🍀 Algorithmaxxing, Labor Organizing, & More
Essays, poetry, and fiction from Kernel 4 — available now!
This week, we’re unlocking all the remaining pieces from Kernel 4 on our website! Each of these pieces is special, capturing a particular way we think about luck, chance, and technology, and I’m so excited to share them with you. In addition to the essays and short stories listed below, we’ve also got an absolute cornucopia of poetry in the issue, expertly curated by our very own Jess Zhou — read her editor’s note to get started!
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!
🌀 microdoses
💝 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