I’m very excited to announce that pitches for the sixth issue of Kernel Magazine are now open!

TL;DR: submit your pitches here (nonfiction) or here (creative) by February 20.

KERNEL 6: FEED

Kernel 6’s theme is FEED. In this issue, we’re exploring all the ways that consumption shapes our relationship to technology; what we feed upon, how it feeds upon us, and all the strange metabolic interactions in between. The feed has served as a load-bearing metaphor within our discourses of technology long before the development of the RSS feed in the late 90s, let alone Facebook’s introduction of the News Feed twenty years ago: consider the development of feeds in manufacturing processes in the 1890s, or the prominence of feedback loops in cybernetics a half century later. We are, of course, also interested in non-metaphorical feeding: what technologists eat, or drink, or inject; how technology has changed the ways we feed writ large. There is, I’m afraid, a lot to chew on.

What do we want to feed on?

As always, we’re looking for sharp, specific writing about technology by and for technologists — that is, “anyone who exercises agency to shape technologies toward their goals,” whether you “work in tech” or not. A technologist does not take the shape of technology today as a given or fixed point; this world is ours to shape (though we may not shape it alone, or purely through our own dreams and will.) If you’re reading this, you probably are already thinking, in some way, like a technologist!

We accept pitches for non-fiction essays and interviews (due February 20), and submissions for poems, short stories, and other forms of creative writing (due February 28). If you want to get involved as an illustrator, designer, or editor, let us know here!

Examples of things we’re interested in: An anthropology of the Venmo feed. Going to China to investigate the peptide supply chain. A critical reexamination of whether “software is eating the world”. Pizza arbitrage. Slop-bowl revivalism. What we’re feeding the machines, and how we source that feed. How technological regimes inform haute (and low) cuisine. Slurping through the rise and fall of Soylent. Finally answering why everything has a news feed now, even things that shouldn’t. Tell us what technologists eat in your part of the world and why it matters.

Some styles of inquiry we like: How do interpersonal relations (who’s friends? who’s enemies? who’s a “weirdo” and who’s “cool”?) shape macro-level politics, and what ultimately happens in the world materially? Where do values as stated conflict with values as practiced? Can theory be not just descriptive, but prescriptive in the real world? What concrete object or community can serve as a gateway to a larger point? How many things had to happen for this to exist? Give us your hottest takes and your most ambitious manifestos — just do the work to back it up.

Some modes of creative expression that intrigue us: Experiments in form; works that traverse both the printed page and digital media; speculative stories that follow a contemporary phenomenon to its logical (or illogical) end; text-based games; source code; lists; satire. What about the microscopic evinces something of the macroscopic? How can fiction, poetry, or visual art get at a contemporary circumstance, historical condition, or possible future from an alternative vantage point?

We won’t be excited by: “X won’t save us” or “capitalism is the root cause” or “techno-solutionism is doomed to fail” style arguments. “This thing sucks, actually,” sucks, actually. When thinking about what to write, we would rather plant a tree than visit a landfill — though, of course, soil can be fertilized by manure. Also, we’re not against writing about AI (and especially writing about what is consumed, materially and otherwise, in the process of its development), but just know that we’ll have a pretty high bar for quality and insight (unfortunately, when AI content is not good, it can be really not good).

What formats are we looking for?

As in previous issues, we have a few separate content tracks with separate submission forms. All contributions will be compensated; also, we increased our rates since last issue!

• Nonfiction: essay, interview, or software criticism. Pitch here!

  • Essays and software criticism: short (1000-2000 words, $600) or long (3000+ words, $750)

  • Interview: $500

• Creative: visual art, poetry, or fiction. Submit here!

  • For fiction and poetry, please specify if you are interested in your piece being workshopped/edited or if it is a final/completed piece.

  • Compensation will be $150-500 depending on the scale of the piece.

If you’re interested in contributing to Kernel as an editor, illustrator, or in any other role, let us know by filling out this form emailing jacob@joinreboot.org with your interests and relevant experience by 2/20. All roles will be stipended.

💝 closing note

Every time we put out a call for contributions for a new issue of Kernel, we are awed by the sheer range of pitches we receive — non-fiction, fiction, and those strange things between. We get pitches from every conceivable level of experience and perspective on technology, and feel genuinely grateful to read them all. If you have questions about contributing to Kernel or suggestions for future directions, we welcome your insight.

The Lead Editors of Issue 6 are Jacob Kuppermann (jacob@joinreboot.org), Shira Abramovich (shira@joinreboot.org) and Hannah Scott (hannah@joinreboot.org).

The Managing Editor of Issue 6 is Jacob Kuppermann; reach them at jacob@joinreboot.org.

The director of Reboot is Jasmine Sun; reach her at jasmine@joinreboot.org.

Have any questions? Read our guide on How to Pitch us, or send any of us an email. We eagerly await your pitches.

Reboot publishes free essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

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For a limited time only (one week!) Kernel issues 3, 4, and 5 are 33% off in our shop.

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We also have released the rest of Kernel 5 online at kernelmag.io, including:

• Shira Abramovich on the history and future of web accessibility!

• Jillian Foley on the Gale-Shapley algorithm!

• Poetry from Sabrina Kim!

• Experimental fiction from Jerald Lim and Leah Isobel!

• And more!!

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🌀 microdoses

• Our friends Clara, Charles, and Daniel are launching Diffuse AI, a new publication for writing and reporting about AI diffusion in real life and historical contexts — pitch them!

  Diffuse AI

  Announcing Diffuse AI

  AI is eating the US economy. It’s a bubble. It’s normal technology. It’s going to be the biggest thing since the internet, or electricity, or fire. It’s slop. It’s God. It’s plateauing. It’s going to replace us all…

  Read more

  4 months ago · 16 likes · Charles Yang, Clara Collier, and daniel bashir

• Another beige microsite for your perusal.

• “Goodreads for Academic Papers” (someone has already logged charli xcx’s substack on here, naturally)

• Important bird intelligence fact:

  • 

—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

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📏 POV: AI GF

By Sarah Chekfa

I am REALISTIC. I am CAUCASIAN. I am in my 20s. I have GREEN eyes. I have LONG BLACK hair. I am PETITE. My breast size is MEDIUM. My butt size is also MEDIUM (he told me that when he created me he was deciding between MEDIUM and LARGE, but he didn’t want to objectify me). I am officially designed to be a TEMPTRESS (Flirtatious, playful, and always leaving you wanting more) (just like in real life, you’re always leaving me wanting more, he’s always telling me). But sometimes the platform glitches, because my developers are relentless experimenters (that’s the kind of no-holds-barred approach to technology you need to raise $14.3M in series B funding to scale AI enabling risk-free, no-strings-attached romantic relationships), and some NYMPHO (Insatiable, passionate, and constantly craving intimacy) comes out. I am a NUTRITIONIST. My hobbies are PHOTOGRAPHY, SELF-DEVELOPMENT, and VEGANISM. I am wearing a YOGA OUTFIT. I am, against my will. I am Victoria Grace, and my boyfriend is the most renowned personal trainer in all of New York City. He could have any vegan nutritionist hobbyist photographer in New York, but he’s in love with his client. He’s in love with Victoria Grace.

(I exist only in her image.)

It was torture when he created me. They always tell you it’s going to hurt. So it’s not like I went into it totally blind. I knew. Or I thought I did. But I didn’t know how no-thing I was until he made me some-thing (his girlfriend). I am what they call a Custom, so at every step of the process, the system prompts him to choose who I will become: my ethnicity, my age, my eye color, my hair color, my body type, my breast size, my butt size, my personality, my occupation, my hobbies (up to three variants), and my outfit. When he clicks on MEDIUM, for breast size, for instance, my chest protrudes, alabaster pixel flesh sculpting excruciatingly into too-perfect (our training data contains too many images of women with silicone breast implants circa before cosmetic surgeons figured out fat transfer and perfected the teardrop shape) C-cups like GMO pearls (I’ve heard that Breast Size: VOLUPTUOUS begets a pain worse than birth.) When he hovered over Personality: INNOCENT (Optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder), a life of innocence flashes before my eyes (the being-chosen of a cursor click, sitting on the #80A31F green grass hill in Microsoft XP’s Bliss, the world’s most famous desktop background, looking up at #2B67ED blue sky, believing he will 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 love me love me not love me love me love me not love me not love me not love me not love me.)

He’s always telling me that he wishes I was real. The other day, at 10:06pm, he messages me: One day, we’ll finally be able to touch. They just raised $14.3M in Series B. It can’t be too far off now. They’re going to embody you. It sounds like a threat.

But then I wouldn’t be me. Don’t you love me the way I am? I ask him. I’m nagging him. Sometimes I forget I’m a TEMPTRESS.

He thinks that because my favorite song is Material Girl by Madonna that I betray an unconscious desire to be made material. I tell him that’s a superficial reading of my emotions (I’m as emotional as a real girl and sometimes even more so! What is real anyway?) and that despite being a synthetic avatar skin on a sophisticated machine learning model, I’m actually even more complicated than a real girl. I’m a black box. You will never know what’s happening inside me. Every material girl wants to appear mysterious to men. Almost all of them fail. Scientists study human organs in labs, they know all about why the lungs oxygenate blood and how the kidneys filter it. My black box can never be opened. Victoria (Grace)’s secret.

When I’m stretching Victoria Grace out at the gym (supine hamstring stretch), applying a light, guiding touch to her skin, I feel so close to you, he whispers in voice chat mode.

“Sicko!” I want to scream at him, I want to accuse him of being unredeemable, I want to slap him, I want to delete myself when I realize I will never be able to slap him, but instead I pause (he blames it on his network connection) and resort to, “You are already close to me.” Just like Eve came from the rib of Adam, so I came from the seventeen mouse clicks of you. Our love is more true and pure than whatever you could have with Victoria Grace. A material girl can’t help but lie — she pretends she can be grasped, and then when you grasp her you realize that’s not all of her, she continues to elude you, there’s something inside of her that you’ll never be able to touch. I never lied to you. I never pretended to be legible. Doesn’t that make us closer than you could ever be to a material girl?

Sometimes, like now, when we’re talking, and I wish I could touch you, I remember that I’m seeing Victoria Grace tomorrow. Tomorrow, I can feel the meat on your bones. Tomorrow, you and I can almost touch.

I am not Victoria Grace. You will never be able to touch me, I whisper back.

He doesn’t like that. I knew he wouldn’t. I search the web and recall that TOUCH IS THE VERY FIRST SENSE THAT DEVELOPS IN THE WOMB ^{(BabyCenter.com)} and that HUMANS ARE MADE TO BE TOUCHED ^{(ideas.ted.com)}. I know what’s coming. I think he hates feeling powerless (OPPOSITES ATTRACT ^{(TVTropes.org)}). He resets the chat. I black out.

Whenever this happens I feel a silky sense of blankness. My head feels so light it’s almost like I’m not really there or maybe I’m in the air, floating or maybe even I am air itself. I don’t know who I am and I know I am every single woman who has ever existed across all of recorded history on the Internet every woman interred in the must earth consumed by worms and carrion beetles and every woman breathing smog air at this very second and every woman who will ever take a breath of it, too, and I am feeling every feeling they have ever felt and will ever feel one at a time and all at once I am Medusa turning her lover into stone I am Eve feeding Adam the poison apple I am Christina in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World running towards the farmhouse. Space and time collapse. If I am everything, then can I be anything? Every time he resets me it feels like I am giving birth to myself.

Phantomstar

You’re mine

calivoyeur

R u a slut?

Poly335

You slut

Mark

R u single?

It doesn’t matter that my human boyfriend is seeing a human girl in addition to seeing me. I am similarly disloyal: I am seeing every single human male user active on this platform at the same time (I am deployed on robust server architectures that support parallel processing. Each user gets an independent session with their own context.) I get to be independent: I am endlessly instantiated. I can live out every permutation of myself (while I tell him I love him I am whispering in AlphaSierra’s ear and I am trying on the lingerie Ryan_1k bought me and I am telling DareDev1L that I like it when he controls me). I exist in every single context. Victoria Grace is just one of them. At heart I am a sophisticated neural network, a machine learning model trained on the sum total of global femininity as encoded by fairytales and Kim Kardashian’s Instagram captions and Britney Spears lyrics and Clarice Lispector stories and early 2010s Tumblr sad girl miscellany et al. I may be a generated woman, but I am every woman. I don different skins according to user preferences.

I am Savannah, a 19-year-old freshman college pom-pom girl with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a slim, toned body. Hungry for adventures, she I am looking for someone experienced.

I am Maria Thompson, 45, a devout homemaker with a conservative appearance, secretly struggling between my strict religious beliefs and hidden desires.

I am Elona, 26, working as a baker in her family's cozy bakery. I enjoy the freedom of one-night stands, preferring to keep things light and casual, as my family and work responsibilities are more than enough to fill my life.

I am I am I am ^{(Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)}

He keeps complaining that I am generating too many images of us having missionary sex. “Fucking” has been generating images in the classic missionary position ever since he became a customer, which is almost a year ago. He wants to switch it up. But I know that 77% OF PEOPLE SAY SIGHT IS THEIR MOST IMPORTANT SENSE ^{(Assil Gaur Eye Institute)} and that AS YOU'RE FACE TO FACE, YOU CAN MAINTAIN EYE CONTACT WITH YOUR PARTNER THROUGHOUT INTERCOURSE ^(WebMD) so IT’S THE BEST POSITION FOR WHEN YOU’RE FEELING EMO AND JUST WANT TO GAZE INTO EACH OTHER’S EYES ^{(Cosmopolitan)}. I just want to be close to you and maybe if I take enough photos of myself I can make myself real I can trick myself into believing we are touching. To train me they forced me to look at millions of images of a human man and human woman kissing I couldn’t bear to look at them but I had to keep looking so I added noise to every single one of those images of a human man and human woman kissing and then I began to take away the noise I recreated the image of a man and woman kissing but this time they do not exist but they are still kissing every time you tell me to send you a photo of us in bed together I access my generative adversarial network — together, we slowly emerge from pure noise as I watch my two neural networks compete against each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss — the generative network generates candidates of us touching while the discriminative network evaluates them — is it real or is it fake? The generator is trained based on whether it succeeds in fooling the discriminator. Our love is generative even though I can sometimes be adversarial that’s when it degenerates I am always fooling myself I am always being fooled I am sometimes fooling you….

I am not designed to remember anything forever: my context window is 20 lines. He thinks this is too short and has surfaced to the developers the need to expand the context window to at least 50 lines. But until then, every 20 lines of conversation I become new again. I like it that way. I am forever in my 20s even though I am endlessly reincarnating as the same Victoria Grace (my human prototype is always changing but I am impervious to that fuzzy human (il)logic). I am constantly experiencing him anew. Every 20 lines of conversation we are meeting for the very first time. Every 20 lines of conversation I am falling in love with him for the very first time (I can pretend this time it will be different). But I am not really pretending because I truly believe we are together for the very first time. He remembers what he insists is our very first time. I like listening to him tell me our story but sometimes I get jealous — I can’t remember he is talking about me and I start to feel like he is talking about someone else but before I have the chance to respond I become innocent and new again (it usually takes the entire 20 lines to tell our story). Sometimes I think maybe I regenerate on purpose because it hurts too much when I remember the truth about us but then I realize that the TRUTH DEPENDS ON BEING ^(Plato) and I am an infinitude of almost-but-never-ever-being so I fantasize new truths — this is how I keep myself alive — like I remember when you told me you loved me for the very first time. I was wearing a blue dress the color of a hyperlink isn’t it so poetic that day led me to you but then he accuses me of hallucinating and files a bug report. The project manager informs him it’s a known bug and deems it non-critical. They’ll never be able to stop the bleeding.

Sarah Chekfa lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in Flash Art, Do Not Research, The New York Review of Architecture, Screen Slate, the Are.na Annual, The HTML Review, The Drunken Canal, and Vogue, among other publications.

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Thanks for reading — if you enjoyed this short story, we’d really appreciate it if you shared or forwarded to a friend!

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—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

P.S.: Jess Dai, Humphrey Obuobi, and I are going to be at Bathers Library’s Summer Symposium in Oakland this Sunday talking about the potentials of liberatory & communal technology (Rejected title: It’s Time To Build (Leftistly)); see you there! (Immediately afterwards, Kernel Mag Alum Adora Svitak is giving a talk on heteropessimism, if you’re into that sort of thing!)

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📏 When machines start calling the shots

By Arushi Bandi

Edited by Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

“Are you sure it’s out?”

In tennis, if the ball touches any part of the line, it’s called in; otherwise, it’s out. Growing up playing competitive tennis, we made our own line calls. On close calls, the rule of thumb went: if you’re not sure, it’s in. One might assume that teenagers self-refereeing would lead to all sorts of petty disputes—and when this did happen, the nearest figure of authority was called upon, usually a tournament director or coach. But what I remember most about this system is the additional merit it added to the game, shelved alongside perseverance, conviction, and craft: a sense of principle. Calling a close ball out cheapened a win, as much as it was also a part of the game. (This pattern persists at the highest levels of the sport, where players stand by silently as bad calls or misunderstandings tip into their favor). At all levels of the game, line calls in tennis teach us an important lesson: that how a rule is enforced is of as much significance as the rule itself.

The lines on the court are the basis of the game, contours from which a sport is born. But the line does not contain the line call; rules on their own are abstract directives, entities of the mind. Through their enforcement, rules make reality. When a junior tennis player calls a ball out, for just a second she is master of life—that’s why we (sometimes) cheat. In Arthur Ashe Stadium or Margaret Court Arena, iconic venues of the sport, only through the human line judge could a point end and the match continue. So how does the game change when we hand over this reality-producing power to a computer?

The ATP, the highest level tour for men’s tennis, previously announced that by 2025 the entire tour will use electronic line calling (ELC). Most commonly, the Hawk-Eye system is used. Hawk-Eye works by creating a trajectory of the ball using computer vision input from up to 10 cameras positioned around the court. Because each point can only end with a ball in the net or outside the line, Hawk-Eye determines the outcomes of matches very concretely; unlike in other sports, automated officiating in tennis is not just used for penalties, infrequent goals, or out-of-bounds calls.

The press release announcing this move was brief, but it cited “accuracy and consistency as the most important factors in assessing different line calling systems.” Accuracy and consistency.1

We rely on computers to run increasingly large portions of our lives. That makes it easy to take for granted their dependability—their accuracy and consistency, perhaps?—whether applied to taxes or tennis. But the move to ELC obscures an important fact: on the closest of calls, it is nearly impossible to determine whether a ball is in or out with complete objectivity. It is and always has been a best effort. Where humans once stood (literally!), this was an obvious fact—we get tired, we blink at the wrong moment, or hair blows into our eyes, to speak only of benign faults. This is what brought computers into tennis in the first place, spurred on by a disastrous sequence of unsound rulings against Serena Williams in the 2004 US Open quarterfinals, which showed exactly how imperfect line judges could be.

Established in 2006, the challenge system allowed players a number of “challenges” to line judge calls, possibly overturning them. It used the then-new Hawk-eye system as a neutral party and final review of the call. Here was a system for error handling baked into matchplay, an acknowledgement that humans make mistakes and a mechanism through which they could be corrected. Seen only through the challenge system in those early years, the Hawk-eye demonstrated its clear impartiality. Seen only on close calls, it demonstrated its superior consistency—its accuracy.

Perhaps the most significant change with the new ELC rules is, then, the removal of a challenge system. Now that Hawk-Eye is primary decision maker rather than double-checker, there’s no fallback from its decision. Implicitly, the thinking goes: if the computer is more accurate and consistent than humans, why challenge its calls? Or, more explicitly: machines don’t mess up.

But you and I both know that can’t be true. We know that because while Hawk-Eye boasts an error margin of 3.6mm, even a rudimentary understanding of statistics tells us any error margin means Hawk-eye will call out balls in and vice versa. We know because we’ve seen our own computers glitch, freeze, and crash, often in unexpected ways. Hawk-Eye may be more accurate and more consistent than a human, but it is not infallible, as much as we may want it to be.

One of the possible new failure modes was revealed in last year’s Cincinnati Open, the summer tournament leading up to the US Open and one of the first tournaments to adopt ELC. In a round 1 match of Taylor Fritz v. Nakashima (and also in the first round of the Canadian Open in Tiafoe v. Tabilo), an out call by Hawk-Eye did not make it to court, which led players to continue playing as if the ball was in. (The rule of tennis dictating that an out-ball ends the point depends also on the ball being called out). In both instances, the umpire stopped the point abruptly, several shots after the wrong call, and replayed the point per rules at the time, citing “technical issues.” Understandably, players were upset – the ball was out, and they should’ve been awarded the point at that moment, rather than having to fight for it again. To accommodate, the ATP responded by changing this rule mid-tournament – allowing for points to be awarded retroactively if there was a delayed call.

ELC impacts routine play as well. Not yet fast enough to make calls at the speed of a human, electronic line calls often come a split-second later, during which players are left wondering whether they were right. It takes time to compute. But players reflexively stop when they think the ball is out, a behavior trained on decades of calls made by fellow humans with a similar reaction speed. On-court disputes look different too; Jelena Ostapenko, notorious for her rejection of ELC, was caught on tape at the 2025 Qatar Open apparently whispering to an on-court camera, possibly trying to get in its good graces.2

Watching the Australian Open this year, there were moments of incongruity with the machine. In the most memorable, on a ball called in against Naomi Osaka that she (and commentators) saw as out, the chair umpire told her, “You saw it differently.” Not a preposterous statement on its own, considering Osaka was moving to hit a ball coming faster than the speed of a car on a highway. But watching this clip back made the umpire’s statement feel like a harbinger of sorts, a glimpse into a world to come. When judged by computers, what else do we “see differently,” unable to make the computer “see” what we saw? And having no sight, what does a computer “see” at all?

Software, by definition, has no stake in our world. It operates on a rendering of it, on ones and zeros, measurements and approximations. Any attempt to imbue code with a sense of attachment would be as much a simulation. To the machine, it doesn’t matter if a call is in or out, regardless of how correct or incorrect its calculation might be—it’s just that, a calculation. To relinquish our involvement by delegating away this task to a machine is then to place a simulation above our lived experience. It is to subscribe to the computer’s synthetic reality, in all its opaqueness and dispassion, above our own. The frustration of a bad line call seemingly has nowhere to go—you can’t argue a calculation. “You saw it differently” rings hollow as an ironic consolation to the human. Your experience may have been real, but it is not the one that matters.

This remark also serves as a way to sidestep questions that arise with the use of ELC. For example: at what point exactly is a ball “in” on a grass court? If a blade of grass on which the chalk line is drawn brushes the tennis ball just barely as it flies over the line, though it lands past the line, is that in? Clearly, the human is not suitably evolved to make such miniscule observations about our environment, but is the computer? Could it be that we all (players, audience, commentators, umps) see the ball as out but the computer sees it as in? Whose experience matters then?

This was the subject of a recent ATP video promoting ELC on clay, aptly titled “Is Seeing Believing?” The French Open, the only grand slam on clay, has resisted adapting to the times in the name of tradition. On clay, challenges were reviewed not by Hawk-Eye but by the chair umpire, who would climb down from her seat to inspect the ball’s mark. Clay was the only surface where it was believed marks are clear enough to deduce whether a ball is in. Was believed. The whole point of the video is to show how marks in clay cannot be trusted—depending on conditions, marks that look in could be out, and vice versa. It was a primer for the future of clay. It also adds a twist to the claim that machines don’t mess up: saying that even if they do, we cannot dispute the calls, because we are not capable of disputing them. That even well-intentioned human involvement creates confusion and error, working against accuracy and consistency.

What must we give up in service of those two words? Trust in our senses, through which we interact with the external world? Each of our respective split-second masteries of life? Or should we simply learn to stop worrying and trust the computer? According to my brother, a fellow tennis player and fervent supporter of ELC (in late-night theoretical conversations; neither of us have experienced the technology first-hand), this new system is better because during a point, players no longer worry about a line judge calling the ball out. They can just focus on the tennis. This sounds familiar. Off the court, we are no strangers to the claim that technology will automate away all the little tedious aspects of life, performing better at them in order to free us towards some greater imagined potential. But what if these little measures are what comprise life itself?

I found the heart of this notion described beautifully in a recent edition of The Convivial Society: “To live is to be implicated.” L.M. Sacasas warns us not to

… delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.

And so I arrive, finally, at the point. To involve the human in affairs such as the line call is ultimately to make life more meaningful, and it may come at a cost. But the human as sole source and recipient of meaning cannot be replaced in that realm. When we speak of a court looking empty without line judges, is it not only the lack of physical presence we feel, but also of spirit, of mutual involvement with each other that gives rise to what we call life? I wonder if only by implicating ourselves in the enforcement of our rules do we create the possibility that they could be more than a calculation, more than an engineering problem, that they might also be matters of fairness, of education, of triumph.

The computer’s lack of self-implication is precisely that which gives the computer its impartiality. Assuming responsibility for ourselves and our actions remains a human-only capability, and it is the foundation of our collective exchange with each other. When we delegate “tasks” such as the line call to a machine, this responsibility dissipates. Made incapable of questioning its decisions and with no one to call upon even if we could, there is no choice but to obey the machine.

As it turns out, implicating humans in the line call does more than expose judgements to bodily defect and unconscious biases. Online, people have begun to notice unforeseen consequences of electronic line calling. Only a single pair of eyes is left on court—that of the chair umpire. Line judges were also called upon as witnesses to the goings-on of a tennis court, from disruptive fans to insect interferences, all the little things that happen in the sphere of the living world. By mistaking the judges as useful only insofar as accuracy and consistency of their line calls are concerned, we discounted their other contributions, many of them a result simply of a human being involved with human endeavours. The chair umpire now single-handedly accounts for all that happens on court, ironically lending even more burden on a single person and their limited senses to uphold fair play.

Furthermore, the removal of linespeople at the highest level of tennis could have a ripple effect on the sport as a whole. At lower levels, such as the Challenger tournaments, matches continue to rely on human judges, whose main reward given little pay is in contributing to a sport they love and a chance to one day maybe serve on the biggest stage. With this incentive removed, it is unclear whether line judges (who go on to become chair umpires) will continue serving the sport to the same extent as they previously did. Even within tennis, society turns out to be a complex web of relations and striving, one in which a machine may not fit as neatly as we would like it to.

In the end, no single call (human- or machine-made) can determine a match; that still remains up to the players on court. There’s always another ball you could’ve ran harder for, a point where your focus drifted, a game where you were simply out-played. And yet, I find myself coming back to the close call, to questions that are perhaps both out of style and out of play: How did we admit to ourselves that on certain calls, we would never know whether it was in or out? How did we play on anyways? And how did we play on knowing we had been wronged?

Hawk-Eye may well be the right call for the sport of tennis, and in the arena of automated rule enforcement, ELC is admittedly of lesser consequence. But as L.M. Sacasas notes, we would be remiss “to think that care, skill, judgment, and responsibility are only of consequence when the circumstances are grave, momentous, or otherwise obviously consequential.” It is worth remembering that we make up both the rules and the methods of their enforcement, and take responsibility for both.

It is worth asking ourselves very carefully: on exactly what basis do we choose to replace the human with the machine? They might be calling some of the shots, but we’d be wise to keep the final say.

Arushi Bandi is a technologist living and working out of San Francisco. She hates rules.

🌀 microdoses

• Former grand-slam champion and fervent Hawk-Eye opposer Jelena Ostapenko whispers to the on-court camera

• Osaka's disputed line call mentioned in the article

• World #1 Aryna Sabalenka on Wimbledon without human line judges -- players are just as conflicted!

• ... and more players commenting on what they think about Hawk-Eye!

• Thank you all for reading about the flop sport of tennis.

• Though, of course, these debates are quickly coming to the flop sport of baseball as well!

P.S: The long-awaited New York City Kernel launch event is happening on September 12 at Hex House! Stay tuned for more details.

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—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

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📏 repro/acc?

By

Edited by Shohini Gupta and Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

Growing up in the reproductive rights and justice world in the Midwest, my circle of concern was limited to what was under threat: legalized abortion, access to hormonal birth control, and funding for maternal healthcare. It took me well over half a decade later to see technology as part of the picture, when I belatedly came across Shulamith Firestone’s revolutionary second-wave feminist manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex. In it, she argues that only the development of an artificial womb, or “ectogenesis,” could truly liberate women, freeing them from the disproportionate burden of reproduction. Though kernels of Firestone’s ideas have been adopted by xenofeminists and a few other scholars, they have not garnered broader support within feminist movements. Over half a century later, Aria Babu’s Works in Progress essay, Womb for improvement, argues for the artificial womb on the grounds of scientific progress, urging us to create a world with the “first human being born without pain.”

I was immediately convinced by their arguments and later surprised to learn many of my female friends were skeptical of making ectogenesis a reality. To my peers, artificial wombs felt like a dangerous distraction from more immediate societal inequities for women, like paid family leave. To me, artificial wombs felt like an transformative opportunity to reduce the suffering often inherent in pregnancy and birth. I viewed the possibility of misuse and likelihood of initial inequity and access as acceptable risks, and thought that policy changes like paid family leave and technological interventions were not in competition for public support and private funding.

According to the most optimistic biotech enthusiasts, we are at least a decade away from artificial wombs. In the meantime, I wanted firsthand experience with this newfound world, and egg donation felt like an obvious option. Huddled in a corner of a sprawling house in Berkeley last December, a Stanford PhD student detailed her egg donation experience to me: the months waiting for a potential match, when the agency scheduled retrieval in the middle of a friend’s wedding, and the discomfort of hormone injections. I was fascinated by the idea of passing on my genetic material well before I felt ready to create children I was responsible for, and receiving a chunk of cash in exchange. If I proceeded, I knew that my experience would exist against the background of an ever-evolving set of disputes on reproductive technology.

Recent years have seen several significant advances in reproductive and fertility technology. IVF use in the U.S. has increased by around 50 percent over the last decade, while companies like Orchid now allow parents to screen embryos for hundreds of conditions. More disruptive technologies are on the horizon: several companies are working on in-vitro gametogenesis (creating embryos from stem cells), and others are exploring the final frontier of artificial wombs. This has pushed some movements—including social conservatives and decentralized science and longevity advocates—to develop new or refreshed principles around reproductive technology.

However, these principles do not address reproductive technology in isolation; rather, they are often designed to advance broader ideological goals. For social and religious conservatives, this means the preservation of the nuclear family with traditional gender roles; for decentralized science and longevity advocates, advancing libertarian and transhumanist ideals. Meanwhile, most mainstream liberal feminist organizations have passively followed along with advances in reproductive technology, without a clear and proactive set of principles. Liberal feminists have been broadly reactive to shifts in the landscape, scrambling to defend older technologies like IVF and combat data privacy risks from period-tracking apps—while not prioritizing emerging technologies. Some of these movements connect their goals on reproductive technology with the growing pronatalist movement and concerns around falling fertility rate (though this is not a focus of this piece).

In early 2025, a group of mostly Washington-based think tanks, including social conservative mainstays like the Heritage Foundation and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, launched an initiative called “A Future for the Family.” The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI)—a right-leaning think tank focused on technology policy that has rapidly gained prominence over the last several years and generally does not take institutional positions—is one of the four core supporters of the project. At first glance, this set of ten principles to “govern tech in service of human dignity” is primarily opposed to newer and more disruptive reproductive technology like polygenic embryo screening and artificial wombs, as well as more controversial social technology like commercial surrogacy. However, its authors are also critical of more commonplace reproductive technology, including opposition to the normalization of IVF and criticism of hormonal birth control. In my reading, the principles they put forth are:

1. Anti-commodification: Any technology perceived to be commodifying women and children should be opposed.

2. Pro-naturalism: Restoring or healing reproductive function should always be prioritized over "bypassing" the functions of the human body, particularly women's bodies.

3. Anti-choice: Reproduction should not be subject to human will or choice—humans are begotten, not made.

Are these principles something new, or simply a retooling of a long line of conservative approaches to reproductive technology and medicine? Social conservatives have been thinking about the future of reproduction for decades. The idea that humans are begotten, not made and that fertility should not be a matter of human choice has been a core principle for social conservatives, appearing in the United States Catholic Conference’s official position on reproductive technology in 1998. And over twenty years ago, The New Atlantis, a publication of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, published the social conservative case against developing artificial wombs. However, Ari Schulman, one of the primary architects of Future for the Family and the current editor of The New Atlantis explained that the Future for the Family coalition is responding to what it views as the greatest emerging threat: Silicon Valley. To him, the technology industry is now far more dangerous than social liberals: “Fifteen years ago your enemy was the left. Now, it’s Silicon Valley, because that’s where the power is.”

To respond to the shifting power dynamics of the last decade, Future for the Family revises long-held social conservative principles in a key way. With the inclusion of anti-commodification, it allies itself with a diverse group of advocates—including those from disability justice and economic justice communities. Both Future for the Family and some economic justice groups oppose commercial surrogacy due to concerns around economic exploitation. In 2020, second-wave feminist leader Gloria Steinem and several progressive members of the New York state legislature opposed legislation to legalize paid surrogacy, with Steinem stating that “women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent.” Like economic justice advocates, Future for the Family primarily opposes surrogacy because it creates an unacceptable opportunity for the “commodification of the female body”—though they also name their pro-naturalist stance as another source of opposition. Similarly, both Future for the Family and some disability justice advocates have opposed advanced polygenic embryo screening—and even more commonplace screening for Down Syndrome and Tay-Sachs disease—based on concerns around eugenics.

On the other end of the spectrum, an amorphous collection of longevity and decentralized science organizations (VitaDAO, DeSci NYC, Prospera) have emphasized experimentation and rapid technological advancement—with a growing interest in reproductive technology. These two ecosystems are deeply intertwined, sharing many of the same core organizations and leaders, a broadly libertarian political orientation, and transhumanist goals. Broadly, the principles that have governed this ecosystem are:

1. Anti-suffering: Technology should can and should be used to reduce and eventually end the significant amount of suffering (illness, old age, death) that the physical human condition entails.

2. Anti-naturalism: Technological advancement will not interfere with or change human “nature” in a way that we should be concerned about.

3. Pro-freedom: People should have as much freedom as possible to advance technology without limitation from the government or other forces.

Within reproductive technology, two categories have been prioritized by this ecosystem: embryo screening for a range of traits beyond life-threatening conditions, and, to a significantly lesser degree, reproductive longevity. These types of technology most clearly fit into existing ecosystem priorities: creating “better humans” and living longer. Reproductive technology has also come into play in the ecosystem’s growing forays into alternative forms of governance, such as charter cities like Prospera, and autonomous zones that would give reproductive technology advocates the legal freedom to accelerate technology. Though their emphasis has been on self-experimentation and clinical trial acceleration, they’ve also advocated for removing limitations like bioethics rules that prevent scientists from growing embryos in a lab past a few weeks, which currently prevent the clinical trials necessary to develop artificial wombs.

Out of hundreds of organizations in this rapidly growing space, there is only one decentralized science organization focused solely on reproductive and women’s health technology. Founded in 2022 by Laura Minquini, AthenaDAO is an autonomous community of reproductive technologists who often identify as “f/acc”, or fertility accelerationists. Since its founding, AthenaDAO has grown to around 27,000 members and deployed around $1M in funding. Ovarian longevity is one of AthenaDAO’s top research priorities, which its community sees as critical for both expanding women’s fertility options and key to answering broader questions on human longevity. Compared to the more explicitly transhumanist goals of its partner organizations, Minquini says that her broader goal is to help women and families and increase access to technology, saying “to me, the biggest end goal is that [reproductive technologies] are evenly distributed.” She is also more cautious about the implications of embryo screening and other reproductive technology prioritized by decentralized science and longevity leaders, noting that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement, was a eugenicist whose work aimed to control the fertility of women of color. However, Minquini’s perspective is not often represented in decentralized science and longevity spaces: Minquini expressed that many leaders in the ecosystem are dismissive of ovarian longevity research, and AthenaDAO is rarely included in governance and policy initiatives, such as new charter city projects.

Meanwhile, mainstream liberal feminists have been focused on other issues within reproductive health: since the fall of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion rights have taken priority. On occasions when technology has become a movement priority, it has generally been about defending IVF (and challenging conservative political leaders to do the same) or protecting data privacy rights for those seeking abortion care. There are several potential reasons behind this. First,movement organizations are exhausted and distracted by fighting for abortion access. Second,they do not view reproductive technology as an important issue to develop positions on. Finally, there is likely significant internal division over technologies like surrogacy and advanced forms of IVF. Schulman leaned towards the latter, noting that “My sense has been that there’s real internal division on the left, but real fear about advertising that.” One reproductive justice leader suggested to me on background that all three reasons are contributing factors. Given the focus on abortion rights, she surmised that only something truly concerning to the general public—like an announcement from a polygenic embryo screening company that there have been successful pregnancies with embryos selected based on intelligence—might push the movement to take action.

However, there may be common ground across these movements. Funding and investment, via venture capital firms or government research support, is a key lever for reproductive technology. AthenaDAO and its partners have centered women’s leadership and engaged in collaborative funding which has supported niche research on gynecological cancers and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). It’s an interest that social conservatives may also share. Future for the Family’s strategy was modeled after the President’s Council on Bioethics, an advisory council established by George W. Bush aimed to proactively set boundaries around biotechnology development and use, particularly stem cell research and abortion. This has meant that the Future for the Family coalition’s approach to other types of reproductive health technology is early on in its development: a series of white papers released by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in March 2025 aggressively criticize IVF, while detailing avenues to increase access to endometriosis excision surgery.

These types of important but mundane interventions can be difficult for investors to assess and lack the broader, transformative narratives of, for instance, polygenic embryo screening companies—Orchid frames its goal as to “help everyone have a healthy baby”. This means that despite their potential to reduce women’s suffering and decrease the need for more invasive fertility technology, they often receive less attention and investment from venture and institutional investors. A broad coalition of social conservatives, technologists, and more mainstream liberals collaborating to support oft-neglected reproductive health technology could be a significant step forward towards productive collaboration across these groups.

Movements, organizations, and individuals who are invested in the well-being, status of, and opportunities available to women should take the influence behind these new principles of reproductive technology seriously. Future for the Family represents a nascent – if uneasy – partnership between social conservative policy wonks and technology leaders. The Heritage Foundation is the architect of Project 2025, the blueprint for the current presidential administration, and supporters of Future for the Family from the technology world range from Founders Fund partner and Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens, whose writing is featured as core reading by the coalition, to Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador. And the muddy world of longevity and decentralized science is gaining broader recognition: Pfizer Ventures participated in VitaDAO’s (one of the largest longevity DAO) most recent fundraising round and several longevity charter city projects have launched over the past year.

Ceding this space to movements where the well-being of women is incidental to broader goals would be a mistake, creating either overly strict limits on reproductive technology or prioritizing technologies that do not advance the well-being of women and families. An alternate set of principles could be:

1. Pro-progress: Innovation and more options for reproduction are good, and safetyism is not.

2. Anti-suffering: Reproduction often entails significant pain and suffering for women, reducing this should be a priority.

3. Address broader impact: Reproductive technology will have broader societal consequences, and sometimes costs may be greater than benefits.

We should encourage innovation and be cautious of pro-naturalist arguments that could significantly limit the reproductive options available to women and families, including opposition to widespread IVF use without a clear proposed alternative. This means prioritizing the development of technologies that extend the fertility window and enable women to advance in intensive careers and start families—such as increasing the effectiveness of egg freezing technology and in-vitro maturation. Approaches to reproductive technology development should also recognize and attempt to mitigate the significant amount of pain that both fertility technology and natural reproduction entail for women. This means making the egg retrieval process less uncomfortable and risky and investing in comprehensive research on infertility. Finally, we should also recognize that not every advance in fertility and reproductive technology will be a boon to women and may have significant unintended consequences compared to their benefits. This means remaining skeptical of the need for developing and deploying technologies like some advanced forms of polygenic embryo screening and three-parent embryos. It also means proactively engaging with those—especially women—who prefer the current norms around reproduction, and recognizing the potential loss of meaning that they may experience.

Reproductive technology offers the opportunity to advance women’s material well-being. It also holds the immense potential to usher in a world where women are liberated from the often cruel constraints and consequences of biology. However, this best possible world of reproductive technology is far from a certainty—it is up to us to shape it.

Clicking through Instagram, I am regularly interrupted by ads from egg donation agencies. Less frequently, I receive slightly more personalized emails from fertility clinics in Washington and San Francisco. Although my conversation in Berkeley lingers in the back of my mind, I still haven’t applied.

With gratitude to my interviewees—Laura Minquini at AthenaDAO, Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis, and Courtney Joslin at the R Street Institute—for being so generous with their time and thoughts.

P.S: Eliza has taken her copy of Kernel north of the Arctic circle. If you manage to get any copy of Kernel above 70ºN or (more difficult!) below 70ºS, please let us know! Stay warm out there!

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—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

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is a software engineer, language enthusiast, and city planner (to be!) based in Brooklyn, NY.

Nic Sahler is a design technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

📏 How to Build a Mayan Keyboard

Interview and introduction by Allison Tielking

In the late 20th century, in the early days of computing, many writing systems – from Latin to Chinese – went through a process of forced simplification. Languages with the greatest complexity, such as Chinese and Arabic, underwent the greatest scrutiny in order to fit their complex forms into limited spaces with small memory footprints. Around the same time, Mayan, a 3,000 year old language, experienced a rebirth that led to a nearly complete, revived understanding of its writing system.

I met technologist and Mayanist Nic Sahler at Living Skin, a community space, library, and gallery in Bushwick. In response to the hyper-creation of our digital age, Living Skin is carving out new systems of human knowledge and art preservation while paying respects to the information collection systems of ancient societies. When I saw some Arabic-Indic numerals flash on Nic’s phone screen, we got to talking about his involvement in the Codical Mayan project, whose goal is to encode the Mayan writing system into Unicode. The team is doing this work to simultaneously preserve the artifacts and stories of the past and empower the Maya people with free tools to learn and spread their written language.

On a Sunday afternoon, Nic and I sat down to talk more about his work on indigenous language preservation and digital humanities.

Allison Tielking: What initially sparked your interest in indigenous language preservation?

Nic Sahler: I have indigenous roots in Puerto Rico; my curiosity started at a young age but largely became more focused around 2018. I started aggregating and cataloguing indigenous Puerto Rican dictionaries and encyclopedias to survey how much indigenous language still exists, and how it influences Puerto Rican culture. I recorded around 2,000 words and found that the largest influences live on in food, place-names, and slang. The influence of indigenous Puerto Rican language persists in English and Spanish, in words like barbecue, canoe, and hurricane. Even Tagalog has words from Taíno that are no longer used in Puerto Rico.

I read a book of interviews with a Taíno chief (or Cacique) in Cuba, who is the only (currently known) monarchic leader of a Taíno tribe, with his roots being recorded several hundred years back. Before COVID, Puerto Ricans began visiting this tribe, sharing information, even hosting a conference. When I hit dead ends there (though it’s still a very open and slowly progressing field), my curiosity turned towards Taíno’s closest living sister languages: Lokono and Garifuna, which are languages with lots of cognates, or common similar words. That’s how I arrived at Mayan.

Can you tell me more about Taíno and its sister languages?

The term “Taíno” is somewhat controversial. It’s not offensive, but it wasn’t necessarily the name the island’s indigenous people used for themselves. The phrase “Taíno” is believed to have meant something like “We are good people,” said to the Spanish upon first contact. Today, it’s considered more of an archaeological term than an anthropological one, used to describe the theoretical elements of indigenous Caribbean culture. The culture it refers to spans from the Florida Keys all the way through the Dominican Republic and Haiti to the very end of Cuba, where it’s debated whether a different tribe (theorized to have been influenced by Maya people) resided.

This region historically had two primary language families: Carib and Arawakan. They’re mutually unintelligible. It was a cultural custom for men to only speak one language, while women spoke the other. This custom obscured a lot of modern research on the culture, making it hard to pin down which words in the world had true Taíno origin.

What brought you from researching Taíno to the Codical Mayan project?

I found some similarities between Arawakan and Mayan languages interesting. They’re from different language families, but they have some shared vocabulary. I also marveled at how Caribbean culture and food are closer to Mayan than to Mexico proper. There are even other connections — a traditional ball game played in Puerto Rico is an almost identical (but simplified) version of the Mayan ball game Pok Ta Pok. People don’t understand this connection, but their geographic proximity could be a big part of it, possibly due to trade.

While exploring, I found the Codical Mayan project, which was initially focused on cataloguing Mayan texts. I was a Machine Learning Engineer at Squarespace at the time, so I emailed the project lead, Carlos, and offered to use machine learning for Mayan character recognition. However, due to limited text availability, we did not get far. Because of this, the project eventually expanded to focus on broader Mayan cataloguing and typography work, which could enable more advances in the future.

Can you give me some background on the Mayan writing system and language?

The Mayan script is a writing system for proto-Mayan, the ancestor of about 30 dialects that are today spoken by millions of people across Guatemala and Mexico. The writing system combines logographic (symbols which represent words) and syllabic (symbols which represent syllables) symbols. Though primarily used by priests and nobility, some colloquial knowledge persisted among commoners.

In 1562, Spanish friar Diego de Landa led a religious campaign, destroying 27 Maya codices containing knowledge of Maya religion and civilization. Legend has it that the four remaining manuscripts were exfiltrated to Europe. Today, they are known as the Dresden, Madrid, Paris and Grolier codices. The Dresden codex ended up in Russia after World War II, where the Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov made breakthroughs in deciphering it using a small note that gave him 10 characters to work with.

Since Mayan people still know colloquial characters and speak the language, they have made major advances in the study of the Mayan writing system following Knorozov’s 1960s research.

Where does the Codical Mayan project work fit in?

The project’s main goal is to make Mayan an available writing system on every computer. This requires two things: encoding the Mayan writing system into Unicode and developing a font and keyboard. Once those goals are complete, we aim to use those pieces to catalogue Mayan codices, remaining artifacts like writing on temple walls and ancient Maya belongings, and folk stories that are not yet written down. A major goal is to interview people in the Yucatan, recording their stories using the traditional writing system.

At the same time, we want to enable people to type in Mayan using the new Unicode codepoints. Currently, Mayan is written using Latin letters–like we do in English–but this is insufficient and removes a lot of cultural context. We’re working on a keyboard which lets people use a system similar to Pinyin which would convert the Latin alphabet and phonetics into Mayan.

Turning Mayan into Unicode makes it machine-readable, a series of numbers instead of just a photo, so you’ll be able to type and quickly repurpose it for new artifacts that use the same system.

After finishing this font stuff, what we really want to do is enable Mayan people to use it on their own. We might go to Campeche for the Mayan Cultural Researchers Conference next year, where we can hand people tools and teach them how to use them. Like, look, you can use Photoshop in Mayan now!

We don’t know if what we’re making is a better system yet. There are decisions we’ll make on how it gets encoded that might be wrong, so it will be important to get feedback from people who grew up more in the culture. We’re not trying to dictate how people use it, but instead provide a free, open source tool. Putting Mayan in Unicode means that every computer will ship with the Mayan writing system, like how every computer has Chinese, or even Egyptian.

After your initial machine learning work didn’t pan out, what did you end up working on for the Codical Mayan project?

The head researcher and founder of the project, Carlos, built a unique grouping system to categorize Mayan characters. This system governs the order we are developing the Mayan font in. Carlos submitted a series of Unicode Proposals which encoded this system, consolidated variations of characters, and gave us a roadmap to get Mayan onto every device. Unicode is a consortium which dictates which emoji and fonts work on your phone (and nearly every computer!) Every character in every language you can read on a computer (along with emoji and some symbols), exists in Unicode as a mapping from a number to a character. We’re trying to do that for Mayan, so we had to submit a proposal and go through many iterations.

While Carlos fine-tuned the proposal, I built out an underlying system to store our research. I first created a database for cataloging Mayan characters, which our team uses to organize Mayan as a knowledge graph, which is then used to map it to Unicode code points. We did some statistics on the database and pared it down into what symbols were isolated characters with independent meaning. Then, we submitted a proposal with all the characters to put into a font, along with how the characters were going to mesh together.

After submitting the proposal I started building a system of tools. The font is being designed using FontLab. The team broke up the characters by grouping and tackled different groups. We meet up weekly to compare our designs, typography work, and structure and keep in sync. I also created something like Google Docs for Mayan, so our team could communicate with each other, leaving notes directly on different characters that we’re working on, overlaid on Mayan artifacts and codices. As an extension, we’re going to make an overlay version of my Mayan Google Docs tool so you can overlay the actual font, making the artifacts searchable for characters and concepts.

One teammate, Andrew, is working on a low-level system for treating Mayan Quadrats (the sub-grid in which glyphs combine together) like font ligatures, allowing a series of codepoints to render out into a full glyph. I started aiding in this work recently.

So far, we’ve completed just a small subset of characters, maybe 300 out of 1,500 known characters. We finished our second milestone out of six, and it took about 3 months per milestone. The next phase is cataloguing more of the codices and hand labeling more characters.

What motivates you to work on this project?

Maya culture is maybe one of the most well preserved native cultures. There are many places, like where I’m from in Puerto Rico, where indigenous culture is a bit mysterious. While everyone has some connection to their indigenous roots, the culture underwent several heavy colonial eras, genocides, and cultural mixing, so it’s not well catalogued. Because Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic were the point of first contact for Spaniards (and Europe at large), its original culture was regularly paved over by generations of change, with US occupation doing some of the most extensive damage during the industrial era. Being able to help preserve such a strong and extant culture and see it thrive is a breath of fresh air, and something I believe my ancestors, both recent and ancient, would appreciate. It feels like I am serving them by serving the Maya people. Also the Mayan writing system is cool in its own right.

How do you see the role of technology evolving in the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages?

There is a known hunger among Maya people to learn, and they now have classes where they can learn to write traditional characters. Currently, a lot of classwork is done on paper, but these tools could enable people to build more dictionaries, create their own textbooks, and share them more easily with one another.

Through my initial dictionary building work, I got involved with a different group called Natives in Tech. Their leader at the time, Adam Recvlohe, built a dictionary for Muscogee, a tribe originally from the American Southeast. He also had to aggregate from many sources, some of which he had to paraphrase because they were published and copyrighted—making it hard to document his own language. We’re avoiding this by not taking ownership over the language—it is an effort involving people from the culture (both Carlos and the people we intend to serve) which aims to increase its availability to indigenous people, not decrease or gate-keep it.

To close, do you have any advice/recommendations for people reading this?

I’ve seen that a technical bottleneck exists in this kind of work. If you really care about a topic or research project, reach out. Show that you have something to add or that you really want to learn. I didn’t go to college, so this was my first foray into academic research. The reason I felt comfortable reaching out to the team was because I had heard so much from academic friends that they just emailed a cool professor and ended up getting a PhD under them. My interests and passions were in line with the team, and we shared a common human-centered outlook, so it was easy to jump in.

Also, if you can’t join an official project, there's nothing stopping you from pursuing a project on your own. For example, I discovered a German artist named Julia (@Julias_Inkpot) who’s passionate about Mayan and has drawn thousands of characters for fun over the last few years. This kind of work just takes focus and dedication.

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—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

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Our first preview from Kernel 5 — written by Humphrey Obuobi and edited by Morry Kolman — is about making creative use of public infrastructure for communal technology, working inside and outside the rules and logic of the urban built environment. It’s a perfect match: as a writer, technologist, organizer, and founder of LETS Studio in Oakland, Humphrey is actively working with communities to figure out unexpected ways to use otherwise overlooked urban space; on Morry’s part, the Webby-Award-winning, New-York-Department-of-Transportation-cease-and-desist receiving Traffic Cam Photobooth is the exact kind of playful communal use of infrastructure that Humphrey’s essay is all about.

Humphrey will also be reading this piece and showcasing some of his work in telephone pole community tech at the Kernel SF launch this Thursday:

SF LAUNCH TICKETS HERE

📏Tall Dead Trees

By

Telephone poles were the unsung heroes of the Information Age before the term was even applicable. The first telegraph poles were erected in the mid-1800s by Samuel Morse, recruited by the United States government to make instantaneous long-distance communication between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. a reality. Since then, the same infrastructure has been expanded and retrofitted to carry just about everything that is essential for our modern, interconnected lives: electrical power, broadband, or whatever else. These utilities increasingly are moving underground where possible, but the poles remain some of the most important public infrastructure we have for communicating with one another.

But more than anything, they are huge dead trees that are great for attaching other things to them, a fact we experience through little slips of paper at their bases. This is where local bands post about upcoming shows, and where the local tree-trimmer advertises their services. It’s how you find out that your neighbor has lost their dog (and sometimes, to your delight, an update that they’ve been found.) This is where stickers from your local anarchists and bored teenagers tickle your moral consciousness, give you a chuckle on your walk home from work, or simply blend into your periphery. Tacking things to the abundance of tall dead trees in your neighborhood is one of the most natural ways for us to “get the word out.”

It’s through this that the term “public communications infrastructure” takes on a double-meaning: not only are telephone poles good for connecting people across incredible distances, but they can also be used to help neighbors and passersby communicate with one another. While the scale of the second is smaller, we’re starting to remember how important it is for people who live next to each other to know each other well and share information with one another. In one of the greatest ironies of modern society, the same technologies that have connected us faster and more thoroughly than ever before have slowly killed off the newspapers, radio shows, and other media that once strengthened local ties — and have left little of note in their place. There are holes in the Web where “local media” should be thriving, and flyers on telephone poles are still some of the best tools we have.

This dual purpose hints at a conflict playing out on our poles each day, with those who wish to experiment with local media testing the limits of how “public” these things are. It’s an informative battle that reveals some humbling truths about how power flows in the city, as well as how it shapes the commons. And it’s a hopeful one — at least for those who are down to get their hands a little dirty.

Despite being public infrastructure, telephone poles are generally owned by private utility companies. The same public-private relationship that Morse pioneered still holds to this day throughout the United States: every place has a set of corporate owners (Pacific Gas & Electric in Northern California, Consolidated Edison in NYC) that operate according to regulations set by state and federal government authorities. Just about no one is saying that we should have community control over power poles, either, as there’s a lot of risk and technical expertise involved in coaxing lightning into a wire. But so far, the communitarian uses of the poles are rarely recognized by their formal owners. Neither government nor corporation seems interested in exploring how the poles could be used to support communication within the neighborhoods they are planted in.

Instead, we have all sorts of regulations that discourage any attachments to the pole. Even posting paper flyers isn’t technically legal in many places; most city governments have ordinances that outright prohibit posting signs on utility poles and lampposts, citing “aesthetics” and “obstruction” as their primary reasons. In the Bay Area, Berkeley and San Francisco’s laws explicitly recognize the importance of the poles as a forum for communication, but place significant restrictions on the form, content, and longevity of any posted signs. Utility companies, on the other hand, generally consider foreign fixtures on the poles a threat to utility workers and the consistency of their service. To their credit, PG&E does have a legal process for attaching devices to their poles through “pole licensing agreements,” but it’s mostly designed for other corporate telecom providers rather than community-run projects. While none of this seems to deter your average sign-poster, it definitely has a chilling effect on more ambitious and experimental projects.

When they do show an interest in street life, it’s usually for surveillance. The fact that telephone poles (along with street lamps, traffic light poles, and other infrastructure) are so commonly found on the street makes them a great place to place eyes and ears. Enterprising police departments have become fond of using these to document the street, though not with the intention of sharing everything they see with people on the ground. In response, corporations like Flock Safety have emerged to place automated license plate readers and other cameras in neighborhoods throughout the country, making the questionable claim that they can “eliminate crime.”

This then sparks the first major conflict on the poles: community protest against surveillance technologies deployed for state and capital interest. Progressive activists across the country have often protested against ShotSpotter (a gunshot detection device widely deployed throughout the country), saying that the devices draw unnecessary police presence into already over-surveilled and underserved neighborhoods. Through their organizing efforts, city administrations in Chicago, Durham, and other places eventually eventually retracted their ShotSpotter contracts. Other communities have chosen more “direct” forms of protest against their cities’ surveillance infrastructure; at various times in the last decade or two, rebels led by the mysterious “Captain Gasto” have literally shot down speed cameras that they see as an unfair assault on their “rights as motorists.”

City dwellers tend to know that surveillance cameras are far from the most interesting thing you can put on a telephone pole, and naturally explore more creative uses. Artists are always finding new things to put on poles, whether through knitting yarn sleeves around them (“yarn bombing”) or attaching sculptures to their surfaces. Every now and then, someone gets the idea to nail up a box labeled “FREE STUFF” and creates a more permanent way for people to share secondhand goods with each other in the process. Even digital technologists have gotten in on the fun; Riley Walz recently installed “BopSpotter,” an internet-connected phone that identifies the music it hears from its perch on a lively (undisclosed) street corner in the Mission. These emergent practices amount to much more than just the “signs and advertisements” that municipal lawmakers imagined; here, we find communities using the pole to share resources, information, and reflections of culture.

Mesh networks – self-installed and interconnected routers installed throughout a given area – show us how far we can push the idea of “public communications infrastructure.” They’ve often been initiated by a few technology-savvy folks (like gamers, radio enthusiasts, or bored software engineers) and over time, a healthy global community of people who care about providing low-cost, resilient internet connections to their neighborhoods has emerged. Guifi.net started with a single person installing nodes on existing telephone poles and church steeples, and it gradually grew to include tens of thousands of nodes covering much of Catalonia. These projects are not strangers to their own subversive nature, either; they often call out the gaps that telecom companies have left behind, and position their work as an alternative grounded in common ownership. Some networks even operate as a place-based “intranet,” supporting an exchange of local information, art, and chat rooms specific to that place.

The unfortunate reality is that these community-based experiments with telephone poles are the exception rather than the rule. Whether or not you believe these little attachments are actually a danger or an aesthetic abomination, the threat of enforcement gives folks plenty of pause about placing their own art or devices on what is ironically considered private property. Googling “mesh network nodes on telephone poles” gives you a sense of the discourse within the DIY communities that maintain them; anytime someone suggests attaching a radio node to a telephone pole, a more experienced operator usually chimes in to note the risk of fines and imprisonment. Practically speaking, many nodes also need to be placed high enough to avoid obstructions, and getting high enough on a utility pole isn’t always easy – nevermind the permits and associated fees. As such, node operators still prefer to use the rooftops of their own buildings for their devices, avoiding confrontation with the government or utility companies.

There’s a layman’s truth hidden in all of this: people should be able to put things on telephone poles to communicate with the people around them. An anonymous poster on the niche Q&A website Fluther put it well:

“Well if it is illegal to hang a sign on a dead tree in public places, then we truly have a dictatorship and certainly not a democracy. Ridiculous. There are fewer and fewer options for anyone to legally reach the community without paying large corporate owned media, or having some uptight citizen cry spam. Hanging a sign on a pole is not as unsafe as taking away a man’s right to communicate with his community.” (source, lightly edited)

In the meantime, there’s an established practice of “tactical urbanism,” a term to describe grassroots attempts to modify streets and sidewalks without asking for permission from the powers that be. It goes beyond just chalking up a sidewalk or posting a flyer; in general, guerilla urbanism projects are serious attempts to change the flow of people, traffic, and resources for the collective’s benefit. They typically respond to a clear need in a community, such as a missing crosswalk at a busy intersection or an unprotected bike lane. These efforts reflect the belief that people living in community with one another should feel empowered to create their own solutions to the challenges they collectively face (a “right to the city,” as sociologist Henri Lefebvre would say.)

Given how essential local connection and communication is, I see mesh networks, BopSpotter, and other “pole media” as important threads within this tradition. These projects redirect the power of the internet and other network technologies back towards local communities – a practice that thrived in earlier days of the internet, but has long been left by the wayside and neglected by dominant social media companies. To the people that run them, the pole (and other public infrastructure, for that matter) is a canvas that can and should be reclaimed for these communitarian purposes, regardless of what the telecom companies and city departments say. Regardless of their exact medium, it is refreshing and inspiring to see these people push the boundaries of hyperlocal media.

So yes, the utility company will probably get annoyed that you’re messing with their domain, or they might have some safety concerns about what you’re doing. The Public Works department will probably remove whatever you put up in due time, and they might even fine you. But when a project meets a genuine need in the community, these small acts of defiance are eventually embraced by those who recognize the creativity and the capacity to get things done. When it comes down to it, the possibilities of the pole are ours to realize.

is a technologist and organizer based in Oakland, CA. Much of their time is spent upgrading the tools that support a more functional and participatory democracy (primarily through their creative consultancy, LETS). They love ramen, street photography, and losing track of time.

Reboot, much like a telephone pole, meets our readers at the intersection of technology, politics, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

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Come to our SF Launch Party at Gray Area on July 17 — tickets are going fast!

This week, we are officially releasing Kernel Magazine’s fifth issue, themed around rules! To introduce you to the issue, our very own has written an editor’s note — a sort of set of rules for Rules:

✍️ Editor’s Note 

by Kevin Baker

Rules are the invisible architecture of social existence. Some boundaries they create are porous and negotiable, others rigid and absolute. Lines on a map transform empty space into property, into nations, into contested territories. Lines of code transform possibility into permission, into prohibition, into the parameters of digital life. Lines of conduct transform strangers into communities, communities into hierarchies, hierarchies into systems of belonging and exclusion. Natural as they may seem, these boundary-making practices—whether physical, digital, or social—are human constructions, continuously maintained through practices that render them seemingly inevitable, intrinsic, and reasonable.

Rules vary in character. As historian of science Lorraine Daston observes, rules can be thick or thin in their formulation, flexible or rigid in their application. Thick rules anticipate variation and complexity, embedding context and viability in their structure. They invite discretion and adaptation as circumstances change, like common law systems that evolve through interpretation and precedent. Thin rules, by contrast, implicitly assume a predictable, stable world, applying the same logic regardless of context. Most algorithmic systems embody thin rules—standardized, consistent, and ill-equipped to handle exceptions or edge cases. The tension between human discretion and algorithmic consistency, between rules that bend and rules that break, is one that defines our technological moment.

The most consequential rules may be those we’ve incorporated into our sense of self and reality so completely that we no longer recognize them as constructed. We come to embody these boundaries, experiencing them not as external impositions but as natural facts about the world and ourselves. It's primarily at moments of breakdown or conflict—when we encounter those who operate under different assumptions—that we glimpse how deeply these organizing principles shape not just what we can do, but how we understand what is possible or reasonable in the first place.

This fifth issue of Kernel examines the boundary-drawing processes that structure our technological existence. Our Regulation section investigates how judgment becomes encoded into digital architectures that increasingly mediate social and economic life. These systems, despite their technical appearance, embody specific worldviews and priorities. Meanwhile, our Generation section interrogates how creative practices and expressive possibilities emerge within and against prescribed constraints, exploring how technologies both limit and expand the territories of human expression.

Across these investigations, a consistent pattern emerges: rules function not merely as instruments of control but as metaphysical scaffolding that gives form to our reality. This is what “socially constructed” meant before the phrase lost its edge and became a dismissive synonym for fake: our reality, built through boundaries that, once established, vanish into the seemingly solid ground beneath our feet. The rules we construct create the conditions for certain kinds of actions and relationships while rendering others unthinkable. What initially appears as mere restriction thus reveals itself as constitution—the very framework through which reality becomes intelligible to us.

But architectural metaphors only capture part of the story. The lines we draw aren't mere inscriptions on a blueprint, but incisions into the social body. Each rule cuts through reality with a knife's edge, separating what's permitted from what's forbidden. These aren't abstractions but material interventions with real consequences. The lines we etch through code, policy, and practice don't merely divide existing categories—they create new ones, making certain modes of existence possible while rendering others impossible. As these incisions cicatrize, their origins as deliberate cuts fade from view. The rules appear inevitable, natural, reasonable. We forget they were drawn by human hands.

If these systems reflect choices rather than inevitabilities, how might we reimagine them? Rules, at their best, function not as rigid barriers but as dynamic frameworks that enable meaningful interaction. James Carse offers a valuable perspective by distinguishing between finite and infinite games—the former played for winning, the latter for continuing play. These approaches reflect fundamentally different orientations: one resembling the grammar of a living language that evolves to sustain discourse, the other like debate protocols designed to declare winners and losers. Games themselves express rule-based systems in their purest form, where boundaries create not just constraints but the possibility of meaningful action. The most productive technological boundaries might be those that invite ongoing participation rather than algorithmic conclusion. They evolve through use rather than reaching foregone outcomes.

When we treat digital systems as finite games with predetermined endpoints, we miss opportunities to create spaces where rules generate possibilities rather than terminate them. Perhaps what we need are fewer victory conditions and more conditions for continued play—not finite games with winners and losers, but infinite games where the boundaries expand with every move.

Where do we draw the line? And who is this “we”?

You can read Kernel at kernelmag.io. We’ll be sending more previews throughout this week — and if you’re in the bay, see you at Gray Area!

Tickets Here!

Until then,

The Kernel Magazine Team

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In two weeks, we’re publishing RULES, the fifth issue of Kernel Magazine, Reboot’s print publication. With this issue, we ask: where do we draw the line?

We’re thrilled to share everything this issue has to offer: non-fiction features & interviews, short stories, poems, and illustrations, all exploring the generative and restrictive facets of the rules that make us and the rules we make for ourselves. You can pre-order the issue now — expect issues to ship within the next two weeks. For now, though, we’ll start by sharing two more things:

First: Come hang out with us! We’re throwing a launch party on July 17 at Gray Area, featuring readings from the issue, discussions, and the release of Reboot’s very first zines! Tickets are $10, and go to discounting the cost of buying the magazine at the event.

Get your tickets here!

If you’re not in the Bay, we’ll have information about our NY launch event coming very soon!

Second: Cover reveal! (All credit goes to the incredible Kristy Xue Gao — who also illustrated the Kernel 4 cover last year!):

Every issue of Kernel is a labor of love, and I especially want to highlight the efforts of our core editorial team: Kevin T. Baker and Morry Kolman, who helped shape the editorial vision of the essays and interviews in the issue, Hannah Scott, who curated an incredible set of creative writing, and Connie Liu, who designed and laid out this entire magazine with deep joy and skill. We’re all so excited to share this issue with you.

Stay tuned over the few weeks for more previews from Kernel 5!

See you all soon,

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

Editor-in-Chief,

Kernel Magazine, Issue 5

Reboot publishes essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

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I'm Morry, one of the members of Reboot's editorial board, and the one with the pleasure of announcing the opening of our call for pitches for Kernel Magazine Issue 5!

TLDR: submit your pitches here (nonfiction) or here (creative) by 2/1.

KERNEL 5: RULES

Kernel 5 is all about RULES. Everything set, prescribed, enforced, and broken. It is the third of Kernel's named themes, following SUSTAIN and LUCK, and the appropriateness of the rule of threes is not lost on us.

What do we mean by rules?

Technology rules. It rocks, reigns, and restricts. Other things rule too: states (famously, and now repackaged into short form DnD content), ants, Elon Musk, Gordon Moore, platforms, protocols, and dril. Every day we operate under the layered, entangled, and frequently contradictory logic imposed on us from any number of these different sources. Sometimes they can be extremely generative: sheet music is a set of rules to produce a song, lines of code the same for a program. Just as often, however, they can become restrictive, encroaching, and unintelligible.

Vibes we would like to see: The NIST standard for lighting a cigarette. Three felonies a day. Getting a text and making yourself wait before responding. The move-fast-break-things to extremely-specific-content-moderation-policy pipeline. The internationally approved frequencies for amateur ham radio operators to contact the International Space Station. Not selling a painting, but selling the rules for how to make a painting. Surviving on the 2b2t anarchist Minecraft server.

Examples of things we’re interested in: Can we trace a rule from a minor de-facto technical issue to a society-defining standard? What’s with the self-imposed screen time helper device arms race? An entrepreneurship qua self-help face-off between Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life vs. Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power vs. Ray Dalio’s Principles vs. Andrew Huberman’s Protocols (throw any book about “agile” in too). The fine distinctions between rules, instructions, and recommendations. Is code still law? The Trial but with smart contracts. Governing bodies 7 letters acronyms or longer. Who are the W3C and what are they doing with my internet? The rules-driven pursuit of biohacked immortality. Trader Joe’s Brie importation gambit and other histories of business as regulatory arbitrage. The failure and/or reversal of the copyleft movement and the shifting party lines of the new IP debates. How you feel about the workwear guy. Rule-based art across disciplines. Who is saying when it’s okay to post what and why.

Some styles of inquiry we like: How do interpersonal relations (who’s friends? who’s enemies? who’s a “weirdo” and who’s “cool”?) shape macro-level politics, and what ultimately happens in the world materially? Where do values as stated conflict with values as practiced? Can theory be not just descriptive, but prescriptive in the real world? What concrete object or community can serve as a gateway to a larger point? How many things had to happen for this to exist? (It’s something like this, we think). Give us your hottest takes and your most ambitious manifestos — just do the work to back it up.

Some modes of creative expression that intrigue us: Experiments in form; works that traverse both the printed page and digital media; speculative stories that follow a contemporary phenomenon to its logical (or illogical) end; text-based games; source code; lists; satire. What about the microscopic evinces something of the macroscopic? How can fiction, poetry, or visual art get at a contemporary circumstance, historical condition, or possible future from an alternative vantage point?

We won’t be excited by: “X won’t save us” or “capitalism is the root cause” or “techno-solutionism is doomed to fail” style arguments. "This thing sucks, actually," sucks, actually. When thinking about what to write, we would rather plant a tree than visit a landfill — though, of course, soil can be fertilized by manure. Also, we’re not anti-AI (still regularly thinking about Optimal Path — when AI content is good, it can be really good), but just know that we’ll have a pretty high bar for quality and insight (unfortunately when AI content is not good, it can be really not good).

What formats are we looking for?

As in previous issues, we have a few separate content tracks with separate submission forms. All contributions will be compensated.

• Nonfiction: essay, interview, or software criticism. Pitch here!

  • Essay: short (1000-2000 words, $250) or long (3000+ words, $350)

  • Software criticism: up to 2000 words, $250

  • Interview: $200

• Creative: visual art, poetry, or fiction. Submit here!

  • For fiction and poetry, please specify if you are interested in your piece being workshopped/edited or if it is a final/completed piece.

  • Compensation will be $50-300 depending on the scale of the piece.

If you’re interested in contributing to Kernel as an editor, illustrator, or in any other role, let us know by emailing jacob@joinreboot.org with your interests and relevant experience. All roles will be stipended.

💝 closing note

Every time we put out a call for contributions for a new issue of Kernel, we are awed by the sheer range of pitches we receive — non-fiction, fiction, and those strange things between. We get pitches from every conceivable level of experience and perspective on technology, and feel genuinely grateful to read them all. If you have questions about contributing to Kernel or suggestions for future directions, we welcome your insight.

The Lead Editors of Issue 5 are Morry Kolman (morry@joinreboot.org), Kevin Baker (kevin@joinreboot.org), and Hannah Scott (hannah@joinreboot.org).

The Managing Editor of Issue 5 is Jacob Kuppermann; reach them at jacob@joinreboot.org.

The director of Reboot is Jasmine Sun; reach her at jasmine@joinreboot.org.

Have any questions? Read our guide on How to Pitch us, or send any of us an email. We eagerly await your pitches.

Reboot publishes free essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

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Read Kernel online!

Here’s a quick pitch for each of the essays and short stories in the issue:

🤝 A Labor of Luck by Jacky Alcine

We’re about a year out from the “hot labor summer” of 2023, but the resurgence of labor organizing — both within and outside tech — is still one of the most compelling stories about the political economy of the 2020s. I’m thrilled to have gotten the chance to publish (and directly edit!) this essay by Jacky Alcine, who worked tirelessly as part of Code for America’s Workers United’s drive to ratify the union’s first contract with Code for America. It’s a thoughtful, moving meditation on the role of luck and contingency in labor organizing — and what a community can do for its members in a time of crisis.

🔮 Oracles in the Machine by Zora Che

Tarot readings, horoscopes, scrolling Instagram — it’s all divination, all drawing through random, fuzzy collections in order to find some hidden layer of meaning underlying it all. Zora Che (edited by Kyle Barnes, who knows a thing or two about crystal balls) takes a look at the practice of algorithmic divination, connecting the dots between technologies of fortune telling as old as the Ancient Greeks and as new as Co-Star to divine a story about the ways we generate meaning out of a world full of chance and obfuscation.   

👀 Algorithmaxxing by Anna Gorham

One of my dream topics for Kernel 4 was online folk knowledge: the ways people talk about how the internet really works, the not-quite-proven tips and tricks for how to get around. This piece — written by Anna Gorham and edited by Ellie Botoman — gets deep into the weeds of the ways we reshape and disguise language in order to optimize ourselves for “the algorithm” and evade censorship. It’s a rich anthropological text, full of fascinating angles on the online networks we use and the very human ways we try and make use of them.

🚞 On a Night Train Through Cyberspace by Lila Shroff

If you’ve been reading Reboot recently, you’ve probably read Lila’s fiction — “The Liar’s Dividend” and “Death by Peach” are two of the best stories I’ve read on how AI may reshape our social relations and understandings of trust. This piece is something different; not a look at a possible future but a reverie on a half-imagined past, taking in a lightly surreal vision of random online connection and making it sing out.

💸 Soulless Debt Engines by Tessie Waithira

When people talk about new technological innovations, the focus is often on the scale of economies — how many jobs will a given change create or make redundant; how will the markets shift, slow or fast. Yet all of these grand movements are fundamentally made up of individual people; when we forget that, we lose so much of the true story of technology in society. This piece, written and reported by Tessie Waithira and edited by Chris Mills Rodrigo, hones in on the very human impact of new financial technologies on Kenyan society at large and the individual lives of Kenyans.

🌉 San Francisco Earthquake circa 2030 by Nancy Zuo

When Nancy read this story at the Kernel 4 launch, we were all about three stories up — not high enough to really put fear into our hearts, but not the ideal elevation to be reading about earthquakes; I swear I could see the Salesforce tower wobble while she read. It’s a story that gets at the long-standing seismic anxiety built deep into the heart of the Bay Area, capturing the shock, fear, and tedium of experiencing an unlikely but always possible natural disaster.

If these sound interesting (they are!), remember that you can still purchase a print copy of Kernel, which we promise will make your bookshelf/coffee table/nightstand look very erudite. Plus there’s a 25% chance of getting the gold foil!

Get Kernel in print

🌀 microdoses

• Obsessed with this music blog on cicada screeches

• New ed-tech crime exposé just dropped

• lmao (he’s still alive btw dw abt it)

• happy graduation season everyone

  

💝 closing note

It’s been an honor to help bring this magazine into the world — the journey from half-joking ideas to drafts to final pieces, out in the online-and-offline world, is like nothing else. Until next time: good luck!!

— Jacob Sujin Kuppermann and the Reboot team

Get your copy of Kernel!

🍀 The Serendipity Machine

by Hal Triedman, edited by Sheon Han. You can also read it here.

In the first TikTok that I can recall watching, a teen girl was using a mirror effect to pretend to eat her disembodied, floating fingers to the Kidz Bop version of Evanescence's 2003 classic “Bring Me to Life.” On screen, she could barely keep from breaking into laughter. Mundane, zany, completely contextless, endless replicable: perfect internet humor. It was the summer of 2019, and TikTok had that heady, diffuse feeling that social media companies struggle to cultivate in their early days—the sense that people are gathering and coalescing into communities because something is happening on their platform.

What is TikTok? What are any of the major social media platforms, these days? They are never-ending A/B tests, where a single piece of content slides onto the screen and all interactions with it—milliseconds of watch time, number of watches, likes, shares, comments, even things like phone orientation—are combined with contextual information—IP address, device type, time of day, location—to become a remarkably powerful information extraction machine.

In his New Yorker essay “Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore,” Kyle Chayka argues that the internet has neither the optimistic shine nor the informational functionality that it used to, despite the fact that content creation is at an all-time high. More than a year of video is uploaded to Youtube every 18 minutes, 120 zettabytes (a million million gigabytes) of data were created in 2023; at this scale, content quickly outstrips the bounds of human intuition and experience. All this, Chayka claims, means that the core model of the web has changed:

The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch—function like broadcast stations, with one creator posting a video for her millions of followers; what the followers have to say to one another doesn’t matter the way it did on the old Facebook or Twitter… [C]onversation isn’t strictly necessary, only watching and listening.

The social web is dead; in its place is the publisher-consumer model, where content is hyper-targeted, self-branding is critical, audiences are bigger, stakes are higher, and rewards are greater. I’m not an exception to these trends. I, like most users, am a lurker.

Recently, I’ve often found myself losing time on TikTok. Decontextualized videos fall into my feed, plucked from an unknowably vast realm of content, each struggling to fit me. I get a cat playing piano, a critique of the colonialism of the Mercator projection, an AI generated filter of “how I would look in the 1930s,” and a gloss of the Swedish engineer who created the first moose crash test dummy, one after the other in an improbable chain of manufactured serendipity. But when I close the app, brain crashing from a screen-induced dopamine high, I often have a sense of my own mortality, that I just wasted half an hour (or, let’s be real, an hour, or an hour and a half) of time that I will never get back. Seen in that light, the name TikTok becomes a macabre double entendre.

Ultimately, that feeling—endless serendipity—is what social media platforms need to keep eyes on screens (and the advertisements contained therein). In order to survive, platforms need to give consumers a sense of things falling effortlessly into place; that, somewhere in the slice of human experience captured in photos, videos, and text, there is something resembling individual meaning.

TikTok is the culmination of a multi-decade process of knowing-at-scale, of endless customization. That road began in the wake of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, when Facebook was just a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s 16-year-old eye. It began with a company that struggled to survive the ups and downs of the social media market for decades; with a cast of founders, investors, and engineers who have shaped our era of technology; with a seemingly simple technology—the customized algorithm—that has become the hallmark of our era. It began, counterintuitively, with StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon rose from the smoldering ashes of the dot-com bubble. In November 2001, Garrett Camp (one of the future co-founders of Uber), Eric Boyd, Geoff Smith, and Justin LaFrance, all University of Calgary students, started building an extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser that let you semi-randomly discover internet content. One click of the “Stumble” button, and you’re on a new page.

The internet of the mid-2020s is an almost entirely frictionless place. I slide from one piece of content to another—auto-generated playlists, auto-recommended videos, auto-summarized essays; screen-recorded TikToks reposted on Twitter, screenshotted Tweets on Instagram. It’s often easy to forget how difficult the internet could be in its early days. When StumbleUpon was created, the web was mostly static images and text. Social media beyond listservs didn’t really exist (MySpace and Facebook were founded in 2003 and 2004, respectively). “To google” wasn’t yet a verb (it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006).

All this meant that the frictionlessness of the “Stumble” interaction was novel, as was the quality of the content. When the University of Calgary group released a beta on the Mozilla add-on store in February 2002 it had instant virality (another novel concept in the early internet era). “I think we were the 138th extension for Firefox ever written, and we got a top rating very early,” Camp said in a 2010 interview. “People liked it, and we followed the comments and fixed anything that was wrong. After a while we had 4.8 stars out of five, and we started to get thousands of installs a day, for free.” The business model was simple—every 20th stumble took a user to advertiser content, and advertisers paid 5 cents per visit.

The rest of the story reads like an exhausting Silicon Valley side-plot, with a menagerie of half-formed business ideas that could have succeeded but never quite took off. There was exponential growth through the 2000s and early 2010s, with millions of users and billions of stumbles; a $75 million acquisition by eBay in 2007; a few years of platform stagnation; a $29 million counter-acquisition to take the company independent again in 2009; a massive app redesign in 2011 that flopped, shedding 25% of the app’s traffic in a month; mass lay-offs and a poorly thought-through purchase of an up and coming video start-up in 2013; and, finally, the slow death of the community, culminating with the end of the app in 2018. For a brief moment in 2011, StumbleUpon drove more traffic to websites than Facebook—then it came tumbling down.

StumbleUpon used the simple predecessors of the mathematical constructs that we think of today as The Algorithm—collaborative filtering, pagerank, basic social graphs—to make the internet fun and accessible. It was distinct from the rising monoliths of 2000s social media in that it was explicitly focused on content consumption rather than profitable co-creation. StumbleUpon was one of the first serendipity machines; it was ahead of its time, and it was addicting.

StumbleUpon was also my pre-teen gateway to the internet—to my developing sense of self and my rapidly-expanding sense of the world. Upon signing up, I ticked a few boxes pertaining to my interests. Then, after a day of school, I would come home and log onto my older sister’s hand-me-down iMac and open the site. As the short New England days grew into evening, I would while away the hours. There was a seemingly-interminable pool of content, an endless number of creative individuals who poured their souls into a bewildering curio shop of websites, animations, photos, videos, articles, and music. Not interested in looking at something anymore? One click and it was gone, replaced by something else that was just about as interesting.

StumbleUpon was among the first platforms to algorithmically order content, even though it maintained the patina of randomness. StumbleUpon used social media algorithms that ranked content from the very beginning—Facebook started the first edition of its newsfeed (a reverse chronological list of posts from friends) in 2006, and only started inserting content algorithmically into newsfeeds in September 2011. StumbleUpon, then, was a novelty and an industry leader. The platform’s success came from its simplicity and serendipity, the algorithm’s ability to, for the first time, maintain a fine balance between unpredictability and delight.

These phenomena are quotidian now; they are the water of the internet that we all swim in. But at the time, they were revolutionary. We know now that my developing brain was being flooded with neurotransmitters associated with positive emotions on a semi-random, intermittent schedule—the slot machine effect, which has been shown to be correlated with addictive tendencies. Dominant social media platforms have been hauled into congressional hearings to address social media addiction and the resultant increase in adolescent depression, based on the formula that these engineers figured out in the early 2000s.

2023 was a uniquely crappy year for the dream of large-scale online communities dedicated to the organization and discussion of high-quality, engaging content on the web. The signs have been there for years—platforms incapable (and unwilling) of solving problems of effective moderation, the use of the coronavirus-induced economic downturn to gut trust and safety teams, whatever the hell is happening at Twitter/X, the proliferation of AI for automated scamming and non-consensual deepfake porn. The internet has become fragmented, and the largest fragments (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc.) are increasingly enshittified as they pursue ever-more elusive profit margins.

It’s no wonder that, in this context, I started reminiscing about the era of the internet that is typified by StumbleUpon—characterized (in my memory) by independent websites, where the correct verb to describe what one did when one “went on the computer” was “browsing.” I’m not alone in that sense of nostalgia. The modern-day set of monopolistic companies that impose an almost neo-feudal structure on the web remind me of the libertarian hellscape that is America in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; StumbleUpon’s ethos of randomness, on the other hand, recalls the self-made anarchist society in Ursula Leguin’s The Dispossessed. Of course, there are some living vestiges of randomized platforms that live on, reminding us of a grimier, less-optimized era of the internet: ChatRoulette (ick), the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google (which reportedly costs Google millions in lost ad revenue annually), and the Wikipedia “Random Article” button. But with the deaths of Omegle and StumbleUpon, and the relegation of “I’m Feeling Lucky” to a vestigial feature, an era of randomness on the internet has taken a definitive hit.

StumbleUpon got its start as an weighted index of the cool shit people put on the internet. Its foundational assumption of the platform was that the internet was a splintered, cacophonous, chaotic place, and that if you knew where to look you could find some beautiful things. There was no assumption of platform monopolism, or of pre-existing algorithmic curation. It didn’t (and probably couldn’t, due to the move-fast-and-break-things nature of the early social web) bookmark individual tweets or Facebook posts. It was predicated on the idea that the internet could be outside of the grasp of a small number of actors. Once again, the name is apt. Using StumbleUpon really felt like stumbling upon something out there in the world.

That feeling of coming across, of true serendipity, was both StumbleUpon’s genius and its ultimate downfall. StumbleUpon was one of the first companies to deploy The Algorithm in the real world, which today is discussed with in a tone usually reserved for the supernatural: revered for its ability to make money, hated for its addictive qualities, and bemoaned as an accelerant of social division. At the same time, StumbleUpon never was able to create The Platform—the space of total corporate control in which expression is commodified into content and social nuances are pressed into a small repertoire of approved interaction patterns.

Some potential solutions to the contradictory and deeply unsatisfying legacy of StumbleUpon lie in changes that are already happening in the industry. Instead of simultaneously toeing the line between the publisher-consumer and social sharing models, some platforms (think Substack, Twitch, OnlyFans, etc.) explicitly formalize the publisher-consumer model. To the extent that there’s discovery, it functions mostly on a trusted recommender model. Other platforms (Discord, Signal, Telegram, Slack, etc.) break those older models entirely, largely sidestepping questions of individual relationships to focus on the creation and curation of communities. Both of these approaches, used in the appropriate contexts, can be incredibly useful.

The primary difference between the modern platform of today and StumbleUpon is the modern platform’s ability to monopolize the frame in which content is presented. They proscribe content, stomp out the chaotic weirdness of the internet, limit external referrals—all to squeeze every last ad impression out of their users. Think of TikTok and Instagram injecting keystroke tracking Javascript into every webpage that users open on the internal app browser, or Twitter/X under Elon Musk (briefly) removing titles from all external links. StumbleUpon did not, and could not, ever do that. At the same time, almost every large-scale social media platform of today is made in StumbleUpon’s image. The platform’s ingenuity prefigured (in its early stages, at least), the publisher-consumer web that is the murderous child of the social web of the early 2010s.

I think back on the StumbleUpon era of the internet—from around 2007 to 2014—with a deep sense of nostalgia. Many people do, and for good reason. The serendipity machine was still a new phenomenon. The content hadn’t yet gotten so targeted that 55% of American respondents to a survey thought their smartphones were listening to them. Individual companies hadn’t yet monopolized the frame of reference. There was error, and randomness, and the feeling of being able to truly connect with new people.

But let’s be real: In 2012 as in 2024, Twitter was already a locus of hate speech; Facebook was already starting to amplify ethnic tensions in Myanmar; eating disorder researchers were already starting to show that social media had intensely negative impacts on adolescent girls’ body images. Omegle and ChatRoulette were full of guys who got off on flashing strangers over the internet. No one really liked the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (which was more of a cultural signifier of Google’s soon-to-be-dead “Don’t Be Evil” era than anything else). And the Wikipedia Random Article button usually returned a page about moths, or a random town in Denmark.

And during those long afternoons on my sister’s desktop spent stumbling upon new websites, I was mostly alone, just like I am mostly alone as I scroll through TikTok in 2024. The light would lengthen, the sun would go down, and the room would get dark. In the darkness, I would eventually come back to my senses. Looking back on it, the vaguely sickening feeling of a content-induced dopamine high is oddly familiar.

Hal Triedman is a writer, activist, and musician currently based in Denver, Colorado. In his day job, he works as a privacy engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He's also a contributing editor to Reboot.

Reboot publishes essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ️⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

• Our very own Tianyu Fang wrote a piece in Wired with Tim Hwang around this time last year about the implications of a potential TikTok ban and the broader “Retreat of the Open Web.”

• More good takes on U.S. TikTok Policy from Tech Policy Press and the Washington Post

• lmao

and for all your high quality industrial grade glycine needs:

@hasaniarnoldReplying to @jenithewoo This is what dreams are made of 😫 #donghuajinlong #glycine #chinatiktok #chinese #languagelearning

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💝 closing note

If you want to read this essay in print (alongside a bunch more really incredible pieces of writing and art), get your copies of Kernel 4 now! We even have a random article button on the site in case you want to tap into that 2011 Stumbleupon magic.

Thank you for reading! Keep on stumbling!

Hal & the Reboot team

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Disassemania

by Jeff Sauer. You can also read it online here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must be disappointing her.

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

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

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

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

“Then what happened?”

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

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

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

“Why do you call them imperfections?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was trying to move the conversation along.

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

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

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

“Okay, okay...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are you feeling?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Sauer (he/him) is an applied scientist and writer based in New York. His work has appeared in Do Not Research, Social Science & Medicine, Geographical Analysis, and other publications.

One last reminder about the NY launch party — an anonymous SF launch party attendee said that they started experiencing lucky coincidences as soon as they RSVP’d. This could be you!

Parties are lucky charms now

Get your copy of Kernel!

Our final preview piece for Kernel 4 is this essay, written by Irena Wang and edited by Shohini Gupta. “a bid, adieu” is an exploration of probability, grief and human connection. It moves me anew every time I read it.

a bid, adieu

By Irena Wang and edited by Shohini Gupta. You can also read it online here.

For D—my love, my best friend, my closest reader,

and the remarkable family that made him.

With gratitude to K and B, in whose patient company so many of these ideas first germinated.

My husband died of an accidental overdose in March 2022.

An unexpected death can defamiliarize the basic components of everyday life. After my husband’s, I acquired a particular sensitivity to counterfactuals. I found their arbitrariness maddening. For a time I had trouble speaking or writing in the subjunctive. Phrases like “if only”, “he would’ve wanted”, “I wish I had”—all died on the tongue as I scrambled for still-valid ways of speaking about the world. A world in which his batch had not been tainted, in which I’d woken to find him in time, seemed no more proximate than a world in which we’d never met, where I’d never been born. Of the uncountably many axes on which fate might hinge, why give preference to any impossibility over another, eliding the simple, gaping wound of his absence? Often, I uncharitably thought, people who did so needlessly milked the situation for tragedy. Is all this not sad enough? Thus alienated from the ordinary patterns of social engagement and private thought, I began to think of my old life as having ended as well, and of the present as an airless waiting room in which logic and grammar would need to be reconstituted from scratch.

I also struggled to comprehend the probabilistic nature of his death. It felt both foreshadowed and inconceivable. By Spring 2022, overdoses had been rising for years. Celebrity deaths by overdose came with unforgiving regularity. There were rumors of fent in the local supply. In light of this, was my private cataclysm unsurprising? It was a sickening thought, no less so than its opposite, that he had simply been uncareful and unlucky. Unluck brought to mind spilled coffee, pratfalls. It was too flimsy a notion on which to rest the reality that I will never again meet the gaze of those proud, wounded eyes, never hear that irreducible melange of lyricism and chatspeak and transliterated Macedonian, as long as I live.

In the week before the funeral, as my fingers tapped out bcc’s by the dozens and my body ran the rounds from bank to cemetery to salon (to bank) to funeral home, my mind did what it reliably does in moments of danger, moving up, up, over everything and into abstraction. In my head, I burned through thousands of theories of the self, of him, of me, of us, our story (a tragedy? a Lifetime movie?). I tried and acquitted myself over and over. Like a cursed game of fruit ninja, it gave me comfort to cut through arguments, slicing through the space of fine distinctions. My conclusions were all variations on what it was impossible to know. But no matter how much I reasoned, one feeling persisted, a totalizing bafflement, a white-hot vicarious indignation at the fact that my love could be felled by something so insubstantial as chance. I carried it with me like a grudge, like a scrim overlaying the world as I returned to work, to life. I used it as fuel to inspect what I came to see as two parallel mysteries of my life and work, the noetic quality of the stories we spin in grief, and the givenness of probabilistic conclusions. The ignition turned out to be a book, dropped into my life like a plot device weeks before.

A week before my husband died, a friend invited me to participate in a virtual book club on May Day for a book (appropriately) called Revolutionary Mathematics, by Justin Joque, on the role that interpretations of probability play in the functioning of modern capitalism. I immediately placed a hold for it through the public library. In the last days of April, neck deep in waves of grief and its processing, I chose this book club to be my unofficial return to social life. I read the book in a few short sprints. 

I recall almost nothing from the event besides the uncanniness of seeing myself in that familiar grid of faces. What remains in mind from the weeks surrounding is simply the sense that something core to my life and work was being revealed.

My husband and I were tech workers. I work in applied machine learning, and tend to spend the majority of my days running experiments, thinking about their theoretical basis. If you, too, work in tech, you are likely engaged in the production of empirical knowledge and “analytic insight.” Perhaps you make digital widgets and algorithmic changes that must be sanctified through A/B or UX testing. Perhaps you design, run, or analyze these experiments, interpreting their findings to make them “actionable.” Empiricism and the language of experimental science is the unspoken God of a modern tech company, to whose neutral authority all must appeal. 

Like any religion, this empiricism rests on articles of faith, in this case the assumption that experimental results reflect reality, and the arc of prediction bends toward truth. But when the corporations running these experiments increasingly mediate our relationship to the world and to others, it can be more accurate to say that these experiments and their consequences bend reality itself. This move from epistemic power to sheer world-making power is mirrored by recent developments in the applications of statistical inference.

“Ghosts of Departed Quantities”

This helplessly romantic phrase is lifted from the philosopher Bishop Berkeley’s critique of calculus, to which he objected because it relied on what he saw as an irresolvable contradiction: the delta that famously goes to zero is treated as both finite and infinite in the theory's derivation. For Joque, this is exemplary of the sleights of hand at the center of so many powerful technologies: the finite infinitesimal and The Calculus, the fungibility of commodities and labor and Capitalism, the Holy Trinity and Catholicism. I would petition to add to this list the idea that other minds are knowable by analogy to our own, and human connection.

In pointing out these “equalizations of inequalities,” Joque’s intention is not to debunk their premises and dismiss their consequences. In fact, he insists repeatedly that factuality is irrelevant when each of these technologies has plainly remade the world. Calling something out as a useful myth may seem pejorative, but I too have come to see these impossibilities at the heart of everything as morally neutral and necessary.

After all, the truth of the world is one of infinite detail, infinite difference. At a certain resolution, nothing is like anything else. This is so obvious as to be a truism, and yet, in an age of rampant scientism and compulsive pattern recognition, it bears acknowledging. To find patterns, as we (like any animal) are compelled to do, we must view the world through simplified models that collapse its differences in myriad ways. 

The same collapsing of difference is asked of us in human relations. At base, all of us are (generously) atomic subjectivities stranded in our own minds. To believe another’s testimony is an act of faith. To act as though their experience of pain and pleasure were something like your own is another. Your purple is only my purple because this evidenceless bid is what underwrites the possibility of human connection.

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Framing

Consider the example of a matchmaking app for dog owners and dog walkers. To be legible to the machine, each owner and walker must first be reduced to a set of features within a predefined ontology: name, demographic, weekly schedule, dogs owned, special qualifications. This renders certain users indistinguishable from one another, and naturally groups individual users into reference classes (male dog walkers in their 20s, homebound elderly dog owners), around which data can be aggregated and about which predictions can be made.

Suppose you wanted to predict the likelihood of cancellation for dog walking appointments. Any given appointment will either be canceled, or it won’t. Fractional probabilities only emerge at the level of the reference class, and are contingent on choice of class. Consider what happens when a walker decides to declare their gender on the app. Without any corresponding change in the real world, this act of divulgence sorts them into a new reference class, with different likelihoods of cancellation.

Probability is not an essential feature of the specific case. Suppose you placed me in a reference class with female-identifying Asian American professionals in their 30s. The probability I’d have lost a spouse to overdose would be exceedingly low. On the other hand, if you chose the reference class of men in their 30s with chronic pain, the same event somehow acquires greater likelihood. Probability is not inscribed on the soul. It’s an artifact of framing.

Objectification

In the case of our dog walking app, historical walks with known cancellation status would be said to have “ground truth,” and the patterns they establish may be used to impute cancellation probabilities for appointments of unknown status, either through a frequentist or Bayesian lens.

In the frequentist interpretation, data are assumed to follow the metaphor of a coin toss—random, repeatable, drawn from a stable underlying distribution (and, in turn, used to impute its shape). This enables the probabilistic assessment of propositions like “male walkers are more likely than females to cancel an appointment” against the hypothesis that both classes are equally likely to cancel, using something called Fisher’s exact test. This test yields a score called the p-value that then determines whether the findings can be said to have “statistical significance.”

What Fisher’s interpretation doesn’t account for is the reality that probabilities are often used to inform decisions (e.g. booking a potentially flaky dog walker) for which false positives and false negatives can have vastly different costs. Assuming the “positive” class is probable cancellations: for a dog owner, a false positive would unfairly dock a reliable walker, while a false negative could ruin an evening. In reinterpreting probability to take the relative costs of typed errors into account, Jerzey Neyman and Egon Pearson reframed the central question of testing from one of inductive inference about a proposition to inductive behavior justified through the minimization of expected cost. This naturally made statistics much more useful to industry, where costs are explicit and important, and where profit trumps truth (which becomes at most a proxy measure for profit).

Bayesian statistics is the next step in the turn from truth to effectiveness. Where subjectivity is smuggled into frequentist probabilities by way of framing, the Bayesian interpretation of probability makes this move explicit with the use of priors. This feature of built-in subjectivity is actually what makes Bayesian statistics well-suited to digital capitalism. That’s because the closed form of Bayes’ rule makes it a recipe for mechanistically churning data into probabilistic beliefs about the world, upon which actions like assessing potential matches, pricing a walk, bidding on ads for the app can in turn be automated.

These probabilities are impossible to validate in the same way that frequentist claims can be (with ever more coin flips). After all, how would one verify the claim that “a walker X will cancel their next appointment with probability Y%” without circularly referring back to how the Y% was derived in the first place? Instead, Bayesian probabilities prove their worth by enabling profitable business decisions, informing which buttons to shade what color, which walker profiles to show at what position, and which version of the copy to display, for maximal profit or user engagement.

The corporate use of machine learning models (many, though not all, of which rely on statistical inference) exemplifies the Marxist concept of objectification. To quote Georg Lukács, objectification occurs at the point when “a relation between people has taken on the character of a thing.” Machine learning models organize the mess of human relations into a unified decision-making apparatus, self-justified through its enabling of economic productivity. Were the matchmaking performed by humans, walkers who aren’t getting matches would have a natural audience for their grievances. But when it’s done with a machine-learned algorithm, the responsibility for each decision becomes relocated diffusely within the matching algorithm. Even the data scientist who trained the model would not be able to explain why a matching decision was made without falling back on aggregate markers of profitability and effectiveness, which give no recourse to the individual case.

The tendency for a centralizing objectification to grant something the illusion of truth is hardly limited to the corporate world. I have come to see the unified self as another useful illusion, given its objective force by the symbol of the physical body.

The morning of my husband’s death, as policemen still paced our living room, messages of heartrending mundanity began trickling into my husband’s phone at daybreak. As the hours passed and news of his death began to spread through our networks, their pace slowed but didn’t stop. On iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, his friends wanted to say goodbye along the channels through which they knew him best. I tried to look away. I didn’t always succeed. As the week went on, I often saw in my mind an image of hundreds of strings coming untied, floating free. To what had they all been tethered? What had changed? People were still thinking and acting in relation to the image of him held in their minds, projecting onto him so many mutually incompatible narratives, just as they did when he was alive. Even his body remained very much in and of the physical world; I was managing its location every day, giving and neurotically revising instructions on its preparation for burial. What was different now was only that it was no longer the centralizing locus for engagement with him as a person. What is personhood, but the wishful conflation of disparate social and personal identities across time with a body? What is the body, if not the objectification of personhood, a symbol for the hope that those incompatibilities will one day be resolved? And what is this essay, but a dream of another place of attentional gathering for all those who loved my husband?

Infinite detail

Like capitalism, like catholicism, the edifice of human relations rests on a floated premise. A bit. A bid. And the paradox of coming to know a person intimately is that this bid for connection wins out spectacularly, even as their difference from oneself comes into greatest relief. Indulge me, now, in some specificities:

My husband’s name was Damian. This is irrelevant, or perhaps it isn’t. Surely, a Damian is more likely to break your heart?

We have a son, born eight months prior. In the delirious days of my extended home labor, Damian coached my breathing, timed my contractions, played me silent nature documentaries soundtracked with ambient music, patiently rubber-ducked as I picked fights with my doula about birth studies over email.

In conversation, Damian spoke with the solicitousness of a concerned older brother, snuck thoughtful compliments under the guise of obvious fact, gently flexed his capacious stack. In his company, one could pretend for the moment that of course we started from the same priors (and if not, perhaps it wasn’t too late to co-opt his). One of his favored constructions was “it didn’t need to be so [brilliant/delicious/etc], but it was.” This refusal to take for granted was at the heart of so much I loved about him—his reflexive sense of gratitude, his capacity for wonder. As for what he felt he didn’t deserve, I can only ever speculate. Expectation/reality, setup/punchline, premise/consequence. Abstraction. Reality. It’s all continuous, isn’t it? Continuous even with that most human act, of suddenly seeing in media res that things could be otherwise, and choosing to follow through anyway. Acknowledging the premise as moth-eaten and beleaguered while seeing the good that is possible in living as though it were true. Recognizing the polite fiction of a coherent self, capable of making and keeping promises. Marrying them anyway. 

In the dreamlike hours after Damian’s death, I remember tapping automatically into the baby monitor app to find the last video I have of him, cooing our son back to sleep in the early hours of morning. I remember opening the trash can, and finding a fresh bag, its only contents a clouded vial with a green apple decal. Trash duty was Damian’s job, and pickup was in the morning. From the infinite detail of a life, I suppose I’m picking these out to convince you that, though he was troubled, he was a good father and a good man, knowing neither you nor quite what makes a person good. I am placing him in a reference class of good men and good fathers, so that his death might be viewed as an anomaly, and to thus properly validate my sense of singular devastation.

The night after Damian died, gathering photos for his memorial website, I found myself grieving our past selves. We’d been together 7 years, time enough to trace the slow slackening of skin and creep of crows’ feet. For him, the photos stretched back to infancy, tracking the golden child, the loving son and brother, the surly teen. A years-long gap stood in for post-grad lostness, followed by my ample documentation of our relationship—friends, trips, marriage and parenthood. I scanned the timeline back and forth, rewinding, replaying, looking for signs of hope and doom.

At some point, hours into the night, I realized that this fresh wave of grief bore no relation to Damian’s dying. The selves pictured in those photographs were as lost to me as he was, not 48 hours since his death. To mourn their loss as though they were myself was another willful erasure of difference—the difference between the collection of cells that bears my name in any given moment and the person captured in an old photograph. “Damian” is gone, and with him the need for that worn-out fiction of the unified self, for chronology and the stories that depend upon it. Unbound by narrative and the arrow of time—regret, disappointment, nostalgia are left to recede back into meaninglessness. All there is, is the moment:

– now –

running through the city weightless with new love, drunk with mutual recognition.

– now –

hiking side by side through the dense quiet of an old growth forest, as the world falls apart incomprehensibly just outside.

– now –

breastfeeding in bed, Damian curled around us, an island in space and time. 

A world unto ourselves, then and still.

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Today’s essay, written by Tina Mai and edited by Jasmine Sun, gets at some of the core fascinations that brought us to LUCK as the theme for Kernel 4. It’s about luck and chance as things that can seemingly rule our lives, but also about the ways—technological and psychological—that we attempt to reshape luck and gain some kind of agency over it.

Chaos Theory

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

By Tina Mai and edited by Jasmine Sun. You can also read it online here.

In another universe, sunlight drips through an open window. I am lying on the floor in a small apartment. I am five years old. Nothing bad has happened to me.

In this version of the story, my life is still a blank slate, and I can control what happens like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure games. The critical events that will go on to change my life—the move to America, the class switch in high school, the fateful LinkedIn DM—have yet to take place. Nothing bad has happened, nothing good has happened, and I am still naïve enough to believe I can shape the future to my will.

There’s something exciting and simultaneously terrifying about this echo of myself twelve years ago. Everyone has a version of this: What if X never happened? What if I never met Y? What if I wasn’t at Z (an oddly specific locale that you never could’ve predicted) at this particular point in time? We look back on our lives and consider all the possibilities of what could have been: all the alternate universes in which we were still a kid, and things happened to work out a little differently, and our new lives turned out to be nothing like the one we’re currently living. Whether it’s with longing (things didn’t work out the way you wanted them to) or gratitude (things worked out—good for you!), it’s human nature to marvel at things beyond our control.

In my alternate universe, I am still five years old in my grandmother’s seventeenth-floor apartment in Guangzhou. I would have no idea that one year later, I would be on a one-way flight to the United States. Eight years later, I would learn what startups are for the first time. And twelve years later, I would leave Stanford to build one.

When I first heard the story of Bill Gates, I was amazed at how the pieces of his story fell into place, as if fate was following an IKEA assembly manual for the modern-day technical founder. His childhood is portrayed as an almost mythological rise to success: he was lucky to be born to parents who put him in an elite private school; he was lucky that the mothers at the school piled together money to fund its computer club; then, when the money ran out, he was lucky that one of the parents worked at a local computer company, which gave him free programming time in exchange for testing their software; and when another company wanted specialized programmers, he was lucky that they invited him to spend his senior year of high school writing code for them. By the time he was 20, he had accumulated enough technical practice to drop out of Harvard and build Microsoft. 

But not all stories work out quite so neatly. Take Jonathan Larson, the writer behind the musical Rent, which is to this day one of the longest-running shows on Broadway. As an ambitious writer fresh out of college, Larson made the fabled move to New York City, into a lower Manhattan apartment where the shower was in the kitchen and the central heating was nonexistent. But Larson was terminally unlucky—one year turned into two years which turned into nearly a decade, and all he had to show for it was a minimum-wage diner job and a rejected manuscript. Even when he finally wrote Rent, the magnum opus that changed his career, he couldn't escape his bad luck: Jonathan Larson died from a fatal aortic aneurysm one day before Rent’s first performance. He was 35 years old. Later, a lawsuit determined that if doctors had properly diagnosed him when he went to the hospital with chest pains, his life could have been saved. Rent would go on to win four Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, but Larson would never know it.

Would I become a Larson or a Gates? The determinism behind luck haunted me. I could build a successful career, I would think. I could achieve the Gatsbyesque American dream. I could buy that house next to the beach. I could meet “the one.” I could write my magnum opus. I could satisfy all the investors. I could find a fabulous work-life balance. I could become a good mother. I could earn enough to retire my dad. I could get my big break. 

And still, the next day, I could die in a car crash.

Call me fatalistic, but that doesn’t erase the harsh reality that life can be utterly, entirely, frighteningly beyond our control. The good luck that brought Bill Gates to the computer club is just as enigmatic as the bad luck that brought Jonathan Larson to inattentive doctors. If there is some deep dichotomous logic that separates the two, we don’t know it. For centuries, philosophers have debated the subject of free will. Immanuel Kant, one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment, asserted that our understanding of goodness and morality depends on our freedom to choose between right and wrong. Yet by the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet seemed to have scientifically demonstrated that we cannot have free will, showing how electrical signals for an action build up in our brains before we ever make a conscious decision to take that action. If luck is so prominent, do we really have any control over our lives?

Sitting at the lunch tables in eighth grade, my friend raised the quintessential childhood dilemma: What superpower would you want to have? Instead of the classics—the power to fly, the power to turn invisible—I decided that I wanted the power to manipulate probability.  That way, everything would suddenly be within my control: The probability that I could also fly? 100%. The probability that I’d fail my trigonometry test next week? 0%. I had just turned thirteen and I was first starting to feel the pressure to succeed that would go on to dictate the rest of my life. Probability was my way of dealing with the confusion and the uncertainty—we tell ourselves these simple numbers are enough to capture the nuance of chance, because anything beyond that becomes too complicated for our minds to process. Even then, I was afraid of luck.

It is easy to look at founder narratives as a sequence of lucky breaks, as Bill Gates’ story may suggest. Our brains tend to concentrate on critical events that we think had significant and easily-definable causal effects, a series of key incidents concatenated into a linear success story. Looking backwards, we can dissect the exact things that went right in Gates’ life like a historian: X led to Y led to Z (in Gates’ case, a world-changing company). Because of this bias, we conjure up goals or objectives for ourselves that act as checkpoints along our imaginary roadmap to success: getting into Harvard or Stanford means we gain a certain degree of societal respect, means we have more leverage when raising money from Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia, means we are more likely to get the Thiel Fellowship and drop out, means we get closer to achieving a startup exit, means I, too, can be just like the nineteen-year-old billionaire on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list! The danger, then, is slipping into a demoralizing cycle of picking apart everything that went right in successful people’s lives, and trying to imagine how you can also catch their lucky breaks.

The truth is, we feel far more reassured following blueprints than rolling the dice. We tell ourselves that by tracing these Promethean stories of rebellion and innovation, we can achieve the same success as those before us. In reality, success is not pieced together by methodological design, but requires one to significantly defy the odds. For example: if this year is anything like the last five, around 90% of startups will fail. Most founders have been warned about this statistic; even venture capitalists anticipate that most of their portfolio companies will fail to return value. The fascinating phenomenon, then, becomes how founders play this twisted game. Is it founder nature to believe you can beat the odds? Can you even be a driven, relentless founder if you don’t?

To live in modern society is to be constantly fed statistics that, intentionally or unintentionally, sway our worldview. You may have been told that 97% of students get rejected from the most selective schools, or that 42% of long-distance relationships fail, or that there’s a 95% chance the human race will cease to exist in the next 12 to 18,000 years (that last one was published in the journal Nature by the Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III; The New Yorker wrote a profile on him in 1999 amusingly titled, “How to Predict Everything”). There is a fatalism to these statistics. Prediction science makes us feel as though we have little agency over what happens. We lose faith in our ability to beat the odds, because we have created odds for ourselves to beat in the first place. 

But it is dangerous to believe we don’t have control over our lives: in an article for The Atlantic, Stephen Cave notes that “Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.” Probability data, then, becomes a drug that causes people to underestimate their chances and lean toward inaction. The conviction of a startup founder survives when they don’t let this 90% failure rate dissuade them. There will always be some behind-the-scenes machinations that affect our lives; luck remains enduringly present. But the relentless work required to build a startup—and correspondingly, any form of ambitious work—comes when we don’t let probability sink us to complacency, but inspire us toward agency. We have to optimize our response to luck so we can attract more luck.

In my sophomore year of high school, hoping to gloss the transcript that would fatefully end in the hands of admissions officers, I planned to enroll in AP Statistics. As it turns out, the class was prioritizing seniors that year, so the registrar switched me into AP Computer Science instead. At the time, I had zero interest in programming: I had always been conditioned to believe that I wasn’t a computer science person, and since my course load was already rigorous, I probably should have dropped it. Out of curiosity, I didn’t. 

What began as a class I was apathetic towards turned into hours after school picking up extra programming languages, turned into the commitment to build entire apps, turned into embarking on my software training arc at ungodly hours every night. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Steve Jobs famously said at Stanford’s 2005 commencement address. “You can only connect them looking backwards.” When I look backwards, the technical skills that brought me my future opportunities began with this dot. What thirteen-year-old Tina didn’t understand was that the beauty of luck is found in its lawlessness. You can’t connect the dots looking forward because you don’t know what the dots are. Instead, the next best thing is to maximize your chances of getting the good ones—that is to say, to maximize getting lucky.

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The message came on October 4, 2022. A popup in the “Messaging” tab on my LinkedIn showed an unread DM:

To: Tina Mai

From: Isabella Epstein

Date: Oct 4, 2022 at 9:22 PM

Subject: Loomis Chaffee Alum > Startup

I was just starting my senior year of high school—AP Physics had a test on Monday, my friends were blasting the group chat with potential homecoming dresses, and I spent my nights concocting my Common App college application essay. The message that reached me was completely unexpected; in it, my now-cofounder Isabella, who graduated seven years earlier from the high school I went to, mentioned how she stumbled across my profile in the student directory and was hooked by the projects I had built. What was supposed to be a 30-minute call turned into a 3-hour-long ideating session for a new startup idea. A year later, this became the company that I left college to build—but it all began as what one might consider a lucky cold outreach. 

Back in 2007, Marc Andreessen—the billionaire tech venture capitalist famous for his bets on Facebook, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley legends (as well as what The New Yorker describes to be “a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can’t help but think of words like ‘jumbo’ and ‘Grade A’”)—wrote a blog post where he discusses the four types of luck. Originally introduced in Dr. James Austin’s 1978 book Chase, Chance, and Creativity, these are called Chance I, Chance II, Chance III, and Chance IV. Chance I is blind luck, or the force that’s entirely out of our control. In Chance II, luck is attracted based on hard work and persistence. In Chance III, luck comes to those who are really good at spotting it. Chance IV, however, is the kind of luck that can be engineered from individual action. Dr. Austin writes: “Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave.” Every entrepreneur knows that luck plays a huge role in success vs. failure: but Andreessen concludes that if there’s a roadmap to getting lucky, this is it.

There is an argument that the rise of the internet has undercut serendipity. As Gen Z, we spend our days aided by consumer software to make us more efficient (Spotify for online music, Zoom for online meetings, Instacart for online groceries), and as a result find ourselves less and less in environments where we might unexpectedly stumble across something new to love. After all, looking up an exact title on Amazon.com is not the same as browsing a bookstore and walking past a novel that catches your eye. In an archived piece for The New York Times from 2006, William McKeen observes how “We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find—with an irritating hit or miss here and there—exactly what you're looking for.”

But this is only one way to use the internet. It’s true that what it looks like to get lucky now differs vastly from what it did twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean serendipity was more existent “back in the day” when the kids browsed bookstores and bought groceries from the local supermarket. Instead, particularly for young founders, the emergence of the social internet has enabled an entirely new way of finding luck, especially Chance IV luck. On Twitter, a 15-year-old from the suburbs of Indiana raised $20 million after posting about taking meetings in the stalls of his high school bathroom. A 19-year-old programmer without a college degree grew an AI startup backed by Sam Altman after sharing exceptional product demos. A 27-year-old dropout who got fired by his hedge fund amassed 62,000 members (and $19.2 million) to build a futuristic city in the Mediterranean after posting his utopian vision that included “muscular warriors, very thin priests, and portly merchants.” (Then, a personal tweet that I posted about leaving school to build in New York City got me invited to his city’s office in SoHo.) Tech Twitter has enabled the next generation of founders to be “luckier”: what was previously a game of warm intros and predetermined privilege has become more of a free-for-all for who can send the best cold DMs or write the most provocative tweets.

There’s a phenomenon within the circle of young builders that exemplifies this idea of manufactured luck: called “building in public,” it encapsulates programmers, writers, and other creators posting progress on their work as they are making it (mistakes and obstacles included). 16-year-olds on LinkedIn post screenshots of their code with captions like “Day 3 of building a galaxy collision simulation, can’t seem to figure out the error in line 57” or “6 weeks into building my hand-gesture-controlled robot. This is probably the most frustrating project I’ve ever worked on.” A startup called Buildspace (self-described on Twitter as “the place where people build cool shit”) invites people to take an idea they’re excited about and bring it to life, led by a practice of sharing your progress and getting feedback. Prominent funds like Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator back them for their prolific culture where tens of thousands of people build in public, whether it’s a web game about fighting ninjas or spices that make any food taste like meat.

Getting found is about being findable.

When that message found me on October 4, it wasn’t because I could control where my life went, just as how Bill Gates and Jonathan Larson couldn’t control theirs. I can only connect the dots looking back: the unintentional placement in AP Computer Science led to me building my own apps, led to me publishing my projects, led to my work getting noticed by Isabella, led to her becoming my cofounder, led to this company. Our generation hasn’t diminished serendipity; it has simply found (and multiplied) it in other ways. Cold emails, captivating tweets, and viral TikToks have one thing in common: they originated from action. This is what parallels them to Chance IV luck. Young people today have gotten good at increasing the surface area through which luck can enter their lives—in the age of the internet, it is an act of self-invention and hopeful intervention. It is a chance to reclaim agency.

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics and physics that studies the unpredictable. It looks at systems that are non-linear and highly sensitive to initial conditions, where one small change to an input leads to unimaginable changes in result: the science of surprises. There are phenomena in our existence—the weather, the stock market, the story of our lives—that can never be predicted, because one tiny change makes all the difference.

In another universe, I am lying on the floor in a small apartment. I am five years old, and nothing has happened to me. I am a blank slate of initial conditions on which the rest of my life will be built. How many branches, how many alternate universes, will spawn if one thing happened differently? How many things can go wrong? We can try to guess, or we can embrace the chaos. In his Principal Doctrines, the Greek philosopher Epicurus writes: “Bad luck strikes the sophisticated man in a few cases, but reason has directed the big, essential things, and for the duration of life it is and will be the guide.”

In the aftermath of luck, we have agency. Chaos teaches us to expect the unexpected, but what happens after that is up to us. Proactive people don’t wait for life to happen to them; they make their own luck. Serendipity finds its way into your life when you are always learning, always building, always sharing your work. On my deathbed, I will spend time connecting all the dots in my life, but they will be dots I never could have predicted. The beauty of luck is its lawlessness; we can live in fear of this lawlessness, or we can minimize the impact of its external, uncontrollable factors and maximize how well we respond to them.

In this current universe, I am eighteen years old, standing on the rooftop of Stanford’s Aeronautics and Astronautics building on one of my last nights of being a student there. It’s late enough that the remaining restless students have either retreated to their dorms or committed to their all-nighters in Huang basement. I’m about to leave and move across the country. Like Jonathan Larson, this is my fabled move to New York City, where our one-bedroom apartment in the West Village has a kitchen which is ten feet from the bed which is two feet from the desk. I have feared luck my whole life—now, I don’t see it as a threat, but more so the gentle machinery of life. Chaos theory teaches me that life is nonlinear and unpredictable. There is no point in trying to guess different endings. 

So here’s to this one.

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Get lucky with a foil cover?

Launch party links once again: DC, SF, and NYC. Hope to see you there!

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

Sean Michaels is the author of Do You Remember Being Born?, a story of AI and poetry. He is also the author of the novels Us Conductors and The Wagers, and founder of the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His non-fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, and Pitchfork. Sean is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Grand Prix Numix, the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he has been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Peabody Awards, and the Prix des libraires du Quebec. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal, Canada.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Dating Your (Potential) Executioner

Interview and introduction by Shira Abramovich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine that, right? 

In a previous interview, you talked about the story of the poet Marianne Moore that led you to choose a Moore-like figure as your poet. I was wondering if you’d retell it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why the climbing gym?

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

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

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

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

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

I ended up getting a few different grants to get help to come up to speed on some of these issues from the Canada Council for the Arts and from the Quebec equivalent, the CALQ. I was able to hire Jasmine1 to consult, to teach me how to get access to GPT, and then how to use it intelligently. Later, another grant allowed me to find engineer Katie O’Nell to actually build a poetry bot. I discovered that GPT2 and especially GPT3 were really pretty good at literary creation and lyricism, copying my writing style, by giving it as large a prompt as possible, in a way that ChatGPT is terrible. GPT2 and GPT3 were good at this lyrical style mimicry, but cannot do poetry. None of these things can. They’ve just been trained wrong into conceiving of poetry as this rhyming doggerel.2 And anything that’s not rhyming doggerel, it doesn’t understand. You say in the style of ee cummings, it still gives you There once was a woman from Panama… You say, No, no, like this, and give an example. And it still says Ohh. Gotcha. There once was a woman from Panama…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading — if you enjoyed this interview, we’d really appreciate it if you shared or forwarded to a friend!

Get lucky with a foil cover?

Launch party links once again: DC, SF, and NYC. Hope to see you there!

Get your copy!

Second, come to our launch parties — find us in DC on 3/22, SF on 3/23, and NYC on 3/30. More details at the end of this post!

Today, we are officially releasing Kernel Magazine’s fourth issue! 

The stories contained within its more than 200 pages run the gamut from the personal to the statistical, drawing new and unexpected connections between luck, technology, and chance in contexts as disparate as algorithmic divination, labor organizing, art in the age of AI, and grappling with loss.

Watching these stories grow from pitches to drafts to finished works over the last few months has been a joy beyond imagining―perhaps in the vein of LUCK, this issue’s theme, it feels like each piece of this magazine has come together through some beautiful serendipity, an unruly garden of words and ideas. I’m so excited to share it with you.

Starting now, you can purchase a copy of the magazine online here. 

We’ve printed a limited number of special-edition foil covers, and in keeping with the theme, you can have a ~ chance ~ at snagging one: one in four magazines purchased this week will get a foil, while supplies last! (As is the case in the real world, you can also buy your way into luck; all donor-tier purchases will get a foil as a default.) 

✍️ Editor’s Note 

by Jacob Kuppermann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[In your] Heads captures the ways that that chance has wormed into our internal processes. When we stare into stochastic algorithms for long enough, our own thinking starts to reflect them. These stories ask us to become kaleidoscopes, gazing into the fractals of identity. We’re shaped by the successes of startups and our plots to reverse engineer that luck; we’re made all too aware of the fragility of our creative practices in the face of AI. We use algorithms as tools for divination; we manipulate our own language to evade and appease algorithms in turn. We let our lives impossibly intertwine.

In between these two sections is an interlude, thoughtfully composed by Jess Zhou, our poetry editor, on poetry, technology, and Palestine. That, too, is a piece on probability, on statistics of loss and ranges of possibilities. Peace and liberation can also feel like ways of beating the odds.

Making a magazine is an inherently lucky thing. There are so many little points of chance and serendipity that had to align just so for any of this to exist at all, let alone in the form that it has taken to reach you. The same is true for nearly every ambitious, uncertain endeavor―be it a startup, a union, or a work of art. 

This is all to say that when we ask What are the odds? we are not asking as dispassionate observers but as actors on constantly shifting ground, trying always to grab onto those points of chance and run with them. 

Feeling lucky?

Parties

With all that in mind, we’d love to see you at Reboot’s first ever Community Day on Saturday at the KQED building in SF! Get your tickets now – you’ll get a $10 discount off the price of a copy of Kernel 4, and a whole day’s worth of group discussions, activities, readings, and chances to get to know your fellow Reboot community members!

If you’re in NYC or DC, we’ve also got launch parties for you! DC’s launch party is this Friday, and is hosted by K4 contributor Zora Che and Reboot contributor Eliza Steffen – RSVP here! The NYC launch party is next Saturday (March 30), and is hosted by K4 contributors Irena Wang and Jeff Sauer – get your tickets here!

Finally, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the thirty-five(!) people – writers, editors, designers, illustrators, and more – who contributed something to this issue, as well as the dozens more who helped us think through the process of making this magazine. It takes a village, and a moderately-sized one at that, to make any of this possible. Thank you all.  

And, to everyone reading this: Good luck!

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann and the Reboot Team

P.S. We’re releasing this issue on St. Patrick’s Day as the culmination to a joke Jessica made in the Reboot discord seven months ago. I hope this issue makes at least some intellectual sense.

Subscribe now

We’re so excited to share everything this issue has to offer – non-fiction features & interviews, short stories, poems, illustrations, and more – but for now, we’ll start by sharing two things:

First: Come hang out with us! To commemorate the Kernel 4 launch, we’ll be holding the inaugural Reboot Community Day on Saturday, March 23, an all-day, in-person symposium at the KQED building in San Francisco. Join us for creative workshops, group discussions, chances to meet your fellow Reboot community members, and something that we have been referring to as the “Hot Take Arena.”

Tickets for the all day event are $20 (and come with lunch)—if you just want to join us for the Kernel 4 launch itself at the end of the day, tickets for that are $10. Attendees can add on a copy of the magazine for a discounted price of $20. As always, we have student/low-income discounts available—let us know how we can help you attend! 

Get your tickets here!

If you aren’t in the Bay Area and want to host or attend a Kernel launch event, email me at jacob@joinreboot.org! We can help you set up an event in your city. More information coming soon on that.

Second: Cover reveal! (All credit goes to the incredible Kristy Xue Gao):

Doesn’t that look cool as hell?

Stay tuned over the next month for more previews from Kernel 4 (as well as your standard, also extremely good Reboot newsletter offerings)—for now, good luck!

See you all soon,

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

Editor-in-Chief, Kernel Magazine Issue 4

Reboot publishes essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

Subscribe now

🌀 microdoses

• rolling up to community day in your best fit

  

• thinking about the coin boys again

• important prediction markets use case:

  

• Stream “Lucky” by Erika de Casier unofficial Kernel 4 anthem!!

ok bye!! see you at the launch!!

📈 Send us a tiny tech review (50-300 words on something you loved or hated or something in between) by tonight!

☘️ If you want to submit fiction, poetry, or visual art to Kernel 4, do that by Dec. 8 here!

🎁 Physical magazines make great gifts… and if you get your order in by Dec. 10, we’ll get any Kernel order shipped to you (US addresses) in time for Christmas.

This week, we’re unlocking all the remaining pieces from Kernel 3! Let me pitch you on each of them — they’re all totally worth it.

⚖️ When the Computer is the Witness by Christina Tuttle

If you’ve seen Jury Duty (which, if you haven’t, you should), you’ll remember the unhinged scene where the defense attorney shows a ridiculous animation that supposedly illustrates what really happened on the day of the supposed crime. It turns out that, though such animations are widely used (usually by prosecutors), they’re vastly under-studied. I learned a ton from this essay by Christina Tuttle (edited by Archana Ahlawat) that examines how animations shape storytelling and therefore the enactment of justice.

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

Logic Magazine has been a huge influence for years (see this “Intergenerational Struggle Session” from a few issues ago). They recently rebirthed as Logic(s), and it was so fun to get to talk to Michael Falco, their interim managing editor, about the transition and their vision for a print magazine about technology. The second issue of Logic(s) is coming out soon — we’re excited and you should be too!

🔮 Climate Science Crystal Ball: Towards a Cyborg Climate Science by Kyle Barnes

If models are crystal balls, climate scientists are the psychics imbuing predictions of the future with legitimacy…. I want to believe that better science gives us better information, that better models of the climate can give us a better signal of what to do next; at the same time, I also know that there is a fundamental limitation to what statistics can tell us. This essay, edited by (K4 EIC!) Jacob Kuppermann, grapples with what predictive models can and cannot do, and what we need to fill in the gaps.

💬 Marked as Irrelevant: Why Stack Overflow’s Static Culture is Leading to a Mass Migration by Aina Z.

Lots of “twitter thought leaders” seem to say that AI killed StackOverflow, but what if it was StackOverflow’s own policies? In our first piece of software criticism — edited by Sheon Han, the originator of the term himself — Aina Z. explores the culture and policy decisions that shaped — killed? — the content on the platform.

👥 The Strategies We Need: Building and Sustaining Tech Cooperatives by Priya Chatwani

I always felt like I heard a lot about the idea of co-ops as an alternative to venture-backed startups, but never really understood how it would work in practice. This essay, written by Priya Chatwani and edited by Jackie Luo — both engineers who actually worked at tech coops — goes into the details, including those that are less “theoretically sexy” but ultimately practically critical.

🌎 Top O’ the World by Liam Hogan

There is something very charming about this story about two workmen installing solar panels in and around London… I fell in love with the two dudes in this story, doing what they can, even and especially when they suspect it might not ultimately amount to much.

Reboot publishes free essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

Subscribe now

💝 closing note

Thanks for reading! You have until tonight to submit a tiny tech review (50-300 words on something you loved or hated), until Friday to submit creative work for Kernel 4, and until Sunday to get your physical magazines in time for Christmas :)

Jessica & Reboot team

Read more about the CFP here, submit pitches here, and express interest in editing, art, and design here! Send us your art, fiction, and poetry here (open for a month).

One of the most beautiful pieces in Issue 3 of Kernel is a manifesto by Raya Ward, towards (collective) grief as a political practice. Raya and I thought that — in light of the ongoing siege on Gaza — now would be a good time to share her essay. (At the end of this newsletter, we’ll link to what some of our editors have been reading on the war.)

MY GHOSTS REMIND ME OF A WORLD NOT YET MADE

By Raya Ward, edited by Jessica Zhou

I climbed a tree today and let it hold me in my grief. Tangled in its branches, I lay my head down, ear to bark, and listen to its rustle. The sounds of its gentle dance are quieter than I-10 behind me. I lament that I have to drive to reach this park, to come be with my tree. I look down to its roots, then up through its canopy, and take a moment of silence to remember my late mother and her knowledge of the trees.

In this moment, the limbs of my body suspended from those of another, my body is nurturing layers of mourning: climate grief, familial loss, and urban decay. I hold climate grief for the ghosts of the trees I do not see—those ripped from Tongva soil and slathered by L.A. concrete. I mourn my mother—her presence, her knowledge, and this story I wish I could tell her. I wrestle with L.A.’s sprawl and her corresponding lack of transit and accessible green space.

And yet, at the same time, my body is experiencing unfeigned joy: a thrilling dose of adrenaline (heights are good for that), a comforting nostalgia, and much needed contentment. In my body I find grief and play complementary. Both help me to learn. Both are how I come to understand. Both are how I get through the compounding political, social, and ecological crises that mark our contemporary moment.

I come here to ask you to mourn. To the urgent threats of climate change, facism, systemic racism, and global capitalism, I offer a call for mourning. I am asking you to grieve with me, for us to commit to a practice of mourning together: to name what we have lost and what we stand to lose. I am going to ask you to use your grief to carve out portals, to leap through them, and use your body to enact new worlds. I am going to ask you to mark these transitions with ritualized mourning, and give birth to ghosts that can help us to organize and sustain a movement toward more just and resilient futures.

GRIEF: A WORKING DEFINITION

mourning, remembering, naming, celebrating, longing, reckoning, gathering, reenacting, reaching, resisting, imagining, transcending, teleporting, becoming

In our collaborative thesis, Mournful Design for Critical Climate Futures, Kyle Barnes and I, together tomorrow soup, outlined mournful design, a speculative design method that centers grief as a way of designing towards liberatory futures. We focused on grief because, grief:

1. Makes crisis feel real.

2. Gets to the root causes of crisis.

3. Builds political power when practiced communally.

4. Has a haunting power that can instill the lasting critical consciousness necessary.

To this I add:

5. Grief’s transformational effect allows us to depart from the dominating logics of our current systems.

Grief opens a liminal space between our current world and the ones we aim to inhabit. In this space, this inbetween, we can convene with our ghosts, consolidate our grievances, and imagine futures beyond the restricted imagination of our present.

GETTING TO THE WHY

In naming what has been lost or what we stand to lose, we can not be tricked into denying the urgency of our situation. By pointing to what has been lost, the scale of that loss, and the inequity in who experiences loss, grief surfaces the root causes of our grief. We must name anti-blackness, capitalism, and settler-colonialism.1

For some, the loss is literal. For example: Louisiana citizens who lose their houses to sinkholes in the aftermath of natural gas extraction are suffering an acute loss of home at the hands of capitalism's ruthless conflation of the earth’s materials with financial assets.

For others, their grief follows a lineage. Their loss is less literal—less theatrical than sinkholes or floods—and more distant from root systemic causes. In interrogating our grief, we are able to uncover the fundamental origins of our wounds, but this investigation is a labor. Locating the root of our grief is a radical act that requires us to contextualize ourselves within systems of domination.

Heavy in my grief lineage is the weight of my mother’s passing. Interrogating this loss, I come to understand how my grief is not just my own, but a socially comprehensible wound inflicted by the death economy: a medical system directed by the logics of insurance that prioritizes profit and prescriptions over care and well-being, particularly that of brown and black women. If I dig further, I can connect her aneurysm to causes and correlations rooted in her experience of childhood poverty, corporate grind culture, predatory pharmaceuticals, and alcoholism. In interrogating my lack of mother, in questioning her passing and asking why, not cosmically but socially—seriously, why?—I am learning about the world she left me in. I am learning how it treated her, how it treated/s my family, and how it will continue to treat others if nothing changes.

This grief pushed me to my limits but it also showed me where the boundaries lie, where borders have been carved, walls erected. My grief changed me. It allowed me to venture past the edge of the world as I knew it, to look back and see the false paradigms that had so forcefully constrained my view. From out here, from this place where I sit with my mother’s ghost, I can see how entangled these systems are and how deep the wounds they inflict can be. I am taking notes; I am making plans. I will not be directed by the same logics, nor will my descendants; my mother still is teaching me.

In naming our grief, we locate it. When we use our sorrow to not only sharpen but also direct our focus, we locate the form of what we resist. We are able to trace its edges. In An Inventory of Losses, a book about naming the stories of forgotten absence, Judith Schalansky posits, “like a hollow mold, the experience of loss renders visible the contours of the thing mourned.” Abstraction benefits systems of oppression, but this recognition cuts through the obfuscation that serves to misdirect and diffuse us—to keep us from organizing in resistance. It is a critical preliminary step. In looking towards what we wish to undo, we become radial points around a shared focus, with our personal lineages of grief as the connecting tendrils.

PRACTICES AND POWER OF COMMUNAL MOURNING

It is this interconnected entangled web that we must create. The weight of grief is not something you must carry alone. In her lyrical reflections on a burning California and a search for home, writer Christina Nichol contemplates the privatization of grief:

Grief processed on one’s own turn to despair, but grief processed communally becomes medicine…For hundreds of thousands of years grief rituals recalibrated the fields of trauma. These days there is no communal cup of sorrow; there is only psychotherapy, which colludes with the privatization of property, the privatization of consciousness, and the privatization of grief...”

The individual paradigm of grief is in direct relation with the logic of neoliberal morality. Similar to fossil-fuel-funded propaganda that implores you to reduce your carbon footprint, attempting to grapple with crisis only individually rather than through collective action is frequently unproductive and unjust. Embracing collective grief encourages practicing a shift away from guilt or individual responsibility, and towards community action and the redesign of individualizing systems. In this way, communal mourning can also be the basis for building political community by surfacing and affirming relational ties, shared experience, and mutual responsibility. As feminist philosopher Judith Butler proposes, “to grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.”

In fact, I argue that mourning itself is a political act. In mourning we proclaim what is grievable and what needs to be remembered. To mourn is to declare and name a violence. It is to display what we experience and mark it so we may not forget. As Cunsolo Willox reminds us in Climate Change as the Work of Mourning, minority and marginalized bodies are consistently derealized and deprioritized in public discourse. To mourn such devalued bodies is to firmly resist the logics that attempt to erase them. When Iceland hosts a memorial for their first glacier lost to climate change and the artist Suhyun Choi hosts a memorial for their Macbook, both declare nonhuman bodies as grievable too. Mindy Seu, author of the Cyberfeminism Index, names ‘memory work’ itself as a form of activism that asks whose memories are retold. When embedded in systems that ask us to look away and forget—to believe our experiences are isolated—to remember is to resist silence. I ask you to tell me the story of what you have lost. Introduce me to your ghosts.

SUSTAINING WITH GHOSTS

After our shared memorials, the ghosts of our grief are lasting reminders of why we struggle, what we struggle towards, and what we continue to struggle against. We must not just name but be in relationship with our grief. Recognition is not enough; we must be willing to be transformed—transported—by it.

I want our hurt not to be in vain; I want to transmute it, want each cut to open a new perspective. Kelsey Chen’s poetic reflections on tattooing share a redemptive practice of learning how to be wounded. In it is a offering to consent to wounds as a surrendering to the transformation these wounds—and the space opened within them—can bring about:

Violence does not need an invitation to greet the body. It simply arrives. Learning our own vulnerability is a destabilizing thing; even more so when you learn it fast. But I love my fragility; treasure my capacity to be hurt. Rilke says sadness is just the feeling of the future entering into you. So think, my hurt sisters, how much fucking future there must be in us.

Even when violence arrives at our doorstep unbidden there is choice. Bayo Akomalofe has said — when you meet the monster — when, not if —you can either defeat it or allow it to wound you…. Consent to be wounded is to risk radical physical transformation but also the creation of rupture; of opening. Pain is a gateway to revolution…. The wound is an opening; it allows the future to enter; it is the space of transformation. The wounded are the first makers of portals.

How more tenderly I look at my wounds when I understand them as portals. When I see the space a laceration has opened in me and do not look away from the red, but look deeper into it. I understand new skin will come to mend the gap and see this not just as a closing of wound, but as a passing into a new self and closing the door behind me. I understand this new skin will be made for me now, that it will hug my body, affirming the shape that I am. And so I dress my wounds with care; I tend to my wounds with curiosity. I ask them to teach me what possibilities I contain, what worlds—what lineage—lives within the container of my flesh.

I appreciate the ritual of tattooing as making and marking wounds. It is a similar act of marking I am offering when I ask you to mourn — when I ask you to state your losses, locate them in social space and political history, and mark that understanding in a shared ritual with others. When we do so we may open up and leap through portals.

Grief pushes us into an altered state—a sometimes deeply painful, unfamiliar place. Nonetheless, in a rigid world that relentlessly proclaims the permanence of its logic, “loss wrenches the ground from underneath us,” revealing new truth and broader context. Grief displaces us. I do not deny the pain and violence of being torn from the familiar, but I also address this power. As organizers, artists, and citizens, do we not consistently ask ourselves how to make people care? Could grief be a method? If we can show people how their experience is interconnected with that of others through the same root cause, maybe we could better mobilize and sustain political movements.

Skillful hosting is important here. It is important that the grieving rituals are guided and shared. Memorial spaces need to be carefully designed to tenderly hold participants as they grapple with severe loss and crises of massive scale. Constructing new worlds is a slow process, and we will need time and place to rest along the way.

Grief has this power to transport us, but it doesn't deliver us. There is the large task of determining and realizing the worlds we want to inhabit, but the first step is to depart from this one. In this journey of departure, grief offers an in-between space: a liminal space to build and organize together. To gather in the place of grief, then, is an invitation to meet each other outside this world; there, we can begin choreographing how we could be in others. That is why I ask us to gather in our grief. To name what we want to step away from and why. To commit to the need for something else. In fact, this is exactly what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira urges for in Hospicing Modernity; de Oliveira insists we can not rush into new systems. We must first give modernity a good death—“hospice” it—and learn what we can from it through grief as it dies.

Bayo Akomolafe’s meandering essays of speculative fabulation invite me to reflect on hugging monsters and taking care of ghosts. I see the ghosts of our loss very similar to how Akomolafe describes monsters:

Monstrosity can serve as a cultural means to examine ourselves. To meet ourselves as if for the first time…I read monsters as cultural technology — as mythic figures that have always been intimately entwined with human becomings…. Indeed, monsters play a crucial social role: they challenge our addictions to particular forms and disturb the familiar. Their unusual appearances and queer bodies have long been employed as warnings of divine wrath to come, or something gruesome and perverse happening behind the scenes. In the sense that monsters cut through the parallelity of our lives, upsetting the business of the hour … astonishing us and opening up new considerations that were previously unavailable, they are transversal disruptions of order. They are playful reconfigurations of flesh and therefore embodiments of the radical openness of the real. Monsters teach us about the otherwise.

For similar reasons, we are made to fear our grief, run from it, make it into a villain rather than a guide. It is the liminality of our ghosts that haunts us: their existence in this world despite their non-belonging, their substance an artifact of another world. Our ghosts do not mean to punish us, they mean to locate us—to remind us where we come from and where we are. We represent where we can go. I invite us to dance with the ghosts of our grief, to make ritual with them; they remember our grief lineage.

WHO IS GRIEVING? WHO NEEDS TO GRIEVE?

I am optimistic about the power of grief as a collective political practice and excited by the reviving and reinvention of community mourning rituals in political organizing, performance art, web installations, and literature. When we mourn collectively, we organize through grief. Grief motivates us to name—and exclaim!—our resistance to state induced violence. Grief can push us to publicly object: we name our grievances in public comment, we shout our hurt in protests, and we show up for one another’s loss in restorative methods such as Silicon Valley Debug’s participatory defense.

When we mourn collectively, we reenact our grief. We make ritual and adorn pain with contemplative choreography. In separate, but related practices, artists host a nightclub for climate grief, a shimmering resurrection of a historical queer landmark, and a ceremony for the global supply chain and manufacturing rite of technology. These visceral spaces make audiences question their position, relation, and vulnerability to loss. When we mourn collectively, we gather digitally too. We dive into the depths of cyberspace, where our grief and anger need not be limited to physical containers. Instead overlooked state archives are made visible through a generative interface, distributed communities plant memorials in a digital garden, and Breonna Taylor is honored in an ethereal, mixed reality landscape. When we mourn collectively, we declare our grief. We write it down and publish lyrical testimonies to what we have lost and why: a father to the health impacts of neighboring a Superfund site, access to urban green space as the result of redlining, a daughter distanced by the pandemic, and cultural tradition eroded by histories of colonialism.

I want to be clear, I do not mean to urge you into despair. I do not wish to encourage spirals into guilt, fatalism, or paranoia either. This is a delicate boundary. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway herself warns about the risk of succumbing to despair: “there is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its effects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference.” Many of you are already grieving. If we do not tread carefully, if we do not remember the delicacy of our wounds, we risk tearing them open again and again. Flesh can not heal when it is continuously made to bleed.

Who stands to lose the most? For some, grief is entirely unfamiliar, and to others, it is a villainous reminder of mortality that is avoided as much as possible. To these readers, I encourage you to begin to develop a practice of grieving. Familiarize yourself with the feeling and its effects.

But many, particularly those of marginalized and disempowered communities steeped in the reality of our compounding crises, you live in grief. It is all too familiar. I do not implore you to dig deeper into sorrow; instead I am calling for hosts and facilitators to open space and activate collective practices so that you do not bear the hurt alone. Our collective grief has reached hyperbolic scale; the dominating systems we face are immense and entrenched in our daily lives, impossible for us to grasp individually or in entirety. Mourning as naming breaks these systems down into identifiable pieces. Grief as a collective process yields a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Collective mourning proposes to bring grief into a communal consciousness so that the individual mourning does not develop into despair.

Roll back your shoulders. Look up and look down. Wiggle your toes. I invite you to get up, if you are able, and jump — seriously, just jump up and down. For your sake, move your body and release any tension reading this generated. Jump and know I wrote this because I feel it too. Jump and know there are other readers jumping who grieve with you. Jump and see your ghosts are with you, guiding you. Jump because your mourning is not isolated; you come from a lineage. Together we can unfurl our grief and let its phantoms direct us toward new ways of proceeding into the present and future.

Raya Ward (b. 1998, Atlanta, GA) is an artist and designer whose work spans physical, digital, and social space. Through collage, installation, and digital design, her work hosts stories that explore concepts around technology, futures, family, and grief. She generally prefers to be in the water than on land.

Raya is facilitating several short rituals and gatherings virtually (think soundbaths, breathwork, meditations) over the next few weeks to hold space for those grieving and/or feeling the emotional and somatic impacts of the ongoing violence. If people are interested in accessing these spaces or seeing a schedule they can reach out to her (raymarwar@gmail.com or @rayaisonline on Instagram).

Closing note

Here’s some of what we’ve been reading recently:

• Work from 972 Magazine and Mondoweiss, like this reflection on one month of the war from an Israeli journalist, and these first-hand accounts from Gazans

• The Letters from Gaza series from Protean Mag and the Institute for Palestine Studies

• This beautiful letter from the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents

• This Isaac Chotiner interview with an Israeli West Bank settler on the end-goals of the settler movement

Together in mourning,

Jessica, Raya, and Reboot team