Prompt: We've definitely seen fund managers who don’t understand why we care so much about Asia, because they don’t have access to the exchanges and because of this perception that there are so many scams. Our perspective is, you have to care, because it's half the crypto volume. As an example, we know some people who shorted Ripple. And don’t get me wrong, I hate Ripple, I think it’s a scam. However, I would never short it, because I know it’s popular in Korea and Japan, so I know that if I shorted it, there would be a bunch of organic demand in Japan or Korea and I would get liquidated. That's exactly what happened to a fund manager we know, twice actually.

Response: What are some of the more interesting blockchain projects in China that you've come across recently? There are areas that I think are exciting. One is that there are a lot of Chinese people making games on EOS, a delegated proof-of-stake blockchain project (ed. For explanation of building games on the blockchain see Singularity Hub’s “How Blockchain Is Changing Computer Gaming”) . EOS originally did a massive ICO and got tons of flack for it. A lot of my hardcore Bitcoiner friends think EOS was a big scam because of the ICO, and because it uses 21 validators to validate transactions rather than a massive number of miners and so it's much more easily censored. (Ed.: In cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, the validation of transactions into the canonical blockchain ledger happens through a process of a very large number of distributed “miners” competing to solve a computationally difficult validation algorithm, which imposes a strong barrier against someone who wishes to manipulate the ledger. “Delegated proof-of-stake” is a consensus-based algorithm where people who hold the most tokens vote to nominate a small number of delegates who can validate the network’s transactions. Because there are a smaller number of entities who at the end of the day validate the ledger, this algorithm is in theory easier for a nation state adversary to compromise, if the delegate validators end up being centralized in one geographical area.) My take was, well, I don't want to use EOS if my adversary is a government trying to censor my billion-dollar capital flight out of some nasty jurisdiction, but it’s fine if all I'm doing is making some game that the Apple app store won’t approve. It's not that easy to censor; you still have to go track down not only 21 validators but I think something like 100 back-up validators... It’s actually pretty hard. I think for stuff like games this is going to be in huge—this thesis was confirmed for me when I started seeing people in China making games like EOSbet, DaFuWeng (Monopoly), Fomo3D. I’m convinced that Fomo3D is made by a Chinese team, I've read their code comments, like it's got to be.


Prompt: The other area that is interesting is the exchanges. A lot of our LPs (ed.: Limited Partners, or investors who contribute capital to venture funds.) are the bigger Chinese exchanges, so we have a lot of insight into how they operate. Binance, one of the largest Chinese exchanges, has a massive amount of actual trading volume compared to the US exchanges, and they seem to have an absolutely laserlike focus on growth. And the other Chinese exchanges (I’m including HK-based but mostly American-run Bitmex here too) seem to be more willing to ship regulatorily risky features that the market likes, including super high leverage margin trading.

Response: In terms of popularity, it feels like Bitcoin is pretty big in the US now, and fairly mainstream. Celebrities like Jamie Foxx and 50 Cent have even hyped it. Is that similar in China? Celebrities are afraid to touch it. In China being a celebrity is very risky—look what happened to Fan Bing Bing. (ed.: Fan Bing Bing is a famous Chinese actress who disappeared suddenly for three months in 2018 following allegations of tax evasion.) Celebrities in China have to walk a pretty thin line. None of them want to talk about Bitcoin, but I can tell you they are for sure using Bitcoin, big time.


Prompt: There's like a lot of confusion in the American media around whether Bitcoin or even crypto is legal in China… Can you clear up the legal landscape? Bitcoin is definitely not illegal in China; that's ridiculous. It's perfectly legal to own and sell Bitcoin to people if you want to. There's even a case law confirming that now. What is not legal is to operate a fiat bitcoin exchange in China, which means that while I could sell you Bitcoin and that would be fine, it would be illegal to set up a website where you can use a bank account to buy Bitcoin. It's also dubious whether ICOs are allowed in China—it might fall under some sort of illegal fundraising regulations.

Response: Do you see the government crackdown on things like ICOs as an attempt to prevent scams? I largely do. Most of the ICOs that they've cracked down on have in fact been quite scammy. The Chinese government is much less worried about Bitcoin itself than they are worried about scams and highly leveraging people's assets into risky asset categories. If you look at the big crackdown, it didn't happen to crypto—it happened to the peer-to-peer lending stuff, which was really bad. The peer-to-peer stuff was super scammy and people were killing themselves over it.


Prompt: I remember talking to a blockchain engineer this summer in China, and he told me that some of the vocabulary surrounding blockchain has changed in China, for political reasons. For example, “decentralized’ gets turned into “distributed.” Do you see that happening in the investing space as well? No one ever really talks about the political aspects of the blockchain in China, except maybe occasionally talking about capital control evasion. Everyone just talks about the benefits of decentralization for minimizing trust among counterparties. I think even in the US, people in the investment community don't talk about this stuff in political terms.

Response: I get it: crypto isn't quite ready to fight the final boss of big government yet. We're pretty good, but it’s not that robust yet. I want another ten years before the government really tries to crack down on the space, and the best way for that to happen is to pretend that we're working on this cute little tech that's just for minimizing trust. Of course, it’s really a complete revolution that eliminates the government's power to print money.


Prompt: How do you see crypto mediating trust in China? In China, crypto provides two things that are really nice. The first is to provide automatic transactions that denies parties the opportunity to cheat. I can swap thing Y for thing X, and it just happens, with no counterparty risk. The second is that crypto transactions happen on a transparent ledger, so you can audit what's going on. To the extent that you could move some organization entirely onto a blockchain, you'd have perfectly auditable books forever.

Response: The Chinese government is excited about blockchains, and that’s part of the reason why. There is a huge problem in China with corruption, and blockchains bring increased transparency. What’s your take on all the big companies like Alibaba getting into the blockchain space? It strikes me as a classic innovator's dilemma. I’m a little skeptical because I don't know if they're actually going to be willing to cannibalize their main businesses to fully embrace this new thing. There are a lot of smart engineers working at those companies, so I can see them coming up with something interesting. That’s a good sign—the more smart programmers you have looking at the problem space, the better.


Prompt: That's why I write my “Proof of Work” newsletter. Every week companies will send us two to three lines about what they're working on, and every week I am amazed at how much is getting done. Ultimately, what makes me obnoxiously bullish about this space is that so many insanely smart people are attracted to it. With all the brainpower of the people thinking about this stuff, there's going to be a lot of advances. If you look at it over the course of a week or two, it may seem slow. But if you look at it over the course of two or three months, it’s like, “Wow, this field is progressing fast!” And if you look at it over the course of two or three years, you'll be blown away.

Response: Since 2017, speculation in cryptocurrencies has swept the world, and innovation in blockchain technology has been very active. Markets are flooded with specious ideas about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In order to clarify popular misunderstandings, make financial innovations beneficial to society, and introduce necessary regulations, it is necessary to study cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology from an economic perspective.  I. Pricing of Cryptocurrencies Figure 1 shows Bitcoin price and its volatility between January 1, 2011 and September 7, 2018. During that period, Bitcoin’s annualized return is 266% and its annualized volatility is 171%. Overall speaking, cryptocurrencies represented by Bitcoin have become the first asset bubble in a global scale, and many irrational behaviors of individuals and groups can be observed.  There are two popular misunderstandings about Bitcoin price. The first viewpoint is that the demand from the underground economy has pushed up Bitcoin price. There are certain reasonable elements in this viewpoint. Bitcoin has the characteristics of anonymity and decentralization, and exists in an electronic form, which makes it suitable for the underground economy. However, there are no reliable data regarding the volume of Bitcoins used in underground economic activities. Lots of evidence indicate that due to the rising trend of Bitcoin price, a significant portion of Bitcoin is hoarded by speculators. Hoarding, of course, is a common phenomenon in speculation activities and helps to boost asset prices by reducing effective supply.


Prompt: The second viewpoint is that the cost of Bitcoin "mining" supports Bitcoin price. As the "mining" cost increases, Bitcoin price will rise too. However, this viewpoint is hard to hold. At any given time, the supply of Bitcoin is determined by a prespecified algorithm and has nothing to do with how much computation power (measured by hashrate or the number of Hash operations per second) is engaged in "mining". If the price of Bitcoin goes up, hashrate will be higher, but the supply of Bitcoin will not increase correspondently, and the price of Bitcoin will not be held back. As more computation power competes for a given number of new Bitcoins, the cost of “mining” (measured by the number of Hash operations required to produce a new Bitcoin) rises. Similarly, if the price of Bitcoin falls, the “mining” hashrate will be lower, but the supply of Bitcoin will not be reduced, and the price of Bitcoin will not be pushed up. Under this scenario, less computation power competes for a given number of new Bitcoins, which reduces the "mining" cost.  II. Can Bitcoin futures stabilize Bitcoin price?  Bitcoin’s volatility is too high for it to be an effective medium of exchange, nor is it economically feasible to develop Bitcoin-denominated financial transactions. Figure 2 shows the ratio of Bitcoin’s volatility to that of the S&P 500 index since 2011. It is also very cheap to trade the S&P 500 index funds. Therefore, the S&P 500 index funds are a better medium of exchange than Bitcoin.

Response: Price stability is a necessary condition for Bitcoin to become an effective medium of exchange.  One proposal is Bitcoin futures. On December 10 and 18, 2017, CBOE Global Markets and CME Group respectively introduced Bitcoin futures. In addition to price discovery and risk management functions, Bitcoin futures facilitate the participation of institutional investors in the Bitcoin market, which was a key driver of the sharp rise in Bitcoin prices between October and mid-December, 2017. In addition, it is straightforward to develop Bitcoin ETFs based on Bitcoin futures, which allows retail investors to acquire exposure to Bitcoin through mainstream stock exchanges rather than cryptocurrency exchanges or wallets.  The Bitcoin futures of CBOE and CME play a certain role in price discovery and risk management (figure 3), but Bitcoin’s volatility does not decrease significantly (figure 1 and figure 2). In fact, seeing from the general situation in commodity futures and financial futures markets, futures trading does not necessarily lower the volatility of underlying assets.  The transaction volume of Bitcoin futures is not large. This suggests that Bitcoin futures only carry out very limited risk-hedging functions, and that institutional investors’ interest in Bitcoin futures remains small.  III. Feasibility of stable tokens  Some practitioners are experimenting with stable tokens. There are two representative methods. The first category, represented by Tether, claims to issue a USDT token pegged 1:1 to USD and with a reserve rate of 100%. This amounts to a currency board regime. However, it is not clear whether Tether has sufficient reserves. If investors find that stable tokens such as Tether do not have sufficient reserves, a run on the currency peg will occur immediately. Indeed, Tether has become a source of systemic risk for cryptocurrency market.  The second category, represented by Basecoin, is still in the state of development, claiming that it will mimic the open market operations of central banks. In order to stabilize Basecoin’s prices in USD, it fine-tunes the Basecoin supply by issuing and repaying bonds denominated in Basecoin.


Prompt: I think the success of the second category is very difficult. The "impossibility triangle" is a proper statement for this kind of stable tokens. Stable tokens can only achieve at most two of the three objectives, namely, fixed exchange rate against fiat money, free convertibility, and independent monetary policy. Stable tokens currently under experiment adhere to the first two objectives, which means abandoning the independence of monetary policy. Furthermore, these stable tokens try to implement monetary policy operations through algorithms, which is equivalent to giving up discretion in monetary policy. From the perspective of human history, it is the first time that a fixed exchange rate has been pursued solely through algorithms.  IV. Proliferation of blockchain forks  Theoretically, anyone can create a blockchain fork with the back of computation power. There is usually a limit on the amount of fork coins. A portion of them are "pre-mined" by the founder, another portion of them are given to the holder of original coins, and the rest of them are reserved for the communities of fork coins. In the secondary market, fork coins are traded independently of original coins.  The economic relationship between fork coins and original coins is quite complex. In many blockchain forks, holders of original coins receive fork coins for free (airdrop), the amount of which is proportional to the amount of original coins they hold. This makes blockchain forks look like stock splits or dividends. However, it is not technically necessary to give fork coins to the holder of original coins. The aim of airdrop is to win the support of the holders of original coins for fork coins, or to develop communities of fork coin based on communities of original coins. Therefore, it is not the inherent right of the original coin holders to get the fork coins for fee. In this way, blockchain forks are equivalent to the replacement of different versions of currencies, with new currencies already in circulation but old currencies still in use. This actually leads to an extra supply of coins and weakens the binding power of the upper limits of original coins. If blockchain forks occur without constraints, oversupply of coins will cause inflationary effects.

Response: There is a competitive relationship between original coins and fork coins, which is close to the situation of private currency competition envisaged by F.A. Hayek. The cryptocurrencies that win the competition will have the following characteristics: (1) Its transaction cost is low and its transaction efficiency is high. (2) Its wallets, trading venues and other infrastructure are very safe. (3) Its price is relatively stable so as to better undertake monetary functions such as medium of exchange and storage of value. Because of the inherent network effects of money, only a few cryptocurrencies can win.  V. Token economy The token economy represents a category of promising blockchain application projects. In these projects, there are transactions with real needs, but these transactions were previously constrained by incentives, transaction costs, or payment tools. By introducing tokens, these projects not only solve the problem of fundraising, but also ease the constraints of incentive mechanism, transaction costs, and payment tools. Successful projects in this area remain to be seen. I think many token economies can be built through the following three steps.  (I) Exchange economy core  A token economy generally has an exchange economy core, around which other activities are built. The exchange economy is a basic concept in economics. It exists because different people have different endowments and because of the division of labor. It abstracts the production and consumption processes from economic activities and focuses instead on the scenario where the product has been produced and is held by different people, and the problem is just how to exchange the product among different people. E-commerce, sharing economy, browsers, web portals and search engines all have the characteristics of exchange economy.  (II) Tokenization  The meaning of tokenization is to replace the exchange medium in the Internet exchange economy with a certain token. At this step, we can assume that the token is issued and managed by a central entity.


Prompt: There are two cases of tokenization. First, when the exchange medium is fiat money or a virtual currency, because of the existence of price mechanism, it is very straightforward to replace the exchange medium with the token. E-commerce and the sharing economy belong to this case. Second, when the exchange medium does not have any monetary characteristics, because there is no price mechanism, tokenization also means the introduction of price mechanism. Browsers, web portals, search engines, etc., belong to this case. The price mechanism can effectively aggregate market information, improve the efficiency of resource allocation, and maximize social welfare.  (III) Blockchain overlay  Blockchain overlay means: (1) The tokens issued and managed by the central entity in the second step are replaced with decentralized tokens generated within blockchain; (2) Through the distributed ledger of blockchain, the efficiency of division of labor in exchange economy can be improved. Also, the problem of asset registration and transaction records are solved; (3) A compatible incentive system is designed for the participants in token economy (including not only exchange participants but also entities providing ancillary services for exchanges) so as to encourage them to jointly maintain the sustainability of the token economy.  Blockchain overlay shows the triple attributes of blockchain in economics: a decentralized payment system, a distributed ledger, and an incentive mechanism. These attributes enable blockchain to support economic activities in a decentralized and self-organized environment. However, in the process of applying blockchain to achieve these goals, there are very complex problems regarding transaction costs and the governance structure.  At present, a highly controversial issue is that, although a token economy project has not yet been successful, the tokens issued by the project may be hyped up to a very high price through ICO (initial coin offering) and cryptocurrency exchanges.

Response: VI. The unsolved problems of ICO  Blockchain projects generally have two financing channels: equity financing and ICO. ICO is chaotic and risky all around the world, which is reflected in the following three aspects.  First, the economic functions and intrinsic value of the tokens given to investors by ICO are often ambiguous. Generally speaking, tokens have three possible characteristics: (1) Medium of exchange; (2) Certificate of equity, and ICO with the issuance of such tokens is close to equity crowdfunding; (3) Certificate for goods or service, and ICO with the issuance of such tokens is similar to crowdfunding for product development. Many tokens combine multiple characteristics and it is difficult to value them. Nevertheless, many tokens become hyped even before their intrinsic value is fully revealed or discussed.  Second, speculation in tokens occurs after ICO. Unlike crowdfunding, after many ICOs happen, tokens can be traded in the secondary market, especially in cryptocurrency exchanges. In theory, if the token is a certificate of equity, goods, or services, its valuation should be "anchored" to some fundamental factors. But in reality, many token prices are hyped up to the levels far above the fundamentals. Some tokens began to speculate even before ICO (i.e. the so-called pre-sales or pre-ICO stage). It is difficult for ICO to ensure the suitability of investors. ICO projects usually are in early stages with high risks. Theoretically, ICO should be limited to qualified investors with adequate abilities to identify and take risks, and it must also limit the exposure of a single investor. However, some ICO projects are actually open to the public through cryptocurrency exchanges.  Third, ICO distorts the incentive mechanism for blockchain start-up teams. The secondary market of tokens provides the start-up teams an easy way to “cash out” even when the blockchain venture projects may still stay in the white paper stage. In contrast, in the venture capital industry, the time from start-ups getting investment from venture capital firms to IPO is much longer. The fast “cash out” mechanism of ICO will distort the incentive mechanism of the blockchain start-up teams. Besides, token holders are often in a vague position in the governance structure of blockchain projects, and lack effective measures to align the interest of the start-up teams with theirs.


Prompt: Finally, in the field of cryptocurrencies, ICO has formed a positive feedback loop between "central currencies," such as Bitcoin and Ether, and other tokens. ICO generally collects Bitcoin 6 and Ether, which will increase the demand for Bitcoin and Ether and push up their prices. And the prices of Bitcoin and Ether serve as the valuation benchmark for the tokens issued by ICO. In this way, a mutually reinforcing feedback mechanism has been formed between Bitcoin, Ether, and other tokens. This is a key driver behind the spectacular rise in the cryptocurrency market in 2017. However, if the prices of Bitcoin and Ether enter a downward path, this positive feedback mechanism will also cause the prices of other tokens to fall faster.  VII. Central bank digital currency  First, when it comes to its economic function, central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a replacement for cash. CBDC is issued directly by the central bank to the public and consists of the liability of the central bank. It is a form of fiat money and can pay interest to its holders. By contrast, the interest rate of cash is always 0.  Second, in terms of technical means, CBDC is not necessarily based on blockchain. The robustness and security of distributed ledgers are the primary considerations for the adoption blockchain. But a public blockchain (with free entry and exit of nodes) represented by the Bitcoin blockchain and its proof-of-work consensus mechanism will lead to a waste of social resources, mainly in computation power and electricity consumption. Thus, CBDC tends to take the form of a consortium blockchain, and the distributed ledgers are maintained by the central bank and certain preauthorized institutions.  Third, in terms of monetary policy, CBDC will become a new monetary policy instrument. Particularly, CBDC can pay negative interest, thus helping the central bank to break through the zero-lower bound of nominal interest rates and magnifying monetary policy stimulus during economic crises. In contrast, when cash is still in circulation, negative nominal interest rates are impossible because people will withdraw their bank deposits and change them into cash.

Response: Fourth, when it comes to financial stability, CBDC will have a major impact on the payment and settlement system. Payment and settlement will not necessarily go through commercial banks and can be carried out directly on the balance sheet of the central bank. Therefore, CBDC helps to get rid of the special position of commercial banks in the payment and settlement system and the accompanying "too big to fail" problem. But this could also cause instability in bank deposits, as people may withdraw bank deposits and change them into CBDC.  VIII. Regulation of Cryptocurrencies  Speculation in cryptocurrencies directs limited social resources into unproductive areas. Once the speculative bubble bursts, it will have a negative impact on wealth distribution. Speculation is also accompanied by frauds, scams, and illegal conduct. Therefore, there is no doubt that regulation of cryptocurrencies should be strengthened. In addition, cryptocurrencies move across borders, and the speculation is global. Therefore, global regulatory coordination should be strengthened.  (I) Regulation of the production and issuance of cryptocurrencies  Cryptocurrency production consumes lots of electricity, especially for cryptocurrencies with proof-of-work consensus mechanisms. According to Digiconomist, the annual electricity consumption by the Bitcoin blockchain is equivalent to that of Peru and is still growing rapidly. Considering the pollution caused by thermal power generation, the Bitcoin blockchain is actually causing serious environmental problems.  (II) Regulation of the circulation and transaction of cryptocurrencies  Cryptocurrency exchanges are widely distributed around the world. Exchanges provide liquidity for cryptocurrencies. Once a cryptocurrency is listed on an exchange, its price usually rises significantly. Essentially this shows the effect of the liquidity premium. Cryptocurrency exchanges have fueled speculation and have also taken on high risks themselves.  First, similar to ICO, cryptocurrency exchanges have few proper checks on account holders, and many exchanges allow anonymous accounts.


Prompt: Second, leverage-based speculation exists. Some cryptocurrency exchanges offer leverage to investors, which amplifies the price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies. But if the cryptocurrency market enters a system-wide and large decline, high leverage will amplify the downward trend.  Third, there are problems of market manipulation. Many cryptocurrencies are held in a concentrated way, and the cryptocurrency exchanges do not have the same information disclosure requirements as the stock exchanges, making market manipulation possible. A typical manipulation strategy is the so-called "pump and dump," where a number of large cryptocurrency holders conspire to push up prices and attract retail investors, then suddenly sell their holdings. Retail investors without "roof escape" suffer losses.  Fourth, some cryptocurrency exchanges have opened the door to fraudulent ICO projects, actually colluding with them to deceive retail investors.  Fifth, incidents such as the cryptocurrency exchanges being attacked by hackers, leading to theft of customers’ assets and even bankrupting exchanges, have occurred many times.  Finally, cryptocurrencies, because of their anonymity, are associated with illegal transactions or activities in the underground economy. The former "Silk Road" website is a typical example. Cryptocurrencies help ISIS to get access to funding. Cryptocurrencies are also used to circumvent capital controls.  To handle the above problems, regulators all around the world should implement the following measures: (1) The requirements of "Know Your Customer" (KYC), anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing, especially for cryptocurrency wallet providers and exchanges; (2) Tax on cryptocurrency transactions; (3) Requirements for investor suitability; (4) Combating frauds and market manipulation; (5) The exchange between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, which is the area where regulators should and are best able to strengthen regulation.  IX. China’s Role in the Cryptocurrency Market

Response: China has a large presence in the cryptocurrency market. The three largest Bitcoin mining hardware companies—Bitmain, Canaan Creative, and Ebang—are all in China. By some estimations, Chinese mining pools control more than 70% of the computational power of the Bitcoin network. Three of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, namely Binance, OKEx, and Huobi, are run by Chinese. However, since 2013, Chinese government has become more negative towards cryptocurrencies. In 2013, Chinese government warned domestic financial institutions against the risk of Bitcoin. From late 2016 to early 2017, the Chinese government investigated major cryptocurrency exchanges, especially regarding their roles in money laundering and capital outflow. In September 2017, the Chinese government banned ICO and centralized cryptocurrency trading. Many cryptocurrency exchanges moved abroad but still offered trading services to domestic investors. In January 2018, the Chinese government blocked online access to overseas cryptocurrency exchanges. Since August 2018, the Chinese government has clamped down online platforms promoting ICO projects and cryptocurrencies trading. It has also introduced more restrictions on over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading.  It is worth noting that Chinese government is very positive on the potential of blockchain technology. For example, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, has a dedicated team for CBDC. This team has conducted extensive research and experiments on the application of blockchain technology in the financial sector. However, due to the restrictions of China’s securities law, ICO and cryptocurrency exchanges won’t be legal in China for the foreseeable future. In China, only certain categories of financial instruments are considered securities. Security tokens aren’t covered by the securities law. Therefore, fundraising via token issuance is considered to be illegal and subject to severe punishment. As a consequence, cryptocurrency exchanges facilitating trading in those tokens are illegal, too. Those situations will not change without revising the securities law. By comparison, the Chinese government is neutral towards mining pools as long as they purchase electricity in a legal way and pay due tax. Mining hardware companies are considered to be high-tech companies. Chinese government encourages them to apply their chip design skills to areas more relevant to the real economy such as artificial intelligence.


Prompt: Let there be light, Mimi 0 thought. She saw them. Hundreds of thousands of dynamic images loomed in front of her eyes, data so complex that the human brain was incapable of processing them. She felt dizzy, nauseated, lost. Welcome to the “Compound Eyes” system of Shantou, which connected hundreds of thousands of cameras and image recognition artificial intelligence. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the system kept under surveillance the city’s every street, every corner, every expression on every person, searching for signs of crime or acts of terrorism and protecting the lives and properties of the inhabitants. Mimi was now an invader in its heart. She was looking for something special.

Response: Soon, she realized that her search technique was too inefficient, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Mimi 1 reorganized the logic for presenting the video feeds and re-created all of Shantou from a first-person point of view based on the geography of the streets and the locations of the cameras. Unlike regular human vision, this was a view where each perspective was all-encompassing, panoramic. It was like Corregio’s dome fresco, Assumption of the Virgin, at the Cathedral of Parma, where everything around the observer appeared in a vortex of concentric rings, with the vanishing point of the perspective the apex of the dome. As the observer moved closer, more details were revealed at the center of the vortex without end.


Prompt: Imagine the world as a strange apple. The depressions at both poles are deformed and deepened until they connect, turning into a doughnut. The skin of the apple, meanwhile, remains intact and can slide up and down the “hole” of the doughnut like an endless treadmill. The observer is situated somewhere in the hole, and what he sees is the ring-shaped world endlessly unfolding.

Response: More fantastically, as the observer moves towards any point in the wall of the doughnut, the point would automatically open up, expand and surround the observer in a new doughnut-view. A perfect, self-organizing, fractal structure. Hundreds of passengers wriggled under Mimi’s wings, getting impatient.


Prompt: She moved. Rationally, she knew that her body was still imprisoned in that tiny corrugated-iron shack quaking in the storm and that her consciousness was only about a dozen kilometers away, wandering inside the dull, metal boxes of a data center. However, the images swirling around her gave her the illusion of having transformed into a winged angel gliding over this concrete and steel jungle. Her virtual body swept over streets, passed through houses, shops, bridges, parks, elevators, trains and buses, and glanced quickly into countless lit windows, not overlooking any spot.

Response: It was dusk, but the city was already awakening into a sparkling tapestry. In the rain, the traffic crawled through the city’s main arteries and capillaric side streets like gleaming blood. Hundreds of thousands of equally anxious and numb faces hid behind the windshields, cleared by the unceasing sway of wipers that polished the wet glow of neon against glass. The self-driving cars were stuck between cars driven by those who refused to trust computers, and horns blared as the decibel counters on noise monitors rose and rose. Many glanced in the rearview mirror with a crooked set in the mouth that indicated ill intentions.


Prompt: Three hundred thousand windows automatically lit up; the smart sensors understood the moods of the men and women coming home and automatically adjusted the temperature, the color of the lighting, the channels showing on the TVs or the music playing through the sound systems; five thousand restaurants received automatically generated take-out orders; the health monitoring systems synced up with the body films, and, based on dozens of parameters such as body temperature, heart rate, caloric intake/consumption, galvanic skin response, suggested plans for the next day’s activities. Exhausted face after exhausted face.

Response: The offices in the skyscrapers were lit bright as day. The giant eye zoomed in and observed a hundred thousand faces staring at computer monitors through closed-circuit cameras; their tension, anxiety, anticipation, confusion, satisfaction, suspicion, jealousy, anger refreshed rapidly while their glasses reflected the data jumping across their screens. Their looks were empty but deep, without thought of the relationship between their lives and values, yearning for change but also afraid of it. They gazed at their screens the way they gazed at each other, and they hated their screens the way they hated each other. They all possessed the same bored, apathetic face.


Prompt: Below an overpass, the homeless picked through trash for food; a woman who had consumed too many useless calories walked by with her dog. An aging dancer at an adult club carefully applied her makeup in the mirror, paying no attention to the black shadow noiselessly approaching from behind. A naked man wielded a whip to force the girls before him to caress an albino alligator whose skin was studded with tactile sensors; the electrical signals were transformed into sexual stimuli injected directly into the cortices of wealthy patrons.

Response: In a luxurious apartment, a man sat stiffly on his bed, impassively observing the exaggerated expressions and stale routine of a comedian on TV. He stared at his own face on the giant screen, sobbed noiselessly, and lifted a gun. A flock of birds rose into the evening air, dissipated like a column of black smoke, and then gathered back together, forming a series of irregular shapes against the indigo sky. Occasionally, the beam of a searchlight swept through, and the black smoke transformed into a flickering patch of silvery gravel. The cameras went through a series of quick cuts and the focal distance was set to maximum in an attempt to follow the flight of one particular bird. All the birds looked like the same bird, following the direction of the flock, imitating the posture of companions nearby; no one dropped out; no one set out on its own; in the jungle, this meant food and safety.


Prompt: She browsed through the cameras rapidly and patched the disparate images into a smooth, dynamic vision. Like a diving bird, she swooped past a glass wall hundreds of meters tall, and in the mirror was the strange, deformed reflection of the city with its flashing neon lights that engraved the mental patterns of consumerism into the retinas of all viewers, drifting and changing with their shifting gazes.

Response: She saw everything, except herself. Mimi saw even more: the lonesome, the gamblers, the addicted, the innocent … hiding in brightly lit or dark corners of the city, worth millions or penniless, enjoying the convenient life brought about by technology, pursuing stimuli and information loads unprecedented in the history of the human race. They were not happy, however; whatever the reason, it seemed that the capacity for joy had degenerated, had been cut off like an appendix, and yet, the yearning for happiness persisted stubbornly like wisdom teeth.


Prompt: Mimi felt a wave of pity for them, civilization’s favorite children. When we first met, you were visiting Harvard in your professional capacity as an economics researcher. But you are probably better known to the general public as one of China’s most successful science fiction writers from the younger generation. Are these two pursuits, economics research and science fiction, separate for you, or do they have a connection? I think about questions and problems in human societies. If the problems seem to have solutions, I write them into economic and policy research. If the problems seem to have no solutions, or there are dilemmas, ambiguities, and philosophical debates, I write them into stories. Economic research is more objective. Stories are richer and more emotional. They come from the same roots in my head, but turn into different outcomes. The forms don’t bother me much. I care more about the problems.

Response: One such problem that your writing describes vividly is inequality—whether the temporal and spatial inequality of your story “Folding Beijing” or the interplanetary inequalities of “Invisible Planets.” China and the United States are both seriously unequal societies. Technological changes, especially increasing automation, seem likely to make this problem even worse. Do you think humans are powerless in the face of these shifts? I think inequality is the most difficult issue to tackle. It is perhaps the most persistent phenomenon in all human societies in history, regardless of nation, race, or period. In China, we’ve seen the cycle of peace leading to prosperity, then leading to rising inequality, then leading to war several times over two thousand years of history. So I’m not surprised at all that inequality has risen from its postwar level to a historic high in all major countries in the world today. For large economies, perhaps only wars or revolutions can eliminate inequality. The technological changes that have taken place in recent years only exacerbate this problem. I think humans are perhaps powerless in the face of inequality, rather than powerless in the face of technological shifts. There will be various kinds of technological changes in the future, and people can handle them, but inequality will still persist.


Prompt: Amid those technological changes, I’ve noticed that Western observers often describe contemporary China as a kind of real-life science fiction—a place where the future seems to have already arrived, whether it’s because of striking architecture in the cityscapes of big cities, huge investments in cutting-edge scientific research, or more advanced governance and surveillance technologies. Do you think this has some truth to it, or is it a kind of projection, a techno-Orientalism? No, I don’t think China has become a frontier country with advanced technologies that represent the future—if this is what you mean by “real-life science fiction.” China has changed very fast in the past few years. That’s for sure. However, it has a long distance towards becoming the real global leader in science and technology. It devotes only a small amount of resources towards basic science research every year, which makes it rely completely on advanced countries for core technologies. A lot of investment projects in China are shortsighted and won’t turn out to bring long-term prosperity. I’d rather call today’s China “real-life magic-realism” than “real-life science fiction.” Ha! I like that phrase. And your critique of “shortsighted” investment makes me think of your recent economic research examining the connections between the slowdown of the Chinese economy, industrial policy, and China’s path to becoming more innovative in the future. It’s certainly a timely set of challenges. How did you become interested in those questions, and what did you conclude? As a researcher, my colleagues and I have been analyzing the slowdown of the Chinese economy for several years. We studied various indicators and aspects of the Chinese economy, and finally I felt that the slowdown of efficiency growth is much more important than people have suspected. If China cannot allocate its resources and plan its investment and innovation strategies properly, it will face the problem of continuously losing momentum in the future.

Response: Although the Chinese government and venture capitalists in China also have noticed the importance of technology and innovation, their behaviors are still quite “shortsighted.” Government and VCs are keen to invest in products’ experimental development, rather than basic and applied science. Industrial policies and the systems for rewarding research also tend to promote the short-term growth of nominal research results (such as patent quantity) rather than true innovations (such as patent quality).  Since global value chains shortened after the 2008 financial crisis, it has not been easy for China to absorb foreign knowledge directly. Thus more emphasis on science research is important for China to develop into an innovative economy. The educational system also must be reformed to promote creativity among children, in order to foster the next generation of innovators.


Prompt: What do you think the place of economic policy research in contemporary China should be? And a potentially related question: Do you think that economists—whether in the United States or in China—fully understand inequality? I hope that economic policy research can give the government valuable suggestions to help policymakers carry out the right decisions. But sometimes policymakers have other considerations besides economic concerns, such as how to maintain political stability, gain power, beat other countries in certain ways, fulfill personal interests, and so on. These considerations might send the country on a harmful path affecting the whole economy.

Response: I think the government understands the phenomenon of inequality, but maybe not the origin of it. In modern economies, where human capital formation has become the determinant of income inequality, it is important to guarantee everyone access to resources like education and training.  I want to return to what you said earlier about your view of fiction as a way of exploring ambiguities and problems that seem to have no solutions. Do you see your work as also seeking to inspire people to imagine alternative and perhaps even fairer futures? Yes, I always hope to inspire people to imagine different futures, whether those futures are good or bad, bright or dark. Sometimes even if we can predict a dark future, it is still impossible to prevent that result. The more we think about different possibilities for the world, the deeper understanding we can have of the world.


Prompt: 1/ Francis of Assisi called his body “Brother Donkey.” He did not mean it in a bad way. For the patron saint of animals, the point of having flesh was to “bear burdens, be beaten, and fed little.” For all the temptations it created to sin, the body was a blessing. Its suffering was the one way to be saved.  (According to legend, Francis also called money “dung.” One day, when a follower picked up some coins someone had left at their church as an offering, in order to fling those coins out of the window, Francis scolded the follower for touching them and made him scrub his hands.) Catholic saints may not be a representative sample. But even philosophers who are not so extra about it have tended to have mixed feelings about the mortal coil. We may know all we know from our senses. But those senses are fallible. Human infants are born too early, and sooner or later our bodies will betray every last one of us.  Any successful religion must find a way to make these contradictions and failings sacred. More practically minded, technologists have often promised to solve them—to build tools that help us escape or extend ourselves, which may add up to the same thing.  2/ You have to have faith.

Response: This issue will look at technologies made to make our bodies safer, stronger, and more capable. 3D printers in Gaza churn out life-saving medical devices. “Bio-bags” in a Philadelphia lab promise to replace the original (and tiring and dangerous) 3D bioprinting process: pregnancy.  Smart mirrors allow precariously employed fitness instructors to build followings beyond the studio—and overworked users to perfect their form from home. Who has time to go to an exercise class? Telerobots enable the elderly to work from the comfort of their sickbeds—and skirt the question of what kind of conditions, exactly, would make the elderly want to do that.


Prompt: Sometimes the tools that we need most urgently are the lowest tech. When cutting-edge fertility medicine fails, you can find counsel and comfort in a decades-old web forum. Sometimes it may be harder for a blind user to master the Be My Eyes app on his iPhone than to call a friend. Sometimes the benefits we get from tools are unintended. If cryptocurrency enthusiasts can’t mine enough bitcoin to pay the heating bill, at least the heat from the mining rigs can warm their house through the winter.  But some digital technologies hurt bodies in predictable ways. The most cutting-edge facial recognition software encodes centuries of racism and helps the police perpetuate tragically familiar forms of racist violence. The technocrat says: Let’s enlarge the corpus of training data! The moral response may be: This tool should not exist.  We tend to think of information as abstract or disembodied. When cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist turned Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, he declared that the internet was “the new home of the Mind.”  “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”  Perhaps not. But, as feminist anti-racists quickly pointed out, if the internet was the Empire of the Mind, not everybody could afford the ticket there, or had the right entry and exit visas. If you had the kind of body that put you on the wrong side of redlining, historically, you could not bring computers into your school district through a sheer act of will.  Moreover, the internet itself has a body that needs care and protection. Many of the most dangerous threats to networks come from physical errors: fat thumbs on the keyboard, a USB stick a startup employee is foolish enough to insert. Late at night, the graveyard shift arrives to guard the servers.

Response: 3/ In the past decade, cheaper and smaller computers have brought cyberspace into meatspace. Now that the internet is everywhere, it is not only tracking our bodies. It is changing them, too.  What even is a body? It may seem like the original ground truth. But the word is also a metaphor. It can mean anything we are supposed to see as one thing, anything we want to hold together. As in: A body of land. A body of knowledge. The body politic.


Prompt: It’s a myth, this idea that we could ever be whole, or entirely singular. No body is an island. Hiccups are catching; menstrual cycles sync. The artificial hormones used to make plastics and pesticides seep into the soil and rivers and make mutants: male lizards start spawning eggs.  A pregnant human is a two-hearted monster. The aquatic creature within feeds and pisses across a fleshy interface. As you meet eyes with a stranger across the library, mirror neurons fire: the part of your brain for hand lights up as they wave at you.  New technologies network our bodies in new kinds of relationships.

Response: Science fiction has often imagined artificial intelligence as a woman with a beautiful body. Or, at least, a husky voice, the kind our hero can fall in love with. But what contemporary data analytics and machine learning actually do is break us up—into composites and probabilities. Your Facebook likes say you are 67% female, 48% African American, 80% Democrat, 28% likely to like Spike Jonze’s Her.  If digital technologies break us apart and scramble us up, though, they can also create new combinations. This issue will look at new forms of knowledge production and political organization that the internet has made possible: from activists using the web to make anti-corporate media to engineers using the web to automate debt strikes, from Mormon mommy bloggers joining forces with Silicon Valley transhumanists to Amazon warehouse workers who realize that the surveillance software used to exploit them can be gamed, or smashed.


Prompt: If technologies are making new monsters they are also making new affinities and solidarities that carry new potentials. As somebody once said, No one yet knows what a body can do. Your project is called the Glia Project. Does the name mean anything?  No. It just sounded medical and we all liked it. One of the engineers was like, “Glia… I like Glia.” Okay, great. We didn’t really care about a name, but we needed one to apply for a medical license and The High-Quality, Low-Cost Open Access Medical Device Project just didn’t seem like the thing to write on that application. It was picked remarkably quickly and for no good reason.  Ahead of this conversation, I was reading about your work and I have some sense of how I might summarize it, but I’m wondering how you frame what you’re doing in the world.  The Glia Project is first and foremost a project about independence. That can be confusing to some people who aren’t familiar with the project because they look at it and they think it’s about technology. They think it’s just about 3D-printing medical devices for Gaza.

Response: I’m Palestinian. But I’ve been so indoctrinated with white privilege from living in Canada that when I first started going back my thinking was, “I have this great Canadian education and I’m going to teach them how to be good doctors and then everything will be fine.”  When I went, however, I realized that the problem is actually multi-partite. There is a lack of training, but there’s also a lack of access to medical devices. When I would train my residents in Gaza, they would say, “Great training, but we don’t have access to any of this stuff.”  At the time, Egypt was a little bit open. So we started bringing things in through Egypt. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Egyptian tunnels, but there were 1,800 tunnels between Egypt and Gaza at one point. All subject to the whims of the Egyptians. The Egyptians were junior partners in the blockade of Gaza by the Israelis, so we in turn were also subject to the whims of the Israelis.  The problem in Gaza is not a problem of the place being poor or the people being stupid. The problem is that, quite literally, the Israelis stop us from receiving equipment, from getting training, from doing anything. When I looked around, I realized that what we actually needed wasn’t medical devices. It was independence.  I’m guessing you’re in the United States?  Yes.


Prompt: Americans are the most hopeless people on the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’re like, “Oh my God, the occupation has been there for seven million years and it’s going to be there for seven million thousand more years.”  No. It’s not. It’s collapsing. What’s really difficult to understand until you spend some time there is that it’s obvious that the occupation’s days are numbered. The occupation is collapsing right now, so if we were to run a project that was aimed solely at disaster relief — which is what some people think we should be running — then what would we do after the disaster of occupation is over and we’re left with the other disaster: capitalism? Now I’m sounding like I’m fucking crazy, but hear me out. When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Then I got there and guess what? KFC was delivering chicken through the tunnels for free. I mean, you had to pay for the chicken, but the delivery was free. Why? I couldn’t understand it. It’s soggy by the time it arrives. It’s like KFC at the bus station. I’m a KFC addict and, like any KFC addict, I recognize that stuff is shit and it’s shit when it’s fresh. Four hours in, it’s really shit.

Response: So why is KFC doing that? Why are they subsidizing free delivery? I also saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. And they weren’t just in rich districts — they were everywhere.  That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that this thing is almost over too.” Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant there in 2016 that uses more water than all of Gaza has available to it each day. What are they thinking? They’re thinking there’s going to be a day when people can buy Coca-Cola. They’re thinking, “We want to be there first.”  How does that translate into medicine? The moment that medical companies think they can get in there, they’re there. But what if we had the ability to create the alternative before the bad guys show up? The guys who love patents, the guys who love copyright, the guys who love all that shit. What if we could create a culture that was resilient enough that it could resist the coming influx of capitalism?  That was one of the big drivers for the project. I mean, I am actually trying to solve a specific problem — the problem of access to medical devices — but my problem could be answered in a million ways. I could go to the United Nations and ask them to buy some shit and import it. Why aren’t we doing that? It’s because we want to play three-dimensional chess. We want to do something that’s good for today and good for tomorrow.


Prompt: Are people on board with that? Inoculating Gaza to capitalism by building up the culture around open source and open access? Or do they get on board because you’re a Canadian doctor? Palestine, like most post-colonial places — let’s call it post-colonial although it’s more complicated than that because it’s still actively being colonized — has an inferiority complex. And we use this inferiority complex against them.  Your doctor’s stethoscope at the doctor’s office costs $200. People see these and associate them with quality because they’ve been around for so long and they’re shiny. And then we show up in Gaza with a 3D-printed stethoscope. It’s plastic. Usually, it’s one color. The first thing they say to me is, “That’s shit. Just look at it. It looks fucking homemade.” I say to them, “Oh really? Because we use it in Canada in the emergency department.” And they’re like, “Gimme that.”  So we’ve leveraged people’s inferiority complex against them. We also flip the development model. The development model, traditionally, is that you go into the Third World, you test on poor people who are defenseless against you, and then you go to the First World to sell your product there.  What we are doing is exactly the inverse. We’re doing all of our development in the First World, and then deploying it in the Third World — the idea being that mistakes are very expensive in the Third World and very cheap in Canada. For example, right now we’re doing a study for a 3D-printed pulse oximeter. That’s the device that goes on your finger and says how much oxygen you have. To test it — even in 2019, if you can believe it — you actually have to suffocate people. You literally put a mask on them and you bring their oxygen down to 70% while you’re draining off blood to test it. If something were to happen, we’re in Canada. I can give these patients the best care in the world. If I were testing it in Gaza and something were to happen, it would be bad news.  The only device we haven’t done that with is the 3D-printed tourniquet. That’s because it was an emergency situation and we needed to deploy them before we could test them. We were testing them on people who were dying. It was awful and totally the wrong way to do it.

Response: What happened? Any engineer who is not in the field has no idea what the fuck is going on. Paramedics in Gaza were telling me, “These tourniquets are breaking.” And I was like, “Why, what are you doing wrong?”  Then I went to the field. Two tourniquets in a row broke in my hands. I did not have the humility to understand the problem until it was happening to me. What was the mistake we were making? We were testing the tourniquets on people sitting in chairs in Canada. Super calm, super chill. Usually, they were even tourniqueting themselves.  In the field, I was literally running while applying a tourniquet. We had four stretcher bearers and I’d be in the middle, on the right side or the left side of the patient, trying to apply a tourniquet. While we were getting tear-gassed, so I couldn’t see. While there was live fire, so we were getting struck by shrapnel and running for our lives. So, yeah, I applied the tourniquet too tight and it snapped. You’re telling me to twist the tourniquet three times, but not four or it will break? Forget it.  After that, I went back to the engineering team and said, “Okay, we really need to over-engineer this tourniquet and make it something that can withstand 1600% of the force that we expected.” The engineers said, “This is stupid. Why are we doing this?” Because I was there, I knew that the amount of adrenaline pumping through you forbids you from making sound decisions in that exact moment. And since we had that intervention, we have had zero failures in 500 deployments. The commercial brand fails 20 percent of the time. We’re not just equivalent: our tourniquet is better than anything out there on the battlefield.  Innovating Outside the Market Tell us more about your development process. How do you develop and produce these 3D-printed devices? We create the designs using FreeCAD, a free/open source CAD software program. And we have medical students doing the production in my basement in London, Ontario. It’s Health Canada-approved. [Ed.: Health Canada is the Canadian public health department and the equivalent of the FDA’s medical licensing division.]


Prompt: Your basement is Health Canada-approved?  Yeah, they did a site visit this week.  There are six 3D printers down there and a few tables where we quality-check and package each stethoscope. A full print job produces enough parts to make four stethoscopes and that takes fifteen hours. In other words, every fifteen hours, we get four stethoscopes.  The 3D printed parts are the chestpiece, which is circular and holds something called a diaphragm, which is what we put to the patient’s chest; a “y-piece,” which is connected to the chestpiece by some tubing and lets us create a fork; two ear tubes, one for each prong of the y-piece so that sound can flow to both of the wearer’s ears; and finally a piece called a spring, which supports the ear tubes and keeps them a constant distance apart. We put earbuds on the ends of the ear tubes, but we don’t print those.

Response: For the tubing, we use huge rolls of Coca-Cola fountain machine tubing, actually, and cut them up into the size we need. We’re able to leverage the fact that the FDA approves this kind of tubing for both food and medical devices — the “F” and the “D.” We buy food-safe material and then can get approval to use it for medical stuff.  Finally, our diaphragms — inserts for the chestpiece I described earlier — come from file folders, which are super cheap.  You cut circles out of file folders to make the diaphragms?  Yeah, we use a craft punch. We wanted to make it very simple. What’s the good of a process if you need a $2 million lab to implement it? My entire lab can be put together for about $5,000. And half of my machines I made myself. It works not just on the best equipment you can buy, but on anything you can scrounge together.  Once the pieces have been quality-checked, we put them in plastic packets and seal them. They arrive disassembled. The reason we do that is because we want to change people’s relationship with their equipment.  Speaking of quality-checking and making sure everything works, I know that you published a paper in an open-access medical journal where you describe how you validated the 3D-printed stethoscope against the traditional stethoscope.


Prompt: We looked around and discovered that there isn’t broad agreement on how you test a stethoscope because nobody really cares. We picked a method that uses a “chest phantom,” which is a simulation of a chest that’s a polyurethane balloon filled with two liters of water.  You put sound in on one side and you collect it on the other side, with the understanding that there are a lot of reverberations in there that happen along the way. And then you compare the two stethoscopes to see how the sound is attenuated by the stethoscope. The stethoscope will take away some of the sound, but you want to make sure it’s not taking away sound in important places.  So you record two audio files: one of the sound that travels through the traditional stethoscope, and one of the sound that travels through the 3D-printed stethoscope?  Exactly. And then you run both files through a spectrum analyzer to see how they stack up. The spectrum analyzer we used was Audacity, which is open source.  We used a Hello Kitty balloon, so colloquially we call it the Hello Kitty Protocol, but we couldn’t write that in a publication — we made it sound more scientific. The cost of new materials for the validation study is about $15, and then you also need the traditional stethoscope to validate against. You could say that’s a capital cost. You also need headphones with a microphone in them. And, of course, you need a Hello Kitty balloon filled with water.  Beyond stethoscopes, what are the other kinds of devices you’re developing? Our big project that I’m really looking forward to is dialysis. Dialysis is also an interesting problem of capitalism. A good analogy is disposable razors. Broadly, in Canada, there’s Schick and there’s Gillette. You can’t use a Schick razor on a Gillette handle and vice versa. That’s called vendor lock-in.  Fundamentally, dialysis machines are a pump, a controller, a flow meter, and a little bit of tubing. Nothing special. The only way for companies to make them profitable is to create vendor lock-in and collude with each other. In California, there was a ballot initiative [Ed.: Proposition 8] to figure out a way to reduce the costs of dialysis treatment. Fresenius and DaVita, the two biggest companies in dialysis, spent $111 million to stop the proposition and they got it killed. That’s good for them because they don’t want competition, and they don’t want price controls. That’s not how they make money.

Response: In Gaza, this creates a problem. Let’s say white people in the United States under Obama decide they want to donate to Gaza, which happened. They donate a bunch of dialysis machines and what are called “disposables.” Machines are about $35,000 a piece. A disposable is a filter plus a circuit of tubing that hooks into the patient to connect them to the machine. Together, the machine and the disposable do the work that a functioning kidney would do: they filter the patient’s blood. Each disposable is about $100 and should only be used once per session. It’s supposed to get thrown away.  But in Gaza, patients take disposables home and wash them and bring them back the next time until they totally disintegrate — which is bad, bad news. It’s circulating your internal stuff. It should be sterile.  Now let’s say that Trump is in office and the Americans have lost interest, but the French have decided that they like Palestine. So the French donate a bunch of disposables that don’t work with the American machines. We put away the American machines, retrain our nurses on French machines, and start using French disposables. It’s the same thing with the Spanish, the Russians, whoever.  We have rooms of machines with no disposables, and rooms of disposables with no machines. Fucking crazy. So patients aren’t getting enough dialysis because we don’t have enough machines or disposables that work together. It’s like if a car manufacturer said you’re not allowed to use anything but Goodyear tires. The tire is the disposable, the car is the machine. This is what the companies are doing to us. They’re making it impossible for us to use anyone else’s disposables.  How can 3D printing help? Our idea is to make a machine that’s generic, where we can create templates for each of the different companies’ disposables. The template would become an interface between our machine and the proprietary disposable, so that different disposables become compatible with our machine. It would consist of printed parts at every place where the disposable touches the machine, a sheet or a board with a cutout to hold each of those 3D-printed parts, and instructions for putting the disposable, template, and machine together.


Prompt: The machine that we’re developing, instead of costing $35,000, costs about $500 to make. But each brand new tooling of a template will cost about $15,000. In that situation, if a country wanted to donate, we’d say, “No, no, don’t give us any machines, just give us your disposables.” Even if we have to spend $15,000 each time a new company decides they’re going to give us their disposables, we’re still way ahead financially. Plus, we don’t have to retrain our nurses each time, which leads to mistakes and errors.  So you have to create a new template for each country’s disposables.

Response: What’s tragic about it is that it’s not even one template per country. The United States has two main dialysis machine manufacturers and their stuff doesn’t work with each other. You can’t take a Fresenius disposable and put it on a non-Fresenius machine. It’s the same in Spain, France, and Germany. I wish it were one per country because that would reduce our problem set.  This is why we’re open-sourcing the templates. We’ll open source the whole process, really — the files to 3D-print parts and lasercut the board they plug into, as well as any validation studies we do, and any data we use in those validation studies so people can quality-check their own work. That way, you only have to spend the $15,000 to develop each template once. Let’s say the Americans donate one set of machines to Gaza and the French donate one set of machines to Kenya. We spend our money to make our template and they spend their money to make their template. Then, later on, if the French donate their machines to Gaza and the Americans donate their machines to Kenya, everybody is all set. Because the Kenyans would already have our template for the American machines and we would already have their template for the French machines. A shared open source repository makes it possible for us to not duplicate each other’s work.  What you are describing — bringing technological innovation to a product to make it better and cheaper and more widely available — is what we’re told capitalism already does well. But in your experience, the reality is the opposite. The market is making the product worse. So you’re forced to innovate outside of the market.


Prompt: The idea behind patents in a capitalist medical model is that, at a certain point, either the benevolence of these companies or their competitive nature should cause them to reduce their prices and make generic versions of their products. Maybe the first version of a particular medical device belongs to a company and you pay an exorbitant amount for it. But then it becomes cheaper and more accessible to everybody.  That promise isn’t being fulfilled in the realm of medical hardware. It is being fulfilled in generic medicines, although the United States has even found a way to fuck that up, which is amazing. Almost no country has allowed drug companies to fuck up generics the same way the US has, where very simple 200-year-old generics cost $20,000. In Canada and in Europe, that shit is just not allowed.  What is a patent? A patent is the government incentivizing innovation by encouraging inventors. It does this by spending people’s freedom — it gives the inventor the right to prevent other people from making or using that invention for a period of time.

Response: Similarly, the government spends people’s money to make a highway. You want the government to make highways. But if the government is spending $20 billion per kilometer of highway, you might say, “Wait a second. I want you to spend some, but not too much.” When highways cost too much — when one kilometer costs $17 million to develop — it’s almost always associated with mafias and corruption. To bring it back to patents, how can there be a kilometer of innovation that costs all of people’s freedom to develop? There must be corruption involved.  What people like myself can do is to force that realization by operating outside of the usual system. A 200-year-old medical device like the stethoscope should not cost $200.


Prompt: Blockade Runners Let’s talk about how your medical devices are printed on the ground in Gaza. 3D printers use plastic to create objects. Where do you get the plastic? It’s recycled ABS plastic. Gaza actually has a 100 percent recycle rate because no plastic is allowed in.  Really?  Yeah, almost everybody’s plumbing in Gaza is made out of recycled plastic. It’s really quite wild. For the printers, we use recycled ABS and we mix in as much virgin plastic as we can get because you always need some virgin plastic — there’s no such thing as 100 percent recycled plastic — but sometimes it’s not very much.  Where do you get the ABS from? I’m imagining a bunch of plastic bottles.

Response: You’re halfway there. Plastic bottles are made out of a material called PET. We don’t use PET; we use ABS, which is the plastic that’s in Lego pieces. It’s also in chairs and tables, picnic tables, shit like that. What happens is: you take those plastic parts, you grind them down, you wash them and dry them. Then you melt them and extrude them into spools of “filament,” which is what 3D printers use to make things.  To process all the recycled plastic in Gaza, they’ve made their own recycling machines, their own grinders, and their own cleaners.


Prompt: Are those machines open source? Are the plans online somewhere?  Yeah, man. One of them is called the Filastruder. It takes plastic pellets and turns them into spools of filament. The company that makes it open sourced their stuff — and that’s a prerequisite for everything of ours, since we have a 100 percent free/open source stack.  Why are we religiously free software? I don’t know if you’re religiously free software, but zealotry is painful. It sometimes takes us five times as long to do anything, but that cost is paid up front and we’re then able to pass what we learn on to other people and get them on board. FreeCAD, the software I mentioned earlier that we use to design the stethoscope parts, has improved dramatically since we started using it. We’ve filed bug reports against it.

Response: Anyway, we got a Filastruder into Gaza and started doing some amazing shit. And we began ordering parts from the company in a really weird way. One day they emailed me and said, “We’ve never seen anyone order parts the way that you’re ordering them. What are you doing?” So we explained what we were doing and they were blown away. They sent me lots of replacement parts for free, which was kind of them.  We’ve since had to go more industrial: the Filastruder was good at the beginning, but now we’ve got twenty printers in Gaza and we’re producing many kilograms of filament each week, so we can’t use it anymore. But it will always be in our hearts.  Are those twenty printers all in one place, or spread around? They’re in our offices in Gaza. But we help make printers for anybody who wants them, by printing the parts that they can then assemble into a functioning printer.


Prompt: There are two reasons we do this. One is that we want to promote the culture. The other is that we’re going to get bombed at some point. When that happens, if we are the only place that has all the 3D-printing knowledge or equipment, then we’re going to set back the entire movement by two or three years. The more we hoard the knowledge or hoard the equipment, the worse it will be. As it is, when our offices eventually do get bombed, we’ll probably only be set back a year. If somebody dies, obviously it will be even worse.  So while we have twenty printers of our own, we’ve “birthed” approximately thirty-five more by printing parts for them. It’s easier for people to get up and running if we give them some parts to start, kind of like a sourdough starter. But what’s really cool is that printers have started showing up that we had nothing to do with.  How did you know? How could you tell that these weren’t printers you had helped make? Historically, everybody had what’s called the Prusa printers, so it was always easy to trace them. At this point, there are Prusa printers that are second and third-generation. We’d make a printer for somebody and then they’d make a printer for somebody. The first thing we ask people to do is print themselves backup pieces, and the second thing we ask is for them to help somebody else.  Still, it’s a monoculture. Monocultures, even when they’re open source monocultures, are not good. So when we finally started to see printers that weren’t ours, we knew they weren’t ours. The culture is growing in a way we didn’t expect.  We’ve started working with universities and high schools. The goal is to get a 3D printer into every high school in Gaza within the next five to ten years. For us to have as many 3D printers as they have in the Netherlands per capita would mean having around two thousand printers. And Gaza needs more printers than the Netherlands because they’re making essential stuff. For example, if your light switch breaks in the Netherlands, it’s usually cheaper and easier to go buy it at the hardware store. In Gaza, these breakages are permanent. When you go to somebody’s house and the light switch is broken, it’s always going to be broken. Introducing 3D printing to that culture is empowering repair culture.

Response: What about the cost and the availability of electricity? Does that create an obstacle for 3D printing in Gaza? Our office in Gaza is solar-powered. We knew right away that the electricity instability in Gaza would kill us if we wanted to print consistently, so early on we rigged solar power for the entire place. We have panels that power the equipment during the day and charge a set of batteries, which we can then use for backup. I’ve also participated in several multimillion dollar projects to put solar power in hospitals in Gaza. Those are important, because if you’re trying to help a patient and then the electricity cuts out for eight hours, it’s not good.  Does democratizing access to basic goods, leveraging solar power, and creating self-sufficiency pose a threat to the Israelis and the occupation? Since their withholding of those things is a large part of how they maintain control?  There are three main components to building a solar power system in Gaza. The first is batteries. In a country like Canada, you wouldn’t have to bother with batteries because you can always access electricity through a reliable, always-on grid if the sun isn’t shining. But in Gaza, batteries are essential. The other components are the solar panels and an inverter, which translates the different kinds of current into each other — so the photovoltaic power generated by the panels, which is DC, can be converted into the kind of power that our building uses, which is AC.  There is no moment in time since I started my work that the Israelis have allowed all three of those components into Gaza at the same time. It’s always one and the others are banned.  It’s clear that the intent of the blockade is to take away independence. So maybe the logic behind the Israelis preventing those components from entering Gaza is part of that. Honestly, I don’t think about it that much. What I care about is building a project that’s sustainable and that’s decentralized. Decentralization is deeply Palestinian. The context is partly religious: Islam is a decentralized religion. But Palestinians have not had good centralized leadership for a very long time. Historically, they organized themselves into villages that were more or less independent. So we’re not introducing new concepts to people. What we’re doing is simply refreshing what they think their community should be, in a technological way.


Prompt: Lucky and Grateful Have you always been interested in 3D printing? Or did your experiences in Gaza spark your interest? In other words, were you thinking about the problems in Gaza and matching 3D printers to the problem?  A little bit of both. I understood that the technology might be usable, but as long as the tunnels were open, it didn’t make sense. I was meeting my needs in other ways, so why bother?  Now, it’s just too expensive. If I were to distribute a stethoscope to each doctor in Gaza — that’s 4,000 doctors — that would be $200 per stethoscope, but probably more like $350 by the time you got them into Gaza because of the corruption, the problems with the Israelis, and so on. You’re talking about $350 times 4,000 people. That’s really serious cash. And for what? For stethoscopes. Whereas 4,000 3D-printed stethoscopes — even with packaging, distribution, training, and everything — are $5 a pop. For $20,000, you can kickstart an entire medical system. That’s nothing.

Response: Now that you’ve kickstarted that medical system, why keep going? At this point, the office in Gaza has the designs and the printers. Why have you continued to show up in person?  There are a couple of reasons for that and they all have to do with benefits to myself. It’s common for people who travel and volunteer to imagine that they are giving and to minimize the amount they’re taking from the society they’re in. The reality is that without absorbing the resilience of the Palestinians, I would have never understood what resilience was. And so I took hope from them. I took from them the idea that when somebody builds a wall, you dig a tunnel.  That recharge of my energy is hard to do when I’m not there. I’m not the kind of person who can easily empathize with a situation without seeing it. I’m also not smart enough to be able to read what’s happening in the news and tease out the reality on the ground. Had I not been there in the first place, I wouldn’t have understood these problems. Someone might understand that there’s a shortage of medical equipment, but it’s hard to understand how that shortage is actualized. What does it look like? Going there, I take a lot that helps me to do the work here, which makes me a better doctor both for my Canadian patients and for my Palestinian patients. That’s the main reason.  But above all, Gaza is a vanguard. It allows us to acid-test our ideas about freedom, about non-violent resistance, about healthcare provision, and about independence.  In May 2018, you were shot in the legs by Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called for an investigation into your shooting since you were clearly marked as a medical personnel, and shooting marked medical personnel is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. You responded that you weren’t interested in an investigation and that you’d rather have investment in infrastructure projects. I’m wondering if you can talk about why.  There is no possibility of justice through the Israeli system as it currently exists. Things like investigations are fig leaves to pretend there is justice. Ultimately, whether there’s justice for me or not is irrelevant. What I want most is to improve the conditions I saw around me that triggered people, week after week, to go to the protest. [Ed:. The protest is the Great March of Return, which began March 30, 2018.] It’ll be fifty-two weeks on March 30, 2019. 20,000 people shot. 250 deaths. More by the time you publish this. Why are people going? It’s because they are desperate. If we can alleviate the desperation, that’s the key.


Prompt: Whether Tarek Loubani gets justice is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If we could get a couple million dollars to put solar panels on some hospitals, that would be a legacy I would be proud of. What’s the best case scenario if there’s an investigation? The absolute best case scenario is some fucking nineteen-year-old getting thrown in jail for a year for what he did to me. So they would destroy some nineteen-year-old’s life even though we all know it’s a systemic problem? No thank you. I would rather make it so that that nineteen-year-old is never in the position where his whole life depends on him shooting a doctor. I would rather make it so that Palestinians don’t have to go up to the fence with their hands up begging for their humanity.  I’ve never seen an honest figure or independent judicial process from the Israeli government. In fact, the Israelis came to interrogate me. They sent people in army uniforms calling themselves an “independent fact-finding mission.” I joked to one of the guys, “Having the word 'independent' doesn’t make you independent. You are a literal soldier.” He said, “Yes, but we take this very seriously.”  You work in and on bodies. What’s your relationship to your own body? And does it change when you’re in Canada versus Gaza?  My main relationship to my body is gratitude. I felt incredibly lucky when I was shot that I wasn’t hurt more severely. I could see how important everything that we were working towards was. We are — collectively, not me specifically or even the Glia Project — trying to make it so that these fragile vessels we all inhabit are as well-cared for as possible in a way that’s just and equitable across the world. There is no reason why patients in Gaza shouldn’t enjoy the same medical care that my patients in Canada enjoy. There’s no good reason for that.  A lot of people look at the fragility of their own body and they’re terrified by it. But those same people look at a glass sculpture and aren’t terrified by its fragility. You can look at fragility as a kind of beauty and as an invitation to protect. I take up that invitation. I take it up professionally and I take it up in this work. But your question is philosophical and I’m not a philosophical person so it’s hard to answer.

Response: The other part, in addition to gratitude, is luck. The guy that rescued me the day I was shot was killed about an hour later.  Musa, right?  Musa. He was a father of four. His wife, when she talked to me, asked, “Why did he die and not you?” Good fucking question. It’s part of that fragility. Have you ever dropped a glass that didn’t break and wonder, “Why didn’t it break?” And another time, it just taps the side of the sink and shatters into a thousand pieces. Why did it break?  Musa died because of a totally preventable condition. Well, treatable, not preventable. I guess it was preventable because they could have not shot him, but I could have treated it with a ballpoint pen. And the wild thing is: my mind can’t look further than my people. I can only think of the paramedics who were shot that day. I can’t even begin to fathom the 1,700 other people who were shot that day. I don’t know how big your high school was, but my entire high school was 1,700 people. It’s like every one of them being shot in one day. So I felt lucky. Lucky and grateful.


Prompt: The Debt Collective platform launch announcement came in my inbox just a few months ago, but the collective has been around longer than that. How would you describe Debt Collective before it became a platform? During Occupy Wall Street, there was a small group of us who started working together. We started thinking about debt, and talking about debt as a site for organizing. We realized that everybody was in debt: we were in debt, everyone we knew was in debt. We realized that indebtedness was a material condition that defined our era.  After Occupy, a bunch of us formed a group called Strike Debt. We were studying what the debt system was, how it was operating, who the creditors were. We wrote The Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual, which is still available on strikedebt.org. Later, we started a project called Rolling Jubilee, which bought defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar and then canceled it. This was a series of projects over several years that came from trying to figure out: what should organizing around debt look like?  Through working on Rolling Jubilee, we came to the conclusion that we needed to build power from the bottom up. We needed a membership organization, something millions of debtors could join. That’s the idea behind the Debt Collective platform.

Response: Labor organizing is a model that inspires us. Getting together with your fellow workers to go to the boss and say, “We want more money, we want time off, we want healthcare” — this is a model that works. Today, more than sharing the same employer, people share the same creditor. Everybody’s got Sallie Mae, everybody’s got Navient, everybody owes the same credit card companies. What can we do together if we join forces and bring some of those labor organizing tactics into the space of finance? That framing — that we might not all share the same employer, but a lot of us share the same creditor — is so striking.  Creditors have so much power over us. They have all this data about us that they’re constantly buying and selling. But we don’t know very much about them, or about each other and our shared situation.  During the housing crisis of 2008, millions and millions of people were foreclosed upon illegally, including disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Our lesson from that is that debtors must be organized. What if all of those folks had been in debtor’s unions and could have pushed back against what was being done to them? That really motivates us. Because what happened then will happen again — in the same way or in a different form — and we should be ready.


Prompt: It seems like that vision informed the whole idea of the Debt Collective platform. Can you tell me about building it? What inspired the technical and the design decisions that you made? In 2015, as a pilot project, we launched a student debt strike with a group of fifteen borrowers who had attended a scam college called Corinthian that’s now bankrupt. Corinthian was a chain of for-profit schools with campuses across the country. They preyed on low-income people and had developed some pretty evil tactics to target low-income folks, racial minorities, and women.  Our campaign had two components. The first was a student debt strike, where former students refused to pay their loans. The other was a complementary legal campaign, where we activated a provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965 called “borrower defense to repayment,” often shortened to “defense to repayment.” The law says that if your school scams you or lies to you in the process of issuing you federal student loans, you have the right to have those loans canceled.  Since 2015, we’ve won over one billion dollars in debt relief from that work. When we started, we didn’t know that’s how it would go. We were a small group of volunteers who had a website and some very basic infrastructure. And we got flooded — flooded — with people who had student debt of all kinds. We couldn’t keep up.  Our takeaway was that we needed to have solid infrastructure, online and in-person, that would enable us to accommodate everyone who wants to participate the next time we campaign. The last three years have been spent trying to figure out what that infrastructure looks like. That’s what led to creating the Debt Collective platform.

Response: When I go to the platform, I see that the first two links in the navigation menu at the top of the page are “Dispute Your Debt” and “Community.” “Dispute Your Debt” takes you to a landing page for six debt dispute tools and “Community” takes you to a forum. How did you decide on those features? The debt dispute tools are important because they help people stop predatory creditors and collectors in the short term. People are struggling with their debt today, right now, and they can’t necessarily wait for the student debt jubilee that we must organize together to win.  At the same time, one of the aspects of indebtedness is a feeling of isolation and shame. People don’t talk about their finances even with their friends and family, so lots of people think they’re the only person this has happened to.  We hear stories from debtors who tell you, “I didn’t expect to lose my job and then my car broke down and I had to take out all this debt.” They may think that if this one bad thing hadn’t happened to them, they wouldn’t be in this situation. But once you start talking to other people, you realize that everybody is in the same boat. The forum is about enabling debtors to make connections with each other. Eventually, the platform will also enable people to work together to develop a campaign for our collective benefit. As more and more people, especially the young, are beginning to talk about socialism and how we have to transition our economy to save the planet, we believe that the time is right to think about how debtors can contribute to efforts that make bold, visionary demands such as student loan cancellation, free health care, and more.  I’d never heard of “a debt dispute tool” before I visited the platform. Tell us more about that.


Prompt: The best way to explain it is to tell you about the first tool we ever made. For our campaign in 2015 with borrowers who had attended Corinthian, we worked with lawyers to develop an app like TurboTax to file for defense to repayment.  TurboTax is easy. A little wizard comes up and asks you questions, you answer them, and, at the end, it tells you what you owe. We thought, “What if we made something similar?” So we developed an app that submits a letter to the Department of Education that says, “You lied to me and here’s the evidence. I want my loans canceled.”  Based on the success of that tool, we decided to replicate that model with other types of debt on the new platform. So now we have six tools. But what’s funny is that when you click on the “Defense to Repayment” link from the tools landing page, it just takes you to the Department of Education website because they’ve taken over the process. We started it and they sort of… stole it.  Seriously? Yeah. A hundred thousand people filed for defense to repayment in the year after we launched our tool. The Department of Education couldn’t allow us to do that. Who were we to submit these letters en masse? So they created their own web app, which looks suspiciously like ours. Now borrowers have to go to the official Department of Education website to file. But the process of applying didn’t exist before we invented it.  They co-opt your work, they don’t pay you, and they don’t credit you in any way. It just blends into some federal website.  The federal bureaucracy takes it over.  There are so many cases like that in the history of labor organizing as well. Victories that are hard won just get sucked into existing systems and made to appear as if they were always there.  It erases the struggle that led to the change. And, like I said, about a billion dollars in debt have been erased now due to the operationalization of that law. The law had existed, but people weren’t using it. A billion dollars is a drop in the bucket, but nevertheless a good sign that organizing in this way can be effective.

Response: You mentioned that a campaigning feature is coming to the platform. How do you envision campaigns coming together? The intention is to organize democratically, so people on the platform determine the campaigns. What if Debt Collective members in some city found each other on our platform and decided to do something together locally? Maybe there’s a payday lending store you want to shut down, so you work with your neighbors and have the support of our organizers and our resources. Maybe there’s a predatory for-profit college, a hospital that’s gouging people, courts and police who are sticking people with fines and fees. The bonds of solidarity can be created at the local as well as at the national level.


Prompt: How has this kind of organization not existed before? Do you know of precedents in other other places or times? There are some examples in other countries. In Spain, when the mortgage crisis hit in 2012, people organized to stop foreclosures. There have been examples in Latin America where people go to the bank as a collective and say, “You’re not going to foreclose on these homes.”  But not us. Seventy-five percent of Americans are in debt. It’s really almost everyone. It’s astonishing that organizations for debtors don’t exist yet, even though we’re all in this situation. That must change. We really have to catch up.  Our theory of change is that massive social transformation does not happen without insurgency from the bottom up. But insurgencies require infrastructure to sustain them. The Debt Collective platform is our attempt to begin building that.

Response: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up, study, develop your interests? How did you come to want to work on open source hormones? I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles, which has the densest population of Chinese inhabitants in all the US. From early on I already loved both biology and visual art, and chose to study both as a combined degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I was very lucky to get exposed to “bioart” as a self-aware practice through one of my professors Rich Pell who taught a course called Post Natural Studio.  After graduating, I began an amateur documentary project, filming interviews with other bioartists and biohackers. Critical Art Ensemble and subRosa were very influential for me because their projects demonstrate how biology and biotechnology could be used for social and political resistance. In 2014, the documentary project led me to Yogyakarta, Indonesia where I met a much more subversive group of practitioners in the global Hackteria community, such as noise artists, fermenters, and of course the Transhackfeminists, who were making DIY sex toys and performing DIY gynecology. Following this trajectory of do-it-together science, critical hacking, and its possible “emancipatory potential” I think it was only logical that I would stumble across open source hormones.  What were your most important sources of inspiration?  My sources of inspiration for the Open Source Estrogen project are plenty:  Paul B. Preciado and his book Testo Junkie, where he outlines the meaning of the “pharmapornographic regime” that governs our subjectivities especially in relation to gender, sexuality, and reproduction.Anne Fausto-Sterling whose writing fights static notions of gender and the body.Giovanna di Chiro and her paper on “polluted politics,” which made me aware of how cultural dialogue manifests around something like hormone disruption.Heather Davies and her writing on “the Plastisphere,” which brilliantly outlines the symbolic and the material of plastic as a queering potential.Legacy Russell on “Glitch Feminism” and the idea that bodies could “glitch” and resist traditional binary code.Laboria Cuboniks on “Xenofeminism”: “If nature is unjust then change nature!” Astrida Neimanis’s essay “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.”