Prompt: Fact Sets Once wardens and guards leave Guantánamo, they tend to go quietly into the night of civilian life. The uproar over Bogdan’s appointment at UNC Charlotte was an anomaly. Members of the Coalition to Remove John Bogdan met in the GroupMe chat and in the library late at night to imagine a campus without him. They amplified their cause by tweeting and chalking the streets. In their written statements, coalition members drew heavily on reports written by Amnesty International and other organizations that had made a concerted effort to track and trace the wrongs that Bogdan’s Guantánamo had wrought. There was plenty of documentation of what was done to detainees. Reports from Human Rights Watch noted that a federal district judge had ordered Bogdan to explain a standing order that called for the use of restraint chairs during the force-feeding of detainees. But there was little information about who apart from Bogdan had been involved in doing it.  It is fair to say that the administrators of UNC Charlotte did not imagine their campus would become the site of a battle over the legacy, meaning, and future of detention facilities that are over a thousand miles away. After the coalition began drawing attention to Bogdan’s alleged crimes, the university’s chancellor issued what he called a “fact set” to defend Bogdan’s reputation and employment history. But the document also went many steps further, legitimizing Guantánamo as just one of the US military’s hundreds of bases.  Bogdan fought back as well. In an interview with a local reporter, he pushed the thesis that “the mission here is not far off from the military.” He declared, “The mission of the Army is to fight and win the nation’s wars. And you do that by developing a team, and teaching and growing and building the future of the nation. That’s exactly what universities do, right?” Around the same time, university administrators instructed the social media team associated with the admissions department to block the coalition on Twitter, so that prospective students were less likely to come across their arguments against the colonel.

Response: Ultimately, the coalition couldn’t translate their understanding of Guantánamo into a campaign that resonated with most of their fellow students. In part, the Zoomers had faced the challenge of teaching themselves and their peers what the military prison was and why it mattered. More importantly, perhaps, in setting out to learn about Guantánamo, they were never going to encounter examples of other struggles like theirs. In fact, there has only been one analogous case relating directly to Gitmo: since 2009, Berkeley law students have repeatedly called for the dismissal of professor John Yoo, who gained the nickname “architect of torture” for his role in justifying harsh CIA interrogation techniques deployed at Guantánamo. The students’ Google searching had led them back in time, to a period during their childhoods when Bogdan was running Guantánamo, but it brought them no closer to a blueprint for how to hold people like Bogdan accountable in the present.


Prompt: Tindering Gitmo If Guantánamo is more than a physical detention camp, if it is also a network of people and ideologies that have successfully implemented the continuous extrajudicial detention of individuals, then how can researchers, reporters, and future generations trace its contours online, and formulate questions about what justice with regard to Guantánamo might look like? In 2015, as a master’s student in comparative literature, I emailed the Joint Task Force Guantánamo, requesting to see the prison’s library. I was informed that only reporters could go, so I began a foray into freelance journalism. To go would be to see, and to see would be to understand, I told myself. Among other things, I set out to learn how the arrival of T-Mobile cell service had changed life on the naval base. I hoped I could convince US civilians that Guantánamo was not so far away—what the Bush administration had described as “the legal equivalent of outer space” was, in fact, connected by multiple fiber optic cables to the state of Florida.  As I interviewed guards stationed at the base, I discovered many of them were millennials like me. They were mostly twenty-somethings, some actually younger, many of whom scuba-dived on the weekends, acting as if warehousing Muslim men was part of their patriotic duty. At the same time, I could not shake the feeling that everything I saw in the detention facilities, where I was surveilled and accompanied by a handler most of the time, was a curated performance. To understand Gitmo, I realized, I would need to find a different way backstage.  For the past five years, I have relied on different open-source intelligence methods to explore the porousness of Gitmo and to follow the people who move through it. I spent one year watching the Joint Task Force scrub its own official Twitter feed of hundreds of tweets. (They subsequently deactivated the account, and I took over the handle.) I sat quietly for years with the knowledge that geolocation-based smartphone apps were a window into a military culture that most civilians will never see, and nodded my head when people told me that fitness trackers like Strava could reveal someone’s location on a military base. I knew that Strava was just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t need to go to Gitmo to speak with personnel there; I could just turn on my phone.

Response: I considered different platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Reddit—where current and former guards might hover. All seemed too public—except Tinder. And so, in the summer of 2017, I plugged in a little personal information about myself on the app, geolocated to Guantánamo, and began to chat with men who were stationed there. I ended up swiping right on private contractors, members of the Military Police, sailors who were just passing through the port. Meanwhile, I sat in my small apartment in Massachusetts trying to understand what precisely I was trying to understand about the detention facilities.  What I began to see through Tinder is that Americans would pass through the base and eventually return stateside. My new digital strategies were leading me to reckon with the fact that guards themselves were constantly returning after their rotations to communities throughout the United States, many slipping back into civilian life. Guards came, guards went, rinse, repeat. Through swiping, I could ask these people what they saw on the ground, and I could do what I had largely been unable to do at Guantánamo—learn their names, gain records of their faces, outline their moral codes, inquire what the detention facilities represented to them.  The responses I gathered included disavowals and defenses of the national security state—a diversity of perspectives absent in much of the public record. At the same time, I was trying to document the identities of former guards, though at a certain point I recognized that this alone wouldn’t cause me to reckon with the vastness of the US national security state represented by Guantánamo Bay. As the scholar A. Naomi Paik argues in her book Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, Gitmo is part of a longstanding and ongoing US project to create physical and legal black sites. A few truths told on Tinder couldn’t make for a global reconciliation.  Home Truths It took the UNC Charlotte students’ campaign, which I first heard about in late 2019, for me to reckon with my own lack of imagination. I had been so intent on using social media to map the identities, ideologies, and movements of former guards that I hadn’t considered what might transpire if their identities were to be widely known. The Zoomers had first learned about Bogdan’s history through LinkedIn—and then they led a concerted effort to fire him.


Prompt: But when I speak to members of the Coalition to Remove John Bogdan and other former UNC Charlotte students, I always find myself circling back to the same question. After unearthing this knowledge about Bogdan, if they didn’t think he belonged on their campus, where did he belong?  One UNC Charlotte alumna, who now works in the national security sector, responded, “I think what shocked me was the ease with which someone that had such a high-profile position like that was able to come back and seamlessly reenter society, and that was it. I guess I just assumed they’d go to like RAND or Deloitte or somewhere like that.” Another Coalition member, now an alumnus, said the question of where Bogdan should be removed to had been stumping him from the start. “My initial reaction was to say that John Bogdan is not fit for any sort of civilian job,” he told me. “But then, I don’t necessarily want people like John Bogdan in our police or military either.”  It struck me that what the students lacked was a model for justice that goes beyond any single warden or guard. This was partly a consequence of the algorithmically curated information they encountered online, but it is also the result of a widespread refusal by American society as a whole to confront this issue. As the students leave their campus and scatter across the United States, like former guards returning from their rotations, they’ll have to decide if they, too, want to leave Gitmo behind.

Response: In the spring of 1989, a virus began attacking computers in Europe, the United States, and Asia. During every sixteenth run of an infected executable file, the virus overwrote a random sector of a machine’s hard disk and manifested the phrase “Eddie lives… somewhere in time” on the monitor. A signature declared the virus’ origin: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.”  Dark Avenger was the most prolific of a number of hackers that emerged in Bulgaria in the late 1980s and 1990s. In December 1990, The New York Times reported that the Eastern Bloc nation had become a major infection vector in the new information economy. The late John McAfee told the newspaper, “I would say that 10 percent of the sixty calls we receive each week are for Bulgarian viruses.” By another estimate, around ninety out of the 300 then extant viruses for IBM machines originated from the country. In 1997, Wired called Bulgaria “the heart of darkness.”  How could a small socialist country become ground zero for so many digital epidemics? The conventional narrative of Eastern European communism is one of technologically backward states that failed to enter the information age, locked behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain that prevented both people and ideas from circulating. In Bulgaria, however, the electronic industry’s success was considered a key component of achieving the state’s ideological and economic dreams. The Bulgarian Communist Party hoped that the computer would usher in a communist utopia. Automation would streamline planning through a nationwide information network, and man would be free from menial tasks. More pressingly, the party was betting that computers could revive an economy that had once been the second fastest-growing in the world, but was floundering by the 1980s.


Prompt: This vision was partially fulfilled: by the mid-1980s, socialist Bulgaria was producing up to 47 percent of all computer hardware within the Eastern Bloc, from Berlin to Vladivostok. But the country still suffered from negligible growth rates and low worker productivity, in part due to the party’s inability to implement the technology its factories were producing. State-produced hardware, computers, and numerically-controlled machines often languished unused due to a shortage of necessary software.  As this problem played out over the course of the 1980s, the party vested its hopes in a mass education effort to transform what turned out to be the last children of socialism into the first electronic generation. These kids would be trained to create the software that would allow the party to automate all it dreamed of automating—from chemical production to managing pension databases. Beginning in 1983, Bulgarian children as young as twelve were enrolled in a state-run program of technical tinkering. High schools and universities were transformed into laboratories of the future and factories for the regime. While learning BASIC, Bulgarian children were to advance themselves as intellectual laborers and truly creative citizens of a newly scientific socialist world, in order to become the future governors of much more complex production and social processes.

Response: In reality, however, the 1980s generation of Bulgarian children found themselves becoming cogs in an economy that continued to suffer shortages, bottlenecks, and scarcity—all of which contributed to the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. When that happened, the technological skills and entrepreneurial desires the state had cultivated in its children were rechanneled into viruses and the first software enterprises of democratic Bulgaria.  Hackers like Dark Avenger were thus the most notorious product of a failed political and cultural experiment with a long afterlife. The death of the party’s dream pushed much of the 1980s generation into an ideology that was fiercely opposed to socialism, but still wildly utopian. Many of these kids eventually emigrated to Silicon Valley and other hubs in the global information economy, bringing with them a strongly capitalist version of the communist’s dream: liberation of the human spirit through technology.


Prompt: Tinker and Spy Karl Marx once quipped that under communism man would be a fisherman in the morning and an artist in the afternoon. By the 1960s, the Bulgarian Communist Party believed that automation had brought Marx’s vision to the cusp of realization. Thousands of engineers were trained in the country’s universities, and cybernetics became a watchword for the party’s economic programs. Computers would streamline information flows, provide objective information on the economy, and allow planners in Sofia to accurately predict the future. The Politburo trumpeted that “science would be a productive force.” Just a generation before, that idea of Bulgaria’s future had seemed unthinkable. Back in 1944, when the party assumed power as Stalin’s Red Army rolled over the Danube, this small Balkan state was largely an agricultural producer. In the nascent field of international development, Bulgaria was considered an example of the region’s “trap,” which could only be escaped through large-scale investment. That is precisely what the Soviets brought, in the guise of breakneck Stalinist industrialization. Throughout the 1950s, the country assumed the Soviet economic model: central planning, smokestack industries, and a growing industrial proletariat squeezed into the cities.  By the 1960s, however, Bulgaria’s extensive growth period was tapering off, and the country was suffering a debt crisis. On the advice of Bulgarian engineers trained in western Europe, the party turned to electronics as the good of the future. As the party’s leader, Todor Zhivkov, put it, “We couldn’t industrialize with tomatoes and eggs.” Heavy state investment was combined with Japanese licensing and a prodigious espionage program to create the Bulgarian computer industry. By the 1970s, dozens of Bulgarian factories and institutes were churning out CPUs, mini-computers, and peripherals, such as ES-1020 mainframes and IZOT hard drives. Most of this technology was licensed or reverse-engineered after the Bulgarian intelligence services had procured it in the West; from its inception, the nation’s hardware industry was based on spying and tinkering, rather than true domestic innovation. The golden goose was the hard disk, which Bulgaria almost monopolized in the Eastern Bloc.

Response: The 1980s were marked by continual heavy investment in robotics and personal computing, bringing the automation age into the office and onto the factory floor. Imperfect as it was, Bulgarian automation did take hold to some extent—around 200,000 workers in a country of eight million worked in the electronics sector, the second largest industrial workforce in the country. Its IBM 360/370-copies, Winchester hard drives, and an Apple II clone known as the Pravetz, found their way into socialist enterprises throughout the Global South. Bulgarian computers flew on the Soviet space station Mir, were used for nuclear research in India, and equipped Mozambique’s nascent statistical authority. Though often slowly, and in a piecemeal fashion, automation entered car production processes and cement factories, monitored milk levels in collective farms, and increasingly suffused social and government services.  Unfortunately, Bulgarian products often fared badly on the global capitalist market due to their sometimes shoddy quality. Rather than looking at its economic principles such as central planning as a potential source of the problem, the party focused on the “subjective factor.” In their view, it was the Bulgarian worker rather than the system that was to blame—shirking responsibilities, pilfering the petty change, and sleeping on the job. Only the computer and robot would solve this problem, by eliminating the human strategies of survival in the shortage economy of socialism, where personal links and the grey market were key to procuring scarce goods. These were the peculiar conditions within which the next, truly computerized generation, would have to grow up.


Prompt: The Man-Machine-Environment The organization that prepared most Bulgarian children to be the model communists of the future was the Dimitrov Communist Youth Union (DKMS). In 1984, the DKMS started publishing Computer for You, a monthly magazine for the new generation. The magazine’s first editorial told these kids that “we will aim to offer you knowledge, experience and creativity from the interesting world of ‘her majesty’ ELECTRONISATION.”  Her majesty was indeed marching through children’s lives. In 1979, the party had directed twenty-seven schools across the country to implement experiments in computer education. But it was the personal computing revolution that opened the Bulgarian school to electronics. In 1983, the Sofia High School of Electronics received its first fully equipped classroom of eighteen Bulgarian PCs, and informatics became part of the school curriculum.  Within a year, there were over 300 PCs in Bulgarian schools, and the numbers continued growing. Education software was used in language training, mathematics, and science lessons, alongside BASIC classes. Eleventh grade was reconstructed to include units such as “an introduction to cybernetics” and “production automation.” Computer for You contained architects’ plans for new classrooms that treated students like cyborgs—“integration into the school environment is effective only if it ensures optimal functioning of the Man-Machine-Environment system,” a cybernetics engineer told the magazine.  If the economy was going to be composed of man-machine systems, schools would be, too. New educational methods were developed under the auspices of mathematician Blagovest Sendov, who had participated in the creation of Vitosha, the first Bulgarian computer, in the early 1960s. In an article for the magazine, Sendov called the computer “a fantastical object” and deemed it the new age’s defining metaphor. Bulgarian socialism, he said, would be defined by the “mind to be molded—on the computer model.” The new society was one of informational glut, and kids had to learn to “continue learning” throughout life—to sift through information, synthesize it, and see the connections between different areas of human endeavor. Learning the language of computers—what Sendov called “the second literacy”—was to become the crux of every school’s curriculum.

Response: Children were also enticed into the new dream through a network of computer clubs operated by the DKMS. The first appeared in 1984 in the capital of Sofia; by 1987, there were over 530 of them throughout the country, from the largest cities to many villages. They contained over 4,000 PCs, as well as small, domestically produced robots, which students could program to perform various tasks, such as moving small loads between two tables. Annual nationwide “Informatics Olympiads” were held throughout the country, and Bulgarian computer clubs also popped up in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. The DKMS estimated that over 600,000 students and young workers used the computer clubs every year.


Prompt: By 1985, the first student-run enterprise in computing was already helping to solve the country’s economic problems. In the course of just a few months, Avantgarde, a collective of high school and university students from Sofia and the city of Plovdiv, had created sixty games and twenty educational programs for classrooms and the computer club network. They also cooperated with state factories, creating specialized data processing packages for the economy: graphic editors for design studios, electronic databases for enterprise personnel record-keeping, troubleshooting programs, and more. The young engineer that oversaw Avantgarde noted that, by 1986, there were software enterprises in many provincial cities, while over fifty economic entities in the state economy were interested in either ordering or co-developing software packages. In the typically staid language of the time, he saw all this as “linking more closely with the ideological preparation… of the young population, in the spirit of the realities that determine the technological transition of socialist Bulgaria into the 21st century.” And as Computer for You more rhapsodically put it, “The intellectual revolution is in the hands of today’s students.” Viral Load Ultimately, Marx’s vision of hunting in the morning and debating in the afternoon never arrived for socialist Bulgaria. Eastern Europe was swept up in the grand changes of 1989, and the Bulgarian Communist Party initiated a palace coup the day after the Berlin Wall fell, removing Todor Zhivkov from power and starting down the road to democratic elections. Yet the country’s intellectual revolution had nevertheless occurred: the cyborgification of Bulgarian youth had succeeded, on both a technical and a cultural level.

Response: Two years before the fall of communism, in an effort to stave off the collapse of the economy, the party had begun introducing modest economic reforms. This included limited forms of private enterprise, and Bulgarian youth formed some of the country’s first legal private companies. Many children found it easy to make this transition to market capitalism—as Computer for You pointed out, young programmers in particular were already operating in the conditions of freedom that the state was now proclaiming. Much of the software being used by major firms had come out of those children’s brains. The state’s airline, Balkan Airways, used the Syntez program from Burgas-based software firm Busoft, where a tenth grader awed journalists by pulling up flight schedules and reservation systems in Bulgarian and English. Young developers had automated hotel reservation, office correspondence, and wage databases, and demonstrated their inventions at the Plovdiv international exposition in 1985, which was themed “the creations of young inventors.” As the Bulgarian economy faltered at the end of the decade, young Bulgarian programmers lost their job prospects along with much of their creative freedom. In this crisis was born the other face of socialist Bulgaria’s computer revolution—the virus. The first mention of “computer viruses” in Computer for You came in April 1988; in effect, the magazine let young programming enthusiasts know what a virus was, and that it could be copied, improved, and spread. Because most Bulgarian computers were shared by dozens of people in classrooms and computer clubs, it was easy to get hold of a virus and infect a machine inadvertently. Viruses also suited the logics of reverse-engineering and copying on which the Bulgarian computer economy was already running. Why not tinker with a digital pathogen and send it out into the world beyond Bulgaria? After all, you knew it would work virtually anywhere, because your Pravetz was compatible with an Apple! Starting in early 1989, computers as far away as the USA and Thailand were infected with Bulgarian viruses. Some were minor irritants, such as the “Yankee Doodle” virus, which simply played the eponymous melody on your computer. Other viruses were what Bulgaria’s first anti-virus expert, Vesselin Bontchev, called “technopathic,” with one causing over one million dollars in losses to an unidentified East Coast company.


Prompt: During socialism, young people with hippie haircuts or punk fashion had often been persecuted by the Bulgarian police. But the regime’s software industry had nevertheless allowed and even encouraged self-expression, and this was reflected in the almost libertine spirit of Bulgaria’s virus culture. To gain access to the Virus eXchange, a dial-in bulletin board system set up by a university student in November 1988, you had to provide one new virus to a growing collection of over 300; the site proclaimed itself “a place for free exchange of viruses and a place where everything is permitted!” This ethos would shape the last socialist generation’s political commitments, too.

Response: The Long Drive West In his powerful trilogy, The Information Age, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells argued that the USSR and the socialist world system failed in part because they never fully made the jump to a post-industrial, post-Fordist, and “informational” organization of the economy—based not on the rustbelt industries of manufacturing, but on the shiny offices of the flexible service sector. In Bulgaria, the economy continued to be dominated by smokestack enterprises and the nascent computer sector was expected to subsidize other, failing industries.  But the failure of the techno-socialist utopia which created Bulgaria’s first generation of coders and founders continues to inform the ideas of Bulgarian tech workers. Those who moved to tech companies in the West left the socialist elements of the party’s political project behind, but retained its techno-utopian ideals. That utopianism found a new ideological home in the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. Momchil Kyurkchiev, the founder of the Silicon Valley firm Leanplum, which makes a mobile marketing platform, recently told a Bulgarian television station that he sees important similarities between the US today and his childhood in early 1990s Bulgaria: if you don’t struggle, you don’t succeed. It is daring entrepreneurship, he added, that separates the winners from the losers. Indeed, the “drive West” of Bulgarian computer programmers, as the onetime scientific secretary of the Institute of Technical Cybernetics in Sofia called it when I interviewed him, has not produced many critiques of the West. If anything, it seems that Bulgarians’ professional success in Silicon Valley has confirmed many in the belief that they had the right acumen, but were born into the wrong social system.


Prompt: Today, Bulgaria has among the European Union’s poorest economies, but the country nevertheless boasts a robust software industry. The post-1989 generations continue to flock to the sector as a guarantor of relatively high wages. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s directorate for statistical information, in 2018 Bulgaria was third in the EU in terms of information and communication technology’s share of gross domestic product. There has even been one high-profile, home-grown software success story: in 2014, the Sofia-based firm Telerik, which creates tools for web development, was sold to a US company in a deal worth $262 million. Svetozar Georgiev, one of the company’s four founders, recalled in an interview with ZDNet that he first taught himself to program on a Pravetz-16 that his father brought home in the late 1980s.  Notably, many of the programmers who stayed in Bulgaria and now work in its software sector vote for center-right parties that promise fewer social services and more competition in all spheres of governance and economic life. According to these parties, the solutions to the country’s major problems—widespread corruption and a bloated bureaucracy that drive Bulgaria to the bottom of every index, from economic growth to media freedom—are technological. Bozhidar Bozhanov, one of the chief candidates for Democratic Bulgaria, a centrist political alliance, is an IT entrepreneur who posits that only forms of electronic governance and digital tools of citizen-state interaction can lessen the bureaucracy, corruption, and opaqueness of Bulgarian politics. Their “six month accelerated program of digitalization” calls for everything from electronic signatures for all citizens and electronic registers of all businesses that have received Covid relief funds, to telemedicine, distance learning, and “electronic justice” which aims to lessen the obstacles to registering complaints and dealing with the opaque judiciary. Anything that stands in the way of this “electronic governance” is to be removed, branded a holdover from the bygone era of yesteryear. In their view, Bulgarian democracy needs transparency, and only electronic tools are able to produce it. This call holds at its heart the party’s aim to downsize the state administration, laying off state employees who much of the public see as corrupt and inefficient. Digitalization’s march can only be achieved through human unemployment.

Response: By the same token, the health of the IT sector is the prism through which parties’ policies are being judged. The country’s effectively regressive flat tax on income and profits, introduced in the late 2000s, is considered one of the pillars of the current IT renaissance. As the journalist Daniel Vasilev put it before the country’s March 2021 elections, any call for progressive taxation would be “deadly,” because it would cause investors, especially those in the computer sector, to flee Bulgaria. State investment in the sector is also discouraged by those on the center-right; the only thing the state should do, in their view, is remove regulations facing entrepreneurs. The labor code must also be reformed, they claim, because it is currently preventing a flexible market, by which they really mean the introduction of zero-hour contracts and precarious gig work.  Of course, the belief that all the problems of a corrupt Bulgaria can be solved through the perfect tools is not that different to the Bulgarian Communist Party’s old dream that central planning through electronic brains would create communism. In both cases, the state is to be stripped back to a minimum. Perhaps today’s technological and political entrepreneurs, like their socialist predecessors, may find out that a new generation raised in conditions of financial crashes, pandemics, and political deadlock may draw different ideological conclusions to what the new status quo intends.


Prompt: @gucaslelfond“I’m so confused because there is this girl who is really pretty and nice and such a genuine person and I want to be friends with her but I’m really nervous?” narrates a freckled, teenaged-looking girl. “Weird. It’s almost like I like her but I’m not gay, so I don’t get it.” She shows the pages of an old notebook as a caption completes the joke: “Reading my ‘straight’ diary from middle school LMAO.”I’d spent a few weeks on TikTok by this point, consistently amazed by how quickly the app seemed to sense my taste. We know little about how TikTok’s algorithm works. A cagey corporate blog post titled “How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou” mostly just explains that it watches the way you engage and gradually tailors the stream of videos to your interests. My feed had already begun to fill with “queer” content—music from queer artists, videos of queer couples, and the like—but nothing explicitly about identity. This video took me by surprise. By this point, I had a vague notion that I was attracted to men, but had only shared this with a few close friends. I still felt confused and ashamed. I’d just begun to think about how my potential queerness may have played into previous friendships—when the video showed up in my feed, I surged with a sense of uncanny recognition. Suddenly, TikTok seemed like a portal, a place where I could more firmly figure out who I was. At the same time, I felt deeply uneasy. As videos about queerness became more common on my feed, I started to feel uncomfortably exposed: How could TikTok know I was bisexual before I fully knew it myself?  For decades, queer people in the United States have been subjected to surveillance. In 1950, Congress issued a report titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” after covertly investigating federal employees’ sexual orientation. The report declared homosexuality a mental illness and homosexuals a national security risk; employees suspected to be gay were immediately terminated. The practice was common among private employers, too. Although some states eventually had statutes prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, it wasn’t federally outlawed until June 2020.

Response: Of course, the monitoring also extended to social spaces. Throughout the ’60s, police raids were a frequent ritual of the queer New York nightlife scene. Police officers regularly lined up gender-nonconforming folks and sent those who failed to wear the mandated three pieces of “gender appropriate clothing” to jail. And trans people are still subjected to such scrutiny on a daily basis—in the bathroom, on the playing field, at TSA.  In this environment, queer people have long worked to craft subtle ways of controlling their own visibility, signaling queerness to each other while remaining undercover to the mainstream. You can see it in customs like the “hanky code” of the ’70s, by which gay men used a system of colored bandanas to covertly flag their sexual preferences. By the ’80s, some of those symbols—the rainbow flag, the pink triangle, the lowercase lambda—became well-known markers of the rising gay liberation movement. Meanwhile, queer people were still seeking intimacy in out-of-view venues—bars, parks, piers. They found community after dark in liminal urban spaces, communicating through lingering eye contact, subtle head nods, the slight twitch of a knowing smile.  Once the digital age arrived, internet anonymity supplanted the cover of night. Sites like Tumblr and Reddit acted as queer watering holes, as teens across the world poured themselves into blog posts and suggestive GIFs that allowed them to safely bare their souls and build community across distance. In these instances, the platforms were just that—platforms, on which queer people could, using re-blogs and upvotes, determine what mattered to them.


Prompt: Now, that brings us to TikTok, perhaps our generation’s closest analogue to those earlier platforms and venues. We imagine, however, that something is missing. We’re still finding community and expressing ourselves through shared signals, and (through monitored engagement) by choosing what becomes popular. But ultimately, on TikTok, it’s the algorithm that decides what gets seen and what doesn’t—when we’re visible, and to whom. The practice of coding once intended to maintain discretion has been flipped on its head, incorporated into a system of self-submitted surveillance by an enigmatic AI. To quote writer Eugene Wei, “When you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.” @anabellejohnstonI realized I was queer when I kissed a girl at tennis camp at the age of thirteen. (Or rather, when she kissed me and I liked it.) Although I felt different than I did seven seconds before, no one around me could tell that I had changed. In true Gen-Z fashion, I turned to the internet to learn what queer people looked like and how they went about finding each other. After concluding a pixie-cut would be the surest way to subtly scream “I’m gay,” I spent most of the following years searching for other queer people. I floated through GSA, cuffed my jeans, and eventually “came out” to avoid the constant guessing game of interpreting furtive glances. When I downloaded TikTok during my freshman year of college, the algorithm quickly clocked me. The steady stream of videos about thrifted clothing, cottagecore, and Phoebe Bridgers—along with explicit hashtags such as #wlw (women loving women) and #bisexual—loudly let me know: you’re on “gay TikTok.” But could I call this a “queer community?” The idea of queerness that I stumbled upon was completely disembodied; divorced, even, from sexual identity. It had been optimized—boiled down to a specific sartorial aesthetic, hashtag, and list of micro identity labels—all in the name of being maximally legible to a machine learning algorithm. In some ways, I felt seen. But not entirely. While “gay TikTok” served me hashtags like #FemmeBoyFriday—which compiles videos of presumably straight boys dressing up in skirts and dresses for views and cultural caché—what was missing was the forlorn glances, sweaty palms, awkward pauses, terrible first kisses; the stumbling inherent to self-discovery. Meanwhile, a popular meme illustrates the other perspective: “When she start rubbin’ on your thighs but you only gay on TikTok.”

Response: We will never intimately know a pre-internet queerness. By the time we reached adolescence, Tumblr was already in decline. While we recognize and appreciate the sacrifices made by previous generations that have given us the freedom to be visibly queer, it’s difficult not to romanticize prior forms of queer community, be they in physical or cyberspace. The way those spaces preserved the agency of queer people feels particularly significant.  Ultimately, TikTok’s algorithm has one goal: to hold our attention long enough to serve us more ads. The organic formation of “gay TikTok”—and all the content niches—likely serve those same business goals. There’s agency in finding community and meaning in each other’s content, as queer people have been doing with commercial media for decades. Still, there’s an unsettling imbalance of power: while TikTok learns things about us that we may not even share with close friends, its own inner workings are inscrutable. The app can see us, but we can’t see it back.  This opacity has already proved concerning. In 2019, an investigation by German publication Netzpolitik found that, in certain countries, TikTok had established a list of “special users” (queer, disabled, and fat people) whose videos were regarded as a “bullying risk” by default and capped in their reach, regardless of content. TikTok claims the list has since been retired. Still, the app’s algorithm and affordances automate and shape the ongoing co-production of what it means—and how it looks—to be queer in ways we can’t fully control or discern.  For many young people, TikTok serves as more than an app; often, it’s a site of self-discovery. And the pressure to fit into a prescribed image of queerness can easily lead you astray. But our forebears remind us that queerness is about self-definition and the freedom to continually redefine. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz warns against the way that pop culture representations of queerness ossify it, writing, “What we will really know of queerness, does not yet exist.” In other words, while the algorithm may be able to determine what we like, we can’t let it define who we are or predict who we will become.


Prompt: A faceless, soft doll in red or blue; a wooden rattle; a mirror; kinetic sand; a rainbow silk scarf. For many families, this particular genre of children’s toy—often sold on Etsy, via targeted ads, or through subscription kits—may arrive benignly and incidentally into a child’s repertoire of plastic dolls, metal trucks, and rubber balls. But for other parents and their families, they are part of a larger system: an elaborate pedagogy meant to steer every aspect of a child’s life—including diet, environment, and even play. In these philosophies—popularized by “alternative” schools such as Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Waldorf—such whimsical recreation is also a tool of parental control prescribed to ward off an ultimate threat: technology.  Today, “alternative” schools, which focus on “hands-on” learning and spiritual development, are largely considered niche options reserved for the very wealthy—although their reach quietly extends far beyond Silicon Valley and Park Slope. In pop culture, they may most commonly be recognized as the tech-free schools where eBay’s CTO and other Valley executives send their kids, supposedly driven by esoteric knowledge about the threat of the products their companies make. (Knowledge which, as scholar Morgan Ames has pointed out, doesn’t actually exist.) It’s more likely that these parents are anxious over a question faced by most parents today: What exactly does technology do to our children, and how do we protect them from it?  Parents’ individual answers to that question fall on a spectrum. Some, in the words of child icon Elsa, simply “let it go,” allowing tech to be a much-needed parenting aid. Others champion ameliorating measures, from limiting screen time, to delaying cell phone ownership, to using parental controls on the TV. But for a subset of parents, like many of those who employ “alternative” schooling, the answer is tech refusal—banishing it altogether. And where this kind of adamancy is present, other extreme politics often lurk just out of view. Such is the case with Waldorf and its underlying philosophy, a longer history of which reveals ideological ties to fascistic thought and racial hierarchies.

Response: Although it represents one extreme, the roots of this niche pedagogy can help us understand the whole spectrum of anxiety when it comes to technology and parenting. Particularly, its history makes clear how the quietly interlocking panics surrounding the technologies of screens and vaccines connect to dangerous notions of purity; ideas that—just as wooden toys tend to appear in ordinary homes—have often made their way into the mainstream, mostly unnoticed.  Stagnant Souls In 1919—against the backdrop of the Spanish Flu, countless political uprisings, and the aftermath of World War I—Rudolf Steiner founded the first Waldorf School, located in Stuttgart, Germany. Having grown up as the son of a railway worker, Steiner’s childhood had been shaped by the violent rise of modernity, and he was determined to save future children from the same fate. Intended as a school for the children of the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, two-thirds of the students were children of factory workers; the last third were children of Steiner followers.


Prompt: By that time, Steiner had gained prominence as the charismatic leader of an occultist movement he called “Anthroposophy,” underpinned by an original, esoteric philosophy replete with a comprehensive theory of reincarnation, spirit worlds, and higher realms. Waldorf was Steiner’s translation of Anthroposophy into pedagogy—down to the curricula and classroom design. It was, in essence, a pedagogical laboratory for an alternative spiritual life, one imagined as free from modernity while tied intimately to its labors and afflictions.  The Steiner model, or “Waldorf schooling” as it became more commonly known, in part preserved traditional education in the present to safeguard it for the future; students spent time outdoors to learn from nature and worked on handicrafts. But it also used approaches that were archaic even for the time: children were categorized into supposedly preordained temperaments based on the typology of humors (phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine, choleric) that had fallen out of the medical canon centuries prior.  A system of guided movement called “Eurythmy” also played a large role in this counter-training, not just as physical education, but as medico-spiritual intervention to care palliatively for the kids. In that first year of the school, students likely would have practiced a specific pattern from Steiner’s growing repertoire, which he taught widely to address the pandemic that raged outside: “The Immune Sequence.” By coordinating sound, dance, and intention, its practitioner was thought to become their best, truest self, and therefore physically immune.

Response: At the time, medical technologies and interventions, especially vaccines, were rapidly advancing. But Steiner believed that they made one “lose an urge for a spiritual life.” He argued that illness was not just the result of pathogenetic spread or due to microorganisms. There was an extra-material reason for illness to present in its host: karma. According to Steiner, not all souls were created equal. As with the temperaments of children, the wider outcomes of this life are already written by the actions in previous incarnations, which corresponded to the supposed “evolution”—or “devolution”—of race.  Put bluntly, Steiner saw the white race as the race of the future—the highest form of being, the endpoint of reincarnation, and therefore the most naturally immune. Meanwhile, melanin showed the susceptibility, karmic impurity, and “stagnation” of a soul. These stagnated souls were, for Steiner, one way illness spread—to be faulted not just for their own static sickness, but that of society. The problem posed an endless feedback loop: society ruins the soul and ruined souls, in turn, degrade society. Care of the individual soul—via the body and the mind—was to be the cure, the solve, the salvation.  Additional schools followed in Germany, The Netherlands, and England. Then, in 1928, the first Rudolph Steiner school opened in New York City as a private school, which still operates today. Of course, Steiner’s set of beliefs made Anthroposophy ripe for uptake in the emerging Nazi Party. Although the Nazis temporarily closed nearly all Waldorf schools in their control, many of Steiner’s followers—including his widow—had close ties to the Party, where the occultist-karmic philosophy was taken up, both strategically and in deeper belief: both systems of thought worked to bring the world into “harmony” and achieve “regeneration.”  Today, the connections (and disconnections) between Nazism, fascism, and this spiritual science are somewhat of an academic debate. According to the historical scholarship of Peter Staudenmaier, much of Steiner’s works and literatures were “cleaned up” to delete mentions of race when translated into English. That’s mostly how the ideas are implemented today: While every Waldorf school differs slightly, Steiner’s initial approach remains largely intact—from typologies, to daily Eurythmy, to anti-vax sentiment—with mentions of race simply excluded. But Steiner’s theories of illness, race, and technology all come from the same well, no matter how obscured in or by the present. His notion of the ideal child endures: The perfect kid is one who is pure.


Prompt: Fantasies of Purity And purity, it turns out, can be marketed and purchased. There are now roughly 125 Waldorf schools nationwide and more than 3,000 internationally, according to one Waldorf executive. Where Waldorf exists as an alternative, parents who see themselves as progressive—even Left—have sought it out, some in spite of larger philosophical differences or outright disbelief. “Private schools almost by definition have to craft stories that appeal to privileged strivers anxious about their children’s futures,” Morgan Ames wrote of Waldorf schools in 2019 for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Some of these stories recount how their graduates’ creative brilliance was spawned in their school’s tech-free environment. Related ones ply anti-contamination themes, and fetishize the purity of childhood.” These stories frame technology as a constant threat, presenting Waldorf schools as bubbles of safety, oases within the desert of the modern.  Waldorf is not alone in the pursuit of a tech-free environment. There have been many movements and philosophies that attempt to achieve purity by cutting off access to technology, specifically media, and they don’t all bend towards fascism or even apoliticality. Tech refusal looks quite different in the context of utopian projects like the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s and other forms of communal care focused on raising children in nature, including the MOVE Family and the international “unschooling movement” of the ’70s. In the hands of the Left, the rejection of technology can be a radical act of carving out a space of resistance within capitalism and systems of repression to imagine a deeper liberation. But, following Danya Glabau in Real Life, “As a metaphor, purity easily translates from necessary practices to exclusionary principles.” Where the aspiration of purity becomes dangerous is when principles entail protecting one’s individual child at the expense of a child next door.

Response: Steiner’s adherents, whether they are “Waldorf families” or in the Anthroposophical movement, or both, subscribe to a sense of predestined exceptionalism that Laura Portwood-Stacer argues is frequently behind the rejection of media and technology—including vaccines. Such principles can lead believers and their fellow travelers to reject “herd mentality” and compromise herd immunity in the process. While Waldorf philosophy aims to protect new life from various social ills, it has become a literal incubator of viruses that, like its greater ethos, organically seep beyond its walls—whether in the case of a Waldorf school at the epicenter of a measles outbreak in New York or now, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Estimates vary, but some suggest 60 percent of Waldorf children are unvaccinated against infectious illness for which there are routine childhood vaccines. Where states grant exceptions for religious or philosophical reasons, rates of refusal are even higher.  The endurance of this resistance is disquieting precisely because of the ways that this notion of purity feeds into unbridled exceptionalism—especially as it takes new, viral forms in our present. Today, 15 to 20 percent of Americans believe in some form of the QAnon conspiracy—another system of belief that, like Anthroposophy, has ties to fascism and the occult—while vaccine rejectors claim that taking the shot is antagonistic to bodily autonomy, and even argue in some cases that it causes sterilization. In turn, some vaccine rejectors are referring to their eggs or sperm as “vaccine free”—triumphantly stating that they are the only key to any possible reproductive future precisely because their bodies stayed pure of medical technology. These ideologies reject the basic, collective reality of modernity and late stage capitalism, as if by doing so they might manifest a different future, one that furthers the comforting—and ultimately racist—fantasy of purity.  It makes sense that Steiner’s philosophies are frequently read as anti-modern. But perhaps this is the other side of modernity. To buy into these teachings is to search for alternative spaces within techno-culture, turning the school into a pastoral enclave that can be carried home with children in the form of rules for families and domestic space. In cherry-picking Steiner’s philosophy to exclude these other insidious forms of purity ideology, Waldorf schools have, in the words of scholar Wendy Chun, “updated to remain the same.”


Prompt: During our ongoing pandemic, at a Waldorf School in Upstate New York, middle schoolers and high schoolers continued to meet regularly outdoors to practice Eurythmy. According to a blog post by the school, they decided to focus on one pattern of movement to address this latest health crisis: “The Immune Sequence.” 1/ In June 1945, a committee chaired by the physicist James Franck raised the alarm about the Manhattan Project’s development of nuclear weapons. The document they produced, known as the Franck Report, urged President Truman not to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Instead, Truman should demonstrate the bomb’s destructive power by dropping it on a desert or a barren island—or he should try to keep the bomb’s existence secret for as long as possible. Otherwise, the scientists warned, a global nuclear arms race would ensue, with catastrophic consequences for the planet.

Response: The authors of the Franck Report had worked on the Manhattan Project. But rather than siphon the scientific knowledge they had accrued in developing nuclear weapons out of the lab and into the commons in order to build a mass movement, they waited until the final hour to pen a letter, addressed to a government that would never heed their call. The scientists understood the stakes of nuclear weapons better than anyone. But in making a moral appeal to the American empire, they demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the social and political context the technology was developed in service of. Two months after they wrote the report, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


Prompt: I was reminded of those physicists in December 2020, in the wake of Google’s high-profile termination of AI ethics scholar Timnit Gebru. Her firing was the final step in management’s systematic silencing of her scholarship, which came to a head over a paper she coauthored called “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” The paper offers a damning critique of the energy demands and ecological costs of the sorts of large language models that are core to Google’s business, as well as how those models reproduce white supremacy—and codify dominant languages as default while expediting the erasure of marginalized languages. Thousands of Google workers, as well as supporters throughout academia, industry, and civil society, rapidly mobilized in defense of Gebru, writing an open letter to Google executives that demanded both her reinstatement and an apology for the egregious treatment she received.  Like the Franck Report before it, however, this open letter represented a grave misunderstanding of the politics of AI and was in no way commensurate with the threat we face. The technologies being developed at companies like Google present major stakes for all of humanity, just as the invention of nuclear weapons did in the previous century. They are strengthening concentrations of power, deepening existing hierarchies, and accelerating the ecological crisis. More specifically, big tech corporations are extracting labor, ideas, and branding from Black people, and then disposing of them with impunity—whether it’s scholars like Gebru or Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama organizing against plantation conditions.  Racial capitalism’s roadmap for innovation is predicated on profound extraction. AI is central to this process. The next flashpoint over AI is inevitable—but our failure to respond adequately is not. Will we continue to write letters appealing to the conscience of corporations or the state? Or will we build a mass movement? As Audre Lorde said, we cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. We cannot stop Google from being evil by uncritically relying on the G Suite tools it developed. We cannot uncritically champion the most popular among us, as if social capital will resolve the colonial entanglements reproduced in much of what passes for research in the field of technology studies. An atlas ain’t no Green Book, and we cannot afford to pretend otherwise. What we can do is to build a better analysis of the context of racial capitalism in which extractive technologies are developed. We can share knowledge about the ways in which such technologies can be refused or have their harms mitigated. We can forge solidarities among workers, tenants, and technologists to help them organize for different futures. We can light alternate beacons.

Response: 2/ Dismantling racial capitalism and displacing the carceral systems on which it relies requires an understanding of how technology produces “new modes of state surveillance and control,” Dorothy Roberts argues. Part of the challenge is that these new geographies of policing, regulation, and management are largely invisible. We experience the immediacy of our Amazon package being delivered without seeing the exploitative labor conditions decreasing the distance between order and arrival. This is not a function of insufficient effort—it’s an indication of how successful big tech corporations have been in concealing the sources of their power. In his essay in this issue, Julian Posada provides a detailed account of Venezeulans performing the tedious, low-paid labor of data labeling on which AI depends—labor that is hidden beneath Silicon Valley’s minimalist user interfaces and promises of automation. The circuits of racialized capital link us ever more closely together even as the pandemic has deepened our sense of alienation.  Understanding how tech has reorganized labor, and developing a strategy to break free, is not easy. It cannot be done with the narrow technical training that produces computer science PhDs—the recent appending of ethics courses notwithstanding. It requires an interdisciplinary analysis in partnership with impacted people who are on the forefront of digital experimentation. There is no way around doing this work.


Prompt: In theory, Black study is the intellectual method and tradition that is best positioned to lead such an analysis. As SA Smythe clarifies in these pages, Black study does not mean Black Studies™ —“a hegemonic and ethnonationalist interdisciplinary framework that was heavily funded by the government” during its founding in the 1960s. Instead, drawing on the work of Robin D. G. Kelley, Smythe defines Black study as “the deeply invested commitment to Black people, Black life, Black possibility, and freedom dreaming.”  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded by former Manhattan Project scientists in 1945 after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its iconic doomsday clock is currently set at one hundred seconds to midnight. This reflects the risk posed to the world from nuclear weapons, climate change, and, notably, “disruptive technologies.” Black study would have us trouble this notion of catastrophe as a singular event or a state of exception. As Smythe explains, exclamations of “How is this still happening and it’s 2021?” show that we’ve been bamboozled and hoodwinked into thinking time has marched linearly forward towards modernity. Smythe insists that the reason we find ourselves in what scholar Bedour Alagraa calls “the changing same” is that we are in fact still in 1492, circling the drain of the ongoing catastrophe initiated by white contact with the “new world.” But this is not cause for despair—it’s an opportunity to ask better questions, like the one posed by Katherine McKittrick in “Mathematics Black Life”: “What if we... begin to count it all out differently?” This desperately needed intervention is constrained by the fragmented character of knowledge production. Within computer science and information studies, race is treated primarily as a social consequence of technology rather than constitutive of technology. In the six years since Simone Browne published Dark Matters, a seminal work tracing the links from the proto-biometrics of the Middle Passage to the present-day use of facial-recognition technology, important scholarship has emerged—including from Gebru, Ruha Benjamin, and Safiya Noble—but not at the urgency and scale with which new technologies are violently renegotiating the social contract. And although Black folks have had no choice but to survive the tools and techniques of social control, technology with a capital T has not been a central object of Black study. Similarly, abolitionist organizers have rightly disavowed technical solutions to the prison-industrial complex as reformist reforms, but have not often recognized how central technology is to intensifying the carceral state.

Response: 3/ What does it mean to Get Out! in the twenty-first century? How do we build fugitive technologies? This special issue of Logic does not seek to provide a totalizing narrative or singular solution. Rather, our goal is to “call in” thinkers and artists from different disciplines—for example, Black studies scholars who are engaged with notions of catastrophe but whose insights have not been yet been taken up by people investigating how technology produces catastrophe, or integrated into the resistance strategies of communities being harmed by new forms of digital experimentation. (The approach of this issue is many times over indebted to Bedour Alagraa’s thinking on “the interminable catastrophe.”) Similarly, how can computer scientists and engineers more effectively communicate to the public not just about the harmful effects of technology but about how these systems actually work and what interventions on the level of software or hardware offer a more liberatory future?  We take the stakes we’re facing seriously while leaving room for our futures to not be overdetermined by white supremacy. As André Brock, Jr. discusses in these pages, our approach to technology does not need to be one of abjectness. “I’m not saying, ‘Oh, I’m on the other side of the digital divide and I’m trying to cross that bridge,’” says Brock. “No, I peeped that bridge and it doesn’t take me anywhere that’s really necessary for me to go.” While we may not offer one path forward, we hope to get in the way of techno-solutionism and corporate-funded initiatives that absorb the most radical elements of the discourse without actually supporting people to go do the most radical thing. Our hope for this issue is that it will be what Seeta Peña Gangadharan, coorganizer of Our Data Bodies, calls “a body of work that cannot be ignored.” I am grateful to the Logic team for letting me hijack their operation, to give us some space where we be imagining, even as the work punctures the myth embedded in the magazine’s name. We offer no singular way of knowing, no hope for messianic deliverance. We be needing logics. This issue is an outlet in which we can explore these logics and meaningfully argue with each other. In a recent interview, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor lamented the fact that “debates that exist in the left have no space to be deliberated upon. People get on social media to either ignore or insult each other’s political ideas and opinions,” she continued, “but I’m saying if we want to be impactful in building a mass movement, to shape and direct politics in this country, then something radically different needs to happen.”


Prompt: In this issue you’ll find Marxists, Wynterians, Black speculative fiction, poetry written inside a cage, a graphic story about internet shutdowns in Kashmir, abolitionists, and the unaffiliated. In this issue you’ll find many beacons because, like Neta Bomani’s tween zine insists, we need to move beyond The Way. As guest editor, I chose to curate love letters over a manifesto—because I know plans and leaders get captured or beheaded, but we can nourish an otherwise set of relations to each other while we strategize on getting free.  Postscript by Ben Tarnoff One December morning in 2020, I DM’d Khadijah on Twitter. We’d never spoken before, but I’d just read a recent essay of hers, “On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics,” and loved it, and wanted her to contribute to Logic. She said she’d be in touch with some further thoughts.

Response: A couple weeks later, she followed up by email. What she really wanted to do wasn’t write a piece, she said, but edit a whole issue: I’ve been thinking about concrete next steps to move beyond calling out the failure of the status quo to providing an alternate beacon for people who are looking for space to build and think critically, take risks and specifically room to think about currently under resourced domains ie tech/data policy in the global south, grassroots response beyond the right to refuse surveillance, bringing in agroecology, the core of Black studies (ie not just citations for bias but the epistemic and historical challenges being raised at the forefront of the field) etc.


Prompt: The aspiration for the issue would be to create “alternate beacons”—that is, to present new ways of thinking about and living with technology, drawn in particular from Black thinkers and practitioners, with the hope of moving beyond critique (as much as we love critique) and toward imagining new worlds. It felt perfect for us. I brought the idea back to the Logic group, who shared my enthusiasm. Soon after, I connected Khadijah to our managing editor Alex Blasdel, and the two of them embarked on the long and labor-intensive task of making this issue.

Response: Why did Logic decide to undertake this collaboration? I don’t presume to speak for the magazine as a whole—Logic is very much a collective venture, of which I am only one part—but I think it’s because Khadijah was giving us a way to evolve, to find new pathways for our project, now in its fifth year.


Prompt: A lot has changed since we launched Logic in early 2017. One of our main motivations was our contempt for popular writing about technology. In the manifesto that led our first issue, we announced that “most tech writing is shallow and pointless.” In the intervening years, however, this statement has become less defensible. As the “techlash” has bloomed, the discourse has become immeasurably more sophisticated. There is now very good reporting about the industry and, with some exceptions, tech criticism as a whole has become less idiotic, more tethered to fact.

Response: But not everything has changed. Despite the greater sense of clarity and concern, a lawyerly liberalism continues to dominate, and domesticate, the political conversation about tech. Some years back I attended a conference in which a fairly prominent tech policy person said that the best way to solve the various problems underlined by the techlash would be to put all of the “smartest people” from industry, government, and academia into one room and have them figure it out. All that was needed was the right constellation of experts, in other words.


Prompt: So Logic still has work to do. The techlash has altered the terrain, but wherever there is power there is a court, and every court has its courtiers. The new common sense is much like the old; techno-utopianism may have fallen out of fashion, but technocracy of one kind or another is harder to eradicate. The techlash has served as a mass credentialing event for a new class of experts, as “AI ethics,” “responsible innovation,” and similar pursuits attract significant funding and visibility. Many of these experts do interesting work, and everyone needs to eat, but the overall arrangement in which they participate can’t help but reiterate the logic of technocracy.

Response: What’s missing from this arrangement is the people whose lives are being reordered by technology—or, more precisely, by a particular set of practices as structured and mediated by technology. What’s missing is a view of technology from below, as it is encountered and experienced by living and breathing human beings. There are both epistemological and political stakes here. The feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock once argued that systems of domination can only be fully understood from the standpoint of those they dominate, an insight she drew from Marx (only proletarians can obtain a complete view of class society) and applied to gender (only women can obtain a complete view of patriarchy). We can extend her argument further, and say that today’s technological regimes are most accurately perceived from the standpoint of those they oppress, exploit, and exclude. And this perception is to be acquired not simply for its own sake, but rather in the service of a broader political project of liberation, as it was for Hartsock and Marx. To see technology from below is also to develop the knowledge needed to govern it from below. Every cook can govern, C. L. R James reminds us, and the internet would undoubtedly be a better place if it were governed by more cooks (and fewer lawyers).


Prompt: This is the spirit that animates the issue that Khadijah has curated. In these pages we see technology through the eyes of sex workers and click workers, of the incarcerated and the disabled. And while there is much injustice, there is also hope, creativity, and joy. There is the great imaginative power of the Black freedom struggle and the Black radical tradition. We are not led to any single set of conclusions and we never arrive at a final orthodoxy. Some circles on the left have long believed that orthodoxy is what makes revolutions. But revolutions are notoriously irregular affairs; their combustion derives from the diversity of their inputs, which interact in unpredictable ways. “The rise of a group of people is not a simultaneous shift of the whole mass,” W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “it is a continuous differentiation of individuals with inner strife and differences of opinion, so that individuals, groups and classes begin to appear seeking higher levels, groping for better ways, uniting with other likeminded bodies and movements.” This issue attempts to seek some of those higher levels and grope for some of those better ways, to do the right kinds of searching and struggle. Logic will do its best to keep lighting beacons in the years ahead.

Response: There’s been an increasing recognition of how racial regimes are mediated by digital technologies, particularly through things like computational policing practices that target communities of color and automated hiring platforms that exacerbate employment discrimination. But so far, the discourse about “algorithmic bias” largely treats race as an aftermath of technology, as a downstream effect. Further, it treats race as a problem—race is the way you add up the bad things that technology does to people. Race is a way to measure harm.  Both premises need to be challenged. Racial regimes aren’t downstream of technology—they’re present from the very start. They centrally shape the design, development, and deployment of the computational systems that govern our lives. And the obsession with calculating race as a function of harmful impact institutionalizes Black people as objects of suffering without agency or political subjectivity that extends beyond advocating for social remedy.  To overcome the limitations of the algorithmic bias discourse, we need to ask a completely different set of questions about technology, drawing on the traditions of black thought and black freedom-dreaming. To help formulate these questions, and begin to sketch some possible answers, issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman talked with SA Smythe, an assistant professor in the Gender Studies and African American Studies departments at UCLA. Smythe is a poet, translator, and scholar of black European literary and cultural studies and Black trans poetics, and is deeply invested in the coalitional project of black life, black study, and relishing nonbinary experiences across the diaspora. Abdurahman talked to Smythe about abolition organizing on Turtle Island, statecraft as reproduced in humanitarian technologies, and orienting toward “otherwise possibility.” The joke I always make is that techno-capitalism puts people who have never taken the humanities in charge of humanity. In that vein, the driving motivation behind Beacons is thinking about how we “call in” Black studies and abolitionist organizers into this technology discourse. Even as I say that, I want to be careful to not reify technology as the property of white, cisgender male tech bros straight outta Silicon Valley because we are all already using, interacting, and modifying techniques and technologies all the time, right?


Prompt: This time that we are asymmetrically experiencing has been intense and overwhelming due to the convergence of so-called “crises,” which are of course interrelated. So, I’m really grateful to be taking up those questions in this format. I’ve felt insecure about how to jump in and have a conversation about “tech” even though it’s so pervasive and is foundational to much of our relationship to modern life/modernity. How do we think about technologies as various techniques, tools, or modalities for collective liberation or for black freedoms? How do we get humanists and humanities adjacent folks—especially people who engage in various black radical traditions and Black feminist practices—to think more urgently about Technology in the capital T sense? I’m not quite sure, but the invitation is key. Of course, as we’ve talked about this ongoing invitation, with scholars like Simone Browne, Katherine McKittrick, Safiya Noble, and Ruha Benjamin, plus many of the other folks in this issue who have been working against “algorithms of oppression,” data, and technologies of liberation through a Black feminist lens for some time—you’ve reminded me to answer and amplify this call.

Response: I’m thinking about the movement and solidarity work that I joined in the wake of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and global Black rebellions in the summer of 2020. For the Cops Off Campus Coalition organizing both regionally and locally across Turtle Island, 95 percent of our convening, strategizing, and public campaigning was unthinkable without Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Skype, and apps like Cryptee, Google Docs, Canva, and Lucidchart, inviting one another to amplify our campaigns and build shared demands across different time zones to mobilize people and share resources. This was of course true for the Black Abolition Futures political education group and political organizing spaces in Europe that I was able to re-enter while physically in the US. It’s challenging, trying to think about what we need to imagine liberation tools and technologies beyond our current capacities, particularly when we’re in movement work or, like you, directly confronting these questions of technology on a day to day basis, and considering what otherwise can materially mean and how to bring that to bear in our present.  When we’re inundated with technologies perceived to be “our only hope” à la Star Wars, where that’s the last chance that we’ve got to get ourselves free; that’s where I think we need to take a second to pause and double down on an acknowledgment: that this is precisely the time where we must mobilize for something else beyond our current capacities. This is when I orient towards the replenishable resource of otherwise possibility, a framing I first came across in the work of Ashon Crawley. Anyone telling you that new technological expansion is our last chance, that there’s no other way, or that this is the easiest path if you want to do the work that you’ve set out to do, I think we all need to reflect and think about our intentions, aspirations, and who among us is really out of time. What options do we have access to or must create? Smaller Scales and The Digital Sea What stands out to me is the idea of thinkability. Mariame Kaba says this a lot in reference to abolition. You know, that organizers worked for a very, very long time. And you know, organizers, including incarcerated people and people who were formerly incarcerated, right? Because sometimes there’s a weird binary—the organizer becomes the one who is separate from incarcerated people. But they work to make the idea of abolition thinkable, something that people, in a decentralized way, practice in their own lives and in their own scholarship.


Prompt: When we’re thinking about tech, the idea that you need to be a Black Girl who Codes or have mastered JavaScript and HTML in order to enter into the conversation is hegemonic. On top of that, the kind of digital environments you mentioned relying on in your organization work for Cops Off Campus are so default, that it is very hard to even think about what a different wave would look like.  Exactly this. And I’m thinking about scale—digital, corporeal, and geopolitical scale all entwined together. While holding the need for global political revolution and exchange, I wonder if we might make the scales smaller and have the kind of impact on the ground that might lead toward a shift in digital space. So to put it more concretely: What’s really great about certain kinds of mutual aid is that I can send money to someone right now in Senegal or in Tahiti. It’ll get there roughly at the same time. But I wonder what this means in terms of rapid gentrification and displacement and dispossession of Black, brown, and indigenous peoples. I’m wondering about the capacity for a digital that is the people’s right, belonging to the people on a smaller scale, and without western attachments to property.  What would that look like—if that’s even a useful way to start thinking about it—so that it’s not governed or even governable by a large scale, monolithic, usually evil enterprise? On a smaller scale, say you live in apartment 5B and you need a babysitter, one of your kids has an ear infection. You have to run out and go take care of them real quick. You can’t bring the other kids with you because that will be too hard to manage alone. Is someone available in the building right now to babysit? It would be cool to think from smaller scale mutual interdependence that abolitionists talk a lot about, that doesn’t look like TaskRabbit, that doesn’t feed into the gig economy which provides care as service for compensation independent of human, communal investment and accountability.  One instance that comes to mind is the Watch the Med Alarm Phone project, a self-organized hotline for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean Sea. For example, if you arrive at the Port of Tripoli in Libya and join a voyage attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe but the boat capsizes or something goes wrong, you could call the hotline which would then point rescue operations to your relative location and come to your aid.

Response: On the one hand, this is a project on a relatively small scale, which is unfortunate in this case because it should be the work of governments whose borders are leading to catastrophe. As Harsha Walia says, the border is the crisis. But you know, government neglect is what it is. There are no real mechanisms then, digital or otherwise, that are consistent and hold the community of those rendered refugees or asylum seekers making that treacherous journey.  The ephemera of the large-scale digital space has made it such that, at the end of the task, of the act, there is nothing, you fall off of the cliff from support after the GoFundMe gets circulated. The lives are anonymized and lost in these spaces while we do the (to be clear, very necessary) work of redistributing wealth to the oppressed, away from the Global North, etc. So, I’m wondering what would happen if the digital realm (which feels to me really large and nebulous, like a sea in its own right) can come down to a smaller scale such that we can collectively navigate our way through. Or does that seem idealistic in a non-useful way, because someone will need to administer it and technology is not value neutral in terms of how it produces and exacerbates material asymmetry?  I’m just pausing to think, because I’m like, “both and neither.” Both in the sense that yes, I think that we do need to find better relationships to administer mutual aid or social support through digital infrastructures. I’m not a nihilist or saying, “Cash App is corrupt,” therefore die slow. I think that it is what it is and we have to help our people. I’ve also been in situations, in my own life, where I needed people to help me. I’m not going to be so dogmatic to the point that I’m saying, “Now you are complicit with capitalism because you have a wage and you’re going to send it to me on this commercial app.” But, I guess the “neither” part is recognizing how these apps are infrastructure and are controlling us as populations. I mean, it’s not so linear like that. I think about the algorithmic flagging of fraudulent transactions resulting in any money being sent to Palestinians on these platforms being suspended and frozen without recourse.


Prompt: We are in a situation where we must have mutual aid. We must send money back home. We must send money to Texas when the state has failed to take care of people. But in that must, we’re relying on these apps or these infrastructures that were designed not in service of us. Not to produce that livability, right? So how do we think about whether there is something qualitatively new manifesting in these technologies? What is new about predictive policing? Before the prediction, policing was still bad, still needed to be abolished, right? Is it just automating that same practice or is something different happening? I think about Virginia Eubanks’ comparison between the 20th century brick-and-mortar poorhouse and the present day digital poorhouse that is using algorithms. She emphasizes how the former geographically co-located Eastern European immigrants and Black Americans together—which some argue laid the ground for the Poor People’s Movement—as compared to the algorithmic sorting of the digital poorhouse which preempts that kind of cross racial solidarity or physical proximity. I feel like the way political subjectivities are formed in relationship to a state’s (often concealed) control of people’s movement through space is a theme of your work on Blackness and migration. Are there connections that you’re making in thinking about these examples? That’s really helpful. I love examples since I really appreciate having something to hold on to. Your question about this distinction makes me think of Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial regimes—that which does not want to be revealed, but by the very nature of its revelation, speaks the truth about the mutability of racial representations as historically uncertain. This is why the system of racial capitalism and the flourishing of white supremacy is specifically one of the things that pretends it does not exist, that there is no hand there building on pre-existing cultural forms with new technologies that emerge to retrench those processes. In this way, “new” technology hides the original intent and how those aims differentially structure our realities.

Response: Last month, when Facebook apps all went down—a possible distraction from the testimony of the company’s whistleblower Frances Haugen before the US Senate—I felt this regime acutely. I was trying to help support planning and get information about my grandfather’s funeral in Jamaica, and I couldn’t reach any of my relatives in the Caribbean and across the diaspora, who all use WhatsApp as the primary mode of communication. For a lot of my family, like millions across the Global South, staying in touch internationally is far too expensive over landlines, and VoIP services like WhatsApp have filled this need. During the temporary crash, I couldn’t figure out how to send money to them. I couldn’t figure out where they were physically so that I could then try to find out which cousin or which uncle or family friend or local pastor had a landline that I could attempt to reach. At that moment, I realized WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, was completely determining my ability to connect with my family, to grieve and support and organize my community in real time, with material consequences.


Prompt: That’s just one personal example among millions, not even just in this particular incident, but consistently and recklessly when we think of, for example, Black trans sex workers being suppressed by the algorithms of most mainstream platforms. While OnlyFans began to ramp up this same suppression that Instagram did, taking down photos that have Cash App links on them, pop stars on the same apps, wearing similar amounts of clothing, are being promoted widely on all of our screens.

Response: Fourteen Ninety-Two My impression is that black study hasn’t taken up technology as a primary site of analysis. Do you see an opportunity for scholars like yourself to intervene in the discourse of techno-capitalism and liberation?  Black studies folks who are not already invested in thinking through technology as an instrument of capitalism should get on board because, as I mentioned, we’re already thinking about things like racial regimes, hidden infrastructures, and what they do to our material conditions and the ability to survive, thrive, and resist. Bedour Alagraa’s work becomes really key to my thinking on this and so many other things when she talks about catastrophe, the “changing same,” and the retrenchment of shared articulations of our dispossession.  First of all, we need to acknowledge that, right? Acknowledge that fact—that this is a different era, but it is an extension from the deadly worldmaking event of 1492 into what we’re perceiving as our present day. And so there are all of these different kinds of work that Black studies scholars are doing to think about the revelations of the coercive organization of our daily lives, conceiving of how we can even begin to think about resisting, about liberation, about freedom dreaming. I’m convinced it’s really important and the intersections are increasingly being laid bare during this phase of neoliberal late stage capitalism.  What I’m trying to hold onto is precisely the ephemeral understanding that “now is not working.” What we’re knowing as “the now”—the conditions of Western oriented or ontologically Western Space-Time—is not working. And actually, we’ve been in the same moment since 1492. So one of the ways it’s not working is that we think it’s 2021 and that has consistent material implications. On the internet people are like, “It’s 2021. We shouldn’t be saying this joke anymore,” or “How is this still happening and it’s 2021?” And I’m like, this is because we never left 1492. We’re playing ourselves by thinking that the clock being offered to us is actually any measure of a real shift in the time that we (and by “we” I mean black people—Africa and its diasporas) have been hailed into—and even indoctrinated within—to be making these kinds of statements. To think otherwise is calling for a real kind of rupture from the status quo keeping us unfree. I’m talking myself into a bit of a circle because of that “both/and” that’s required, and because I would never say, “Well, no computers for anyone and so I can’t Venmo you some money for your urgent care.” Or like, now I don’t support Facebook, and I delete all of my little apps, so I can’t message my auntie in Trelawney or uncles in the mountains in Jamaica, can’t participate in mutual aid for Black trans kin, sex workers, and migrants in communities that I’m no longer physically living near but still accountable to? We need both.


Prompt: Breathing into otherwise possibility is to me a fundamental, ontological, ahistorical rupture—in the sense of capital “H” history being a Western epistemological framework. It is a total divestment from the current world order. That means that the way that we can organize ourselves (or we even dream about organizing ourselves) in relation to one another is actionable and realizable; not fixed, but possible and dynamic.  I don’t think that enough of us are entertaining the possibility, because of a false binary where it’s like, “Well, I need to survive.” And I’m thinking that part of this survival is orienting to this otherwise—it’s not seeing your survival as just the next meal or where’s the next paycheck. That gets really hard to narrate without sounding like you’re just swimming in privilege, completely oblivious to the material conditions of people who need to know where the next check is coming from or how they can get together for that next meal.  I find myself sort of trapped by my own seductions, by my own desires for us to collectively orient ourselves to a thing without sounding like I’m oblivious and not aware of what people need—to be, to literally exist. But also understanding that the current order and the current perceptions of an allegedly discrete and separate catastrophe or of some kind of linear arc toward something—as opposed to spinning the wheels, “the changing same” and a deep retrenchment or acceleration of accumulation by dispossession and being asymmetrically displaced—is not it.

Response: Moving Beyond The State I keep bringing up how algorithms are hegemonic, bringing to scale the movement of people through space and producing new kinds of divisions through classifying and sorting people. Because predictive policing is not just about expanding forms of community surveillance, it’s also a labor management tool. We see in welfare, automated decision systems are producing and managing resource scarcity, and then managing those subjectivities. Sometimes this is enacted in a very broad and decentralized way, and sometimes in an intensely violent way that is neither unclear nor metaphorical. From any given vantage point, we cannot see everything, so we need that multiplicity of perspectives.  It’s well documented that predictive policing relies on dirty data sets embedded with the historic overrepresentation of Black and houseless people, thereby redirecting the police to the same geographic sites they’ve always over-policed. What Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals uniquely identified in their Algorithmic Ecology project, was that PredPol was not actually classifying the Skid Row residents as high risk, which is what the traditional argument of dirty data would lead us to believe. Rather than labeling the Skid Row encampments as “hot spots,” PredPol is classifying the perimeters of Skid Row as high risk. In practice, this means that the moment residents tried to move past these otherwise invisible borders, they would encounter higher rates of arrest and police contact. If the LAPD announced a brick-and-mortar wall was to be built as a border around Skid Row, people would riot, right? Academic researchers who primarily rely on privacy rights to critique these technologies eschew the collective or communal harms that resonate with people who are targeted. I worry that residents of Skid Row, abolitionist organizers, and others may disengage from resisting these technologies when it’s rendered unclear how the stakes are much greater than data privacy.


Prompt: Even if we can understand Black Marxism from Cedric Robinson and are engaged with Bedour around not just rearticulating the same modes of catastrophe, crisis, and linear march through history, we’re still not in the refugee camp. I’m not reifying standpoint epistemology, but literally we don’t have access to everything, even at this moment where massive amounts of content is constantly being produced, right? I’m thinking about this “not knowing” alongside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2017. Examining the coordinated housing entry system in L.A., he emphasized that experimentation with public sector adoption of automated decision systems happens on the most marginalized sections of society before being generalized to the rest of the population. We can trace policies mandating fingerprinting for welfare recipients during the Clinton era to Simone Browne’s seminal book, Dark Matters, explicating the proto-biometrics of the Middle Passage in the ledgers and branding of enslaved Black peoples.  So, some of these technologies have been the situation—and at the same time as recognizing that historic lineage or sameness, we have to recognize what’s different in these new forms of surveillance and social control as they are being enacted onto broader swaths of the population.  In tech, to a degree there is a sociopolitical critical analysis, it often coalesces around bias. When you get to geopolicy, the discourse becomes very reliant on statecraft and state terminology because states actually have an analysis of society. They actually have a sense of who different actors are and, in a vacuum of political or theoretical frameworks, state actors are ascending. What stands out to me so much in your work is a rejection of state terminology, particularly as I’m thinking about my family in Oromia in the southern region of Ethiopia and observing how advocates are making moral appeals to the UN or to the US State Department. Human Rights Watch branded a recent report on Eritrean refugees in Tigray with a satellite image from Maxar Technologies. This just stood out to me so much—not that I want to hearken back to the old days of the ’83 famine where they just put starving, nameless black people on the cover—but because this bird’s eye view that renders people into polygons, if they’re even seen at all, and even then it only allows for people to be seen en masse, there is no humanity within it. What does belonging mean in that context? Similar to WhatsApp, many people will justify use of satellite imagery citing it as the sole source of gathering visual evidence during a crisis.

Response: Neither of us is here to defend the ivory tower, but this is why we need black study. And I’m using that term the way Robin D.G. Kelley points us to, as distinct from Black studies. So not Black Studies™ as a hegemonic and ethnonationalist interdisciplinary framework that was heavily funded by the government, by the State, namely through the Ford Foundation from the discipline’s institutionalization in the Sixties. But black study as the deeply invested commitment to black people, black life, black possibility, and freedom dreaming, beyond institutions and in fact under siege by them. Collectively attending to black study would have us asking a very different set of questions, and perhaps being prepared to bring about very different answers.  This premise about evidence and evidencing is something that black study has taught me to challenge and expose the underlying perceptions of. What am I understanding when we talk about this bird’s eye/drone’s eye/God’s eye perspective is a view of people rendered non-people. That framing is borne from a visual technology that James Scott describes in Seeing Like a State. In managing how and who we’re seeing, this particular apparatus instigates us into a certain organized affect, initiates into a socially reproduced hierarchy—this is effectively what citizenship, nationalism, and patriotism do.


Prompt: A patriot sees a flag burning and they are moved to defend the nation, as opposed to seeing a piece of cloth that they can walk over in the street, right? And that’s because of what it means to belong to the state. You might feel it as an extension of yourself as opposed to what it is, which is the other way around. And so, I think, that thinking with black study, thinking with Black thought, would actually have us question: What does it mean when we’re seeing non-people? What does it say about us if images of the oppressed masses are disseminated, and when we encounter them we can then go, “Oh, I get it, it’s really bad there.” Technologies of seeing and the epistemologies they are informed by need to be interrogated so that when we engage in movement work and defend our communities, we are not benefitting statecraft or reproducing an asymmetrical and oppressive world order.

Response: Sometimes I feel increasingly militant about not reproducing certain images as evidence because, I mean, we’ve all seen them, right? Black people drowned at sea, black people’s bodies washed up on shore or left out in the street for hours as in the case of Michael Brown and countless others, dozens of black people on, what I guess what passes for a boat with an infrastructure than cannot safely cross the Mediterranean, whose image gets printed on the cover of The Telegraph with the language of “the swarm” with an action shot of black people fleeing in Haiti or in Sudan. We know what gets made to matter and how. Black study reminds us whose narratives, whose stories have weight and amplifies the work that needs to be done without trafficking in the antiblack violence of dehumanizing erasure.