artificial intelligence – Antonia Malchik

Art harder

August 1, 2025by Antonia Malchik2 Comments

My mother sent me a birthday card years ago that I have put above my desk everywhere I’ve lived since. On the front is a reproduction of a painting by Deborah DeWit Marchant, dated 1994: a woman, brown-haired and pale-skinned like me, is sitting in a booth at a diner, next to a window. On the table in front of her are an empty plate with what looks like the remains of pie, a glass of water, a cup of coffee, and an open book. Her left hand rests against her face and she is reading. The street looks wet with recent rain. The woman’s hair is even braided back, as mine almost always is.

The painting is titled “The Artisans Cafe.” There’s a sense of peace in it I’ve always loved, a sense of allowance—this woman can sit there getting lost in a book, no other demands on her attention for at least a little while.

Reproduction of “The Artisans Cafe,” Deborah DeWit Marchant

For years I’ve looked at that picture with both longing and an internal struggle. It speaks to me of the kind of permission to rest that too few people in this life, including me, feel they can allow themselves. I’ve been caring for others since I was four years old, when my younger sister was born, and when I look at that picture I see a moment for myself when everyone is fed and occupied, all the dishes are done, and the floor swept, the laundry folded and put away, the endless tasks of housekeeping and people-caring soothed and calmed and, for the moment, finished. Complete. It’s a moment that never comes.

Maybe it’s the pie plate that gets me. This woman has eaten, and has time to enjoy her book, and her coffee while it’s hot, and doesn’t even have to wash the plate. What a luxury.

I long for the moment in that picture nearly every day. It takes a lot of mental effort to give it to myself once in a while, breathe into the moment, any moment, even while the laundry remains overflowing and last night’s frying pan is waiting to be scrubbed and the peas need picking and the strawberries weeded and forms filled out and the bank account stressed over . . .

In the original draft of this, I followed that line with a list of all the things I’m behind on, everything that keeps piling up, but those details aren’t important. Each of you has your own list, your own burdens and worries and piles of laundry.

None of it will ever be caught up on permanently, much as I long for that moment, and in the midst of it all is my own work, which has been intensive for a while and will be for a few months more. An essay for this newsletter about the conflation of wealth and power that I keep needing to cut down (really, there’s no need to quote every book on this subject I’ve ever read but it’s hard, and do you really want to know exactly how Aristotle advised overthrowing oligarchy? yes, probably), essays for non-Substack outlets, and a lot of editing. A lot of editing.

Over the past six months I’ve been helping my friend Kathleen McLaughlin, longtime journalist and author of the fantastic book Blood Money, with a new anthology of essays by Montana writers she’s putting together for University of Oklahoma Press. It’s been a project she’s been shepherding for over two years and it’s finally taking “holy crap this is real” shape. I have an essay in it, but far more interesting to me is that I’ve been working with over twenty writers copy editing and helping develop their essays about Montana. In over twenty years of copy editing, which I mostly do for K-12 textbook publishers, it’s one of the most satisfying and challenging projects I’ve ever worked on.

It’s interesting being immersed in this editing just at the moment when what is marketed as artificial intelligence—but LLMs, or large language models, are not in fact anything of the sort, not yet—is being pushed as capable of taking over work like mine and I wonder, between rounds of essay edits, if I should take up the manager of the local tire shop on his persistent job offers. That job comes with health insurance and in America that’s far more precious than gold.

There are many levels to the speed of this technology’s adoption that are worrisome but out of my control, from people’s willingness to believe it truly is revolutionary simply because they’re told it is, to a complete bypassing of the reality that most of these systems are built entirely on stolen labor and stolen work—my book is among thousands used to train the LLMs with neither compensation nor my permission—and deployed not to improve people’s lives but to further bloat tech companies’ profits, to the deep, disturbing willingness to withdraw the possibility of creative work (much less income for it) from human beings who sorely need it.

A subscriber here once recommended this post to me, by science fiction and fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente, about artificial intelligence and creativity, that I’ve hung onto, while watching people who, for various reasons, justify the use of a product built on stolen labor and being used to replace the creative work not just of writing, but of editing:

“It can and will get ugly. But oh my god, people won’t stop writing or creating or performing, and they won’t stop coding, either, not the ones who love it and are passionate about it, certainly not because AOL Instant Essayist can, too. That shit is compulsive. From hands on a cave wall to these words on this screen, we cannot stop trying to express ourselves, and if one thing about our dumbfuck monkey dance on this call of salt will never change, it’s that. The unending plaintive scream of people trying to connect, to be heard, to be seen, to be known, to take what is inside us and make it manifest on the outside. . . .

Take away art and we’re going to art harder just to spite you.”

It’s also a really funny essay (while managing to be both slightly depressing in its realism and also empowering in its “fuck you we’re going to be human anyway” manifesto), so I’m going to quote another paragraph just because:

“This is not the optimistic part of the essay. Sorry. This the god dammit we spent literally all of science fiction telling you not to do this can you actually not for once part of the essay. Oh you’re definitely doing it anyway? And shoving me in my locker afterward? Perfect.”

For those who’ve never done it, this might be hard to believe, but editing is at least as creative as writing is. It is art. There is something almost indescribable about helping a writer tell their story or find how to say what they want to say in the best way possible, and in the way that is truest to who they are. It’s psychology and architecture, sociology and tailoring. It’s working with live wires of human storytelling all the damn time.

A writer I used to be friends with once told me that he thought my work as a copy editor simply involved “fixing commas and stuff.” I laughed, but was surprised at his assumption, since I figured he had to have worked with copy editors on his own writing once in a while. I do fix commas, true, but it’s a very small part of my job, which is far more about communication and storyweaving than it is about grammatical rules—which I know well enough to, frankly, not care. At least, not unless I’m being paid to. I’ll never correct your typos, unless you want to pay my hourly rate.

Copy editing is, for me and the copy editors I’m friends with, the people I respect, something far more in-depth. Something vibrant. It’s working with language at the level where it lives, before it gets pinned down in a dictionary like a butterfly specimen on a corkboard.

This really came home to me working on this recent project. So many writers, each with their own voice, style, strengths, and stories to tell. Editing is never just working with words or narrative; it’s approaching that narrative as an animal whom you have to get to know before touching. That animal could be affectionate, happy, traumatized, wild. Anything. The animal is alive and individual, their own self. That’s the point.

It’s working with who the writer of that narrative is, and the readers they want to reach. Sometimes, sadly to me, that means accepting when a writer is allergic to revision and balks at editorial feedback, meaning I only do the bare minimum. Frustrating, especially when there’s talent and potential, but I can’t force people to do their own stories credit. I just accept that they don’t want to know their work any more deeply than they want to know themselves and move on.

Other times, it’s the delight of working with someone who’s never published before and is eager to learn how to bring the best out of their own story in their own voice; or the delight of working with longtime, professional writers who feel the same. There are copy editors who will dictate to writers how to shape their story, but it makes me happy not to be one of them. It’s more fun.

This anthology project has eaten up an enormous amount of my time and energy over the past six or so months. It’s reminded me why I almost never teach or lead workshops: giving feedback in the way I do comes from the same creative place my writing does. I give of myself to other people’s work the same as I give of myself to my own writing, or to my kids, and I have to be careful with that. A couple of times I told Kathleen I had to take a break because my creative well was empty, and since she was of course doing even more work on the project than I was, she understood.

But it’s been far more of a gift to me. In the midst of a lot of personal and global turmoil, it has been a sheer pleasure to challenge myself, to be part of something I think is valuable and important, and to work intensively with such a large and varied group of writers, to be reminded that each one of them is an absolutely unique human being. As we all are.

It’s been both creatively fulfilling and soothing to my humanity—with each exchange and round of edits with each writer, with email conversations that veered into moments of shared experience and running jokes in their essays’ comments, I was reminded that there are no seething, personality-free masses of humanity, only people each with their immediate and intergenerational traumas, their struggles, hopes, memories, and battle-scarred heart.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the sound of a sandhill crane passing by, making me think of a few weeks ago when I heard my first of the spring as I waited in line at the tire shop before dawn to get my winter tires switched over and wondered if my ten-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it can handle another decade.

And earlier this week I came back from a self-guided Montana history trip with my younger kid (who’s been homeschooling this academic year) to meet the lilacs at home just beginning to open, and the two resident hummingbirds back in the caragana bushes. The tobacco plants and tomato starts thriving under the grow light my brother-in-law gave me, and the onion sets accusing me silently of neglect while the sweetgrass is thriving.

That night I stayed up to watch the full Moon rise in the southeast, an eerie green-blue glow through the night’s slight fog, the western sky still darkening from Sun who sets far too late this time of year for my taste, lover as I am of the cold and dark of winter.

It was, I’ve heard, a full Moon in Scorpio, a Moon for letting go, a release of what no longer works in our lives. I’ve got plenty of that, I thought, and hoped the murky moonlight would help some of it dissipate.

I have a new editing project starting just as this other one is finishing. It’s a book by someone I’ve worked with before on her audiobook, which I’ve often recommended, about algorithms and bias. She’s a roboticist who worked for NASA on the Mars Rover and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to know in this life. My creative editor self is excited to immerse in that work.

Her book? It’s about the promises, pitfalls, and prejudices of artificial intelligence, by someone who knows these technologies better than almost anyone else—and, unlike many of us who criticize them, loves them while being clear-eyed about their flaws and risks.

Talking about this project with her brought me back to Ursula Franklin’s book The Real World of Technology, based on her talk in the 1980s that was recommended to me ages ago by a subscriber here and has become one of my touchstones since then.

“While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing ‘it.’”

Enormous social mortgage. What of our future freedoms and choices do we give up with every unquestioned technology adoption? Who else’s choices and freedoms do we strip in the process without their consent?

In times of darkness as well as times of rapid change, having clarity can feel almost impossible. It’s one of the reasons that I wrote before last year’s U.S. presidential election that one factor many people were missing was keeping the right to protest at all, to fight back, something that is currently—and unsurprisingly—quickly being criminalized. What kinds of choices can you make when the rights you thought were foundational, at least in theory, are being broken up and carted away?

There are at least as many answers to this question as there are human beings alive at any given moment. My own is to look at my Russian-Jewish grandparents and the kinds of choices they made living under the authoritarian dictator Joseph Stalin.

But it’s valid to look also, I think, to that unique human gift of creativity. The messy, tangled, most often unproductive and unprofitable, process that has been somehow fundamental to the history of our entire species, across the planet and over hundreds of thousands of years. One of the answers to how one remains free is—thank you, Catherynne M. Valente—to art harder.

Until all the children in the world live without fear of hunger, violence, oppression, or abuse and every border is marked only by a tree, a greeting, and a bit of cultural orientation, claims of technological progress are, for the most part, mirages obscuring accumulation of wealth and profit. (I’m not talking about developments like vaccines. Vaccines are great, as are many other technologies. But technological “progress” is not the unmitigated good it’s assumed to be—see the entire century of building a car-centric world and the attendant pollution, severed communities, and human health consequences.) They might be developments most of us have no control over, but we can choose to keep our humanity as intact as possible.

I see no reason to give up writing or editing, even when so many believe the marketing hype that says LLMs can do those tasks just as well. I don’t, frankly, care whether they can or not. I care that people believing it’s true will probably eviscerate my ability to make a living doing something I love, but that won’t stop me from doing it. Storytelling, as I’ve written before, is for me paired with walking—a fundamental human experience, core to who we are as a species. I don’t intend on giving that up, even if I need to get a job at the tire shop to pay the rent and feed my kids. It’s not a bad job and the people there are nice.

Editing and writing are, for me, represented by that old birthday card above my desk. Every word considered or line scratched out in my notebook, every minute sitting with a writer’s essay and trying to sink into what it is they’re truly trying to say, and to whom, is a moment of rest, clarity, and the ineffable spark of insight. It’s life, interwoven with the hummingbird outside my window and the river that runs through town and the heartaches and losses and beauty of human experience. It’s connection to whatever it is that holds it all together—holds us, all, together.

It is my chance to live in the Artisans Cafe whenever and however I can.

My kid and I stopped in Missoula on our way home from the history trip, took a wander along the big-shouldered ponderosa pines of Maclay Flats and were rewarded with fresh beaver chew. Every moment of our lives is a struggle between contributing to technology’s social mortgage, which we can’t always escape, and . . . this.

The deep ethics of optimism

November 17, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

Swan Lake, Montana, nearing sunset, through the smoky haze of a nearby prescribed burn.

In 2016, a month or two before that year’s U.S. presidential election, I was at a two-week interdisciplinary artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Canada. We had dancers, writers, visual artists, actors, composers, and musicians in our group, with writer Pico Iyer, musician Richard Reed Perry (of Arcade Fire), and choreographer Christopher House leading workshops.

The residency was formed around the theme of the Art of Stillness, taken after Iyer’s recently-published book The Art of Stillness, with a series of weekend workshops on stillness open to the public—like forest bathing, a Japanese tea ceremony, concerts, and a series of talks on Deep Listening that might have contained one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had.

With Iyer, we discussed writing of stillness, and stillness practices. Perry had us listen to our own heartbeats and breathing through stethoscopes, and composed music based on the rhythms we tapped out.

It was a beautiful two weeks, easily the best residency I’ve ever been to. I attended another three-week writing residency in Banff two years later, and decided that interdisciplinary ones are far more inspiring. There’s a cross-seeding of creativity, of playing in unfamiliar forms like (for me) dance and composition. All of us who attended the Art of Stillness have stayed in touch over the years (one of our group, writer and physicist Wendy Brandts, passed away in 2022) and followed one another’s work. Stories shared in that group made their way into A Walking Life, and the book itself was largely shaped by the lessons I got to soak in for those two weeks.

Every morning, Christopher House offered a movement session before we each went off alone to studios to do our day’s work. I can’t remember what kind of music he played or if he gave us much direction in the dancing, but there was one line he repeated day after day, in those movement sessions and in his own presentations and workshops: “We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism.”

I wrote about that line off and on at the time, and remember posting something on Instagram the day of the presidential election with simply that line and a photo of the bitterly cold, snowy morning, Sun’s rise refracting off ice-glazed caragana branches.

That was in 2016.

I wrote about the deep ethics of optimism leading up to that election because I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I’ve thought about it frequently ever since and still don’t understand what it means. The deep ethics of optimism. What does it mean, what does it mean?

I have a feeling it’s the kind of idea I might have an epiphany about just moments before I die. I hope that moment is a long way off, but I look forward to it.

And it’s a thought I find myself wanting to share now and again. Maybe I’m hoping one of you will have an answer. Maybe I hope that for one of you it will be an answer—in the way that I say walking is, not something that gives an answer, but whose action, whose exploration, is an answer in itself.

We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism. Maybe it’s what brought me to writing more seriously about the commons—I’d published my first essay about the commons and land ownership in Aeon earlier that year. Freya Rohn, who writes the Ariadne Archive, recently sent me photos of “a list of women who were named as defying enclosure laws and were imprisoned and executed” in rebellions against enclosure—theft of commonly shared land in England—in 1589.

The optimism of the commons does not require building something new, but it does require an understanding of what has gone before. It needs us to see not only what has been lost, but that things haven’t always been this way. It’s why it was so important to me to write about centuries of violent rebellions against land enclosure in High Country News recently. The harsh restrictiveness of private property in land is very recent—while the same of ownership of people, especially women, and of food and seeds, is very old.

It is deeply ethical to ground yourself in the knowledge that humans have always, everywhere, shaped their worlds—our worlds—differently, have shaped them to treat animals with respect, revere trees, nurture kinship with rivers and springs, and at the same time care for people’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. To have, as my friend Sherri Spelic has written about with regards to education, Care at the Core, the kind of ethos that shaped economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model, meeting human needs without straining ecological limits.

Maybe optimism is misunderstood. Maybe this is about the deep ethics of knowing, not just believing, that there are better ways to live. That it is possible because it has happened, over and over.

Maybe the deep ethics of optimism is more about what we think of human nature. It can be, and obviously is, dire, cruel, selfish, abusive. But it is also reflective of what a society rewards, what culture cultivates. Humans evolved in community, in interdependence. We wouldn’t be the species we are if we hadn’t cared for one another for hundreds of thousands of years. The paleoanthropological records are clear on this. Hominins evolved within the necessity and ethos of care.

Which means we can, with intentional effort, reward and cultivate behavior that brings care back to the core of human life. Given where we are, that’s not easy. Given where we are, it might be hopeless.

But given where we are, I can’t accept giving up on humans’ capacity to do better. People have burned down their worlds, and others’, countless times throughout history. In such times, those who suffer most tend to be those who have always suffered most.

A friend recently sent me some photos of her visit to Kara E-Walker’s exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I misread text on the wall that read “A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler” as “A Respite for the Weary Time-Tender.” It felt a perfect word-shape to hold the increasing everyday stresses of lives even without considering war, genocide, climate change, and the power of billionaires.

A respite from tending to time, because we are weary.

We are weary. We need respite.

We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism. Maybe all it is is being alive, and loving this world with our whole hearts, despite everything that seeks to break us.

First snows! Looking out toward the peaks of Glacier National Park recently in Montana’s North Fork Valley. ☃️❄️🏔️

When you can’t walk away

December 1, 2023by Antonia Malchik2 Comments

A Walking Life starts with what mainstream news sources call a “refugee crisis.” I don’t like that term any more than I like the term “migrant”—I love the richness that words hold, the worlds they carry, but their ability to flatten is equally powerful. These are shorthands that limit how we think about one another: a crisis of refugees, or a crisis for people who’d been forced to become refugees?

The story was one that dominated news headlines in 2015: people fleeing war in Syria, on foot, stuck for a time in Hungary before being allowed to cross the Austrian border and on into Germany. Vienna, Austria-based BBC reporter Bethany Bell, an old friend of mine, was reporting from the border, where she sent me pictures of the piles of abandoned shoes “worn-out and inadequate to the monumental task they were being given,” I wrote. “In between interviewing refugees, Bell took pictures of bedraggled shoes and a prosthetic leg abandoned on the pavement. Another pile of donated shoes waited to be put to use.” In her interviews, she found an unexpected sense of hope, and, she told me,

“‘for me there was something deeply human in it. For all the things we create for ourselves, the homes we build, the lives, sometimes you just have to walk away.’

Walking is both our first step and last resort when fleeing war or persecution. A refugee doesn’t have the luxury of restraining his step with respect to political margins.”

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin wrote recently about the line a lot of us living in . . . let’s say “politically challenging” places hear on a regular basis: why don’t you just leave? Which not only, as she points out, ignores financial and other constraints, but also, as she also points out, ignores the reality that harmful or violent politics don’t stop at borders.

The spectrum of who flees, who’s forced out, who’s being put at grave risk by staying, and who stays to fight no matter what the cost, is vast. It’s determined by factors that accumulate and pull on one another and is, in the end, beyond anyone else’s individual judgment. Not everyone can leave. Not everyone is allowed to stay.

All I can personally say is that the story of whether or not one leaves a home, and how, and what level of choice is or is not involved, is the story of humanity. It is in this particular story that my writing about walking and my interest in private property intersect most profoundly, and in ways that often surprise me.

A couple of weeks ago I came across an article some of you might have seen, about a database compiled by The Atlantic of the books used to train generative-AI systems. I figured my book had to have been used, along with the 20 years’ or so worth of writing I have online, since last winter my spouse put my name into ChatGPT and said, “Look! It can write an essay in your style!” (This conversation did not go well, though I think we eventually got to the point of me being able to explain why the last thing in the world I want is a machine to do my writing for me, especially one that’s stolen my work to do so.)

Sure enough, A Walking Life is in the database. It winded me a bit to see it verified.

To be clear, the copyright issue is the least of my concerns. If you want to go to a local library and photocopy every page of A Walking Life and pass it around to people who want to read it, I’d actually be thrilled. That is, after all, how my father and his family read Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, though photocopiers were highly controlled and only in government offices and a bureaucrat risked his life to get those stories out into regular people’s hands. The more copies of my book are purchased, in whatever form, the happier (theoretically) my publisher is and the better chance I have of selling them or someone else on another one, but it’s far more important to me that people read it than that those reads show up in the graph provided for me in my publisher’s author portal.

It’s a completely different thing to have a multi-billion or -jillion or whatever-dollar company steal my work and then use it to both make more profit for itself, and to put other writers and artists out of work.

It’s also impossible to disentangle complaints about AI and other digital tech from the long history of technology being used to deliver more profits to a few, steal masses of people’s labor, and provide lower-quality services and products to people paying for them, along with building unjust and destructive structures that humanity and the rest of life simply have to live with going forward as best we can. Roads, highways, and automobiles are the examples I usually bring up but there are plenty of others. In A Walking Life I wrote about the Luddites, who are usually characterized as anti-technology but weren’t that at all. What they objected to was being forced out of their jobs—with no compensation or safety net—by machine adoption that made more money for the factory owner while also producing shoddier products.

Luddite poster art from Justseeds.org, spotted in a Butte, Montana, art gallery last summer.

It’s not about whether technology exists or not. It’s about how it’s used, its effects on people and ecosystems—the energy and water consumption of AI and data centers is absolutely staggering—and whether its role in the world is to contribute to life’s well-being or make it worse.

“The planning structure always fits well into the needs of the powerful,” said physicist and technology philosopher Ursula Franklin in a series of 80s-era lectures (undying gratitude to Jake for sending them to me; they’re amazing). “It rarely fits well into the needs of the powerless, and that is where the struggle sits.”

She gave that lecture long before talks of artificial intelligence became rampant, but whether we’re talking about AI, highway systems, railways, or the mills and machines that powered the Industrial Revolution, her questions hit home:

“Do people matter, or are people in the way? The technology will come once we make the decision whether indeed people matter or whether they are just in the way, and you design more and more stuff to make more and more people unnecessary, unneeded, and redundant. Don’t ask what benefits. Ask whose benefits, whose costs.”

The theft of my book, which took years of research and writing to produce, hasn’t done anything to improve my life, and I doubt it has anyone else’s, but it’s certainly contributed to someone acquiring just that bit more wealth, which can then be used, as wealth always has been, to tip the scales of injustice a little bit more in their favor. My cost, their benefit. That is what enclosure is, both historically and currently: taking that which was in use by all or already belonging to someone in one form or another, and making it your own for the purposes of private profit.

Neither I nor any other writer or artist has been given a choice in the matter, nor can we disentangle ourselves from the systems we’re being frog-marched into, not unless we give up creating entirely. And I can’t think of a single writer I know who would even consider that. We create because we can’t help it, because it brings us joy, because to not do so would be to flee one of the things that makes us feel most alive.

“There is no reason,” I wrote in A Walking Life,

“why our online lives can’t be used as a tool to enrich our restored communities, no reason why we can’t recover from the flu with some good friends bringing us soup and others bolstering our spirits through Instagram.”

Which, in my feverish and brain-fogged state when I came down with Covid last week—a week after getting a third booster shot!—I was delighted to notice was exactly what happened: A friend came by and left a jar of soup and some leftover huckleberry galette by my door. My brother-in-law offered to drop off more turkey broth. Another friend brought me groceries on her way home from work at the rail yard and included a bar of nice chocolate she knows I like.

And then a friend online, whose newsletter Berkana is one of the most beautiful and thoughtful on Substack, sent me a short video of someone making turmeric chai that was so soothing to listen to and watch I let it loop several times before realizing it was something I could actually do (the brain fog of this virus is very, very real for me). So I made some and drank it and did so again in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and you know what? I felt better the next day!

A Walking Life is about a lot of things, but at its core it’s about being fully alive beings on a fully alive planet. Walking leads us into every one of these subjects because walking is how we evolved. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it’s what makes us human. And it’s what can shine a light most clearly on the barriers that have been placed to prevent our full exploration of that humanity.

The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has filed a class-action lawsuit against several of the companies who’ve used published books to train AI. I gather some of the basis for the complaint is that the content was scraped from a site of pirated works. I’m curious where the lawsuit will lead, though it’s currently only for fiction and I’m not going to get too hung up on its potential. For nonfiction writers and others not immediately affected by the lawsuit but whose work is in the database, the Guild encourages us to write letters to the companies involved and provides a form for that purpose.

Which honestly made me laugh. I appreciate the thought but have better things to do with my day than beg any one of these enormously wealthy and powerful people to please not steal my work to make themselves richer. I can spend that time making more turmeric chai, for example. Or sewing up the hole in my kid’s blanket. Or writing a letter to my county commissioners about their gutting of the county library system, which I doubt they’ll care about but at least they’ll read (maybe). Or I could go for a walk.

These huge, systemic problems can’t be solved by piecemeal approaches, and in any case my focus is on the deeper structures that make the harms possible. Technology has been used both to improve human and non-human life for millennia, and it has been used to control and destroy it far more often. It depends on who benefits, who pays the costs, and who decides.

Perhaps most damaging of all, it’s been used to determine what we think we can imagine: a way of being in the world and living together that’s not determined by the control, power, and ownership of a very few. A world where food, shelter, health, soul-fulfillment, relationships, and even the joyful gifts of creativity are not dependent on tricking us into thinking we can only succeed in competition with one another.

I want us to unburden ourselves at the very least of restrictions around what we conceive as possible, and to contemplate a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations.

Someone’s been updating the No Trespassing signs on the fencing around the rail yard in town.