes that a decade ago were considered worst case scenarios that we hoped would not happen. but here they come.

what i see that concerns me the most is that in a moment where we need experimentation and to open space for myriad new possibilities, we are instead trying to cement into place the world we have by gathering up all the data we have available and automating things as they are now.

this argument is pretty nuanced but I feel pretty confident about it.

some assertions:

we have hypotheses about what kind of systems will be needed to live in the global climate that’s rapidly emerging, but we don’t know how to build those systems
there is very little likelihood that a universally stable and homogenous system is desirable or achievable
complex systems theory and ecology teach us that systems need to be adaptive, dynamic, and responsive
AI, in its current form, is limited to the training data available to it, and it needs large scale sets of data to succeed
this means we can really only automate things that are adopted at scale, that have proofs and that we understand well
this puts AI at odds with mitigation to climate change because we need to experiment, and we don’t know what the success requirements are, because the systems have to be tested in the real world, scaled up intentionally, and (very importantly) be reversible if they do not serve us well.

i think what this means is that my political analysis at the moment is that we are in a multi-decade long inflection period determining whether we can evolve our industrial systems that are dependent on a stable climate, freedom of extraction, and globalism’s economic homogeneity into systems that can sustain us while we suffer the consequences of a few centuries of industrialization.

automating the existing systems makes them harder to replace because it ensures that we start building new systems on top of them, rather than thinking about how to dismantle or evolve them.

it feels like the exact wrong approach to a problem that is staring us in the face.

A Story I'm Telling Myself

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 08:58:36 -0500

The New Yorker published a good review of a new book, Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us that helped me make sense of an idea I’ve been stewing on lately. I’m writing a quick, shitty post to capture it, in the hopes that I can keep expanding later.

Through my day job in the past few years, I’ve noticed how important storytelling is to humans to make sense of everything. At work I’m a PM, and it’s my job to synthesize a wide variety of data, inputs, and opinons and shape the synthesis into a narrative. When I do my job well, the people around me understand what we’re working on, and why, and what they need to do. It’s through this job that I’ve really come to appreciate how much storytelling is important to every day life.

This has led me to to pay deep attention to how helpful accurate stories are in actively unfolding events. We humans are narrative animals; we’re experience our lives as unfolding stories, and we map those stories onto other stories to make sense of them. If you are walking on a sidewalk and trip over a crack, there are many many ways you can make sense of that. You can think it’s a random event, and it happened because you weren’t paying attention. You can think it’s a sign from a deity. You can think it’s a clear sign that your tax dollars aren’t being spent accurately. And so on. These stories aren’t exclusive, any event might be made sense of through a variety of stories.

A key thing to notice in that example is that stories always tap into other stories; you are never experience the world as a decontextualized, meaningless space. Every human has experiences and knowledge that they bring with them, helping them map the events they are experiencing and make sense of them.

This is what I mean when I say humans are narrative animals.

Currently, in the US, and unfortunately therefore globally, there are significant, terrifying events unfolding. The US hired an angry, senile bull to manage our expensive ceramics shop, and well, we are reaping what we have sown.

And because I know stories are so important to us, I’m thinking a lot about how we can create narratives of the moment that are accurate without being so tedious as to bore. How can those of us (many millions!) who are opposed to the harms and chaos of the moment be the ones to tell the story of the moment, so that those with power can’t also control the narrative, even if they control the systems of power.

Here’s my working start. It’s nascent, and so far has been built in isolation. I believe the best stories about unfolding events can’t be built in isolation, they need to be collaborative. The work of building consensus around a narrative is the work of improving and clarifying the narrative. So I’m putting this out to see if it resonates, to see if there are even better ways to say it.

A Story for the moment

We are, in this moment, in a battle between the existence of many complex, richly diverse, thriving futures, and the existence of a simple, complicated, fragile future. The people who have siezed power in the US are actively building the latter vision; but the vast majority of people want the former. I will explain my thinking.

It’s helpful to define 3 words in that last paragraph. First, “complex” is a word I take from complex systems, and it refers to a thing made up many interconnected parts. You, as a human, are a complex system, with your many biological systems that interact with each other in order to keep you alive and conscious. Complexity is the opposite of simple; to be “simple” is to not have many interconnected parts. Not many things are simple in the world unless you break things down to their consituent parts; electrons and amino acids and elements, for example. Simple is very difficult to achieve because the universe starts at the atomic level and works up from there, even examples like “a piece of blank paper” lack simplicity, because it relies on the existence of materials that have been grown, extracted, processed, etc.

Complex and simple are very useful concepts because already we can see that most everything in life is complex, but complex things are always built out of core simple things. There is one more word that helps me get a richer picture of these opposites, and that word is “complicated.” Credit to Don Norman for initially introducing me to this framing. Where complexity is natural and found everywhere you look in the universe, “complication” is useful for distinguishing systems in balance (meaning, working well) versus systems that are fragile and likely to implode. Complicated systems are not self-balancing, they cannot adapt to sudden changes, they require active maintenance to stay operational.

Complicated systems are a subset of complex systems; not all complex systems are complicated, but all complicated systems are complex. Complicated systems are most often the type of systems we have built as humans.

Keeping these definitions in mind, I want to unpack my story.

The United States—ever since white people stole the land and started building on it—has grown more and more complicated. White people took a continent that had been inhabited for well over 100,000 years by people who learned to work with the complexity of the land. Those people had built relationships with the land and animals they lived with, and learned to thrive without extraction or decimation. White people came, claimed the land was uninhabited, and started extracting everything they could without any consideration of the future. White people also invaded another continent and enslaved people and imported them to this continent as labor.

From these original sins, we’ve built a country. From the early days, our infrastructure has been built as a complicated system layered on top of the land, in order to support extraction. We’ve built up a system where many people have gotten rich by extracting whatever we could find a market for; beaver skins, cotton, wheat, timber, oil, gas, technology of war, financial products, software, and so on. In each era of extraction, infrastructure has been built to make it easier for profits to be made.

I think one way of framing this history is that the complicated systems of extraction, infrastructure, and profit were made possible because white men enforced comically, horrible simple stories about how the world works. By believing and operating within these simple stories, white men could ignore the vast complexity of the world and focus only on the things they wanted to care about.

They (we) could build a wildly complicated infrastucture of capitalism because there was no concern for the variety—the diversity—of human needs. Of plant and animal needs. White dudes enforced narratives of hierarchy; that the prototypical human is a white man, that all other humans are lesser. Women are the weaker gender. People of color are less evolved. Disabled people are outcasts. Only heterosexuality is allowed, because procreation is the highest good. That work is the highest good, and all other human needs are subservient to it. That all of life can be ordered in hierarchy, and all humans are identical. So on and so forth. These stories came from religion, from science, from people who were telling stories that served their own needs regardless of harm caused to others.

Once the stories were written, they were enforced. Black people were defined as less-than-human legally. Indigenous people were defined as outside-the-law. Everyone who was not considered white and cis male was given fewer or none protections, and forced to exist at a lower priority across all of civilization.

To be clear, ever since those stories were written and enforced, they have been contested. At no point since white dudes decided the world was theirs to own and control have they successfully gained full consensus on their plans—the people they have murdered, raped, enslaved, harmed, dismissed, and more have always been fighting to deny their beliefs. But, through disease, colonialism, technology, bureaucracy, and debt, white men siezed and have mostly retained power for the past few centuries.

This framing is useful because it helps me tell the story of what is happening now, in the US. The supremacy of white dudes has always been contested; go read The Rediscovery of America or Reconstruction or any number of books about the ways that the fight for dismantling the power systems that shape the world is ever ongoing. But there is an inflection point that happened in the past 30 years because the shape of power shifted. Since the early 1990’s, the internet has been adopted around the world. In the past 20 years, social media has vastly changed the way that information travels, and specifically making it so that the power structures that had previously limited which stories saw broad distribution suddenly had far less gatekeeping ability.

There is a joking analysis I’ve seen online that feels funny because it feels accurate: rich people and people in power have lost their minds because the internet—specifically social media—popped their bubbles of positivity. Prior to the past ~20 years, people in power mostly could pretend that they were doing good and people liked them. The complicated systems of media and information served to coddle their feelings, to insulate them from criticism and critique.

And they were really fucking attached to that coddling.

The story is a bit clearer now, althought there’s much more I should expand on.

I believe that we can look at what is happening under this administration in the US as the second coming of redemption. After the civil war, the US entered a period known as Reconstruction; for a brief moment in history black people in the US had full rights of citizenship. Many white people in the US experienced that period as an attack on their existence, and they responded with fury, leading to the Jim Crow era with lynchings, vast migrations, and continued horrors (the Civil Rights act addressed some of this, but the past decade of Black Lives Matter shows that the horrors never actually were addressed).

But I think this period we are actively in is not simply a racial backlash. It is an entire economic order backlash. I look at the past few decades as a period when complexity was emerging out of complication. The systems we lived under prioritized white men’s needs, and those systems were not just legal, but were in every domain of life. The education system, the healthcare system, the scientific research system, the transportation system, the supply chain system, every single system was being interrogated for the ways it had adopted the logic of white cis supremacy. These interrogations were starting—just barely—to lead to shifts that were more sustainable and representative of all beings. Just barely.

This is what we are seeing described as “woke”— the nascent transformation of massive, complicated systems that only prioritized certain people into massive, complicated systems that might allow for more priorities, such as those of all the humans fucked over by the current systems. And maybe even some of the land and non-human creatures also fucked over by the systems.

Alas, the backlash seems to be strong, but it also feels incredibly idiotic. White dudes are grabbing all the systems they can find and trying to re-establish a world where they are the only living beings that matter. Every single initiative that takes into account other’s needs is being dismantled, destroyed, undone, as rapidly as possible.

These fuckers are trying to institute the most fragile, limited vision of the future possible. They want their needs alone to matter, and their access to money alone protected. And they are trying to enforce rules and ways of being that deny every other expression of life.

Unfortunately for them, the dam has broken. The alternate stories are already written. Our imaginations have been captured by worlds that were emerging, worlds that do not center the supposed supremacy of people like me. Worlds that are complex, varied, caring and sustainable. As much as we are seeing critical systems crumble around us, in real-time we are also seeing people narrate why those systems matter, what those systems provide, what harms we will encounter without those systems. That means that the vision this US administration is using all its might to enforce has already lost.

I didn’t mean to end on such a hopeful note but I guess that’s where I am. I look around and I see that millions of people have been fighting these systems for centuries. The future that assholes are working to define is not guaranteed. Their future is dependent on every human without power falling in line, doing what others tell them to, and denying their own dreams and hopes. I look around and I don’t see many people who are willing to do that. That gives me hope.

What if We Plant Some Seeds

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 08:47:50 -0500

We are raising funds to get my trans kid to safety if you are able to help. I’ll post this link again down below.

A few days ago Erin Kissane published a piece where she sought to think with Ursula Franklin’s list of suggestions for how evaluate public projects, from Franklin’s book The Real World of Technology. In my own personal copy of the book, the checklist is on page 127 and along with being heavily marked up, I have written at the top of the page “Checklist! *” because I regularly revisit the list. Erin’s piece is excellent, worth reading and sitting with, but I am using it as a springboard, because in it Kissane ends with a quote from “Using Technology as if People Matter” (from Ursula Franklin Speaks).

To proceed in a hostile world call it an experiment. Admit that you don’t know how to do it, but ask for space and peace and respect. Then try your experiment, quietly.

This citation was the spark my brain needed to call to mind some ideas that feel urgently necessary. To acknowledge that the world is hostile these days feels like acknowledging the color of the sky. It is so obvious that we need not dig in further. But, the rest of Franklin’s assertion feels inviting. I would like to try some experiments! Yet, finding the energy and space to experiment can seem impossible due to the surging hostility. My hope in this piece is to pull together some ideas from writers who have, collectively, given me a path forward. A path that is helping me learn how to sustainably generate the space needed for experimentation.

What worries me most these days is not the hostility (though I am deeply worried about it) but the burnout, resignation, and hopelessness I sense amongst so many people. This worries me because the future is not settled at all; so many futures, so many possibilities, so many other worlds remain open to us, but the better futures are impossible if we are not actively working to make them possible. Burnout, resignation, and hopelessness are not states we can stay in if we want a better world, and yet we can’t simply escape them through wishful thinking or willpower alone. We need ways out, ways that are accessible from the shithole we’re currently in.

We are in these states, feeling the however we do, because it’s a rational fucking response to the Horrors. I like how adrienne maree brown summarizes it in the intro of Emergent Strategy:

The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive.

And we are small.

So much hostility, so many crises, endless Horrors, and no respite available to gather our strength safely before we must work to deal with the next Horror. If you are burned out, hopeless, feeling resigned, please know that is an extremely reasonable response to the world. But, also know, we desperately need everyone we can find to help build our next worlds, including you.

In the past few years I’ve been reading a great number of authors who are thinking about how we make better worlds. From them I’ve gathered a collection of ideas that have congealed into something that feels like a workable strategy for fighting the Horrors and resisting burnout. A strategy that does not require anyone to suddenly find superhero strength and endurance, but instead assumes that we already have everything we need, in our current state of being. Or at least, this is how I read their words, and the strategy that I desperately hope is true. In the rest of this piece, I’d like to map out this strategy by thinking with them.

To start, I return to the very next sentences from adrienne maree brown, in their book Emergent Strategy:

The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive.

And we are small.

But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as part of the universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

emergent strategy

by adrienne maree brown

Copyright 2017, AK Press

Cultural Analysis

brown is arguing, as I read it, that a critical part of creating better futures is learning to think with ecology, which is inherently complex. Ecology is dependent on relationships, on connection. In learning to think this way we develop patterns and ideas that are inaccessible in reigning belief systems. This rethinking, this new storytelling, creates space for emergence.

Emergence, “our inheritance,” is the secret to evolution that we missed for way too long. Evolution is not a survival-of-the-fittest fight for survival; that was a misunderstanding of the data. Ecologists and scientists now see how evolution uses symbiosis, interdependence, collaboration, unexpected relationships, and creativity, in fact is almost entirely dependent on those things in order for new forms of life to emerge. Emergence is what is able to grow in the space that these relationships generate, in the places where it has freedom to try something else. Had life not emerged however many billions of years ago, had it not tapped into every nascent possibility it could find to flourish, none of us would be here.

So, from amb we gather the idea that we need to make space for new possibilities to emerge. Which, sure feels like it would be easier without all of us being burned out and hopeless.

To bring in the next part of my strategy, I turn to the poet and essayist Ross Gay. His writing has long been a source of solace, wisdom, and joy; I have had his poem A Small, Needful Fact taped above my desk for years. In his most recent book Inciting Joy, he explores an idea I find impossible to stop thinking about.

But what if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only tangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but also is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?

What if he’s right? There is a growing belief that burnout is often related to moral injury; to the ongoing confrontation of how much the world sucks. Burnout is a wound. Regarding hopelessness, the drumbeat in progressive circles is “hope is a discipline.” A practice, an intention. If these are true; that burnout must be healed, and hope must be practiced, then keep listening to Ross Gay, and see if you find his hunch applicable.

My hunch is that joy is an ember for and a precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further joy. My hunch is that joy emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together.

Inciting Joy: Essays

by Ross Gay

Copyright 2022, Algonquin Essays

Cultural Analysis

This book arrived in my life as a lifeline, and this specific passage a challenge. If I didn’t want to collapse into burnout, if I wanted hope to be sustainable, I was going to have to find joy.

I am just one person but let my experience be a encouragement: Ross Gay’s hunch is dead fucking accurate. Joy is possible amongst immense sorrow. There are many ways I have found to cultivate it; laughing with my children, enjoying hobbies, sharing a moment of vulnerable intimacy with my partner. But none of this comes close to the joy that emerges from communal efforts to show love and care; to make space; whether tenderly (as with a seedling), or disruptively (as with a tidal wave). In the past year, as I have felt the Horrors grow closer and darker, I have worked to build habits of looking around my community for people who want camraderie and support. Each time I do this, I feel the Horrors become slightly less oppressive. I find it easier to create space for emergence. I find joy.

The joy that this work of solidarity generates is wild. Solidarity is distinct from saving, and allows no space for paternalism. Each act of mutual aid–of connection, of taking the people around me seriously and joining with them in whatever I am capable of doing—nourishes my soul. It proves to me that hopelessness is a fucking lie. Better futures are always in reach, we can be turning them into reality every single day.

This framing—that every interaction with a comrade is a chance to experiment with a better future came to me first in Saidaya Hartman’s phenomenal book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Hartman is a historian who was unwilling to let the narratives of black women be controlled by the archives available to her—archives that were generated by white people, mostly capturing all the ways black women were criminalized and destroyed by the power systems of the day. So she wrote a book about everything that was omitted from the records. In so doing, she was able to focus on the humanity of her characters, to imagine them as full of dreams, of desires for better worlds, desires they were working to manifest in every possible moment. Hartman explains:

I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgement and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment, and confinment, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments—to make living an art—undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

by Saidiya Hartman

Copyright 2020, W.W. Norton

Race

Beautiful experiments are what this moment calls for. Beautiful experiments to create space, to foster joy and solidarity and justice and healing and evolution and yes, emergence. Beautiful experiments that make us all promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward. Beautiful experiments to create counter-narratives for the Horrors.

The administration that has taken over is subjecting us to horrific experiments of death, looting, and greed. The future these goddamn asswipes are building—these power-hungry, imagination-deprived, toxic, chaos idiots—is a shitty future. What I am arguing, in putting adrienne maree brown, Ross Gay, and Saidaya Hartman in conversation is: it’s on us to find and foster all the alternative futures we want to live in. We must find sustainable ways of living, of dreaming, while living amongst the Horrors, until the day comes when we finally sink them to the bottom of the ocean to decompose.

However—I don’t know about the rest of you—if I give myself space to calm down, get out of fight-or-flight mode, and stop engaging in simplistic war thinking (these are my enemies who must be defeated), if I can find some calm to think, I find a Grand Canyon-sized canyon to fill.

What, exactly, am I experimenting towards? What emergence should I pay attention to and foster? It is not enough for me to say that victory means the current administration is gone, because the world already sucked before they took over. The climate crisis is ongoing, accelerating if the administration is successful in their goals. I need more to aim for.

I want liberation. I want abundance. I want safety for all. I want there to be no more power structures in place that allow rich chucklefucks to harm millions for a few more dollars.

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway addresses this need to think bigger head on.

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with, it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Staying with the Trouble

by Donna Haraway

Copyright 2016, Duke University Press

Climate Change, Cultural Analysis

Reading this book is where I started to understand more how to engage with the work Emergent Strategy argues for. Haraway argues that we will not recognize the world that is emerging, it will be filled with monsters we have created from years of capitalism run amok. We cannot “defeat” the worlds that will emerge because we must live with them. She thus challenges us to stay with the trouble; to reengage our curiosity with what is possible in our terraformed world.

But let me linger for a minute on her last sentence above. “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” I interpret this to mean that the stories we believe, the stories we tell, the stories that help us understand the world, these stories are not benign narratives; they are creative forces that shape what we believe is possible and define what sense is made of the events happening around us. The stories we use to make sense of the world are also the stories that we use to inform the futures we build.

What I understand from Haraway is that finding new stories is how we make new worlds possible. And, from reading adrienne maree brown (and Anna Tsing, and Octavia Butler, and Alexis Shotwell, and innumerable others) I have learned—I now strongly believe— that we don’t need to know the stories in advance. We need to create space for them to emerge, and to build them together. In Franklin’s words, we need to admit that we don’t know how to do it, but then, through staying with the trouble, staying near the sorrows, we can find the joy that generates the energy to keep going. We can encounter joy, practice hope, and build the myriad worlds that are nearby if we keep creating space to let them emerge.

There are many who are already building these worlds; they have been for a long time. Go read Mariame Kaba, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, N.K. Jemisin, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nick Estes. Go listen to them on youtube, or find podcasts where they are interviewed. They are just the people I thought of off the top of my head, there are hundreds of thousands of people (do I dare believe there are millions?) doing this work. We are not starting from scratch, and it’s not on you to solve everything.

The thing I hope to leave you with is that the Horrors are not all-encompassing. There are people right now, in this very moment, who are working to replace the Horrors with the Wonders. They could user your help; we could use your help. It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be safe, but we can make it joyful. Find someone with an idea for the future and see how you can contribute, even if you’re burned out, even if you’re hopeless, even if you want to be resigned. None of us know the future, it’s entirely possible we succeed.

I’m going to return to Ross Gay, here, though, because I love the way he puts it. In Inciting Joy, he outlines the Horrors, the ways that people are without gardens, or food, or water, or support, or many other things, and then he suggests this:

To be without is violence, it is abnormal (even if it is the norm), and it is an imposition of precarity that is not not natural. All these comorbidities, all these communities exposed to toxins, all this absence of sick pay or good pay, every day, is not simply an affliction, but an infliction. It is on purpose. And the withholding from some of the means of life, of which there are plenty to go around, is a disprivilege. Which is to say: life, though it is a gift, is not a privilege.

And rather than indulging in virtue signaling that simply reifies or maybe even enjoys the guilt of so-called privilege, rather than wading around in that little impotent indulgent cesspool of hand-wringing regret, how about instead we figure out how to get rid of disprivilege, which we could do.

Rather than cursing the darkness, what if we planted some seeds?

I cannot put it better. We are facing some horrible shit right now. But I’m not interested in merely seeing it end, I also just spent 4 years seeing how horrific it is when “the good guys” are in power.

No, I need a better world, one that is filled with more joy and less sorrow, and widespread solidarity. A world where every human has the best chance they could possibly have of living their fullest life. One where marginalization is in the history, a history we keep close as a warning. I want keep planting seeds for those worlds. I believe—I believe with my whole being—that if you join those of us planting seeds you will find that there is so much joy to be found in the world, even, absolutely, in these dark moments.

Coda

This post has become urgent to write in the past week because without my practice of joy, without my daily practice of trying to stand with anyone around me who wants support, I would be falling apart. Members of my immediate family are being targeted by this administration in horrible ways and I am terrified. I am terrified, and unsure of the future, and unsure if everyone I love will make it out ok.

(Specifically, my kid is trans and the government is trying to kill her. We could use some support..)

But, simultaneously, as Ross Gay argued, I am experiencing joy nearly daily. There are so many beautiful people in my communities, and when I pour my energy into them I find it generates more energy for me. It feels like I am creating an immune system for burnout—not, mind you, that I am immune to burnout, but I have systems in place that actively fight it. Beyond everything else, caring for and standing with friends and family in meaningful ways takes up a lot of time and energy. At the end of the work, I barely have time to wallow in the horrors. I just get the new information and process it, and go back to the things that generate joy while they push back against the horrors.

It also helps, for me, that I am oriented towards futures that I know are possible. I don’t need to doubt, because these futures have been with us for millennia and, if we can make enough space, may yet see a resurgence. I am talking about the futures that indigenous people around the world are fostering and resurging.

You probably grew up, like me, with histories that were fucking bullshit. Indigenous people were “indians” and the histories all implied they had been eradicated. Or perhaps they had all learned the brilliant ways of capitalism and patriarchy and some form of christianity, then assimilated themselves into the polity.

As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance

by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Copyright 2020, University of Minnesota Press

Indigenous Issues

My highlights

Despite the “histories” white people in power want to tell, indigenous people have always been here and are still here and many have not lost sight of the worlds they know are possible to live in. Nick Estes and Winona LaDuke are two among many authors who are working to rewrite the bullshit histories, and if you are someone who finds joy in these times through reading (in all its forms), I encourage you to read their books. I’d like to conclude this piece, however, with the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Her book As We Have Always Done is a fierce and clear argument that indigenous people have lived in worlds that made space for all people (cis, trans, two-spirited, genderqueer, disabled, etc), and those worlds are not dead, they are just being crowded out by the world that capitalism has made.

One of the ways I hope to use my energy and labor in the coming years is to join in the work to make space for these worlds to have the resurgence many are already working towards. This is decolonialism; working to get land back, disrupting domination systems, being available for activities that create space whether or not the laws allow for them or not. It’s important for me, however, that my work is done in solidarity and community, to avoid the habits that white people have of “fixing” and “saving” things (and reifying all the power structures in the process). Once again I see the very actions that bring joy are the actions required of me to make space for other futures.

I would like to end with Simpson’s words, because her thesis is that this world is still present, still possible. This is one of many worlds I am working to make space for with every breath.

Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg are salmon people. Doug tells me Chi’Niibish had its own resident population of salmon that migrated all the way to Stoney Lake to spawn. We drank directly from the lakes, and that was a good, healthy thing to do. There was a large population of eels that also migrated to Stoney Lake each year from the Atlantic Ocean. There was an ancient old-growth forest of white pine that stretched from Curve Lake down to the shore of Lake Ontario, which had virtually no understory except for a bed of pine needles. There were tallgrass prairies and black oak savannas where Peterborough stands today. The lakes were teeming with minomiin, or wild rice. The land was dotted with sugar bushes, the lakes were full of fish.

It sounds idyllic, because compared to now it was idyllic. Our knowledge system, the education system, the economic system, and the political system of the Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg were designed to promote more life. Our way of living was designed to generate life—not just human life but the life of all living things. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg were travelers; we rarely settled, and this was reflected in our politics and governance, in our diplomacy with other nations, and even in the protection of our land. Stable governing structures emerged when necessary and dissolved when no longer needed. Leaders were also recognized (not self-appointed) and then disengaged when no longer needed. It was an emergent system reflective of the relationality of the local landscape. I think of our system of governance as breathing—a rhythym of contraction and release.

40 Things That Helped Me Become the Current Version of Myself

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:07:06 -0500

Today I turn 40! I use an exclamation mark there but everyone who taks to me regularly knows I’m not particularly excited about the milestone. I had the same struggle when I turned 30 many years ago, so I guess this is just how I am with the decades.

Anyways, here are 40 things that have had a large impact on my life. (One note, it’s pretty obvious that all humans are influenced and impacted in innumerable ways by the people they are surrouned by. So it goes without saying that I’ve learned a lot from my partner, my kids, my extended family and friends.)

Personal Traits

First, some things about me that may or may not be common, but I have found quite important.

1. Asking Questions

Is there anything more joyful in life than being curious? Can we truly learn without questioning things? What if the desire to have a stable, fully understood world is an irrational belief we lock in at an early age to feel safe? What if there’s more? What if there’s a different way to think about things? What if I can think about things differently? Where would I be if my brain didn’t work this way?

2. An Eternal Commmitment to get better at Failing

I truly do not know when this congealed into a conscious thought, but at some point in my life it did. I hate failing, hate it so much. I hate the embarrassment, the shame, the disappointment. It’s even worse when I fail and it lets others down. I hate it so much, that sometime in my life I decided to stare failure in the face and intentionally get to know it. I realized that failure is a deeply important part of learning, and it can be done accidentally and randomly, with unknown consequences, or it can be done carefully and intentionally, with a limited blast radius. I’ve spent a lot of time since then working to understand how I move more of my failure towards the intentional end of the spectrum. It’s going to happen, but I want to be sure I can learn from it, and minimize harm to myself and others. This is a journey, not a destination.

3. A deep-seated awareness that I might be wrong

Look, I have a lot of anxiety. It took me a long time to name that, even longer to start to map it, and I assume every new year will bring new lessons. Anxiety, I’ve come to believe, is a signal. It’s not always the most accurate signal, but it is a signal. And one of the ways that signal can manifest is self-doubt, an intense fear that everyone else knows more than you, has better information, or is just plain right.

Sometime in my adulthood I began to see that my self-doubt was not always wrong; sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I was HELLA wrong. However, sometimes I wasn’t. I made an argument, or put the pieces together, or made a plan, and it was the right thing to do. That’s when I realized my fear of being wrong was extremely useful; I could somewhat formalize it into a bunch of questions (see point 1) and check myself, before (see point 2) I decided to wreck myself or not. It’s great! I love this signal now, although it did help to learn to accept that I can be right and I should trust my gut.

4. Bold Hairstyles

I dunno man, sometime in highschool I was like, goofy hair is fun. And then I got older and I never had a career where it mattered, and now it’s just a thing. Boring hair is boring, and life is too short.

5. Bright Glasses

This was a later in life addition, and now it’s a personal signature. I have lots of glasses. Many of them are bright colors, like the neon pink ones I’m wearing right now. As I enter my 40’s, I have a new style icon and may need to level up.

6. Leaving space for serendipity

I have noticed as I’ve grown older a tendency amongst this chaotic world we live in that the tendency at all scales— from individual level to global level— to control things. Remove unpredictability, guarantee outcomes, limit risk, so on and so forth. It’s not that I’m against these things, it’s just, well, I like the unexpected. The word that has begun to mean so much to me is “emergent”. As in “emergent properties”, a concept in complex systems theory. Or Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown’s brilliant book. Things that emerge aren’t always predictable, aren’t always what you want, aren’t always pleasant. But their presence means that there’s still room to breathe. The chaos has not been smothered, even if it is somewhat managed.

7. Introspection

Asking and reflecting on my feelings, motives, desires, perspectives and sense of the world has been a continual source of learning and evolution. It’s easy to over-introspect or anxiety spiral, I am quite familiar. But in a healthy state, this practice, of recognizing that something of note happened, and interrogating my internal perception of that thing, it’s good. I’ve done this literally as long as I could remember, and I have no intentions of stopping.

8. Anger

There was a period in my life when I was angry all the time in an incredibly unhelpful way. It was a result of an unhealthy relationship and living situation that I felt very little control over. I hated anger for awhile after that; it felt toxic and harmful. I learned a lot when I came out of that period, and one of the things I learned over the ensuing years (after lots of introspection, natch) is that I can hold anger in healthy ways, and it’s not a toxic emotion by default, if you can express it in cathartic and expressive ways.

That lesson has proven true time and again, because fucking hell, there is so much to be angry about. The world is fucked up in so many dimensions, and the people with power like to pretend they are helpless to change things. Well, that’s been true, but, next week the US gets a new administration filled with people who aren’t afraid to use any and all power they find at their disposal.

I have a feeling the anger will burn brightly for years, and I will be constantly on the hunt for comrades who are livid that any of this is happening and furious to do more. Witness us.

Feeling

I am a human with big feelings. These were not fully drilled out of me as a child (as many other AMAB people have experienced), but I was never really given any guidance on how to accept and navigate my big feelings; it’s been a long journey to pick up some skills and tools to help. Here’s some things that helped.

9. Live Music

My parents took me to my first concert at some point, I’ve no idea what age, and that was my first taste of the sublime, I like to imagine. This is an entirely apocryphal self-myth, but it registers truthy for me. I’ve been hooked on live music ever since. I’ve moshed, I’ve screamed along, I’ve sat in silence, I’ve wept, I’ve even taken an infant (my oldest) to a Josh Ritter show. Live music gave me space to sit in my feelings and let them be big, as big as they needed to be. Music played live feels like magic to me.

10. Sufjan Stevens

“Will anyone ever love me”, Sufjan asked on his most recent heart-wrenching album filled with grief, and once again I found myself listening to songs that somehow splayed my soul out on an operating table, as if one could autopsy the innermost knowledge one has of oneself. My friend Drew introduced me to Sufjan around the time that his Illinoise! album dropped, and I’ve been sobbing along with him ever since. Whether it was Casimir Pulaski Day creating a space for me to ask about my still quite stifled queerness, or Pittsfield, validating that small courages matter, or I Want to Be Well with its cathartic ending cries of “I’m not fucking around!” which I sang way too many times in the car, or the entire fucking album Carrie and Lowell which to this day is the album I put on before I even realize how sad I am, or the entire Javelin album, where he lays out how hard it is to love truly, but how wondrous and beautiful it is, in all its horror, fuck, I’m crying while typing this. Sufjan, if you ever read this, thank you so much.

11. Frightened Rabbit

I’m already crying so let me just point you to this post from a few months ago about the impact Scott Hutchison and company had on my life. I’m eternally grateful.

12. The Postal Service (band)

In 2023 the Postal Service did a 20 year reunion tour and I got to go back to my adopted home city of Philly to see them live with my partner. Very few moments in my life have generated such full-bodied joy. The Postal Service’s 2003 album Give Up has been a constant companion for 20 years, I turn to it when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when I’m bored, when I need something familiar, and particularly when I want to dance.

13. Alone time

One of the things that has helped me sustain my ongoing love of people and extroversion is, obviously, spend a lot of time by myself. It’s very hard for me to step out of the rhythms of daily life and settle into that beautiful space of contentment unless I’m alone, and that space is so deeply meaningful to experience regularly.

14. Soft Pants

Look this post is not all high-minded. For goddamn years I deprived myself of comfort and coziness because it was very hard for me to find things that actually felt comfortable and cozy. Then my kids came along and had a bunch of sensory issues and it turns out I also have had sensory issues for my entire life, and I had a whole host of adaptations to deal with them. That was great, and then I found Vuori’s Dreamknit line of clothing, which is truly the softest thing I’ve ever put on my body, and now I live in their active pants (which do not have annoying cuffs at the ankles like all joggers). Comfort is good, actually.

Learning

Look I’m curious and enjoy learning. Here’s some things that have fostered that, or milestone books that I keep returning to.

15. Books

Yeah first I just have to give a shout out to books. I’ve always loved them; as a child we would go to the library and I’d check out the maximum amount of books (2 or 3 dozen, if I remember correctly) and I’d get home, sit down, and read them as fast as I could. Then I would read the stack my sister checked out (shout out to American Girl and Babysitter Club books, I loved ’em). Ever since then books have been my happy place. Also bookstores. And libraries. And little free libraries. And book sales. And friends houses with books. I love it.

16. Science Fiction & Fantasy

The Real World of Technology

by Ursula Franklin

Copyright 1990, House of Anansi

Tech Industry, Cultural Analysis

(4th time reading)

Here is where I admit I fell for the trap. I listened to the assholes who said that genre fiction wasn’t serious, that only non fiction and literary fiction was worth reading, for way too long. But friends introduced me to SFF sometime in the past decade and I’m better now. Talk to me about N.K. Jemisen, or Ann Leckie, or Becky Chambers, or Ursula K. Le Guin, or Tamsyn Muir, or or or or. Literary fiction is all “ooooh what if boring ass people did boring ass things and we called it sublime” meanwhile SFF writers regularly are like “what if shit was different?” and they FOLLOW THOSE THOUGHTS THROUGH. I love it. I’m sorry for my snobbery.

17. The Real World of Technology

This book came to me via Mandy Brown a long fucking time ago, and it is the gift that keeps on giving. First delivered as part of Canada’s annual Massey Lectures series, then published in 1989(!!) and later expanded, this book by Ursula Franklin is one of the most tightly argued, cogent theories for how technology works. Period. It’s fucking brilliant, and I find it meets me anew every time I reread it; always relevant and still prescient.

18. From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler

Fuck yeah I have to credit my favorite book of all time. A few years ago in Philly I wondered if I had fallen prey to the hyperbole of memory; what if this book doesn’t hold up? So I walked up the street to my neighborhood bookstore, grabbed a copy (thank you Head House Books in Queen Village!) and walked home. Within 2 hours I finished it, sobbing with joy, because not only had I not overblow the memory, I had forgotten just how exquisite it is. Two siblings run away from home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and while they evade security guards and methodically explore the museum to learn, they also end up solving an art mystery that no adults could put together. Talk about empowering! Claudia, you are my hero, and E.L. Konisburg, you changed my life for the better with your novel.

19. Wishbone

If I’m going to write about how much I love books, is it any surprise I’m going to sing the praises of the dog who loved to read and inhabited the stories as the main character? Of course not. Wishbone is one of the greatest tv shows of all time, fight me.

Thinking in Systems

by Donella Meadows

Copyright 2008, Chelsea Green

Cultural Analysis

20. Thinking in Systems

Donella Meadows is the one who introduced me to the field of complex systems, and talk about a revolutionary concept. I read this first in 2016 or so, and I expect the rest of my life I’ll be trying to make sense of systems and how to map/understand them. I might go so far as to describe this book as the thing that pulled me out of Plato’s cave, into the light. Suddenly I had a vocabulary for things that I had noticed since childhood, and the delight to know that many people had been thinking and theorizing and exploring the concept for many decades. The best kind of late to the party.

21. Against Purity

Against Purity

by Alexis Shotwell

Copyright 2016, Minnesota Press

Disability Theory, Cultural Analysis

Admittedly, this is a niche book and I’ll be surprised if many ever picked it up to read, but I found it brilliant. Alexis Shotwell wants us to tell better stories, or, to steal from Donna Haraway, she wants us to have better stories to tell stories with. In this book she looks at a few examples in biology and ecology and interrogates how, if we default to the standard set of lenses and frames that western civilization uses, we close down the interpretations and emergent ideas the examples otherwise lead us to. She questions our desire for purity in numerous realms, and challenges readers to think better. The embrace of nuance and complexity in this book was a personal delight.

22. Legacy

Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing

by Suzanne Methot

Copyright 2019, ECW Press

Indigenous Issues, Cultural Analysis

A few years back I was able to visit Birchbark Books in Minneapolis and treat myself to a shopping spree of sorts. I had saved up and could justify spending a good bit on books, so I just built a stack, regardless of price. It was wonderful. When I got home with all the books, I started working through the stack, and early in it read this book, by Suzanne Methot. In it, she uses her life experiences as an indigenous woman as a lens to tell the story of how Complex PTSD (CPTSD) works, and to apply that frame to all indigenous people in the US. This description does not do justice to how insightful, powerful, and wonderful this book is. It was the first time I read about CPTSD, which led me to seeking out a great deal more education on trauma. It’s also one of the first books I’ve read relaying the history of indigenous North Americans from an indigenous lens. Learning that history has become a lifelong project, and I mark this book as one of the first steps down that journey.

23. Mushroom at the End of the World

The Mushroom at the End of the World

by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Copyright 2017, Princeton University Press

Climate Change

The last book I want to call out (and I had to cull a lot of options) is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s incredible work of ethnography and sociological theory. I’m due for a reread of this book, to be honest. In it, Tsing uses the matsutake mushroom as a frame for asking questions about the end of capitalism, among so many things. The subtitle captures it well: “On the possibility of life in the capitalist ruins.” Readers meet mushroom hunters in the pacific northwest, follow the mushrooms to their final destinations, but also learn quite a bit about the conditions that lead to the matsutake thriving, and the histories that turned these fungi into valuable cultural items. There is honestly so much more, it’s a struggle to summarize well. Having the stories and theories in this book to think with has been so very generative for me.

Exploring, generally

When I started making this list and then organizing it, I realized that uh, I had a lot of exploration things, and some of them were conceptual and some of them were very specific. So here’s the bigger things.

24. The Open Road

For my 18th birthday and highschool graduation in 2003, my dad bought me a 1996 Nissan Pathfinder. In that vehicle, I fell in love with the quintessential American myth: the lure of the open road. In the ensuing 22 years, I’ve driven across the country numerous times and taken so many other road trips (including an 18 month road trip that was very helpful in ending my first marriage, indirectly). I am tired of cars now, I’d like to be a person who gets by with just public transit and long bicycle rides (see next point), but there’s no doubt in my mind that the many hours in the car gave me space to think, places to scream along to songs and feel my big feelings, and generally see this beautiful country.

25. Bicycles

Bicycles are joy machines, I know no other way to put it. When I get on a bike and start moving, the dopamine hits and my smile is intense.

26. Mountains

Nothing improves my morale like staring at big fucking rocks and realizing how old they are and how insignificant I am. I love them, looking at them, climbing them, walking around them, whatever. Mountains are great.

27. Long Walks

When I was in a very shitty living situation during my divorce, I used to plug headphones in and wander Philly. That was the safest way I could be alone with my thoughts and work through all the shit. Later, when the living situation improved, long walks became one of my favorite ways to think and explore. I’ve walked so many of Philly’s streets in all types of weather, because it felt so good. Before I left Philly, a woman I was seeing and I decided to go on an “urban hike”—we did 12 miles in a day and it was lovely. In the past few years, here in Chattanooga, my partner and I would go on long evening walks to converse and unwind from the day. Walking, even on very familiar terrain, changes things in such a good way.

Exploring, specifically

In all my exploring, some places have mattered the most.

28. Philadelphia

There is a classic billboard that said “Philadelphia is not as bad as Philadelphians say it is.” and let me tell you, accurate. Philadelphia is my personal nominee for best city in America. It sucks so much, but god it’s great. I lived there for 4 years and during that time completely put my life back together after divorce. Philly will always be the place I most felt at home, and even though I don’t expect to live there again, I will always love it.

29. Tattooed Mom’s

In Philly there is a famous street: South St. It’s where all the Jersey people go on Friday and Saturday nights to walk up and down and drink citywides at shitty bars. In between 5th St and 4th St, though, there is one bar that was effectively my home for a couple years. I lived 4 or 5 blocks from Tattooed Mom’s, and 3-5 days a week you could find me at the bar, drinking happy hour beers and reading a book. Sometimes I talked to neighbors, sometimes I just stuck to reading. TMom’s was the first bar where I was a regular; I’ll never forget a barback coming up and introducing themselves because they were like “I see you here all the time, figured I should know your name!” Bartenders would comp me beers and I’d pay for it in tips. I can’t say this period was healthy for my liver; I definitely relied on alcohol for handling anxiety rather than better options I later learned (see below). But for a couple years, TMom’s was my safe space, where I slowly learned how to reconnect with all the things I love about myself.

30. The General Jackson Riverboat

Look this is a funny one, but I worked on this (super-racistly named) tourist attraction when I first moved to Nashville. It was my only foray into service work, and I will always appreciate the experience. I’ll never ever step foot on the boat again, but I also will never tip less than 20% and I’ll always give service workers the benefit of the doubt because of this dumbass boat.

31. The heyday of Twitter and Google Reader

Look, they were good, and they introduced me to a lot of cool people and helpful ideas. I miss this version of the internet, even though I don’t think it was all that good in hindsight.

All the rest

32. Mycorrizhal Networks

Trees talk to each other! They have networks of mutual aid, built on symbiosis! That’s fucking cool.

33. Email application to Editorially

Sometime in 2014 I sent an email applying for an internship with the coolest startup I knew of, Editorially, and somehow, for still unknown reasons to me, I got the internship. It was paid, not much, and not enough for me to get by, but I met some of the greatest people I’ve ever worked with, and those connections opened nearly every door career-wise that’s led to my current life. One email, and now I have this life.

34. Good Notebooks

I could rhapsodize about notebooks but this post is so goddamn long. Leuchtturm1917 are the best general purpose notebooks, if you’re curious, but there are so many great notebook makers. If ever you need to give me a gift, a good notebook is a guaranteed winner.

35. Bourbon & Beer

The Tattooed Mom’s period is when I finished my lifetime quota of bourbon; I don’t drink it at all anymore (or any hard liquor). Maybe I’m not supposed to praise these things or look back on my reliance on them with any positivity, but I don’t care. I had a real shitty life for a bit, and one of the ways I survived that period was drinking. I don’t wish that on anyone, but sometimes that’s the way life goes.

36. Speech and Debate

In highschool I did competitive forensics, and I did it because it was fun to perform and argue about shit. Now, I have to do impromptu presentations in front of execs and customers who are paying my company millions a year, and thanks to those highschool shenanigans, it’s no sweat at all.

37. Architecture

My dad is an architect, and because of him I learned to pay attention to the built world, to appreciate quality design, and to treat the entirety of the human world as constructed. That’s a wildly important lesson—it’s so easy to think of things as fixed and unchangeable. But every single wall was built, and that means it can be unbuilt.

38. Craftiness

My mother is one of the most creative people I’ve ever met; she’s never met a project she couldn’t tackle. She taught me a lot, but this is the thing I feel like shaped me so much. Where dad taught me about the built world at building scales, mom taught me about the built world at smaller scales. Her ability to turn ideas into reality was something she passed on, and I use those skills daily.

39. Yoga

In the past few years my partner introduced me to yoga and we shared a daily practice for a period. While that daily practice has evolved, the impacts linger. Yoga helped me release trauma, learn to listen to myself, it even made me about 2" taller by unfucking my back and hips so that my posture naturally straightened out. I don’t know how I lived so long in my body without this practice.

40. Mystery

Last of all, is mystery. In my youth, I was interested in mystery for religious reasons, but even though religion no longer is in my life, mystery is ever present. I love the small mysteries (why does that hurt?) and the large mysteries (what does life mean) and all the mysteries in between. Thankfully, I also like asking questions, so mysteries sometimes unravel themselves for me.

I don’t know why you read this entire post but if you did, thanks? I’m on bluesky and would love to hear your thoughts.

What if god doesn't control capitalism

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:10:34 -0500

The world I grew up in was suffused with god. Specifically, the Christian god that evangelicals describe and worship across the US and in other pockets of the world. It was the air I breathed for my first 25 years.

[Note: This post is not about my religious trauma, I promise. I am thinking about capitalism and better futures all the time these days, and that has led me to spend a lot of time trying to understand the current system so that I can potentially identify narratives or ideas that might help make it feel less stable. I want something better than what we’ve built, and I don’t know how we begin to shape that without understanding what we’re starting from.]

A key belief in evangelical circles (and in other Christian flavors as well) is God is in charge of the world. Not in charge like the President is “in charge” of America, where the president sets a vision and steers direction but is mostly ignorant of the inner workings of everything happening inside the country on a day-to-day basis. No, Christians believe in what feels like an impossible level of control by god; that they are deeply and actively controlling every single thing that happens in the universe. Not on earth, but everywhere.

This is one of those beliefs that is taken at face value by most Christians I have ever interacted with, including me when that label applied to me. It’s a wild-ass belief? Try for a second to see how much of your entire life you can hold in your mind. It’s not a lot; there is so much more happening just to you that you can’t perceive or keep in mind all at once, and so much that is outside of your control affecting you. That’s what it’s like to be an individual in a vast system. But the Christian belief is that the entire system is known by an entity that exists outside the system, while also having complete control over the system, including being able to affect the outcome of any possible interaction or event. Also, Christians are convinced that the entity that knows everything about the entire vast system is aware of them and cares about their needs? This belief system is completely irrational if you poke at it just a little bit, but it’s the default belief of millions of people.

Because of this belief, every single event that happens to any person who holds this belief system can be explained by god doing it. Good events; you get a raise or a promotion, it’s because of god. Bad events, you get fired or a flat tire or broken up with, it’s because of god.

I can’t stop mulling the impacts of this belief. If you believe that there is an omniscient being in control of everything, it significantly reduces the agency of every living creature. Not a one of us is actually freely able to make choices, we are all just left in a position of reactivity. None of us can change the world unless our plans align with god’s. There’s an all-powerful veto button that can be exercised by the tyrant whenever they desire. Also, Christians regularly explain illness and calamity as the result of god’s will or decisions, so there is this looming threat that if you displease god you will be fucked over, because there is no safety.

Looking at the implications of this belief could go in a few different directions, I think it colors so much of the world we live in today, but I am currently interested in one specific implication. To help it make sense, I need to dip into a bit of complex systems theory, as I understand it.

The simplest way I can approach this is that every system that humans create is a response to a previous system, and is always constrained by that previous system. Think of the creation of a building—a new house is a great example. Every single modern house is a complex system of materials, structure, and plans all interacting to create the final product. That final product is a unique thing, no building is identical to another down to the molecular level. But a house is also constrained by many factors; the site it is sitting on, the services available (water, electricity, sewage), and maybe most importantly the budget available to the builder. Each of these pre-existing complex systems constrains the possibilities for the house.

This also happens at much larger scales. Hurricanes—despite our desire to write them off as acts of god—are outputs of other systems, and their strength is dependent on the ocean water and air, the atmospheric conditions, and many other factors. But a hurricane can be extremely severe without causing a disaster; a disaster happens when the hurricane impacts humans and they are not prepared. Preparation for a calamity like a severe hurricane is a human planning issue, and if humans have built systems that are incapable of properly preparing for the foreseeable storms that may come, it’s not the hurricane’s fault that it created a disaster. It’s not god either; it was humans who designed the system and the things they decided to ignore may not turn out to be ignorable. Hurricane preparedness (or any sort of disaster preparedness) is thus constrained by the systems humans have built, and disasters are a result of those systems being shitty.

Perhaps a better framing is that every system humans create is informed by other existing systems. Pre-existing systems could constrain the new system, by limiting which possibilities are achievable in the new system. But they can also shape the new system by removing constraints that ought to be there.

I can think of a lot of examples for this too; it’s kind of what capitalism is good for. Take self-driving cars, for instance. Elon and the leadership of Tesla have built up a hugely profitable company by making claims that self-driving cars are right around the corner. They have done this by proclaiming the safety of self-driving (compared to humans who can make mistakes). They released self-driving features. They were able to do this because the American auto regulatory system assumes good intentions on the part of auto manufacturers. Our regulatory system assumes safety until proven otherwise. Which is how Elon got rich while building the most dangerous car company in the US. Tesla figured out that there are effectively no consequences to building a brand on lying and offloading risk onto their customers, and they leaned into it.

This happens all the time under capitalism; frictions or boundaries that should exist are removed because it’s far more profitable to move fast and break shit.

Lately this theory keeps swirling in my mind and I can’t let it go. I think that capitalism works this way because it was developed as a response to the previous system; not feudalism, as is often told, but Christianity, and its omniscient god.

I should be clear right now; this idea is filling my head in part because I’m reading Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici and her core thesis is that early capital accumulation started with the medieval witch hunts, which were a process of subjugating women to be domestic caretakers, so that men could be freely available for waged labor. This is a terribly summary of an excellent book, please go read it yourself.

Federici’s thesis has been very useful to think with, because it’s helped me start asking generative questions about the shape of capitalism, the histories where those shapes become clear, and what else might have factored in.

Which is how I came up with this working theory: Capitalism is premised on eternal growth, because it was developed under a belief system that had no natural constraints. Maybe I am the last person to get here and this is well known as a theory. Part of why I’m posting this is hopefully someone will be like, oh you clearly haven’t read [insert book or person here]. That’d be a lovely outcome.

There’s also the possibility that this is a novel theory. That would be a little bit wilder; I’m quite used to “discovering” ideas that many others have long ago arrived at and written extensively on. Anyways, regarding the theory, it’s not that complex, but it feels generative in the ways it changes what I see about capitalism. Here’s my summary.

Christians have long believed that the world is controlled by god. There are so many places in history where people in power who also claim Christianity as their religion explicitly connect the dots that if god is in charge of everything, and nothing can happen without their allowing it to happen, then whatever that person does is acceptable to god if they succeed. It’s a beautifully syllogistic logic that is premised on bullshit. It’s also long been called bullshit by many many humans who could see that institutional Christianity functions much better as a defense of power and a people controlling mechanism, than a generative practices for mystery and love.

Which is why there was vast resistance to Christianity across Europe for centuries. Millions of people actively resisted accepting a belief system that denied them full agency and freedom. In Caliban and the Witch, Federici documents how the adoption of Christianity was not bottom up (people voluntarily choosing it) but top down, mandated, enforced via state institutions, mercenary actions, and rich people actively working to build a world that suited them. They wanted to be comfortable and rich, and they had a belief system that told them success in their goals was the equivalent of god blessing it.

The even more sinister implication of my theory is that the rules of capitalism are premised on a false understanding of the world. If you operate in the belief system of christianity, then the only limit that is worth acknowledging is god. Every other “limit” is meaningless. If god wants the limit to disappear, they will remove it. Out of wine? Just use water. Have thousands of hungry people? Grab 5 loaves and 2 fish or whatever, the food will just keep coming until everyone has had their fill.

The belief that god is completely in control of the universe implies that all natural laws are actually just contingent rules, that all systems don’t actually work the way they seem to work, that nothing is real except that which we believe to real. The implication of a single entity having full power over everything in the universe is that everything in the universe follows no actual laws, there is no true causality or expected outcome to any chain of events, because at any moment the omniscient entity can intervene and shape the events to their will.

That was the ground that existed. And now we’ve built up an entire world-controlling system on that ground.

Capitalism is, very literally, a system that assumes growth is eternal. States are built on the assumption that population will always increase and tax revenue will always grow. Companies are organized with legal requirements to grow and increase profits. This belief that growth is always possible, always good, and always needed is everywhere under capitalism (and quite well documented in analysis).

I’m now pretty convinced that the assumption that growth is always possible was a response to the systems that existed prior to capitalism, and specifically was built on this underlying expectation that if any future a human sets out to achieve is “bad,” then god would intervene to stop it.

That’s a pretty massive assumption about the world, about the existence of god. It does not align with history whatsoever; lots of terrible shit has happened around the world and it’s pretty obviously terrible well before the shit ends, via whatever means (war, bankruptcy, assassination, etc etc).

I think what’s been useful for me lately in thinking about this is seeing how pervasive this assumption still is. I enjoy identifying load-bearing assumptions like this because they are ripe for challenging. If capitalism is god-haunted in this way, and the trends are that beliefs in god are rapidly shifting at a civilizational level, we have a chance of connecting the dots. Of telling different stories that align capitalism with god, or specifically the christian god (who, i repeat, is an utter asshole, as described by god’s adherents).

Ok, I have no solid conclusion here. This is my burgeoning theory. It’s probably wrong in really interesting ways, but there’s hopefully some truth in there as well. I’m writing it out because ultimately I’m interested in better futures, and I’d really like to contribute to the work to making them possible.

Practice Refusing

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:42:59 -0500

I did not know I was a rule breaker by nature until I went to college. I grew up homeschooled and evangelical, contexts which did fuck me up but not in all the common ways. One of the ways that I had a quite abnormal experience is that I grew up in a house where all the rules made sense. My parents—to their eternal credit—treated me and my siblings as intelligent humans from the day we were born, and because of that, always worked to help us understand the rules that governed household life. Because of this, I grew up generally able to make sense of the logic of my home and world. My parents also did not create onerous rules based on beliefs of How The World Should Be or How Children Should Act, instead choosing to make rules that acknowledged our agency and desire to gain independence. In the house I grew up in, things made sense, and the rules were logically defensible and felt overall reasonable to live with, which meant my rebellious side wasn’t really developed.

After graduating high school, I worked full time for two years before electing to attend college. I enrolled in a very fundamentalist Christian college at age 20, after having a lot of freedom and agency over my life for the past 2 years. The thing about fundamentalist Christian colleges is they very much believe that college students are children, and children cannot be trusted with freedom or agency. Which is how I got a crash course in a different world from the one I grew up in, one where prioritizing agency and freedom are not the goals for most rules. The rules instead exist to control and reduce freedom. Suddenly I was in horribly oppressive environment, by my own choice.

I fucking hated it.

That is the point in my memory when I began practicing one of the most useful skills I possess today: refusal.

Refusal has been on my mind lately because this fucking country just re-elected a narcissist who campaigned on the simple platform of: let me be the genocidal dictator I failed to become last time. Which seems to me is a pretty clear sign that a bunch of bad shit is going to happen in the next 4 years (or more!).

It’s going to be worse than last time because we gave them the practice round! Now they are better at propaganda. They are better at navigating the legal system. They’ve worked on their messaging. They’ve identified trans people and immigrants of color as the othered enemies. But it’s also going to be worse because we’re all tired. We’re fucking exhausted, this is the 8th year of this bullshit, and the country just ensured at least 4 more. We are numb with burnout, and that means they won’t face as vocal of a resistance. They have bigger ambitions while facing less friction. The signs are not positive.

So if this is the world we’re living in, it’s my belief that all of us need to start improving our abilities to refuse. To say no. To create friction foremost, and also to create space for new possibilities.

I believe this because I know that when you practice refusal, you start conjuring up space for different futures. It’s a magic trick. When you refuse to do a thing that the majority of other people are doing, you create space for others to join you. When you refuse to enforce a dumb rule, you make the world malleable. When you refuse to believe a story without doing your own research, you build trust in yourself. When you refuse to take people at their word—when you understand that trust has to be earned it is not just given by default—you undermine power. The effects of the practice of refusal is to create a less predictable world, which makes planning harder. Right now, the people taking power are making a bunch of plans that they hope to implement, and because they had a practice round, they believe they know what the barriers to implementation will be.

To practice refusal is to always be open to different worlds. To embrace the possibility of change, to stay open to curiosity, to do so many things that nourish the parts of yourself you need to tap into for this future we have in front of us. The practice of refusal can take so many forms. The fun of it is you can determine for yourself what shape your refusal will take.

For me, I have never met a rule I’m not willing to test. Test doesn’t necessarily mean break, but it isn’t exclusive of it. The first test is always is to ask for more context on the rule, such as the consequences for breaking the rule. After that, there’s lots of other tests. The goal of all of these tests is to figure out how much of the rule matters. What can I refuse?

Sometimes you can refuse simply with a hard no. I love this option. The world is filled with choices, and because of the way we’ve structured the world, there’s often a lot of people incentivized to get you to say yes. Buy this thing, use this new product, AI is the future, crypto is useful, so on and so forth. Resistance is futile, many say, and it’s true you cannot reform the system from within the system. But you can intentionally choose to refuse certain parts of the system.

AI is a relevant example for me; you can go look to see all the books I’ve read on data and AI and such. I’m not ignorant about the tools. But so far I have refused to use any of them. I don’t use ChatGPT, I actually don’t even know where to go to use it. I have never generated an image with those tools. I have refused to use any of the modern AI products, simply because I can. I have a lot of reasons and arguments, yes, but those are about the system; why I don’t think the tech industry should be allowed to build in the ways it is, to destroy the climate in the way it is, etc etc. I think those arguments are reasonable, but they do not inform my refusal. Mostly, I just don’t use these tools because I haven’t yet hit a point where anything I could use them for seems better than my existing workflows.

But for you, I don’t care if you use AI tools or not. That is not the point. The point of developing your muscle of refusal is that it teaches you about possibility and agency. Even if you don’t choose the refusal as a hard no option, there are myriad ways to refuse and push back.

You can refuse to do things on others timetables. Sometimes this is a dumb decision; if you are in danger and you refuse to act with urgency, you will fuck around and find out. Sometimes, though, it’s a brilliant decision. If someone is asking you to do a thing on a specific timetable, that is most likely because their goals are dependent on that timetable. If you think their goals are bad, or not important, or just not worthy of harming yourself, you can drag your fucking feet. Move slow. Push back on timetables. Keep asking for more time. These are all options when you are the one defining the timetable, and by pushing back and fighting for timetables you think are reasonable, you are fighting for your needs and reducing the assumed power of the other person (for more on this, read up on malicious compliance).

You can also refuse to accept the expectations of others. This is a wildly powerful form of refusal that mostly is only exercised by assholes, which does give it a bad name. The harmful form of this is refusing to meet reasonable expectations; cleaning up after yourself, or considering others emotions, or you know, just being a kind and empathetic person generally speaking. That’s a real good way to be an asshole, and if you do it to people who you need on your side, well, you reap what you sow jackass. BUT, there are a lot of people these days who are not on our sides. Not just in power, but who actively are cheering on this administration. And if they expect to live in a civilized society, well, they are very much trying to have their cake (which, in my imagination is a cake that says FUCK EVERYONE THAT’S NOT LIKE ME in big red MAGA colors) and eat it too. Which is to say, the people in power and the people who have gleefully elected those people into power want to enjoy the fruits of the world that exists while also destroying everything that led to its creation.

We can refuse their desires. Do you remember when a small family restaurant refused to serve a Republican leader during the last administration? It was a HUGE controversy because it punctured the myth of civility. Republicans truly believe themselves to be the good guys, doing the lords work. And to have to face the indignity of getting thrown out of restaurants and refused service, well, who on earth would be so villainous.

I am arguing that this controversy should become commonplace. Republicans have power and are planning to use it to harm a bunch of people. They are going to expect everyone around them to buy into their belief system. They want to be the good people, and they will absolutely freak the fuck out if they are unable to hold that belief.

You have agency and freedom to a far greater degree than maybe you realize. You may not have power; none of us alone do. We may not succeed at harm removal during the next four years, but every day has to include active practices of harm mitigation. Practicing refusal, in myriad forms, helps you continually center the freedom and agency you have. You are subject to systems and institutions far more powerful than you, but they are not all-powerful. You can work to find or create the cracks, and you can work to find the others who are also finding or creating cracks. If we all start practicing this work of refusal, of identifying the systems and expectations and rules that don’t make sense, aren’t serving needs, or are actively harm, and then pushing back on them, in small and large ways, we can all start learning what else is possible.

We can create new worlds together, simply by learning that this current world is not the only possibility. By practicing refusal, we take ownership of our actions and stop mindlessly perpetuating a world that is actively harmful. That seems pretty great.

As a post-script, here’s a very random, very flow-of-consciousness list of ideas for refusal that you could start practicing.

Refuse to tip the minimum, because you know that an extra $5 can really make someone’s day.
Refuse to chide a coworker or report for a minor transgression of the rules, because you can see it was harmless.
Refuse to use a goddamn leafblower to have a neat lawn, and instead prioritize the wellbeing of the critters around you (there are 3 leafblowers across the street from me right now, informing this point)
Refuse to use your normal coping mechanism for some stress, and see if you can find a new option
Refuse to drive when you can walk, as an experiment
Refuse to expect perfection of yourself or someone else, and instead set your expectations based on the needs of the context
Refuse to agree with someone who says an asshole thing, and instead ask them to explain it more
Refuse to laugh when others are the butt of the joke
Refuse to demand eye-for-an-eye when you have been wronged and instead center the other person
Refuse to center the other person when they have legitimately harmed you, and instead center your own needs
Refuse to treat things as black and white when you see nuance
Refuse to let others introduce nuance when a simple solution is available
Refuse to believe the lies others say about people you don’t know
Refuse to trust people who have not earned your trust

I could keep going. My point with some of these is that refusal is not a rulebook, it is a question. It is to recognize that the future is not guaranteed, and maybe it’s worth trying something new in a situation to see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, you can help something better emerge.

To Scott Hutchison

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 06:27:27 -0500

Scott,

I saw a post this week from Hanif Abdurraqib commemorating your birthday, and when I woke up this morning these words were screaming to get out. So I’m going to write you a letter, because I miss you so much and I had no actual relationship with you except as a fan. But god, you mattered so much to me. Matter so much to me.

I remember in 2018 when I got the news that you were missing. Your family put out calls to help find you, calls that were eventually successful in the worst possible way. When your body was found, when we learned that the day you had told us you’d save for the future finally came, it destroyed me. For at least a decade, your voice had bouyed me through the good, the bad, and the mundanity of life. Your songs, your lyrics, your work had at times truly saved my life by giving me something to hide in, to scream along to and cry to and feel seen by. And now you are gone.

I still miss you so much.

For years after your death I couldn’t listen to your music. I was so thankful that you initiated a tribute album to Midnight Organ Fight; it gave me a way to keep your words close without being overwhelmed with grief and sadness. I spent so much time late at night, drunk, crying and watching videos of your friends singing your songs as well. All of this helped, because your music is so important to me that even if someone else is performing it, I can still access all the memories of my life that I’ve connected to your songs.

I guess sometime into the pandemic, the grief I felt from living in this world became so large that it felt commensurate to the grief that I have over your loss, and suddenly I could start listening to you again. Which probably explains why, as I write this at 6:30 in the morning, I’m writing through sobs. The grief from your absence is still so present in me. I feel it every time I listen to your music. It’s just, I also feel that grief anytime I’m not listening to your music now. The world you left behind is a horror show and the horrors are only increasing.

Thank you for creating a body of work that was not afraid of these horrors. Your music makes me feel anchored, helps me feel stable. You saw the shit, you saw the joy, and you saw all the humans doing everything, and you described the world with elegant, brutal accuracy. Thank you for that.

I first encountered your music from a music blogger in 2008, right around the time Midnight Organ Fight dropped. I cannot remember if I purchased it or pirated it, I’m sorry. I own it on vinyl now, I did buy it eventually. I have listened to that album so many times that I… I’m at a loss for any silly hyperbole about it. Hundreds of times. Thousands maybe. You can put on any song from that album and I can sing it from front to back, including attempting to capture your accented pronunciation of each syllable. When I am sad, that type of sad when every single molecule in my body feels like it weighs as much as this planet, when nothing is appealing to me except wallowing and staring into the distance, I can put on Poke and you meet me right there. Actually, every single song on that album is attached to varying moods, and without fail turning on your music and singing along somehow both embraces the emotion and releases it.

When my kids were young, I had to rock them to sleep every night. They would not fall asleep on their own, and so I would spend 20 minutes to an hour every night rocking a baby in my arms. Both of my girls needed this. I was no good at lullabyes, never learned them, didn’t care about them, so I sang my girls my favorite songs. The most common song I sang was Heads Roll Off. Yes, it’s a song about dying, and not believing in religion, but it’s also a song with the chorus that has become—I can’t believe I’m writing these words but I am being as honest as possible—the closest thing I have to a religious credo.

When my head rolls off, someone elses will turn / while I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to earth.

I sang that to my girls every night, and now when I listen to that song, I feel the grief of your loss, and the joy of their existence, and while that seems like it should be unbearable to hold together, it isn’t. It just means when I listen to that song I remember that the world, as immense as it is, contains wonders and horrors alike. And we get to make tiny changes, if we want to.

Once, Abdurraqib put out a call on his social media, asking fans of you, of Frightened Rabbit, to call in and share memories. So I did, I called in and he put my recording at the very beginning of the podcast episode. I’m not sure if you can tell I was lightly crying while I talked, but I was. I told how, to further remember those nights of singing my kids your words, of hoping that they too would grow up and make tiny changes to earth, I got a tattoo.

It’s a solid line tattoo of a square, just one thin line creating a 3" square, on my bicep. And underneath, written in my own handwriting, are your words “make tiny changes to earth.” The purpose of the square is so that my kids could draw in it; so that they could make tiny changes to dad, which they have done over the years. Ghosts and kittens and stick figures and hearts, temporarily filling up the square.

I still tear up every time I tell the story of that tattoo.

Each of your albums met me at different periods of my life and became new life preservers I could hold onto as I navigated being alive. The Winter Of Mixed Drinks came out when my life was pretty stable, but when I later went through a shitty divorce, I spent hours walking around Philly late at night blasting this album (particularly The Loneliness and the Scream) while sobbing. I eagerly purchased your following albums and went to see the band as soon as you came to town, wherever I was.

I had one other friend all through those years who loved your music as much as I did. We saw you together live for the first time, at a tiny ass club in Birmingham, AL. The lineup included We Were Promised Jetpacks, and the Twilight Sad. We pressed up against the stage amongst a crowd of other fans and we sang along with every word as you played. That was the first of six times I had the joy of seeing you live; each time an opportunity to let loose with all the passion I could muster to sing along.

You were singing during my favorite concert experience ever. It was the tour where you opened for The National, although I only went to see Frightened Rabbit. The show was at an outdoor, uncovered amphitheatre. Right before you went on, it started drizzling after threatening to do so for an hour. You came out, and played the set, just 5 songs, because openers never get enough time. But you ended on The Loneliness and the Scream, and so there we were, 50 or so Frightened Rabbit fans, pushed against each other in the pit in the soft rain, screaming along with the melodies at the end of the song, as you and the band finished playing. It feels ironic, that this beautiful moment of community and joy arose from a song about being so alone that you could scream, but that’s what you do so well. You stare at all the shit we do as humans, and you write beautiful songs about how shitty it is.

Your fans love you so much, because of this. We are humans who don’t want to write off the world, we want to make sense of the world, we want to truly see it for what it is. Your songs and lyrics make us feel seen, and bring us together, even when you are writing about the utter mess of relationships and guilt and shame.

I know I’m not alone because in one of the cruelest ironies of life; your music was one of the points of connection between my partner and I, even though we met years after you died.

A few days after I met her, while we were doing that new crush thing of asking questions about things we love to see if our crush shares our passions, she sent me a text message: “Do you know Frightened Rabbit?”

Scott, I can’t tell you what it’s like to meet someone who loves an artist as much as you do, on just as many levels as you do. I can’t tell you because even though I experienced it, I just don’t know how to describe it. But meet we did, and found that we had each seen you live an equal number of times (6) and both, despite each having gotten rid of most of our belongings for different reasons in the years before we met, had Frightened Rabbit memorabilia that we held on to. We knew all the words, loved the same songs for different reasons. The album we put on after we first had sex was Midnight Organ Fight. That’s weird to tell you but I don’t care, it’s true. You always fought to tell the truth, even when it feels bad.

When we moved in together we made a shrine to Frightened Rabbit. It’s right in the entry way of our house. We jointly made a large piece of art with your double cross and lung/liver/heart drawings, and hung it up. Your memory is alive in our home. We tell everyone who comes over this story, we rave about your music and how important it is to us. Most people vaguely recall hearing the name of your band. They’re missing out on so much.

I miss you so much.

There’s so much more to say, but I will stop here. Thank you for your music, for your work, for your willingness to explore the complexity of being alive. You made so many tiny changes to earth while you were alive. I’m eternally grateful to have found your music and to have it with me as I suffer through this world. Thank you for all the work.

the god of flowers

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 20:49:32 -0400

I’ve been writing some poetry lately, and while most of I’m writing for me, I felt like sharing this one.

the god of flowers

she had watched for eons
as the surface cooled
as the water explored the terrain
as beings emerged from the sea
as cells explored photosynthesis
as limbs evolved
and some even became wings

a tapestry of interdependence
and possibility

our god is so patient.
she had seen other gods
introduce new threads

their artistry expressed in
ecological niches
charismatic megafauna
fungal experimentation
symbiotic pairings

still she watched

she would play on the unseen
colors of the rainbow
sliding down the infrared
climbing up the ultraviolet

until some other god
distantly yelled their version of
Eureka!

our god is so patient
is how the flowers tell it

sometimes it takes a lot
of work that looks unproductive
to give an idea space to gestate

our god is so good
at looking completely useless
superfluous even
just taking up space

but—
the flowers whisper this part
for dramatic emphasis

eventually she noticed how little
fanfare was paid when
the earth turned towards
the sun
and the snow melted
and the water ran
and sure, there was
the slow emergence of green

but the animals met
the solar glory with energy
unmatched by their botanical peers

the bees kept joining her
on the infrared slide
to get the energy out

our god is so patient

but that day all her
unproductivity finally came together

and as the idea bloomed
she became our god

Live Music

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 22:03:15 -0400

Apparently in April, Manchester Orchestra released a live album from a show last year where they played their 2014 album Cope front-to-back. I was playing it within 30 seconds of discovering it existed this morning. It’s excellent. I’m so happy it exists.

About 3 minutes into the first track (Top Notch), as lead-singer Andy Hull sings the words “give up,” which are drawn out in the song to be a sort of “give uoooooooouuuuooouuup” sound, the crowd joins in at their top of their lungs. Hundreds of people singing the same notes in that rock show ecstatic unison that is so beautiful to experience.

I spent part of morning driving around on errands and I had the windows down, the volume at top notch. I screamed along to every song and remembered the only time I’ve seen Manchester Orchestra play, in 2022 at the Ryman in Nashville. The Ryman is an incredible venue but not exactly great for headbanging and dancing—which did not stop me but did diminish my rowdiness. As I drove, and screamed, and air drummed, and repeated songs I felt a little grief come up.

I don’t really go to shows anymore. Chattanooga is not a popular stop for the artists I love (shout out to the big exception The Mountain Goats), and it is rarely worth the exorbitant ticket costs + hotel + driving time to go see shows in Nashville or Atlanta. So live music has become a much less prevalent thing in my life since 2020.

So it goes, I guess. But today’s stumbling upon a live album I didn’t know was available made me remember all the good shows I’ve seen, and all the joy I’ve felt dancing my ass off and jumping and screaming along to songs I deeply love. I may not currently been in an era of live music, but it has meant so much to me and I guess that’ll do.

Watch the World Burn

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 10:47:34 -0500

What are four words you would use to describe your music?

Nature punk / grief folk.

— Alynda Segarra (Hurray for the Riff Raff) in an interview with Uproxx

One of the many violences of capitalism is how it demands that all of life arrange itself around money. Actually, I can be more specific. The violence is how those of us who are forced to work waged labor in order to survive in the world are required to arrange our lives around the primacy of our keeping our paychecks. Rich people may not have to do this—I don’t know I’ve always lived paycheck to paycheck. But the majority of us who have a job are just hoping that we have enough sick days to cover all illness, enough bereavement leave to account for mourning, and enough vacation days to feel rested and celebrate whomever needs to be celebrated.

This had never occurred to me until I read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s tome The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, in which, somewhere (I tried and failed to find the relevant passage just now) they discuss how in pre-capitalist worlds, there was an inherent seasonality to life. Whether it’s the cycles of the harvest, or whatever animals you are reliant on, or the religious rituals that structure life, over most of human history people have lived in communities with a natural seasonality.

Under capitalism, the seasons are ancillary; work is the constant. Everyone needs to survive, and survival requires money, and getting money mostly requires some form of waged labor (I’ll point out here how the rise of algorithmic gig labor in the past decade tried to co-opt critiques of this day job system to suggest computers would revolutionize this system but the reality has been that the companies who own the algorithms figured out how to require people to work more for less money). So now we operate in this rigid system that assumes everything outside of work is controllable and containable.

That’s obviously bullshit.

This bullshit hit me hard this past week when I encountered the new Hurray for the Riff Raff album. Thanks to internet friends in a small discord server, I am getting back into the habit of paying attention to new albums. I’ve been aware of HftRR in the past, but this was the first album of theirs I sat down and listened to. I was enjoying it immensely— great songs, beautiful lyrics, mournful vibes— and then I came to the last full song on the album Ogallala. It stopped me in my tracks.

First, of course, was the name Ogallala, which along with being the name of a town in Nebraska (where the song starts), is also the name of the one of the world’s largest fresh water aquifers. It’s been on my mind because I’m reading Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens, which has a chapter (unsurprisingly) on the Dust Bowl, which originated in the Great Plains. The Ogallala aquifer was part of the reason white settlers took over the Great Plains for agriculture in the late 1800’s; the immense amount of fresh water underground offset the lack of rainfall that would normally be necessary for the types of agriculture white people invested in.

Owen’s Dust talks about the dust bowl, and links it to current agricultural practices, and then hits you with the fact that the extraction of water from the aquifer has increased every decade, and at current recharge rates, would take 6000 years of rain to replenish what we have taken out. We continue to take more out each year.

It’s fitting then, that Hurray for the Riff Raff’s song has a mournful quality, reminiscent of Auld Lang Syne. What starts as a song focused on a moment in the singer’s memory, before turning inward, asking

Now what do I do with this terrible feeling?
Been all these years I’m driving the same highway stretch
You know that scene at the end of “Titanic”?
Well I’m the one who’s still playing on the deck

The ship is going down, Segarro sings, and they are still on it.

This week there are two deaths in the news that stand out against the thousands of deaths that are in the news every week; Nex Benedict’s and Aaron Bushnell’s.

Nex is the Oklahoma teen who was bullied and beaten up for their identity; beaten up so badly that they died from their wounds. For being trans. For believing that who they are mattered, that their truth was worth naming and fighting for. Nex has so many people on their side, from the parents outward. But they also live(d) in a world where many other people hated them, feared them, wanted to deny their existence and to criminalize any acknowledgement of it. Those people are to blame for Nex’s death, and they are to blame for the fact that Nex was not the first and will not be the last to die due to the violence that the anti-trans crowd are happy to cultivate as part of their fear.

Aaron is the man who protested the genocide of Palestine with an act of self-immolation. Here is Sarah Jaffe writing about him this morning:

Aaron Bushnell did what he did to protest the rendering of so many people disposable. He did it to get our attention, to demand we not look away, to reach for the emergency brake that Walter Benjamin wrote about. The use of flames was not an incidental choice. His action recalls Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the rebellions known as the Arab Spring, a wave of uprisings that still shape the world around Gaza. It recalls Buddhist monks opposing American involvement in Vietnam, and American protestersfollowing them to the flames. Aaron Bushnell was an active duty member of the American military; “I will no longer be complicit in genocide," he said. His last words were “Free Palestine.”

I’m now typing this post amidst tears, because the weight of Nex and Aaron’s deaths are so heavy. This is the world of 2024; this is what we have wrought.

I’m also typing this despite it being after 9am, meaning I should be working. I need to sign on to my remote job and use my labor to build products and generate value. That’s the contract I’ve signed; my labor in return for a wage. That is the thing I am supposed to spend my time on today.

Meanwhile, there are wars raging around the world. There are genocides taking place, against Palestinians in Gaza, against trans people in Republican-controlled states in the US, against the Royhinga people, against the Uyghur people. We continue to destroy our access to clean water, eradicate forests, drill for oil, burn the oil, expand the economy. Modernity marches onward.

But sometimes it helps to talk about how stupid all of this is. I don’t even hate my job! I hate this system that denies us the ability to look at the world honestly and give space to the grief and sorrow that feels like it flows endlessly.

Now what do you turn into when all reality’s blending
an image of a photocopy of life?

As Ogallala builds to the end Segarra names the feeling I languish in regularly. What agency do I have? If the ship is going down, what can I do? I want the world to be better, but many days it feels like that opportunity has passed. I don’t believe it has, I refuse to believe it has, but in this song, Hurray for the Riff Raff gives me permission to sit in that space, to look around and see how horrible it is, and name the feeling. This week, I needed this.

I used to think I was born into the wrong generation
but now I know
I made it right on time
to watch the world burn
to watch the world burn
to watch the world burn
with a tear in my eye

to watch the world burn
to watch the world burn
to watch the world burn
i’m right on time

The Gravity of Capitalism

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 05:47:12 -0500

When I first encountered Systems Thinking (through Donella Meadow’s book Thinking In Systems) a lot of things clicked into place. All my life I had tried to make sense of patterns and I noticed that the patterns scaled and applied at quite large levels, and finally with Systems Thinking, I had language for all of this.

Thinking in Systems

by Donella Meadows

Copyright 2008, Chelsea Green

Cultural Analysis

Since then I’ve tried to read more Systems literature and found that it’s quite dense. So dense. Some of the hardest prose I’ve ever tried to make sense of. Worth it, maybe, but oh my god.

This post is not that type of writing. I am allergic to dense prose. But I’m interested in defining a concept that I’ve been mulling over for awhile, and I’m going to attempt to do so in this post. I’m writing this preamble because I highly doubt I am the first to notice this or describe it but I have no idea where else it’s talked about in the field of systems thinking. So if what I describe here sounds familiar, uh, great, please point me in the direction where I can learn more!

Every system creates a internal gravity. That’s the core idea. Gravity as we experience it in physics is a direction, a weight, a pull. When I toss something into the air, gravity pulls it towards the earth; down. When rain falls, it falls towards the earth. What we know from physics is gravity is not a constant; if I could wander into space I would experience a loss of gravity and what I have always understood as “down” suddenly becomes much less enforced. Sure I can still point to my feet and say “that’s down,” but without gravity, that is an idea I am imposing, rather than an idea I am deriving from external physics. Gravity is thus very influential on reality, relative to the system I’m currently in.

In systems thinking, a guy named Stafford Beer coined a dictum: “The point of a system is what it does.” This is a somewhat important truth to grapple with, because as humans we often want to point to things like what humans intended to do when they designed a system—or the stories we believe about a system—as the proper ways to understand said system. But intentions and narratives are not always (in fact, rarely ever) aligned with how the system works. And so, when engaging in systems thinking, one of the challenges is to name how the system actually works, rather than naming how we want it to work or how we think it works.

I’ve found that thinking about a systems’ gravity is a generative way of describing what a system encourages. Here’s a few examples to build a picture of what I mean.

The gravity of urban planning: In most of America, we live in a system where the world has been built up such that walking is very disincentivized. Over a century of urban planning has built up a world where the places any person needs to regularly visit are scattered over geographic distances that make walking inconvenient, if not impossible. The urban planners have embraced suburban sprawl, built wide roads, added minimal sidewalks, and because businesses know this system exists, they optimize locations based on where land is cheap rather than where humans live. On top of this, US cities have broadly avoided investing in robust public transportation; most have only bus systems (if there’s any transit) and navigating them is annoying and inconvenient. This is the system that exists. The gravity of this system is therefore that cars are the default. Every human in this system feels like they need a car. Despite the many many reasons to avoid car ownership and usage, the current US system makes having a car is the most “reasonable” way to navigate the world. To resist having or using cars is possible, but you are fighting the gravity of the system. It takes a lot of work and you may constantly bump up against situations where your unreasonableness is frustrating.

How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

Copyright 2019, Melville House

Cultural Analysis

(2nd time reading)

Another system we can look at is the internet. The social web today has mostly shifted towards being controlled by a few large corporations; Meta owns Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, Google owns YouTube and email, ByteDance has TikTok and oh yeah there’s Discord. Everyone (it feels) has a smartphone, either Apple-made or one running Android, also owned by Google. These companies (and the companies they stole from/bought along the way) constitute the popular social internet today. If you’re connecting with friends via the internet, it’s almost assuredly via one of these pipes. And the thing about these companies is they have spent almost 2 decades figuring out ways to maximize the appeal of their products, with notifications, algorithms, gamification and every other trick they can find to keep us engaged. The gravity of this system is that it’s easier to pick up a screen and use these corporate pipes to fulfill our social needs rather than all sorts of other activities that might be more generative and satisfying. Our attention has been rewired to pull towards these internet products, whether or not that’s the way we want to use our time. (this is the thesis of Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing and that book is wonderful to pair with Natasha Schüll’s Addiction by Design to learn how designers use our psychology against us). Plenty of people resist the gravity of this system, but it requires a lot of intention and work.

Addiction By Design

by Natasha Dow Schüll

Copyright 2014, Princeton University Press

Tech Industry

To summarize: the gravity of a system is whatever actions/behaviors/patterns the system incentivizes most heavily. It’s not required; resistance is possible. Same with gravity the physical force! We build massive skyscrapers, we fly planes, hell we escape the atmosphere in rockets. Gravity always exists but if accounted for can be worked around.

My thinking about the gravity of systems emerged out of trying to map the way capitalism works. Perhaps maybe a more accurate way to say it is: I’m trying to map why capitalism is so fucking hard to get out of. We live in this world where money (the “capital” of capitalism) controls everything. Anyone who is interested in building the future depends on access to money, and therefore is constrained by capital. Those with the easiest access to capital also have the most freedom to shape the future as they want regardless of how good their ideas are. Because money derives its power from state-backing, the world we live in is this fun (sarcastic) place where states create and enforce monetary policy, and then are bound to create a national economy where the money is useful and capital flourishes.

This is the system we live in, and this system creates a lot of misery. Immense destruction. It prevents most humans from having a chance to flourish. A broad survey of the billions of people who live in capitalism suggests that the majority of them live in poverty, struggle to provide for basic needs, and have very little agency to change that. And yet, there is a whole class of people who have the money, who control the shape of the world, and who generally think things are ok. And while naming this system design helps clarify why capitalism is such a hard system to change or destroy, it does not help me understand why so many people find it hard to fathom anything outside of capitalism, myself included.

I believe that looking at the gravity of capitalism might be useful in creating space for imagining otherwise.

We cannot survive the future if it perpetuates the status quo. This statement feels very uncontroversial now; climate change is not some distant threat anymore (was it ever, in my lifetime? actually?), every single area of the earth is experiencing weather patterns and seasons that are unprecedented. We know that climate change is caused by greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases are present at their current levels because humans are profligate users of systems that create them. This is our reality, no matter how much some people find political value in believing otherwise.

Appallingly, stopping this system to make space for other futures is turning out to be ridiculously hard. We are barely making progress; every year the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to march upwards, with no decrease or otherwise positive change in direction.

I stay aware of this because I read a lot about climate change out of a morbid curiosity. A desperate curiosity? Perhaps both; I want to understand all the ways we are fucking up the future, but also I’m interested to know what options remain, what possibilities have not been foreclosed. ¹ There are many possibilities that have not been foreclosed.

As I read about climate change and making the future survivable, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: there are a lot of good reasons to fight for different futures. The essays, books, posts, art and conversations about climate change and the future of humanity talk about things like connection to the land, justice, peace, healing, space for joy, space for creativity, undoing trauma, building community, finding family, and so many other desirable things. Millions (billions?) of humans worldwide are longing for more than simply stopping climate change, they are yearning for a world that feels more livable. A place where the many species we share this planet with can also thrive. A world where water is drinkable, the soil is not filled with industrial chemicals, and we are not trapped in a system that is not genocidal in nature.

Unfortunately, the world we’ve built doesn’t see any of these futures as valuable. Because the human constructed world that exists today only understands “value” as “monetary value.” That’s it. That is the sole dimension we have for defining whether things are valuable or not. And this system has a very strong gravity.

The gravity of capitalism has somewhat consumed me the past year since the idea began forming, both because it gives me a sensible explanation for so many things that are confusing about the world, but also because it points me towards generative ideas about how to destroy capitalism. And lest you be confused about my politics, I would oh so love to see capitalism destroyed.

The gravity of capitalism is monetary value is the only actual value of anything. What I mean by this is: in the human world that exists today, the easiest thing possible in nearly all situations is to prioritize money. All other values and considerations are secondary. Money is primary and all systems (financial, legal, political, cultural) have been designed to enforce this primacy.

To fight for other values than monetary value is to fight against the gravity of the system. And because capitalism encompasses nearly all of human existence today, the gravity is very strong. This would not be too enlightening as an analysis except it is antithetical to how most humans operate and how most people believe the world works.

Here are recent examples of things I can remember people expressing frustration and confusion about:

Reducing staffing at hospitals and increasing shift times despite nurses and doctors already feeling overworked and stretched thin
Implementing AI tools that have a very measurable decrease in quality over the humans that previously did the task
Rezoning farm land to be used for more industrial development
Forests only being understood as “productive” if they are available for logging
Colleges moving to adjunct teachers instead of full time staff to manage costs, despite strong evidence it harms learning and teacher health.
probably dozens more

In each of these cases, there are numerous arguments against the decision; everything from it harms human and ecological health to it decreases the long term value of an organization. But those arguments don’t matter because they require the system to value things other than money and our system does not have that capacity. Humans have that capacity, but the people in power have built a system that lacks that capacity.

This gravity is artificial, to be clear. It is not a natural law that we are powerless to change. It is an emergent property of the systems humans in the west have built up over the past 400 years and exported to as much of the world as they could. But this artificial gravity is nonetheless very real and impacts us continually.

One large impact that I keep noticing is how this gravity affects the way we imagine the future. Every time a possibility opens, our imagination turns to money. Because the system only respects monetary value, we have learned to treat monetary value as proof of other values.

This is true on the small level; think of any time someone shares a hobby or a skill they have. The natural cultural response is: you should get paid for that. Whether it’s an encouragement to turn a hobby into a business, or a suggestion that a skill is good enough to charge for, we understand culturally that getting money for labor is the proper way to say “this labor is valuable.” That is the gravity of the system at work; capitalism has taught us what matters. But there are, of course, so many other ways that labor can be valued. There is the personal value; hobbies and skills might bring one joy, pride, satisfaction, growth, or connection. There is the communal value: using labor for the benefit of others shows love, builds community, opens up space for intimacy and reciprocity. It’s easy to keep going, finding all sorts of values dependent on what the labor is (cooking? nourishment is valuable! gardening? ecology is valuable!). All of these types of values exist and matter, but none of them matter in capitalism unless they can be translated into monetary value. Only then can capitalism understand the value and do our systems recognize the importance of whatever is under consideration.

This is also true on quite large levels. Think of major natural systems we are reliant on: oceans, forests, aquifers. These systems are innately valuable; the earth is inhabitable for humans because they have evolved over billions of years to create an atmosphere and planet that can support us. But in the last few hundred years, white humans in western countries have built up systems that are wreaking havoc on these natural systems beyond what they can repair.

In the oceans, we’ve filled up one with a massive garbage patch of plastic, and another is so affected by the warming earth that a key current is close to collapsing. The garbage patch is making one ocean inhabitable for the millions of species that live in it; if the North Atlantic current collapses the impacts will be felt across multiple continents (and not in a positive way). Even as we can name and validate these crises, our systems worldwide can’t address them. The oceans are uncountably valuable, but they are only valuable in capitalism for what we can extract out of them. Go read articles about the impact of a current collapse, or the impact of larger hurricanes generated by warming oceans, or the impact of extinction due to overfishing. The only way we know how to talk about the value of these impacts is in money, and the money is framed in terms of eventual damage to property or loss of revenue due to industries dying. Capitalism’s gravity prevents us from seeing the value of oceans outside of money.

Worldwide, we are destroying forests at increasing amount every year, which also increases surface heat, eradicates thousands of species, and weakens numerous dependent ecosystems. The Amazon is often in the news for rates of deforestation, but this problem is happening on every continent with forests, and there’s no clear sign that we have any way of changing it. Facing this reality is horrifying; it seems like it should be simpler to stop cutting down trees, to try and protect what exists. But the gravity of capitalism means it’s ridiculously complicated to stop: every tree that is still standing is money to be made. Trees that stay planted cannot generate money; all schemes that try to change this dynamic (Carbon Offsets being the most popular strategy) constantly struggles with the reality that under capitalism, a tree left standing is money left on the table. We can’t value forests in any other way, despite all the other types of value they have innately and culturally. And so we continue to exist in a world where forests disappear on every continent, felled under capitalism’s gravity.

Or consider fresh water aquifers; the way billions of people around the world access the water necessary for daily living. We’ve gotten really good at extracting water from under the earth, and because of that we’ve built up a bunch of industries that are extremely dependent on water; everything from industrial agriculture to lithium mining to bottled water (and much more). The result is that globally we are depleting fresh water reserves far faster than they recover, and because so much of our water usage results in contaminated water, we’re hindering future ability to have clean water as well. But here again we encounter the gravity of the system we’re in: water is only valuable for the ways it helps us make money; there is no clear pricetag (that generates interest or profit) on leaving the water in the ground. That just hinders all the other things that are very profitable! We know where the money is, and we have to follow it. When—in the very near future—we have much less access to clean water, we will understand the many different ways that water has value. But capitalism has decided that is a future problem, for now, the money beckons and the water flows.

As I’ve spent months thinking about the gravity of systems, naming this about capitalism has been helpful. When I see all the suicidal choices humans make at a systemic level I can at least make sense of them; I can see how the artificial gravity of capitalism is making those options the easiest to follow. In no way to I find our destructive, horrible system reasonable or defensible now; in fact naming this aspect of capitalism has increased my disdain for the system and those who defend it. This concept has helped me begin to make sense of two things I’ve struggled with for a long time: why is capitalism so sticky, and why is it so hard for us to imagine things outside of capitalism?

Earlier I proposed that capitalism’s gravity—erasing all value except monetary value— is antithetical to most humans operate and how most people believe the world works. I believe this is actually an insight into why capitalism is so sticky as a way of arranging the world. Most people live and operate inside value systems that are multi-dimensional. We are all the time making choices that stem from things we hold valuable beyond a monetary value; whether it’s out of community value (romance, family, friend groups, community orgs), conceptual value (beauty, challenge, excitement, etc), or any number of things we might personally value. We are all the time embracing the many dimensions that value can have, and often having to consider monetary value as a part of that (because money is often a limiting factor in decision making). For most humans, then, the gravity of capitalism is not all-encompassing. We are regularly factoring in that gravity, but making decisions based on a host of factors.

Most, but not all humans. Some humans embrace capitalism’s gravity wholeheartedly, choosing to accept the proposition that monetary value is the only important value. And those are the people who succeed the most in capitalism. I recently finished reading Brian Merchant’s excellent book Blood In The Machine about the Luddites. I learned a great deal about their fight and context, but one thing stood out to me: in 1812 at the dawn of the industrial age, there was already a gravity at work in the halls of power that monetary value is more important than anything else. The political powers of the day were much more inclined to side with the entrepreneurs (the capitalist class that Luddites were fighting) than the laborers (who, democratically speaking, were the much larger majority). This is because the state institutions were reliant on taxes, and the entrepreneurs were increasing the size of the economy (at the expense of the livelihoods of tens of thousands of workers). The gravity of this early capitalist economy was already against the bulk of the citizenry.

Today, this is still true; the people who most embrace monetary value as the sole way of navigating life are the ones who thrive in capitalism, and by doing so they gain power and influence. Because they align with the system the best, they gain the most power for influencing the shape of the system. This is another way of describing what Marx observed 150+ years ago in his writings. I recognize “capitalists are good at capitalism” is not a particularly shocking revelation, but that’s not the insight for me. What I keep coming back to is my belief that the majority of people do not live or act as if capitalism makes sense. Most people believe there is more to life than money, and they act that way constantly.

The stickiness of capitalism is—if my argument has any merit—in the fact that it is a system built upon greed, and the people who thrive in it are constantly modifying our political, judicial, and cultural systems to make the greed easier. I think at this point I could easily describe capitalism using metaphors like cancer, or bacterial infections, or hell, toxic chemicals being dumped into water. We have a lot of metaphors available for talking about the way some external entity spreads through a system. But as convenient as those metaphors feel; they miss something. Capitalists and capitalism are not external entities infecting or poisoning a system. We’re discussing humans building human systems here—human systems oriented around greed, too simple to handle the complexity of life, too poorly designed to do anything but destroy every good thing on earth.

This is why I keep coming back to gravity. Gravity exists, but it is not definitive. Just because the system makes a thing easiest, does not mean that thing is all-encompassing. I mean look around! Let’s just beat the hell out of this metaphor. On earth, gravity exists and impacts us all, but also millions of gallons of water float above us regularly. Birds spend a large part of their lives in the sky. Trees grow up, defying gravity until they don’t. In capitalism, the thing to focus on is not that it’s so all-encompassing, but that billions of humans ignore it regularly. We value things according to our own systems, and ignore money whenever we can. The problem has been that up until now, we have not fought to make those forms of value meaningful in systemic ways. The capitalists have defined value as money, and the gravity of the system perpetuates this simplistic definition, but most people ignore it, preferring a more robust understanding of value.

I think it’s time we start figuring out how to take these value systems—which are prevalent in so much decision making—and find ways to build systems that account for them, systems that can operate on value in more than just a single, simple dimension.

Which brings me to the last consideration of this piece; why is it so hard for us to imagine things outside of capitalism? As I’ve mulled over the gravity of capitalism and considered all the ways we are hurtling towards an unlivable planet for most of the species that exist on it, I keep coming back to the ways that I and the people around me generally operate as if capitalism weren’t the dominant system it is. We make so many choices that aren’t focused on money, or where money is a factor but not the sole factor. We treat money as a means to whatever ends we care about, not the end itself.

Capitalism is a system where money is the end. Humans and natural resources have been turned into the means which a minority of other humans use to get to that end. That minority has the system on their side right now, but the system was made by humans, and therefore it can be unmade by humans.

Understanding systems as having gravity has helped me ask better questions about them. Using this lens on capitalism has helped me build out the analysis in this essay. The metaphor of gravity has given me one final insight. If a system has a gravity and I’m curious in disrupting or destroying the system, then a reasonable test for whether those goals are being met is by asking: is the gravity the same here?

By which I mean, if I seek to imagine futures beyond capitalism, a really generative question to ask about potential futures is: what’s the gravity like there? I like this question because it takes my focus away from the thing I want to destroy (capitalism)—a goal of negation—and makes me focus on what I want to enable. A goal of creation.

If I remember that humans are already making myriad choices daily that operate outside the gravity of capitalism, I start to get excited about finding ways to make systems that allow for value beyond money. Systems where future access to clean water is valuable now. Systems where hobbies and skills don’t need to have monetary value in order to count. Suddenly imagining worlds beyond capitalism feels a lot easier to me because it involves imagining worlds where all the things we are already valuing in small ways become the things we are also valuing in large ways. I can do that—lots of people are doing that already!

As I’ve worked to get months of thinking into this essay, one idea keeps lingering that feels like the right place to end. I have proposed gravity as a useful metaphor for systems, and then sought to apply this metaphor to capitalism as both a way of talking about why it’s such a horrible system and also as a way of reframing the question of what else exists outside of capitalism. In thinking through all of this, I keep returning to a place we are all familiar with where the gravity of capitalism has been upended, where some other gravity is at work, where we don’t need to imagine a beyond capitalism because it’s already there for us to enjoy.

I keep thinking about public libraries.

Libraries in America are under attack from multiple angles. Many library systems are facing budget cuts (capitalism!) and many states are trying to make librarians liable for doing their job (by making information available to patrons). There’s a lot of shit happening. One could argue, persuasively in my opinion, that this is because libraries really fuck up capitalism.

Public libraries are public spaces where money holds an almost shocking lack of power. They are open to everyone. Many libraries have dropped fines, so there’s almost no financial barrier to access. They provide a multitude of services; access to information, access to entertainment, a climate-controlled space, all sorts of functions for citizen participation (passports, job application help, so on and so forth). The possibilities that a public library creates for members of the community are vast, and often don’t correlate to monetary value. There are a broad varieties of value captured in a library’s function. A public library—even the budget starved, under attack version that many of us have access to currently—is a window to what is possible beyond capitalism.

We should make more windows like this.

We cannot survive the future if it perpetuates the status quo. Capitalism’s gravity is pulling us towards an unlivable future, by creating a present controlled by systems that only understand monetary value. Every year the global economy grows; more monetary value is created, profits are achieved, pockets are lined. The cost of all that growth is widespread human misery, interrupted and weakened ecosystems, extinction and ongoing climate disturbances we are unable to prepare for. But capitalism’s gravity is artificial, not natural. It emerged out of systems we built, and even though those systems are quite powerful, they are not inevitable or immovable. Hopefully we can begin to look around and see all the ways that value is something much more complex than monetary value, and find ways to build systems that center all the things we care about and value the most. Better to try that than simply let capitalism collapse in on itself, in a black hole of our own making.

How Infrastructure Works

by Deb Chachra

Copyright 2023, Riverhead Books

Climate Change, Cultural Analysis

As an example, I recently read Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works and learned that the amount of energy that hits the earth each day from the sun is 10x the amount of energy that would be required for every human on earth to use as much energy as the average Canadian. I learned elsewhere that fossil fuels are super inefficient; something like 40% of the energy they generate is lost in the process of making it usable via an engine or power plant or whatever. “Green” energy sources are much more efficient, often losing less than 10% of generated energy. These two numbers mean… we could theoretically give every human on earth a “first-world” standard of living using only green energy. I had no idea this was even a possibility! ↩︎

Respecting Anxiety

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 08:42:28 -0500

For as long as I have memories, I’ve been an insomniac. Well before I hit puberty I remember long nights laying awake in bed, trying to fall asleep. Just an 8 year old kid struggling to rest. Sometime during that period I found a way to make those hours of insomnia productive, developing a habit that stayed with me well into adulthood: imagining all the tragedies I could fathom, then thinking through my best plan of action for dealing with that tragedy. House fires, home invasions, car wrecks, kidnapping, natural disasters, you name it. Anything my brain could imagine as a possibility. I would think about the awful thing, then try to sort out what signals I could use to make sense of the situation, find safety, and help others.

In my 30’s I realized that this habit was a form of anxiety relief. Rather than holding a generalized anxiety about a ton of potentially terrible things,child me was creating plans of action for various scenarios. Only in my 30’s did I really name the fact that I have high anxiety, and I always have. It was also then that I realized that child me had been pretty fucking smart about dealing with anxiety.

(Around the time that I had this self-realization I also figured out that the anxiety was the root cause of my insomnia. I realized that I would get lost in thinking and inadvertantly hold my breath for long periods of time. Once I learned to notice the slow breathing and intentionally focused on regular, deep breaths, I started falling asleep inside of 30 minutes every night.)

Anxiety is a real motherfucker, as anyone who has ever experienced it will tell you. While different people might experience it in different ways, for me it’s always felt like I’m very stressed but there’s no obvious stressor I can point to. My physiological state does not seem to match my conscious state, and that disconnect is what I understand to be “my anxiety.”

The past few years have involved a lot of personal work to better map how anxiety works in my body and to understand triggers that lead to it flaring up. One large example; in these years I’ve developed a personal yoga practice, and in so doing realized that my lower back was inaccessible. With the rest of my body, I could focus on a muscle and tense or relax it as desired. But not with my lower back; I just couldn’t mentally find those muscles to relax them or tense them at all. Slowly, over months I was able to bring them back into my perception and relearn how to integrate them into my conscious self. During that long process, what I realized is that they were inaccessible as an anxiety coping mechanism; when I had gone through some periods of super-high anxiety, my body seems to have dealt with it by shunting it all into my lower back and locking those muscles up as a way of processing the anxiety.

Yoga and integration meant that I was able to release some back pain I’d had for years, which was lovely. But the next time something in my life triggered some anxiety, what I immediately noticed was a return of the pain. The solution to the symptom was yoga, but the solution to the cause was understanding what in life was generating anxiety and addressing that.

Which brings me back to my childhood insomnia. I don’t love that I spent a few decades of my life struggling to sleep and lacking rest, but I do think that I stumbled into a pretty great method for dealing with my anxiety. As a little kid, I intuitively tried to take a generalized feeling (stress about a lot of scary things that seemed somewhat possible) and turn it into a specific course of action for a single scary thing. This process, repeated over years of work, helped me slowly reduce the number of things in life that felt unknown, while also helping me build skills of perception and awareness about the world around me.

Which brings me to the thing that’s been on my mind this week as I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety from coworkers as we map out 2024. I feel like the topic of anxiety often (ironically?) generates a good bit of anxiety itself. It’s a mental health topic. High anxiety is the same as high stress—if it continues unaddressed for a long time, it’s very bad for your health. Anxiety is thus widely recognized as a problem to resolved.

I don’t disagree with this, but I worry sometimes that we understand “problem to be resolved” as “symptoms to be addressed.” In this frame, if you’re dealing with a lot of anxiety, the solutions are often self-care oriented. Do yoga, meditation, maybe even take medication. Those responses will 100% address the symptoms of anxiety to some degree and often are necessary to create space for other options.

But only pursuing self-care avoids asking the question I’ve come to believe is most important for me: what is this anxiety telling me?

Little kid me laid in my bed at night, staring out the window and thinking about my house plan and how I would navigate the entire house if it were on fire. I tried every path, hit dead ends, and tried new paths. I thought about how smoke would move through the house and tried to think through what that required me to do (I mapped where my shirts were and how to get to the sink while crawling with my eyes closed, these were extremely detailed plans of action). In all of this, what I was doing was treating a generalized anxiety about “what if my house catches on fire” as a real risk, then figuring out what my anxiety needed to know to relax.

I respected my anxiety as a signal. As having a cause worth investigating. As being a helpful thing, not a harmful thing.

Realizing how helpful this was as a kid (even if done at the wrong times, and with unhelpful results due to the insomnia) has helped me be more intentional about anxiety as an adult.

When I see my coworkers’ anxiety spike, I no longer treat that as a problem to resolve at the symptoms level. Instead, I respect that the intelligent people I’m working with have life experiences and knowledge that is leading them to be stressed about the current situation. Anxiety is high, which means we need to sort through the situation.

Sometimes this just means they are lacking necessary information. Incomplete context can generate stress. But sometimes it means that the situation is bad, and we need to intervene in whatever ways are possible to modify the situation. Addressing the symptoms will not work, it is only by identifying the root causes and changing them that we can actually resolve the anxiety.

To do that, you have to trust that anxiety is a useful signal, and be curious about it. Thanks to little kid me, I am relearning old lessons this year, and finding that I feel far more empowered to change situations to avoid anxiety at all. It’s nice.