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Issue 15

Beacons

We Be Imagining partnered with Logic to create what the scholar and organizer Seeta Peña Gangadharan calls “a body of work that cannot be ignored.” This special issue of the magazine presents a collection of interdisciplinary essays, interviews, poetry, and visual art that offers a material strategy and vision for abolitionist technologies. At a time when despair about our technological future has reached a high, the issue aims to go beyond mere critique to serve as a beacon of new possibilities.

editorial

A Body of Work That Cannot Be Ignored

J. Khadijah Abdurahman

What does it mean to “Get Out!” in the twenty-first century? How do we build fugitive technologies?

chatlogs

Technologies of Black Freedoms: Calling On Black Studies Scholars, with SA Smythe

Refusing to see like a state.

(dis)Info Studies: André Brock, Jr. on Why People Do What They Do on the Internet

A conversation about the unholy trinity of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism.

Organizing as Joy: An Ocean-Hill Brownsville Story, with Tranae Moran and Fabian Rogers

A conversation about dismantling surveillance the Brooklyn way.

Holding to Account: Safiya Umoja Noble and Meredith Whittaker on Duties of Care and Resistance to Big Tech

Critique and capture in the strange space of “AI ethics.”

features

The Oversight Bloc

Lilly Irani, Khalid Alexander

An investigation into how tech workers and community organizers fought the San Diego surveillance state.

Sex Workers Unite

Selena the Stripper

Building a sex-worker-owned platform.

Family Units

Julian Posada

The communities behind the data annotation work that powers AI.

Disrupting the Garden Walls

DJ Savarese

An inquiry into the technologies of speech-based societies.

assets

Ontology of God and Other Poems

Justin Rovillos Monson

A series of poems clocking the commonplace and the sacred, with a foreword by Joshua Bennett.

Account Withheld: A Kashmir Story

Malik Sajad

A graphic story about internet shutdowns in Kashmir.

included zine

Beyond Dark Matter

Neta Bomani, Romi Ron Morrison, Sabii Borno

A tween zine about time traveling and overthrowing master technologies.

Cover by Cy X.

First edition of Issue 15: Beacons released December 25, 2021.