The following are cultural artifacts from the future scenario, Memory Work. Although they might only exist in this possible future world, they are informed by signals of change observed today. Click each artifact to explore the social, political, technological, and theoretical signals that informed it.
Acall for people to be with and of nature, to
take care of the Earth and each other through mutual aid and collectivized reproduction — the concept of a
Living Internet took root as a new way of thinking and feeling about how we form kin.
Like
mushrooms springing from disseminated spores, an ad-hoc network of communes began to emerge outside of
cities. Populated by urbanite folx who looked to move from precarious conditions to collective survival —
the communes embodied ways of life oriented around slowness, intentionality, distributed abundance, and
decentralized care.
The Living Internet became a kind of superorganism mediating the flow of
nutrients among all living beings.
“She is the bridge between infrastructure and ecology, immediacy and longevity, information and life. We are the spiritual caretakers of the Living Internet, charged with the responsibility of growing and nurturing her.”
A Field Guide to the Living Internet
“Revillaging” is a term that is increasingly being used in traditional healing communities to describe the importance of revitalized community support and social connections, particularly in postpartum care. A model that focuses on spiritual maturity to support the developmental needs of children and support adults in the necessary rites of passage, revillaging is about cultivating multi-generational way of life.
Revillaging
Inspired by the symbiotic arrangement between people and forest, A Field Guide to the Living Internet is a speculative piece that considers what it might be like if the internet was a living entity. Imagining the internet as a long-lasting natural system based on values of intergenerational stewardship, inclusivity, and kindness, it serves as a field-guide on how to grow and care for the Living Internet as its spiritual caretakers.
A Field Guide to the Living Internet
Anab Jain argues for a “More-Than-Human” Politics — “a new kind of tentacular, multi-kind, multi-species politics of care … that gives us a kind of relational agency to help us imagine alternatives for living with and through global warming.” She created a manifesto (2020) that shifts perspectives from human-centred to more-than-human (e.g., fixing → caring, innovation → resurgence, nodes → knots) as the beginnings of a Field Guide to this practice.
More-Than-Human Politics
“Make Kin Not Babies!” is the slogan of Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene, a plea for a world different from the anthropocene or capitalocene. The Chthulucene calls for multispecies ecojustice that denies human exceptionalism. Haraway challenges readers to make “kin” in persons not bound by ancestry or genealogy, and outside of normative familial (or species-bound) structures — an act of restructuring work and family while challenging the role of the private home within the economy.
Multispecies Ecojustice
Scholars like Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman argue that
the transatlantic slave trade created a social and juridical condition of
“kinlessness” that was imposed by force and can be
transmitted through birth. This exile from legal kinship can be seen as having no
family, despite having many children.
Kinlessness
Hyperlocal Community Networks are bottom-up, dynamic forms of organizing in emergent, localized (walking-distance) groups to leverage social capital and commonality for mutual aid, connection, and a sense of community. For example, Nextdoor is a hyperlocal social network that sorts users into neighbourhood-specific private groups. It is designed to amplify local voices and counter digitally induced isolation by creating a neighbourhood hub for trusted connections and exchange of information, goods, and services, both online and offline.
Hyperlocal Community Networks
Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019) proposes that we practice “full surrogacy” by abolishing traditional notions of the family. Recognizing all gestation as productive work that involves both immense physical and emotional labour, Lewis calls for a need to take collective responsibility for children as a means to radically transform our notions of kinship and care.
Full Surrogacy Now
ME O’Brien’s “Communizing Care” argues that communes are the answer to the essential question, “How can we take care of each other?” — the question that will arise in a revolutionary process. Highlighting that care in our capitalist society is a “commodified, subjugated, and alienated act,” the piece calls for the abolition of the family as the positive creation of new institutions and practices of love, reproduction, and erotic life. Drawing from French socialist Charles Fourier’s concept of the phalanx, O’Brien provides a vision for communes to come, with the collectivization of domestic, social, and reproductive labour as a strategy for survival and community.
Communizing Care
Referring to a loosely knit movement of
political, business, and spiritual leaders; entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators; and their
supporters — the words Mothers of Invention (or the initialism MOI) are found
emblazoned amidst the taped seams, utility straps, and zipped pockets of tech aprons and lab coats (worn
functionally and fashionably as a political statement).
In response to the clumsy and ineffectual
Climate Imperative of the first decades of the 21st century, the anti-patriarchal Mothers of Invention
seized control of the world’s institutions — transitioning big businesses into cooperative models,
formalizing new means of equitable exchange, and choosing nurture over growth.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
The Prepaid Economy: Africa (2013–present) is a research project on the leapfrogging potential and vernacular innovations of digital technologies as they intersect with the informal economy in Sub-Saharan Africa, an economic sector that is often particularly led by women.
Informal Economies
The FX (Foreign Exchange) Beauties are an online group of Japanese housewives whose active trades represent 30% of all retail currencies traded out of Japan. Described as “amateur currency speculators,” they are challenging the traditional position of Japanese housewives in an introverted country dominated by conventions of gendered domesticity in the home. Christine Bjerke’s project “(On the Floating World of) the FX Beauties” questions the limitations of the home and examines the architecture that reflects the shifting position of women working within a self-governed, decentralized network.
Domestic Exchange
The Degrowth Movement emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the following decade-long experience of stagnation in the derogatorily named PIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). A “missile concept” meant to provoke conversation, degrowth isn’t a theoretically or programmatically unified movement, but a range of alternative economic practices and policies united around opposition to the notion that economic growth is the only way to improve individual, social, and environmental well-being. In this, it draws on feminist critiques of the economy that range from Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-prize winning work on the commons to Australian economic geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham’s work on already existing non-capitalist markets and community economic practices.
Degrowth
Society-Centred Design (2020) is a design manifesto by London-based design collective If, calling for a framework that goes beyond human-centred design to advocate for civic value, equity, the common good, public health, and the planet. It centres on design principles such as put care first, earn trust, empower collective agency, create patterns for public value, and redistribute the power of tech.
Society-Centred Design
Sister is a feminist business consultancy (2015–present) that asks what the principles of a feminine economy might look like; it offers courses, consulting services, and materials like a “business birthing handbook” to design and prototype businesses organized around values of collaboration, gratitude, generosity, empathy, etc. The Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women and Canada’s Institute for Gender and the Economy have both published “A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan” for the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), which acknowledges the significant impacts of the pandemic on women’s health, livelihoods and bodily integrity. They put forth recommendations to diversify and reshape the economy we want in ways that advance equity in gender, race, indigeneity, and class.
The Feminine Economy
The platform cooperative movement, coined by Trebor Scholz (2016–present), has updated industrial cooperatives for the possibilities of the digital age, spawning worker-owned platforms for services like ride-sharing, food preparation, and producing intellectual property for the creative industries; the idea has recently attracted interest from feminist intersectional perspectives and practices.
Platform Cooperatives
Fureai Kippu, or “caring relationships tickets” (1995–present), are one of the most successful time banks to date; in the middle of a lost decade of asset price collapse and stagnation, they were used by cash-poor individuals to trade in a “caring currency”. Hours as credits are received for the time spent taking care of parents and grandparents of those who had moved away from their families in search of work. The time credits can then be redeemed later for services or help.
Caring Currency
Decolonising Design is a movement launched in 2016 by a collective of globally dispersed designers with a manifesto. It asks how might decentred ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world away from exclusively Anglo/Eurocentric views, and toward a plurality of other ways of sensing and sense-making. The project continues to be inspired by, as well as extended and enriched with work from Latin American and Caribbean contexts, such as development anthropologist Arturo Escobar’s notion of “pluriversality,” to describe the operations of design at an ontological level, in the design of a plurality of inhabitable worlds.
Decolonizing Design
Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Catalog 1990–2020 (2019) stemmed from a collaborative online index and is now assembled as a resource that challenges the dominant understanding of internet history. Focusing on intersectionality, it maps the radical techno-critical activism that shapes a cyberfeminist counterpublic. Its manifestation as a printed catalog draws reference to the New Woman’s Survival Catalog or Whole Earth Catalog, and it is meant to live on as an open-access, open-source, and a crowdsourced website for others to respond to and build upon.
Cyberfeminism Catalog
Designer and professor Deepa Butoliya’s PhD research on “critical jugaad” (2018) looked to India to explore vernacular DIY making practices and their relationship to colonial powers; these kinds of on-the-ground design practices have implications that remain underexplored by the critical design community at large.
Critical Jugaad
Black Quantum Futurism is a literary and aesthetic collective (2015–present) that builds off the lineage of afrofuturism identified in the 1990s, which looked to the particularities and legacies of the Middle Passage and slavery in shaping a dislocated and hybrid perspective, aesthetic, philosophy, design culture, and more. The collective also runs a Community Futures Lab in North Philadelphia.
Black Quantum Futurism
The Cosmetic Healer offers personal care
services that are not merely aesthetic, but also affective, producing positive psychological and mental
health outcomes. Cosmetic healing practices include a broad array of services from ancestral dietary
guidance to postpartum care. In the application of topical cures and facial serums, in the intimate acts
of stretching, massaging, and sculpting the body, in the pull of lifting surgeries, and in the tensile
pressure of braiding — subtle energies, ripples of love and compassion, transfer through the therapist to
the client. Among Cosmetic Healers, treatments involving the manipulation, stimulation, and removal of
hair are most sacred. Hair is seen as our subtlest sensing technology, an antenna to our external and
inner worlds. It is also a storage device, a kind of soft drive, a recording of selfhood and generations
of trauma. The rubbing, kneading, and then pulling of the hair into braids is a labour of care,
stimulating growth and ascension to a higher self.
Given the nature of vulnerability involved with
their practices and the level of faith entrusted to Cosmetic Healers, they often operate only within
smaller, local communities, offering their services to lifelong friends and fictive kin in exchange for
invaluable gifts such as childcare, home-cooked meals, and expert advice.
Hairwork, which evolved from the craft of wigmakers, became a highly popular and accessible middle-class activity in the Victorian era. Mourning jewelry, in particular, was a fashionable trend of painstakingly hand-crafting lockets, rings, brooches, and weaved bracelets or wreaths with the hair of the recently deceased. Given the decay-resistant nature of hair, hairwork was an act of devotion to one’s connection with the dead, and was also a means to preserve a sentimental and everlasting memento of a loved one.
Victoria-Era Hairwork
Clementine Morrigan’s “Three Thoughts on Emotional Labour” (2017) highlights how the acknowledgement that emotional labour is frequently exploited has translated into a belief that emotional labour is inherently exploitative. To counter this discourse, she calls for the need to accept emotional labour within an ethical framework by asking if it is consensual, valued, and reciprocated.
Ethical Framework for Emotional Labour
“Labour of Love” is a hair styling and jewelry series by Asia Clarke (designer of Wild Moon Jewelry and a foresight strategist with From Later). It harkens back to the spiritual roots of hair as antennae, acknowledging black hair adornment as divine architecture. The project is meant to be a form of creative resistance against the suppression of black hair expression throughout history.
“When you are braiding someone’s hair, you are touching their head. You become very familiar with something in them that feels like an insecurity, and you are turning that into a place of pride.
Every time I twist someone’s hair, I have to do it with love. That love requires attention to details. The love that’s in it is coming from me out to that person through my talents, but it is also reflected back to me in the way that they are receiving love because of how they look. I’m doing hair with a consciousness that I am able to uplift people, to make them feel better — that’s a superpower.” — Asia Clarke
Hair as Antennae
Hairdressers are one of the most trusted professions. Leveraging on the unique trusting relationship and the tendency to confide or unburden in salon spaces, Illinois implemented a law that mandates salon workers to be trained in abuse prevention as part of the licensing process. The training is meant to put cosmetologists on alert to emotional abuse in particular, in the hopes of helping to curb domestic abuse and sexual assault. Meanwhile, salons and organizations like The Confess Project and The Lions Barber Collective are training hair stylists and barbers on how to advocate for and provide mental health support to clients, and also themselves.
The Trusted Hairdresser
Oral history offers the narrative that the enslaved African woman played a crucial role in the diffusion of rice seeds across the Atlantic. By braiding rice grains in her hair so the seeds could escape detection, her efforts established an African subsistence preference in South America and also the United States, enabling her descendants to survive on the plantations.
Grains in Her Hair
The epigenetic inheritance of trauma is a widely contentious area of debate within the living sciences. A number of studies in mice have shown evidence of the intergenerational effect of trauma, such as those associated with scent through an altered epigenetic signature in sperm DNA. Although these studies have been used as a model for studying the mechanism in humans, and recent studies on trauma transmission among Holocaust survivors and prisoners of war have indicated an epigenetic explanation, sample sizes in these studies are small and the science remains young.
The Epigenetic Inheritance of Trauma
Emotional Labor: The MetaFilter Thread Condensed (2016) is an annotated MetaFilter thread about contemporary observations on emotional labour. Inspired by Jess Zimmerman’s “Where’s My Cut?: On Unpaid Emotional Labor” (2015), the thread unpacks deeply rooted collective assumptions, and ways to undo as well as rethink the cost of emotional labour, particularly in the care industry.
Unpaid Care
Broadly speaking, drag is a way to express oneself through “appearance, action, and
dress.” As an artform within the LGBTQ community, it has a history of fostering resiliency
and strength. The practice is also increasingly recognized as a psycho-social therapeutic
tool to address confining notions of identity and improve mental health. New York-based
practice Drag Therapy, for example, is an
interactive, mixed-medium psychotherapy for individuals and groups to identify, explore,
and embody different “Drags” of themselves with the aim of increasing emotional
flexibility, creativity, spontaneity, and joy. For the trans community, developing a drag
persona can also be an important tool to take back the control of objectification — to be
able to express oneself freely and also be closer to the image they see of themselves on a
day-to-day basis.
“Drag fulfils many of the aims of CBT, which involves weakening entrenched negative thought patterns and replacing them with more self-reparative ones … In drag, you live out a fantasy that directly contradicts the reality of your core beliefs … It is only the gift of drag that has been able to change the very nature of my core beliefs.” — British-Iraqi writer, drag performer, and filmmaker Amrou Al-Kadhi
Drag as Therapy
The field of Ancestral Intelligence (a mended iteration of AI) integrates more-than-human ways of thinking — reviving ecological frameworks from indigenous knowledge and employing the sensing and processing powers of plants to better understand our situation in the natural world. Ancestral Intelligence is governed by a covenant of reciprocity, to honourably transact with the natural systems whose intelligence we’ve relied on to produce our medicine, food, energy, and building materials. The principles of Ancestral Intelligence are applied throughout the living sciences and in the biotechnologies. New life is cultivated to heal environments: microorganisms that filter air pollutants, purify waters, and regenerate soils.
The Kari-Oca Declaration asserts that “the health rights of indigenous people must include the recognition and respect of traditional knowledge held by Indigenous healers.” Further, “Indigenous Peoples' harmonious relationship with nature, Indigenous sustainable development models, development strategies and cultural values must be respected as a distinct and vital sources of knowledge.” As its final point, the Declaration says, “The United Nations should promote research into Indigenous knowledge and develop a network of Indigenous sciences.”
The Declaration was adopted at the Indigenous Peoples meeting held before the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Indigenous Sciences
The Penelope Project (2016–present) is an exploration of weaving as a technical mode of existence, as inspired by the Ancient Greeks’ belief that weaving is a fundamental link to the cosmos. Through the creation of citizen science exhibits, the project aims to design and construct tangible programming systems for live-coding looms and new forms of robotic weavers that can manipulate ancient loom technology.
Weaving Code, Coding Weaves
Permaculture Women’s Guild’s Permaculture Design Course is a whole-system design course taught by an international faculty of women. With an aim to empower busy, creative women to spend more time designing gardens, homesteads, and livelihoods, the course focuses on Earth-care, people-care, and future-care ethics to create cultural alternatives and human habitats that regenerate the Earth.
Whole Systems Agriculture
Julia Watson’s Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (2019) is the first compendium of indigenous design technologies, such as the living root bridges of the Khasi hill tribe of northern India, meant to serve as an inspiration and model for the sustainable biodesign of new infrastructures, buildings, and landscapes.
Lo-TEK
“Grammar of Animacy,” coined by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), refers to the linguistic structure to speak of the living world as fully sentient, as if it were a person, as if it were our family. Stemming from her fascination with the almost-lost language of her native Potawatomi Nation, it ascertains an Indigenous worldview that Western scientific language lacks the words to articulate.
Grammar of Animacy
Future Ancestors Services Inc. is a Canada-based Indigenous and Black-owned enterprise that provides speaking, training, research, and community services centred around ancestral accountability, climate justice, and equity. It was created in response to the demands of climate change and social intolerance of systemic racism, colonial violence, and ignorance of lived realities.
Ancestral Accountability
Ruha Benjamin argues for “Black Afterlives Matter” — the practice of cultivating “kinfulness” beyond biological relatives to include the materially dead or spiritually alive ancestors in our midst. Rooted in a stubborn refusal to forget and be forgotten, it invokes the idea of “ancestral co-presence,” an evocation of ancestors through spiritual practices of ancestral communication to remember and imagine things that have not been witnessed by drawing on the experiences of one’s ancestors.
Black Afterlives Matter
In the
age of creative biology, the biggest challenge facing the technosphere is the closing of its materials
loops and waste streams. Taking inspiration from the deep time-tested processes of evolutionary adaptation
and Gaia-scale recycling, engineers, designers, and citizens are turning to biomaterials for inspiration —
combining long-known traditional techniques with new molecular-scale capacities for intervention. One of
the most influential organizations in the world, Almanac, provides the tools, materials, and training to a
new generation of problem solvers working to make products (from organic buildings to bio-fashion) that
are more resilient, more adaptive, and cycled more efficiently back into the metabolic processes of the
Earth.
Almanac’s organizational code reads as follows:
About Almanac | We Make Living
Tools™
Almanac is a design ecosystem for the era of creative
biology.
We are a cooperative of citizens, makers, scientists, engineers, and
organizations coordinating productive workflows for programmable biology.
Together, we’re creating
a flourishing desktop biotech economy, governed by a philosophy of stewardship, sustainability, slowness,
and safety.
We’re giving everyone — from curious citizens to seasoned designers — the tools,
materials, and knowledge to create with biology and make the most out of life.
“The Biological Factory” refers to how full control of biology through multispecies mapping of genomes can allow us to manipulate nature and reality in unprecedented ways. Paul Dabrowski, CEO of Synthego, argues that biology is a macrotechnology that can be used to imagine cities as single organisms with specialization, and that mutability on a macro level can allow us to present environments that fulfill the needs of people.
Biology as Macrotechnology
Somos Labva is an independent and self-managed biomaterials community laboratory and kitchen located in Chile. Artists cook up and grow biomaterials, and research local and circular economies, aiming to bring science closer to the community by focusing especially on new materials or open biomaterials.
Biomaterials Community Laboratory
Mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, is increasingly being developed and used as a sustainable source of material. Examples include Ecovative’s Mycelium Foundry, which uses mycelium to grow advanced materials by programming biology, and Mycoworks’ Reishi, which is now being marketed as a plastic-free, non-animal premium leather alternative for the fashion industry.
Mushroom Materials
Neri Oxman’s Mediated Matter group (2010–present) at the MIT Media Lab researches and prototypes at the intersection of computational design and bio-derived materials and techniques, such as architectural structures grown from silk, 3D-printed composites of cellulose and pectin that can be recycled by the rain, and programmable living materials that respond to touch and light.
Mediated Matter
Natsai Audrey Chieza’s Faber Futures (2018–present) is a creative biodesign studio that researches synthetic biology and the use of bacteria, fungi, and algae for fabrication techniques in the textile industry, such as in-vitro biopigment dyes and waste recycling, raising questions around the desirability of biotechniques that could be more robust but less efficient.
Creative Biodesign
Terreform ONE’s Fab Tree Hab (2008) is a home concept where the living structure is grafted into shape with prefabricated Computer Numeric Controlled reusable scaffolds. As a method to grow homes from native trees, it enables dwellings to be fully integrated into an ecological community.
Tree-Grown Homes