Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology, and media literacy will somehow “save” or “educate” rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.
In Shandong Province, I asked one thief why they decided to steal from the government. As if I were missing the obvious, they responded, “Well, clearly I would never steal from other villagers and none of the villagers would steal from me. We all know each other. Once in a while, we’ll take vegetables from each other’s gardens. But anything of value, I’d steal from someone I don’t know!”
And the government would deserve it, to be honest. (This would apply to many governments, more than just the Chinese government, as they're all complicit in hoarding wealth and resources.)
The easy argument is that the world is moving faster, becoming more controlled because of the internet and mobile devices. But the gravity of acceleration is not inevitable. The way we experience time has changed; the kind of critical wonder we hold toward objects has collapsed. My great-uncle once sat in amazement looking at the new Japanese-made TV we bought him, at how crisp the image was, and how remarkable it was that so much complex circuitry could fit inside a thin screen. He now looks up from his smartphone occasionally, complaining how slow his phone is at opening apps.
Hardin’s original essay in 1968 used the example of the medieval commons, a place where peasants grazed their cows. According to Hardin, the ungoverned nature of the commons led to overgrazing, which is why the commons had to eventually be enclosed and privatized. Yet Hardin was also wrong about this history—the commons model had actually thrived in Europe for hundreds of years. The mismanagement of the commons by peasants was a lie, an excuse made up by powerful landowners who wanted to seize and control these spaces.
The same is often applicable to the quality of goods/services, which is also brought up. The quality of food, for example, was less of an issue prior to different forms of centralisation; companies demanded that people do things for as little as possible (squeezing them), and this in turn impacted the quality of those goods/services (making them worse).
Which then led to yet another round of 'tightening' and centralisation of those goods/services, which just keeps causing the cycle to get worse.
We trust all sorts of technical systems every day without having to read their code. The software that flies our planes, runs our city trains. Like a lot of emerging technologies, blockchain is beholden only to its makers, and to a handful of well-funded companies. The conventional answer to this is to suggest government regulation of software, as is the case with airplane and train software. Yet the political ethos of blockchain is precisely about taking power away from a central authority like the government. And deep down, I find that sentiment admirable. However, blockchain has yet to answer the question: If it takes power away from a central authority, can it truly put power back in the hands of the people, and not just a select group of people? Will it serve as an infrastructure that amplifies trust, rather than increasing both mistrust and a singular reliance on technical infrastructure? Will it provide ways to materially organize and enrich a community, rather than further accelerating financial systems that serve a select few? Can the community expand and diversify itself, so that it does not reproduce the system of power and patriarchy that it is attempting to dismantle?
By creating a system based on the assumption that humans are destructive and selfish, you only end up making those assumptions reality: a self-fulfilling prophecy. It serves as a reminder of the physical, material relationships that bind our world together.
YEP.
There is some debate about whether blockchain and crypto are here to stay, whether the technology is actually able to do all the things it says it will do. I think of the melamine-milk scandal, and whether blockchain would have helped in that situation. The contamination came from farmers, driven by economic pressures. Blockchain wouldn’t have helped prevent falsification, but it would have made the milk more expensive. Under authoritarianism, which benefits from holding expertise within its realm of power, and under an economic system that thrives off inequality in creating a market, of course blockchain is here to stay. It creates another layer of inequality, another incentive to make food a commodity.
According to Jianhu, the first case of ASF [African swine flu] in China was in a backyard pork operation, one of the many midsize pork farms with fewer than a hundred pigs. Ninety-eight percent of the pork farms in China have fewer than fifty animals, and these small to midsize farms account for about a third of pork production in China. These highly decentralized farms make government oversight difficult. There is also enormous pressure for these farms to keep up with the market price for pork, and to maintain steady production. The government was finding ASF a convenient excuse to eradicate these small farms, making way for centralized, industrial-scale operations.
See previous comment about the commons and centralisation/quality.
We created the ASF epidemic, says Jianhu, out of the quest for cheap pork. One of the ways to ensure cheap pork is to lower the cost of feeding pigs. Xiangyang village’s pigs were fed cooked grains and beans fit for human consumption. ASF has been transferred through industrial pig swill.
Later explanation that industrial pig swill includes treated food waste that often includes pork, which means that they're effectively feeding pigs to pigs.
Since 2009, in Lushan, Zhejiang, NetEase has been perfecting the art of raising pigs under Weiyang, its new agricultural products division. The farm in Lushan has the precision of an electronics factory and the feeling of the world’s most sterile, meticulous resort. On this farm, pigs live an optimized life, with an optimal amount of exercise and an optimal swill mix. They even listen to a soothing soundtrack, carefully designed for stress relief. This music is beneficial for us, as pork eaters. Stress before slaughter can alter a pig’s metabolism, increasing cortisol and resulting in what’s known in the industry as “DFD” (dark, firm, dry) meat. Weiyang pork is now available online and at special Weiyang retail stores scattered across China’s software capital, Hangzhou.
More than a lone founder’s quest for pork purity or sheer novelty, NetEase’s foray into the food space is a clever business move. As Matilda mentioned to me in Shanghai, information about food is central to food safety. This makes industrialized farming, including modern pig farming, an information business, with a focus on scaling trust. NetEase Weiyang declares itself to be combining “internet thinking and modern agriculture.” And part of internet thinking involves farming at a scale and degree of precision possible in software—a level of control over every microscopic variable along the way, such as pig stress levels. Weiyang’s entire approach is crudely transparent—food, like engineers, can be a pipeline and sourcing issue, solved through increased vertical integration. NetEase has set up numerous massive online open courses (MOOCs) to create a population of skilled workers for recruiting directly into their company, addressing the existing shortage of skilled high-tech workers. Similarly, Weiyang skips the step of working with sources, instead creating its own source of high-quality pork, further eliminating any point of failure.
All of this is just beyond bizarre to me, especially as someone who grew up on a dairy farm.
The logic is striking. A demand for pork drives industrialized farming of pigs, which increases disease transmission. The constant emergence of diseases drives the implementation of new technologies like AI pork farming. These technologies go on to make pork cheap, driving even more availability and demand, as people start to believe pork is a necessary part of their diet. AI is not the balm to any problem—it is just one piece of the ever-hungry quest for scale.
I see the myth of automation replacing humans as yet another attempt by those in power to sharply define the boundaries of what being human means, elevating AI to a form of power that seems to have a righteous, natural force in our lives. This myth defines being human as simply being a rational, efficient worker. The fear instilled by these radical proponents of AI is ominous and forceful, and it implies an inevitability written by those in charge—leaders in the tech world, owners of companies that are building this scary AI. The same fear of automation drives a public discourse that glints with a subterfuge: that being human is the only thing that makes us special.
The desire for a controlled world arises from an inability to honor the unknown. “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas”; we think that “the brain alone will set us free,” wrote the poet Audre Lorde in 1977. As a writer and activist, Lorde experienced firsthand the connection between the personal and the political, asking us to question the historically conditioned ways we have been taught to understand the world. “The white fathers told us: ‘I think, therefore I am,’” she says, referring to the Enlightenment-era philosophers who dissected knowledge as a technical, mechanical pursuit, rather than seeing forms of knowing as a reservoir of opacity, felt and lived through poetry. She asks us to move beyond dichotomies of rational versus emotional ways of knowing, for “rationality is not unnecessary … I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” Beyond binaries, it is the place of poetry, “that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, to which our analysis and understanding can only build roads.” Poetry is a place of power within each of us, and poetry is “the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.”
On the ground, the bulk of AI research is being carried out by large companies like Alibaba. The realm of AI ethics and public discourse is saturated and funded by those same companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, and corporations directly manipulate the creation of ethical frameworks. It takes millions of dollars to create AI models like ET Agricultural Brain, and an enormous amount of computation time and data labeling. The economics of these technical requirements concentrate control over these models in a handful of companies. The broader AI industry requires a massive amount of data, and subsequently, companies advocate for lax government restrictions on collecting data. Until the makers and builders of AI solve the material realities of the technology, AI will be stuck in a downward spiral, as a tool to optimize life, shaping it into a closed system. Without questioning the intrinsic faith held in prediction, or the political economies of building algorithms, the field of AI ethics and algorithmic fairness will remain mere fodder for dinner party conversations among the rich.
For ET Agricultural Brain, so much labor goes into making the models: not just the labor of engineers at Alibaba, but also the labor of those who create the training data. Farmers examining training data and labeling the pig in the images as sick or healthy. Entire swaths of Guiyang designated as “digital towns,” where young rural migrants sit and generate training data for AI, clicking on images, tagging animals and objects. Despite stories of AI replacing humans, AI still desperately needs us. . That is the reality of work and labor. For more than twenty-five years, my mother woke up at 4:00 a.m. and drove to her job as a university cafeteria worker outside Boston. She used to have a deep commitment to her job, and it gave her a sense of fulfillment. It felt good to feed stressed-out college students who weren’t taking care of themselves. She and her coworkers were trusted by management, given breaks and autonomy on the job. . Over the past ten years, her feelings of fulfillment have drastically turned. The school optimized her work with arbitrary, quantitative metrics. As a result of this optimization process, there’s less autonomy, fewer breaks, and new, bizarre working schedules. My mother feels little connection to her job now. My mother’s is the kind of job that some people think robots should take over, that should be optimized and automated. After all, she would supposedly get more free time and fulfillment in life. The irony is, she stopped feeling fulfilled when her workplace became optimized, her work stripped of meaning, turned into mere labor.
I ask Sun Wei his opinion about the equalizing effects of technology, if a technical position like his is liberating and will allow him to do anything he wants in the future. These equalizing effects are pervasive throughout the technology and development world, the stories of “technology transforming lives” tiresome in their ubiquity. Projects like the failed One Laptop per Child, by Nicholas Negroponte, or the Hole in the Wall project exude this techno-optimistic belief—if you can give a laptop to a child or put a computer in an Indian slum, children will teach themselves linear algebra and become the next Bill Gates. We now know this is a myth inflated by a hype cycle. A whole support system of teachers, peers, and family is a stronger influence than a laptop or computer screen. But part of me—the American part of me—wants to believe the narrative about individualistic passion overcoming everything, including a lack of formal schooling or connections.
It would be nice if we could toss the formal schooling, honestly.
The word “innovation” is laden with baggage. It gives rise to a whole industry built on conferences, media, and thought leadership. It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley. . In English, “innovation” was not always regarded as positively as it is now. Its original form in Latin means “to renew, to introduce something as new,” perhaps subliminally acknowledging that the category “entirely new” is difficult to define. The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring down empires, threatening the status of kings and elites. But slowly, throughout the Industrial Revolution, the phrase began to be seen as more positive when engineering culture took shape. In the early 1900s, Thorstien Veblen advocated the idea that technology was the output, the product of a group of male workers he termed “engineers.” And while engineers worked to create technology, it was the company owners, the grand industrialists, who reaped the profits of innovation. . Contemporary innovation in the United States and China appears to strengthen rather than threaten the political and economic order of the world. Riffling through recent coverage on innovation shows the most innovative products appear to be varying forms of management through technology—managing people, cars, take-out orders, or goods. Our modern-day monarchs, corporations and CEOs, are unthreatened by innovation. It begs the question: If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?
For both this young analyst and my VC friend, innovation still seems to carry a lot of assumptions. Why does the new, the novel, always require a certain amount of addiction to an app? If failure is so important for innovation, why are we only confronted with stories of technology’s successes, rather than stories of its spectacular technical failures? If embracing failure is the prerequisite for innovation, who has the privilege of failing?
Membership in the Rice Harmony Cooperative has been growing every year, and this is no small feat in modern China, where individualism is increasing and the memory of previously disastrous attempts at collectivization by the government remains. Yet the cooperative structure centers the community as the locus of decision-making, creating a collective investment that is resilient under the strain of strong personalities and politics. This is not an easy process to navigate, with cooperative members needing to resolve conflict rather than walk away from it. As a shanzhai endeavor, actions cannot be singular and individual. Xinghai and Qiu spend planting seasons in their own fields, and alongside other farmers, providing technical advice and negotiating interpersonal conflict.
Explained in the text: Shanzhai literally means "mountain stronghold," but it is a reference to knock-offs (because people in those mountain villages couldn't afford name brands or official products).
I wander through the paddies, past the Frankenstein machines, past the piles of rice straw used as organic fertilizer. If innovation casts the spell of capitalism, in this mountain stronghold, I see shanzhai as a verb, used to cast a different kind of spell. To shanzhai. To turn protocols into practices that bind us together rather than centralize authority. To turn back the worship of scale and renew our commitments to care. I think back to the words I heard when I was a kid, the other magical phrase, Made in China, and the dismissive tone in the man’s voice. Barometers of success and innovation are invented by those with money, turning engagement into the surface-level interactions of informed users, rather than the deeper actions that tackle structural, social change by invested citizens willing to hold long village meetings. Entire entrepreneurship programs exist, funded by VCs, designed to foster what VCs see as the core values of innovation. Instead of continuing to accept success and innovation as empty containers, I propose new measures, understanding our world through shanzhai, through the ability to care, maintain, renew, and deepen commitments.
This is definitely an aspect of the world I would love to see supported.
Like China’s food and language, urban villages have an enormous amount of regional variation. What is common across all urban villages is that they are home to those on the fringes of city life—nannies, housekeepers, construction workers, delivery drivers. In Shenzhen, urban villages have played a key part in the city’s rise, nurturing new inventors with brash ideas and informal economies. Yet because of the socioeconomic status of the population residing in urban villages, these areas are deemed dangerous by upper-middle-class urbanites. The term that upper-middle-class Chinese people use to describe this population is “low-quality” (disuzhi, 低素质). Strangely, the upper-middle class seems to have no qualms about the low-quality population traveling to wealthier parts, watching over their children and cleaning their homes.
Though they don't often reside in 'urban villages', many people reside in suburbs and outside of the cities in which they do the same work. They live on the fringes of the city, in the cheaper areas, working for the wealthy who look down upon them; the wealthy see those areas as either worthless or dangerous (or both), yet they don't care that they rely upon these people. The contradiction doesn't connect for them.
To be fair, I feel this in my work. I'm from a rural background and have made cities my home, working with the children of upper-middle-class people. They have no qualms about me teaching their kids, but they are still happy to talk about me (and people like me) as if I have no value.
All this information sits in a database, a hulking engineering marvel that underpins so much of our modern world. Databases allow people to read, write, update, and destroy data in a fairly dependable way. They also require the people who build databases to form strong opinions about the world and the way it’s structured. For example, the attributes of a user on a platform are dictated by columns an engineer defines in the database. Different databases have different logics for the way data must be formatted, which in turn shapes the way we have come to encode the world. In the case of Real Population Platform, Xiaoli tells me the hardest part is data compatibility. . “To be honest, many of the recent upgrades in Guiyang have been a headache.” Xiaoli looks at me, and then suddenly asks, “It is true that Americans each have a number that allows them to be tracked? But that there is only one database that has that number? The social benefits number?” It takes me a second to realize that he means social security numbers. After all, it’s not immediately obvious to me that a social security number tracks us. But it does, as any American can attest to: the social security number and credit score follows us, it dictates if we get loans, if we can access credit, and if we can access housing. And while we give our social security number out somewhat casually, research has shown the ways credit scores, attached to our social security numbers, exacerbate deeply entrenched inequality in the United States. For an individual, it’s an innocuous number, but on a large scale, it forms a hulking system.
The commercial runs, with sound effects, on repeat, every minute. Standing in front of the screen, abetted by the occasional coo and glitter effects behind her, the Megvii spokeswoman I talk to makes it very clear: Megvii doesn’t store any data, it just makes the algorithm. It is innocent, she says. What governments and companies do with it is up to them. The engineers show up every day and just do their job. . The Megvii algorithms break down bodies and life into numbers, measurements, and parts. This kind of thinking is not new—many of us have been locked into it for hundreds of years, while grasping at an elusive, atomic sense of identity. Looking at the engineers at their desks, it can be easy to judge their ethics, to question why they continue to show up every day when Skynet videos play on loop next door. Yet, like most desk-based jobs these days, the ethical boundary becomes defined by awareness. When you have been made accustomed to solving problems by breaking them down into parts, how could you see the larger picture to know whether you’re doing harm? The world is certainly complex, but doesn’t it feel good helping law enforcement make the world safer? Why shouldn’t you trust that your work is being used by policy makers who know what they are doing?
Megvii (Face++) is one of the beautification programs and identification algorithms.
The "just do their job" is so ubiquitous that, one day, we need people to realise they do not need to simply do their job. But it's hard to get people to understand how the work they're doing is harmful, especially when it's couched as something as simple as "a beautification tool" on WeChat or a filter on TikTok or whatever people want to call them.
At some point, we need to recognise that people are using these tools (across the globe) to harm and/or control us. They're using them to create programs that allow us to "securely" access our social benefits; they're using them to determine who is allowed to go where and how.
And while it sounds like fear-mongering, we should be concerned. It's not "just doing your job" after a while.
Inner Mongolia was my friend’s home province. The trip was his attempt for us to see the grasslands of the region—instead, it ended up being a tiring journey on buses and trains, a requiem for the last parts of nomadic Mongolian life. We drove from a copper mine to a coal mine outside of Hulunbuir, watching straggly sheep herds in the waning grassland. He’s ethnically Mongolian, but his family ended up on the Chinese side of the border during the split between independent Mongolia and Inner Mongolia as a territory of China. As an ethnic minority in China, he has a fraught relationship to the government. Early assimilationist policies, alongside forced resettlement of nomadic Mongolian herders into Han Chinese–built cities, has led to an erasure of Mongolian language and culture in the region. Mining, an industry exalted by the national government, is desecrating pastureland—these tensions were crystallized in a series of 2011 protests after a Han Chinese miner ran over a Mongolian herder.
This whole section is incredibly sad, particularly as it details their friend's life and how he is trapped with a criminal record from brash behaviour when he was a teen (which is entangled in his ethnic minority status).
Yet as a tactic of policing, surveillance has always been crucial in making criminality throughout history, drawing a line between those on the so-called right and wrong sides of society. And this line drawing is enabled by distilling life into arbitrary parts: class, race, gender, with the line of criminality itself constantly shifting throughout time, serving political-economic crises. “Crime went up; crime came down; we cracked down,” writes the scholar Ruth Gilmore.
There is another side to data, illuminated once we understand constructions of fear in our day-to-day lives. “Can data ever know who we really are?” asks the policy researcher and activist Zara Rahman. For my friend and many others, the data on a past crime remains committed to his record. And while his life changes—he becomes a friend, a husband, a doting father, an artist, an uncle—all the data points about his past remain static. Data cannot truly represent the full spectrum of life. It remains a thin slice of the world. There is always some kind of bias built in. Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls “quantifauxcation”: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty. Some strategies for quantifauxcation, says Stark, include saying things people want to believe, and adding opaque complexity to models, since complexity has become conflated with accuracy.
Why didn’t Xiao Niu stay in Guangzhou? “City life is not designed to keep you there,” he says. “If you earn RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a month, that’s great money, sure, but city residents spend more than that just on rent. You can’t build a life off that.” Sometimes we play the game or the game plays us. And so Xiao Niu took the money he’d earned and returned home to the mountains of Guizhou, determined not to be played by the game. It at least was enough money to do things like improve his parents’ house and buy his dad a printer. . Part of tackling poverty means being able to measure and map it. There are disputes among experts in the field of international development on how to do this, especially on how to measure poverty in communities that rely on farming. Defining household assets is one method, but with farms, depending on the season when you take the measurements, assets will change before and after harvest season. Another method is quantifying household disposable income—the ability to purchase. It’s these on-the-ground variations, compounded into larger macro-economic figures, that lead to claims that global poverty is getting much better, or much worse. Yet these claims do not answer how people become poor in the first place, and, if we have found the key to eradicating poverty, why it still exists. . However you quantify it, the facts laid bare are these: Shangdiping and other places in rural China have higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy rates than cities. Education access is lower. And the entrenched poverty of China persists in its remote, rural, ethnic minority regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Guizhou, and Yunnan.
RMB 3,000 to 4,000 is equal to roughly USD $460 to 620.
To note, the rent that I paid when living in Shanghai (which was cheaper than most of my friends)? Was RMB 7,000, which is a little bit under USD $1,100. A lot of my Chinese co-workers were severely underpaid (especially in comparison to every single white person working in the school); they might have pulled in half of my salary (RMB 22,000 - almost USD $3,400), working as teachers in the same school.
So keep that in mind.
But it's also worth pointing out that none of these poverty-measuring tools are consistent. The EU measures it based on percentage, some organisations measure China's "raising people out of poverty" based on people living on more than $1.90/day, etc. It's also interesting to note that the people determining levels of poverty are the same people who are responsible for many people being impoverished in the first place.
Funny that.
“Alibaba sucks us dry,” he says. “It sucks the blood out of us, and it will suck the blood out of this village. As sellers, all our money is kept in Alipay because that’s how buyers send money. At the drop of a pin they can demand a refund, and because of the escrow service, the money gets sent back to them, even if I’ve shipped the order already. Or maybe they don’t like the material, they think it’s cheap. But we have to keep on making worse-quality stuff. How are we supposed to keep prices low and also compete with others? The government thinks it’s great and keeps doing things like building roads, putting in broadband. And Alibaba uses all this infrastructure for free, relies on us to make decisions on lowering the quality of goods. But what happens next? There’s only so much cutting corners we can do. There’s only so many ads we can buy, lies about the products we can say. What happens when this system fails?”
Refusal and purchasing to support are both cruel optimism, providing a false sense of control. It’s that same sense of control that makes shopping so pleasurable. In a world that is so interconnected, with problems at a scale I cannot comprehend—climate change, plastics in the ocean, e-waste, political instability from globalization—the trick of shopping is that it makes me feel like I am doing something about those problems. I am asserting my agency, this agency that I am promised as an American. My small choice to either buy or not buy exerts control over the world as I want to see it—as I imagine it, maybe more eco-friendly, more sustainable.
The proliferation of MLMs [multi-level marketing schemes] can be easily blamed on social media and technology, just like the spread of misinformation, bizarre health advice, or selfie culture. Yet the reality is more complicated. Social media and online community certainly play a part in accelerating information, as well as in decreasing the barrier of accessing content. But these online interactions are a manifestation of broader socioeconomic conditions. With one of the worst, most error-prone health-care systems in the developed world, why wouldn’t you seek out online health advice or alternative explanations for illness in the United States? With deepening job insecurity and the elusiveness of the American Dream, why wouldn’t you at least try joining an MLM to sell online?
The popular Chinese press likes to fan the flames of Kuaishou’s impact on rural society. For example: Zheng Tao, a rural youth who left his village for factory work in a city. A loser on the margins of urban life, he moved back home and became a livestream celebrity, making money from adoring fans. Other similar success stories have encouraged millions of youth to search for money and fame online. Chinese livestream’s popularity echoes the same desires of American livestream, whether it’s groups behind pearl parties or niche YouTube stars. The desire for community, for companionship, and, mostly, for monetizing emotions has never been stronger.
A movement coalesced around Peppa Pig, crystalizing a careless nihilism and rejection of mainstream values. Like in so many other countries, consumption has become the sacred value of daily life in China. The narrow path laid out by authority figures and parents is to get good grades to go to a good school, go to a good school to get a good job, and with a good job, shop, have kids, and shop some more. Instead of abiding by this prescribed life, shehui ren have no desire to enter the competitive whirl of school and employment; they see through the expectations of society. And the government sees this kind of nihilism as troubling, both socially and economically.
In Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he provokes readers to think about a set of impossible politics, a theory of failure. While conventional politics are defined as the push and pull between the left and right, he insists that most of us end up creating a culture where political action is premised on the illusory figure of “the Child.” The call to act is haunted by the specter of “our children,” whether it is a future of environmental destruction or a disorderly future without “traditional values.” We are always trying to live for the child that does not yet exist, fixing the world for our children who do, impressing our expectations on their desires. These political visions draw upon fears of decline or loss of control, on an innate need to crave a future—some kind of story or meaning that motivates us to keep living. This same need is the reason why we get stuck in a cycle of chasing after the future, a future that never appears as perfect as we imagined it to be.
I think of my parents, my grandparents. My grandmother and her nightmares, how the last few years of her life were marked by her confronting the depth of her past, despite having lived for the future in her youth. My mother’s insistence on a better life, as she defined it, full of expectations for her children’s future that neither my sister nor I was able to fulfill. Her fingertips, cracked and dry from working, saving for a life that she felt was not hers. Why do I work long days to dutifully pay off the five-figure student debt I have, the debt I took on in fantasizing about a better life? Even if I paid off the debt, would the debt-free future that awaited me be as perfect as I imagine?
I stare into the darkness that shifts with occasional washes of light. I cannot bring myself to see the honeyed visions of a comfortable future. Instead, I see the intrinsic truth of living as one of difficulty, the constant effluent of change. Without a future, I must give myself over to the present, to undertaking the work that must be done.
I continue to stare. The present stares back. The present moment promises nothing—it only demands. It demands building the communities that shift culture, that allow interbeing to thrive. It demands the work of awareness and care, instead of the tools of efficiency and scale. It demands seeing individual freedom as nothing more than a way for all of us to be oppressed. Most of all, the present demands the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting. Through the present moment I see the glimmers of liberation embedded in the work we must do at this time. Because what else can we do?