Meditations on Life and Logic(s)

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Ginjo, Jimma, Oromia Region, Ethiopia. Courtesy of the author. :::

This essay is part memoir, quarterly report, love letter and mourning. I hope it provides context for the challenges and successes we have faced as an organization since re-launching as Logic(s) plural in 2022. This marks the end of our brief hiatus, in addition to digitally publishing pieces commissioned for issue 24, we are launching a podcast this fall. If you’re interested in supporting our mission, please either contribute directly with our new fiscal sponsor, Aspiration Tech using this link to our Commit Change portal. Aside from financial support , please let us know if you’re including Logic(s) articles in your syllabus or community organizing. We’re also soliciting letters to the editor or other volunteer contributions aligned with Logic(s) mission while we’re seeking to restore previous levels of funding. Contact us via grow at logicmag dot io with submissions or further questions.

Where you really from?

I grew up in a franchise of national behavior modification centers¹ on the east coast of the United States with kids ages 4-21 years old. Reading was banned and the few notebooks we were allowed had numbered pages to ensure that we were not engaging in unauthorized writings on torn out sheets. On the infrequent occasion I was granted leave for a weekend, I made my way to 125th street to cop mixtapes and browse the book tables. In the early 2000s, tables swelling with books were bifurcated between Bishop TD Jakes, Sista Souljah, 48 Laws of Power and Push by Sapphire on one side then Henry Louis Gates, Cornell West and Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverley Daniel Tatum on another. If I had some change I’d cop across the dimensions of black life and if not just browse, thumbing the covers marveling at Baldwin’s economy of language. Any books I was able to buy would have to be read as fast as possible before the Sunday afternoon run back to Port Authority. Until they instated strip searches, I would duct tape the CDs tight to my stomach like a binder with a loose hoodie to escape detection during the checks conducted for off-campus returns.

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Harlem Book Fair (2015). Courtesy of Courier Newsroom. :::

I always imagine the crack epidemic like sledgehammer to windshield glass, fractal consequences infinitely branching out everywhere all at once; each set of splinters forming a family tree. In school you could feel some of what divided those 125th street book tables, the buildings stocked with foster kids whose rights to their family were legally terminated. The echo of courtroom gavels reverberating into their severed lives. We all attended “school,” in a one story cinder block structure equipped with two quiet rooms. Every day from when I entered at 12 years old until I left for a stint at a step-down program at 16, we would hear somebody’s baby screaming from within one of the quiet rooms for a mommy the courts decided they’d never see again.

Making eye contact with or verbally commenting on a child in the quiet room or spread-eagle in 5-point restraints as we navigated the corridor could get you points deducted or placed into something called a “Training Setting” where you were banned from speaking or doing anything besides sitting for at least 24-48 hours. Before behavioral psychologists encoded social media with nudges, Pavlovian notifications and engagement loops, modernized residential schools implemented token economies. There are other types of programs in the industry based on 12 steps and wilderness programs but the vast majority are behavior modification centers predicated on some version of a token economy. The way it was implemented within the center where I spent the majority of my time, was that there were four “earnable” tokens per hour; we carried around our half letter sized sheets everywhere we went for the staff to grade hourly. Within the program, daily and weekly percentages of earned tokens would ultimately determine your level and therefore what access to privileges and punishments you’d receive. Beyond this, token performance could shape how children whose parental rights were terminated were marketed to potential therapeutic foster homes and whether or not discharge planning would be initiated. The younger kids didn’t have the developmental capacity to work toward such temporally distant rewards so they were given Twinkies, Ho Hos and other processed pastries as more tangible and immediate prizes throughout the day. In combination with the ubiquitous use of atypical antipsychotics, morbid obesity became uniform². What they tracked as the token economy driven “reduction in behaviors,” is more accurately understood as brute pacification akin to slotting any child old enough to sit up, in front of a tablet.

With this as my adolescent backdrop, I was rendered speechless by the embedding of similar logics within luxury wearables. Dopamine hits when reaching physiological benchmarks, nudging into eye contact in service of biometric verification and withholding of congratulatory animations when dark patterns are evaded have an uncanny parallel with the tactics of places where disabled people, adoptees and former foster youth are warehoused. In her prescient examination of the social implications of public sector adoption of automated decision systems, Virginia Eubanks argues that “poor and otherwise marginalized people live in the surveillance future.” There are analytical merits to the colonial boomerang concept, for example the predictive risk modeling was experimentally deployed in family policing prior to programs purporting to calculate the risk of child abuse among all families issued a birth certificate, including middle class white people who have historically low exposure to this mode of police intrusion. However, as privacy researcher Chris Gilliard emphasizes in his work, the difference between an Apple Watch and a court sanctioned ankle monitor are nominal. In fact, the way electronics are branded as elite expands surveillant capacities because of people who opting-in to perceived upward social mobility.

This was under Bush 2’s Jesus Camp era so we’d read Christian prayers carved on wooden blocks in the cafeteria before each meal. I learned salad meant drenched in mayo or suspended in Jello. It was torturous to be placed on medications that made you pathologically hungry and confront what looked like inedible science experiments at each meal. For refusing to eat the food or drink the carton of school milk that accompanied each meal, I spent the better part of the first year in the quiet room. The quiet room looked like a bathroom stall with no fixtures, just a drain in the center of the floor and a CCTV camera in a plexiglass box on the ceiling. The door only had a handle on the outside; a staff member would hold it shut watching you on the TV. No matter how many hours I spent inside, I was able to hold my urine but almost every day you’d see a little kid mopping up their pee after finally being granted release. Locals apparently were appalled by the conditions of the school so staff were recruited from Canada. They were also systematically rotated to new groups every 3-4 months so that we didn’t form a bond and therefore “game the system.”

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Poster for the 2006 film Jesus Camp. :::

We called it school for lack of a better word but its “individualized” programming typically meant textbook variety packs were handed out and we’d sit in front of them until it was time for the next class. Most of the kids had learning disabilities and almost all of us were on high doses of the atypical antipsychotic, Risperidone. It was only years later that the new type of rapid cycling pediatric bipolar disorder which pathologized any affective response as symptoms came under heavy scrutiny. Revelations arose that the director of Harvard Child Psychiatry was receiving kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies—and Johnson and Johnson in particular. Subsequently, off-label prescribing of Risperidone to transitioned away from pediatrics to the elderly mirroring the market sequencing of the infamous opioid Oxycontin a generation later. Due to this sharp rise in overdiagnosis and off-label prescribing of atypical antipsychotics to children with the diagnosis, the 5th edition of the DSM created a new diagnostic category, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder but it is unclear whether it actually accounted for lowering rates of antipsychotic prescriptions. Between the drugs and the trauma, my memory of this period is patchwork yet I also can never forget it. It’s what shaped my relationship to learning and much later when I got the opportunity, formally producing knowledge within institutions.

Locating the Logic(s) universe

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Covers of Logic(s) issues: Supa Dupa Skies, Out of Place, Policy: Seductions and Silences, Medicine & The Body, and Beacons: A Body of Work That Cannot Be Ignored. :::

These life experiences shaped the contours of Logic’s relaunch as Logic(s), the first queer black and Asian tech magazine. People who are traditionally excluded even from indie publications including: sex workers, a nonspeaking autist³, black kids locked up in Birmingham, Alabama wearing gym uniforms emblazoned with Confederate president Jefferson Davis on the front in collaboration with Radical Reversal, young Gazan journalists joining Zoom calls with rubble in the background and always the violent hum of drones, have been featured within our pages. In the academy, these are voices sometimes “centered,” out of some ethical tithing or additive data points from hard to access native informants but within the Logic(s) universe they are invited to contribute conceptually alongside academics from elite universities. This is part of what it means for the researched to become researchers in the vein of Indigenous scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s vision of Decolonizing Methodologies.

Likewise, critical analysis about artificial intelligence and its social implications are excavated through graphic stories, speculative fiction, interviews and fashion as much as the traditional long form essay. I championed my editorial vision with over 65 contributors over the course of 4 issues and more than a dozen orgs and independent researchers were given $5k-$10,000 of seed funding. In addition we coordinated three fellowships: one for Palestinian Journalists in collaboration with the Arab Reform Initiative, 16 editors representing every continent except Antarctica and another for engineers and computer scientists to translate their work into popular writing with Chris Dancy at Penn State University. We made an active effort to get as many resources to as many people across as many continents as possible at every stage of the game. On top of all this, we piloted a translation program that focused on translating from English to languages like Tamil, and Afaan Oromo or to English from Palestinian Arabic like this series of poems written live from Gaza by Anees Ghanima.

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Flyer from the Logic(s) Palestinian Journalist Fellowship in collaboration with Arab Reform Initiative, featuring Eman Alhaj Ali and Hamza M. Salha. :::

The typical academic biography listing university affiliations, publications and positions doesn’t suffice for us. Against the grain of cosmopolitanism, we ask people who they are in relation to the story they are claiming to tell. This doesn’t mean that people must be enclosed within some imagined authenticity, or a filial cage not permitted to write about anything outside of their own lived experience. Rather, it means that there’s a responsibility to address the politics in your own backyard as Dalit scholar Shaista Aziz-Patel has so eloquently articulated. Maybe within your white dominated computer science department, you can get away with anchoring your self-narration as an immigrant woman of color full stop, but Logic(s) doesn’t allow Brahminism⁴ to be omitted. Opportunities you’ve been allowed to accrue at the expense of caste-oppressed people is part of the story and therefore initiates a vetting on our end, constituting part of our internal editorial process. It only becomes possible to market yourself as a “vulnerable person of color,” while leveraging your father’s connections as a former agent for India’s Research and Analysis Unit to access Kashmiris in an Occupied Clinic when the illusion of the Lockean individual is enshrined within institutional mechanisms for distributing knowledge. People say, “the daughter shouldn’t pay for the sins of the father,” in order to disarm the kinds of critique of positionality and power a collective and genealogical lens makes legible.

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The Shankala section of The Map of Ethiopia by Hiob Ludolf and Abba Gorgoryos (1683). :::

Likewise, many of my fellow second-generation African immigrants have embraced Afropessimism paradoxically as a method of evading histories of slavery back home. Ritually reciting, “the world is founded on antiblackness,” while relying on the ignorance of an audience who doesn’t know that the category Habesha you belong to was constituted through the enslavement of indigenous peoples throughout the Ethiopian Empire. As early as the 17th century⁵, an Abyssinian monk collaboratively designed a map of Ethiopia with Orientalist Hiob Ludolf in Rome that designated Abyssinian Christian supremacy in contrast to the pejorative labels of galla and shankala, which in turn contributed to European conceptions of Africa more broadly. To be clear, there is no genealogical essence or dasein determining complicity, but identification is not a matter of individual choice. For better and worse, it’s a function of collective belonging. So yes, the world is founded on antiblackness but racialization encompasses origin stories outside of the new world. It’s always fuck white supremacy but we argue that requires attention to how that variable manifests at different levels. For example, France through forced repayment of “independence debt,” and the US through layers of disaster capitalism ravaging Haiti since its revolution. And, but, also, a core site of antihaitianismo is the Dominican Republic⁶ and its diaspora.

If you’re writing about the Horn of Africa or Nigeria, we are going to ask you about the contours of slavery⁷, and differently manifested modes of antiblackness within those geographic contexts like the Hausa-Fulani colonialism by proxy of the Middle Belt under British indirect rule as described by Moses E. Ochuno. Within the current publishing landscape—indie magazines included— these demands are rarely made, instead their elisions are invited and rewarded. It is incredible that Sylvia Wynter selected a text about the Oromo’s indigenous institution for democracy—Gadaa—as a central pillar for conceptualizing Black studies. To this day, few share her commitment to citational breadth or the priority she places on continental Africa. However, the text by Eritrean anthropologist, Asmarom Legesse that she cites⁸ first in 1990 in Do Not Call Us Negroes, then later in “No Humans Involved:” An open letter to my colleagues, On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being of Desetre and throughout her career, is his 1973 text where he repeatedly refers to the Oromo as galla. As depicted on the map Abba Gorgyros co-created with Orientalist Hiob Ludolf, galla is a pejorative racial category or slur the Habesha manufactured for the Oromos in order to justify their enslavement and land dispossession. As Rizvana Bradley discusses in her urgent new book, Anteaesthetics, “Hortense Spillers has stressed the importance of a hermeneutic attuned to “intramural dynamics of alterity … that would account for the ‘secret’ text… [of black life] in a world of keen ears, of decisively configured discursive interests.” The capacity to attune to these intramural dynamics is still limited today due to how few Oromos operate within the academy and how systematically black African indigeneity is conceptually denied more broadly. African immigration to the US prior to 1990, privileged elites who typically understood their positionality as orthogonal to African Americans as compared to increasing numbers of new arrivals to the US who comparatively identify with the experiences of people who descend from middle passage trafficking. The alterity of the black intramural dynamically cuts both ways. In a collective memoir of Swarthmore’s struggle to found a Black studies department, one alumni recounts:

“Professor Asmarom Legesse was the only black faculty member during this period. Perhaps because of concerns raised by SASS, he was hired for a temporary position for the 1967-68 year and later received tenure. As an African, he had not grown up with American racism, yet he was expected to be the voice of the African American students. He was a friend to many of the black students and did an admirable job as liaison to our organization during the College’s “Crisis.” As a non-tenured faculty member, he took considerable risk in his public support of our organization. Like some white professors who had publicly expressed admiration for how we had conducted ourselves, he did not endorse our tactics, but he urged the faculty and administration to rise above their personal indignation and listen to our well-presented positions.”

This secret text subtends narration of blackness as monolithic and pre-differentiated. Secrecy is also maintained by those who benefit from concealment. Disaggregating racial categories renders legible political genealogies that would be inconvenient to those representing themselves as freedom fighters grown from concrete all the while being beneficiaries of slave ownership since the trans-Saharan.

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Swarthmore’s Black Cultural Center (1969). :::

Can the subaltern shut the fuck up

In the years that have elapsed since my pilgrimages to 125th book tables, the bifurcation has deepened into what feels like an unbridgeable chasm. Baldwin marks the outer limits of when the Black intelligentsia primarily lived among the black masses they wrote about. But it’s not enough to comment on this as a class divide. My colleague and big brother Andre Brock talks to me about the homegrown negro problem. We remember Baldwin saying what he appreciated about his adopted country is “that it left him alone.” African Americans that fought for and founded Black Studies at the tail end of Great Migration are now systematically unrepresented. My fellow second generation African immigrants are there instead alongside 2nd and 3rd gen Caribbeans and yet few critical analyses of Africa exist or perhaps controversially are permitted within the places we are present. I agree with Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson’s refusal to turn away from the stench of the shit and the vomit in the hold but in the same vein why isn’t the crack epidemic and the generations of black children systematically separated from their families since the passage of Adoption and Safe Families Act, the focal point of any analytical repertoire? If critical confabulation is required why is there such disinterest in those borne of fetal teratogens from which the clinical term, confabulation emerges⁹ from? Or at a different register, why not return to Drew Ali’s Moorish Temple, Mohammed Ali’s declaration of being, “an Asiatic Black Man,” if instead of what white people call lies, we understand that some of us, “be telling stories;” why is the space ceded to the wayward limited so respectable? Why wayward b it not niggas?¹⁰

In critical tech parlance, they/we are “impacted people,” living demonstrations of what a predictive risk assessment like COMPAS can do; their sole contribution is expanding the empirical archive, manifesting rhetorical flourish; or an opening anecdote to make dry research “more colorful.” Christina Sharpe prefaces In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, with a reflection on a nephew adopted from foster care, thoughtfully pausing saying this is not her story to tell. At certain registers, that kind of decisive silence is honorable and needed, too many have denied adoptees and former foster kids the rights to their own story. However, conversely this kind of silence doesn’t undo the need to theoretically integrate the auction block within the contemporary family regulation system to our conceptions of blackness. Or to return to a different part of the black studies canon, sometimes the intellectual task is in the streets, the jobless are your colleagues whether they are the intended recipients of your letter or not. At a Malcolm X Grassroots dinner in ‘92, Tupac Shakur reminded elders that after the Black political leadership of the ‘60s and ‘70s went to penitentiary or the suburbs, his mother Afeni Shakur stayed home to put ideas in his head; it was Malcolm before the Nation of Islam, when he was a pimp and all that, that gave them a pack, taught them how to flip it, saying ‘that’s how you get back at the white man’ [when the middle class abandoned the hood.] He goes on to say,” there’s still a war going on like it was during your time but that was BC, “before crack.” Shattered glass on the road from Black Studies to black study.

In discussion with Imani Perry about two of his books, Being Property Once Myself and Owed, Joshua Bennett emphasizes how great poets within the Black tradition foregrounded teaching. He points to how the dissolution of Black open school projects like Poetry of the People in Berkeley and Gwendolyn Brook’s work with the Black Stone Rangers in Chicago, led us to “miss a ton of what makes Black poetry important and relevant, which is its really to give a set conceptual tools to young people, for poesis, for making new visions of themselves and also a vision of Black associationalism or Black institutions for the future that they too can then build up.” He connects this to a demand for Black aliveness because what is the point of the work unless it matters? And what is the point unless that mattering is for generations? Similarly, Dionne Brand¹¹ asks, “what is language if it doesn’t move?” She contrasts this to the logics of capital, “which can’t imagine trees except for lumber¹².” More violent than capital reducing us to purported use value in the way Brand eloquently describes, is how it hails out people swelling prison cells, as those without any value at all. In contrast, Bennett’s introduction to incarcerated poet, Justin Rovillos Monson in our landmark issue, Beacons: a body of work that cannot be ignored states, “There is no living poet, to my mind, that is writing quite the way Justin is about the interior life of mass incarceration. That is, how it feels to both be rendered physically invisible by the fact of one’s containment, and, to riff on Du Bois, to be the problem on everyone’s mind.” Like a call and response, in his poem, Ontology of God Monson writes:

::: verse       We want to shake off the slough of our numbered bodies            hieroglyphs               in our skin sluiced onto the floor. We want to live in a space :::

Researched becoming the researchers

The byword of academia is publish or perish, not read or die. The COVID shelter-in-place orders in the western world led to a proliferation of online talks and open access publications but paradoxically there’s no proportionate interest in the archives. Within technical fields we saw an early adoption of generative AI despite the presumed advantage in grasping the negative downstream impacts; combined with the use of Large Language Models to summarize key insights from the literature in lieu of actually reading texts, the resultant incuriosity is valorized as pragmatic and optimal. Exhortations for slow reading in Black studies are sometimes instrumentalized to ward off engagement with the primary texts and their contexts. On one hand, I am awed at how a very small handful of scholars, mainly but not only Black women, have forged a universe in which one can immerse themselves in black scholarship without having to be dragged down into what Maya Angelou described as the racist tedium where one must evidence a disavowal of every colonial claim levied against you. On the other hand, as Mark Christian Thompson points out in Phenomenal Blackness, a substantial portion of African American radical thought is informed by and in response to theory from the European interwar period. Recognizing for example, the Derridean origin of a concept like “emancipation as an ideal perpetually yet to come,” requires a broader vantage point than the call for close reading ultimately entails. Frantz Fanon and his work remains important now more than ever but he cannot serve as the exclusive representative of African scholarship. Yes, “there’s no romantic past to return to,” but the people being conjured here as nothing more than past tense romantic fantasies are, in fact, here and alive now. This denial of coevalness is why late Oromo musician, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa sung Malaan Jirra, which loosely translates to “we [the indigenous people within the Ethiopian Empire] exist,” or “what existence is mine¹³?”

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Ethiopian musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa poses while dressed in a traditional costume during the 123rd anniversary celebration of the Battle of Adwa, where Ethiopian forces defeated invading Italian forces, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 2, 2019. Reuters/Tiksa Negeri. :::

African pastoral nomadic peoples like the Oromo have refined a model of collectively managing ecological risk through the distribution of cattle across the society (as they periodically cycle across different locations) reaching back to at least 1850-1550 BCE during the Nubian C-Group’s resistance to Egyptian colonization, as examined at length by LaShayla Monroe in, Colonizing Cattle: The Zooarchaeology of a Military Frontier in the Egyptian-Nubian Borderlands. Within the logics of contemporary automated decision systems, risk is understood to be either endogenous to a subject or spatial location—and therefore to be contained through the withholding of resources or the provision of sanctions. In contrast, pastoral nomadic groups understood the cyclical volatility of desertification, flooding and other environmental sources of chaos to be invariant or expected over time and sought to manage this risk through the annual re-allocation of land, gifting of cattle to solidify non-familial relationships and flexibly timed movement across lands over the course of a calendar year. The latter practice where livestock is seasonally moved between fixed pastures is known as transhumance. The resonance with people who move across gender assignations or Trans people is not just a coincidence born of language games. The fixity of assignations whether gender or address is closely entwined the bureaucracy of centralized states from which formalized writing systems originate. Monroe’s research suggests that the Nubian C-group for example ultimately divested from Middle Kingdom Egypt in order to rid itself of surveillance of which hieroglyphics were a major contribution.

The alternate mechanisms of intergenerational knowledge transmission they adopted in opposition to writing weren’t just, “oral,” as blanketly categorized in anthropological engagements and European travelogues. A complex web of ritualized kinesthetic, calendrical and spoken performances animated modes of gender and remembering that was fluid and affirming of bodies collectively on the move. Another vantage point from which this can be appreciated within contemporary practices comes from Gemetchu Megerssa’s discussion of gender in Oromo cosmology. As explained to him by an elder, Bulee Guyoo¹⁴, “Taking rain as an example, all phenomena undergo processual change from one gender to another. ‘When rain is still a cloud,’ he says, ‘it is referred to as isa [he/masculine]. When it becomes water and begins to flow down, as long as it remains between the cloud and the ground, it is referred to as isaan [they]. Once the rain touches the ground and enters the soil, it becomes isii’ [she/feminine]. The neuter gender is, thus, that which occurs in-between things.” The violent mode of gender assignation slavery wrought¹⁵ was as much about displacing the fluid capacities they found among indigenous people as it was about forcing rigid configurations in the plantations, militaries and homes of slave owners. These alternate reservoirs of meaning making, being and time are not virginal imagined communities of the past, they are battle tested (and contested) social institutions that co-exist with western modernity in the present. With undermining of liberal expertise via cloud services and predictive models, there is a defensive tendency to reclaim traditional bulwarks of liberalism even under the guise of “imagining an otherwise,” but receptivity to indigenous histories and approaches can give us a much more expansive set of alternatives.

If technology is the enactment of man’s agency and intelligence, the indigenous, the whore, the convict or the dropout symbolize the absence of intelligence and agency. Upending these constructions with the production of the magazine and the programming that orbits around it has been very cathartic. However, interdisciplinary research is an extremely labor intensive project that requires substantially more time than traditional scholarship¹⁶. Recruitment into the professoriate, funding decisions, publications all incentivize the latter and this is before taking into account the kind of reversal we have been attempting in terms of historically excluded peoples and expertise. Surveying the publishing landscape, almost every single company is led by white people and few engage in the level of editing and research support we have endeavored to provide. Instead they rely on a now diminishing ecosystem of philanthropically funded fellowships or research programs that provided developmental editing mechanisms for authors (often diluting analysis in the name of “alignment editing”). There are also the informal networks of credit and social capital mediated by caste and ethnicity that go unnamed but serve as institutional and social prostheses despite the illusion of the individual applicant.

To be honest, pulling together a project of this scale given not just the asymmetry of resources but the active hostility from many corners began to weigh heavily on me last year. To further complicate things, I had broken up with an Oromo academic who hunted me for months, commissioned people to follow me, sent death threats, recruited soldiers and intelligence agents into a war that culminated in my two week imprisonment in rural Ethiopia last summer. My crippled self was hospitalized multiple times during that period which allowed me to send an SOS text to some academics who eventually formed a transnational group chat and campaigned for my release. Learning this as I got out filled me with tentative gratitude. I was incarcerated in a part of Ethiopia known to be lawless compounded by a rainy season where usual operations were suspended. I had gone to the police station to submit a statement and when I was pulled into what felt like a storage closet with nothing but a cheap mumu pulled over a desk, I didn’t realize I was even in court until they said guyyaa kudha afur or in English, the 14 days I was initially being sentenced to. I could have been held indefinitely within a squalid country prison where two sheep ate from giant piles of refuse if it wasn’t for this windfall of support. However, their initial assumption was that I was a political prisoner and I understood that the discovery that I had actually been charged with infidelity in violation of local morality laws rubbed up against academic respectability politics. One professor who helped organize my release declared in frustration that the members of the “save Khadijah group chat,” could have been their tenure letter writers. A $200,000 donation I secured to tide Logic(s) over in our departure from Columbia was administratively delayed while a professor calculated whether my reputation was more liability than benefit post-incarceration. In the words of an African-American proverb, I found myself, “out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

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Jimma Police Station. :::

University labor is so deeply filtered by economic and other types of privilege that there are even special programs for people whose only marginalization is being the first generation to have attended. But my story isn’t nicely contained in a neat little box, I’m inconveniently crippled, taking the Zoom call from the hospital while my son gets chemo or while I was septic with polynephritis the first year producing Logic(s) myself after the managing editor I secured a two-year postdoctoral position for took the money and dipped; pushing my body to its outer limits. I’m always under investigation, receiving death threats, being accused of being an Oromo terrorist, the main character of someone’s academic listserv because despite their best efforts I won’t simply die off. I press all of my body weight against the levers of administrative bureaucracy trying to get money to an intermediary because Sudan is a sanctioned country, or to Gaza after even the Somali hawalla closed, for so and so, so she doesn’t lose her SSI, or trying to send to his baby moms because there’s no way to wire to this prison. I demand that everybody else does too, I act like it’s obvious because it is. How are we supposed to understand carceral technologies without the inmates, the psych hospitalized or make the transnational linkage between Palestine, Tigray and Sudan with only the diaspora but anytime I pause for another breath here go the chorus: “that’s just not how it’s done,”…we made an exception last time but now you have to follow the appropriate procedure.” Everybody fucks with me because I read real good; irritatingly better and deeper than them, but let a whore consume too much administrative overhead, you get tossed with disgust like a used condom.

Rebuilding the University From the Inside Out

The point is not that the ivory tower must tithe, or ascetically sacrifice per se, it’s that Logic(s) is an attempt to re-build the university from the inside out. The elitist colonial nature of the university isn’t Newton’s 5th law; there are legitimate opportunities to do things better and different. Jarvis Givens reminds us in Fugitive Pedagogy, of the illegal schools dug into pits on the plantation and Carter G. Woodson’s vision of autonomous schooling¹⁷ that complicated John Dewey’s notions given 400 years of enslavement warping Black self-perceptions. With Negro History Week, Woodson returned to the calendrical basis of black life that equally animated Cushitic people in the Horn of Africa and the Dogon to the West, since antiquity. It was only the 20th century—when computing referred to mostly human labor— that Carnegie proposed the basic structure of what we now understand to be higher education¹⁸. There are some things that model got right, inducting young people into concerted intellectual engagement requires co-locating them for a multi-year period in a place where they don’t have to worry about housing nor food; specialization should be an optional course that follows and includes teaching or some version of generational knowledge transmission to the youth behind them and fulfillment of a project of their own choosing, under the mentorship of an elder whose expertise overlaps with the proposed research. But the well- known downsides of this model include an institutional infrastructure that resists distributing resources outside of categories it itself has produced, making company towns and filibustering much less resourced communities who make demands on it. Academics also fail to get the analysis right when they invect against the growth of administration, most of which are not MBA dilettantes but the variegated labor that capacitates political vision beyond the page.

After I got out of jail, the death threats kept following so I concocted a safety plan and relocated with the kids in the middle of the night. As soon as I was safe, I began planning Issue 24. Alice Wong responded that she didn’t feel the call was a good fit for her because she didn’t specialize in tech. 2 months later she was dead. My colleague, Victoria Copeland who had introduced us, lost their verbal capacity and most of their mobility after graduating with their PhD and presumably the kinds of violence and theft that entailed. The year leading up to my imprisonment, I felt like I lost my purpose and even wondered if it was time for an illiteracy campaign, like maybe we made a mistake by introducing writing into the modern world and the only thing left to do was to roll it all back. But all of the effort that had been invested up to this point in preventing me and people like me from distributing our ideas into the public sphere inadvertently became an induction into a much deeper commitment to this project. I am proud of the body of work produced by Logic(s) thus far but I felt like core questions remained under theorized and that those missing pieces enacted a series of barriers at every level. So I spent six months trying to answer a series of seemingly basic questions including: What is Technology? What is Computing and AI? What is our counter vision of transnational solidarity as compared to third world internationalism? Beyond representing marginalized viewpoints, what did trans, queer and racial methodologies have to say about computation and AI?

Essays reflecting on each of these questions, on the backdrop of what I have outlined above, are forthcoming but the central thrust is that these questions are asking us to think about technology as the grounds upon which we’re able to act; governing through protocol as much as it’s automating detection for more traditional enactments of policing and power. Technology isn’t just another topical domain for which scarce attentional resources must be allocated, it’s the portal already behind us. And the truth is we’re not just asking you to “come as you are,” it requires a revised set of conceptual tools and an intensity of engagement on par with its hyperscale infrastructural ambitions. Appending AI, computation and technology to more familiar terms like colonization, labor or data also doesn’t address how politics are differently located in the medium of computation—where democratic power has been squeezed and/or relocated to new guilds. AI isn’t an epiphenomena, nor is it a camera for which we can get the media analysis out of storage and just rinse and repeat. It’s tied up in the emergency of Black life, itself entangled with and belonging to the indigenous and multispecies modes of life which AI infrastructure is hostile to. Institutional level resources are required to grapple with this despite the shrinking commitments of big philanthropy. We have to find a way to make a way out of no way.

In a discussion of Candy House, her novel exploring technological dispossession from our own memories, Jennifer Egan says that it’s not just that the creators of Chat-GPT have the audacity to rob us of our own ideas and then turn around to sell them back to us, her aversion to large language models is to the inherent group-think. But what Egan also gets is that the algorithmic nature of our collective thought is not exclusively the product of genAI interaction; our intuitive and creative invention is too easily subverted or assimilated. Or as my colleague and legal scholar, Cynthia Conti-Cook puts it¹⁹, “it’s not collective intelligence in that it represents diverse voices equally, rather it amplifies the sum of average voices, filters for dominance.” This is also why Logic(s) has sought to platform multi-vocal and multivalent narratives or to double down on the title, logics.

From a different angle, Spyridon Koutroufinis excoriates the groupthink of systems biology for prioritizing computational modeling and the mechanistic genetic reasoning²⁰ it embeds against the empirical realities of organisms that we used to remember. Systems biology has yielded few insights beyond more exhaustive taxonomies of genetic lineage (because such endeavors of genetic classification are coterminous with the simulation’s own logic) and as the modeling of organismic processes via differential equations produces increasingly greater numbers of parameters relative to each variable, cloud storage is increased in lieu of re-examining the core assumptions of the initial simulation. Koutroufinis emphasizes that it’s not simply that the outcomes of such simulations are wrong per se, it’s that they’ve dispensed with the awe animating the term organism’s social construction in the first place. The whole point was that what it means to be alive as an organism (not just humans but across species) is to forge your autonomy in interaction with the environment as well as through your own self-organization. An example he cites at length to “demonstrate the ability of organisms to radically transform their morphological, genetic, and physiological structure,” is worth repeating here:

The well-known theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard is noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity play a seminal role in animal evolution and speciation. In her influential book Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, she defines ‘plasticity’ or ‘phenotypic plasticity’ as “the ability of an organism to react to an environmental input with a change in form, state, movement or rate of activity”²¹ (p. 34). This ability enables ontogenetic development to respond to challenges imposed by the conditions of life as well as to genetic challenges. West-Eberhard provides one of the most remarkable examples of animal plasticity: A goat, which was born without front legs, “adopted semi-upright posture and bipedal locomotion from the time of its birth” (p. 51). When after a year of bipedal life the goat died due to an accident, it had developed behavioral specializations similar to those of kangaroos, and other bipedal mammals, such as “the ability to hop rapidly when disturbed” (p. 51). The clinical autopsy revealed many morphological changes in its innervation, musculature, and skeleton, such as enlarged hind legs, a curved spine, an unusually large neck, a thorax similar to that found in kangaroos, and a wide sternum resembling that of an orangutan (p. 52). According to evolutionary theorist and geneticist Eva Jablonka, those correlated phenotypic changes are due to flexible mechanical reorganization, new regulatory interactions, and “exploratory processes followed by stabilization at the cellular, physiological and behavioral level”, whereas at the molecular level, developmental plasticity “can involve epigenetic changes in regulatory systems”²² (p. 101).

The hazy residue of inaction and disorientation in the face of rapidly escalating fascism has less to do with the severity of catastrophe and more to do with the triad of learned helplessness: dread, debility and dependency. The silver lining of this diagnosis is that peeling back the corporate marketing language can begin to undo the asphyxiation wrought by infrastructural dependencies. Infinite listicles of harm with demographic segmentation is not going to move the needle. Viscerally remembering awe and wonder at the goat who walked around like a kangaroo might. Integrating visual arts and speculative fiction at the same register as the traditional long form essay might make Logic(s) a more interesting magazine to read, but more importantly it’s the only way we can address technology where it’s at, in its multiplicity, instead of limiting it to narrow policy concerns and the niche litigation as proposed by the endlessly commissioned yet rarely read white papers.

To edit is to be the midwife for another person’s ideas. I have been fortunate to usher nurseries over the course of producing five issues and the universe of activities they’ve anchored. But there’s a cost to being the person who says the things everyone else knows is true but doesn’t want to bear the consequences of. It’s not just that I don’t have the traditional credentials, I pay that system dust. The truth is that universities weren’t prepared for generative AI because obedience and profit displaced learning and curiosity decades ago. Of course people are going to cheat and plagiarize within an educational system that is only nominally about education. Of course an educational system that refuses to divest from the genocidal occupation in Gaza or gentrifies places like Harlem and Baltimore with impunity fails to grasp the everyday knowledge held by the organic intellectuals in each of these cities. Of course this is exactly why I started Logic(s); why I can’t give up despite all the hardship I’ve faced personally and organizationally; and why I hope you will contribute to its future.