The College Hill Independent — Vol. 45 Issue 4

Masthead*

STAFF WRITERS

Hanna Aboueid

This Issue

From the Editors

Brandish your board like a just-cleaned broadsword; you’ve been carrying it all day for this moment. Start at Smitty B, beyond that quaint garden with the bench and the plants and the squirrels. Look for cars—or not, no one lives forever—and then you’re off! To your right, the parking lot! To your left, the house with the vegans! Make sure to glance daringly down the Meeting Street mountain. Then, a few seconds later, sneak a peek at that department building they just moved somehow (how’d they do that?). Pretty soon you’ll be coasting under the arch and down the green—prepare yourself to slide through the oncoming narrow gateway, before bursting out onto the open road, hell yeah! (Watch out for cars!) Keep going until Power (that’s Brown to Power, not Power to Brown—never the latter) and then bang a sharp left. Smile at an onlooker and give your trusty board another pump; you’re almost home. -SS

Leong

Sloan

Wang

WEEK IN REVIEW

Masha Breeze Nora Mathews

ARTS

Cecilia Barron

Anabelle Johnston Lola Simon

Chen Ayça Ülgen

Zachary Braner

Ryan Chuang Jenna Cooley

LITERARY

Madeline Canfield

Tierra Sherlock

METRO

Jack Doughty

Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Nicholas Miller

SCIENCE + TECH

Justin Scheer

Ella Spungen Katherine Xiong

Priyanka Mahat Alissa Simon

X Lucia Kan-Sperling Seoyoung Kim Maxime Pitchon

DEAR INDY Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD Sofia Barnett Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Alisa Caira

Sage Jennings Anabelle Johnston Isaac McKenna Deb Marini Peder Schaefer

Madeleine Adriance

Njari Anderson Maru Attwood

Graciela Batista

Mark Buckley

Lily Chahine

Swetabh Changkakoti

Laura David Emma Eaton

Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber

Keelin Gaughan

Sarah Goldman

Jonathan Green

Faith Griffiths

Eric Guo

Charlotte Haq

Anushka Kataruka

Roza Kavak

Nicole Konecke

Cameron Leo Kara McAndrew Morgan McCordick

Sarah McGrath

Charlie Medeiros

Alex Purdy

Callie Rabinovitz

Kolya Shields Alex Valenti

Julia Vaz Kathy/Siqi Wang Justin Woo

COPY CHIEF Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Ava Bradley

Qiaoying Chen Dun Jian Chin Mack Ford Klara Davidson-Schmich Eleanor Dushin

Zoey Grant Aidan Harbison

Doren Hsiao-Wecksler

Rahmla Jones

Alara Kalfazade

Jasmine Li Rebecca Martin-Welp Angelina Rios-Galindo Everest Maya-Tudor Shravya Sompalli

Eleanor Peters

Grace Samaha Jean Wanlass

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Klara Davidson-Schmich

Britney De Leon Ayça Ülgen

Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis

Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Brianna Cheng Ri Choi

Addie Clark

Amy/Youjin Lim

Ash Ma

Jaesun Myung

Enya Pan

Tanya Qu

Jeffrey Tao Floria Tsui Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION

EDITORS

Sage Jennings Jo Ouyang

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek

Noah Bassman

Ashley Castañeda

Claire Chasse

Julia Cheng Nicholas Edwards Lillyanne Fisher

Sophie Foulkes

Haimeng Ge

Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz

Sarosh Nadeem

Hannah Park Sophia Patti Izzy Roth-Dishy Livia Weiner

Iris Wright Jane Zhou Kelly Zhou Elisa Kim

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATORS

Anabelle Johnston

Bilal Memon

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Alara Kalfazade

Rini Singhi Jean Wanlass

WEBMASTER

Isaac McKenna

MVP Jeffrey Tao

The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA

The CollegeHillIndependent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

COVER COORDINATOR

Soeun Bae

Week in Random

Acts of Kindness

Extry extry, read all about it! Nora and I have a nose for news, but nothing really happened this week so we decided to make some headlines of our own by performing random acts of kindness around our community. At first, we wanted it to be anonymous, but then we realized we could extract social capital from telling people about it! So here’s a list of all the kindnesses we did, take notes <333

1Blackmailed my professor! What better way to say “homework SUCKS” than to hack your professor’s email, find out that his kid doesn’t know she’s adopted, and threaten to release that information unless he cancels your class’s midterm? When I told my class what I did, everyone stood up and cheered and now I’m Prom Queen Forev er! Then Dierk Marzipan, the hottest boy in school, kissed me and broke up with his girl friend (aka my nemesis, Madeleine Albright Jr.), on the spot. Just goes to show that adoption is kind of cringey and if you put good energy out into the world, it comes back to you :)

2Got my dentist a birthday present! She made it weird, but I guess some people just don’t know how to accept generosity.

3I cleaned the big cauldron my room mates and I use to cook all our meals!

Listen, no one likes to be on Big Caul dron Duty, but someone has to get in there and clean its comically huge walls. I was supposed to do it last month but I have trauma around cauldrons (my mom was a witch). This week I had finally gathered the courage, so I went in there with a loofah and scrubbed until I could see my face in it. Looking deeper, I saw my innermost desires floating around my reflec tion—being the soccer captain next year, achiev ing the Guinness World Record for Humblest Girl, visiting Maine, owning a ladder—they were all nearly within my grasp. But just as I reached out for them, they dissolved into dust, and I was left staring at the flat, unremarkable contours of my face (I’m a woman of mid-experience). That night, I was set upon with dreams of glory, power, a version of myself that was almost unrecognizably radiant. I wanted it desperately, I wanted to be that per son from within my marrow. I felt myself make some sort of deal, and the next day I awoke to find all my dreams had come true. Plus I have pyrokinesis!

4As a level 10 maxi-empath, I can tell when one of my friends needs a hair cut. That’s why, yesterday, I gave free mullets to every member of my improv troupe while they were asleep (I say asleep; it’s more of a coma that they’re all in after our bus to the East Coast Improvapalooza competition crashed because I made the bus driver turn around and make eye contact with me so I could ‘read his energy’ and make sure he wasn’t mad at me).

5I made a zine! Zines are important to society because they sort of dare to ask the question, “what if we took the MAGA out of magazine?” I’m a lib eral, which means I own a mug that says “Male Tears” on the side, I named my cat Covfefe, and it totally gives me the ick when my aunt says something homophobic. Zines are like my own personal revolution, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that radical kindness can look like giving copies of your self-published poetry to all of your friends, emailing them to ask for “feedback :),” and then when they do give you critiques, cutting them out of your life completely/try ing to get them canceled on Twitter (#KirstenIsOverParty).

6I gave a home to an adorable 8-year-old black lab who was going to be put down at a local shelter. Not my home, but still!

I bought her a gorgeous apartment in Pittsburgh’s historic Glurf District and just kind of put her there. Don’t worry, she’ll live out the rest of her days in style—I left her a closet full of authentic costumes that were used in the TV series Girls (she’s a total Jessa).

7

I didn’t cyberbully my sister on Club Pen guin for a whole week! My sister is kind of like if a butt was a person, and she deserves bad things. She’s been really confident and coming into her own recently, and everyone keeps say ing she looks like a younger, prettier version of me. So, every week, I log into Club Penguin and pretend to be a different 14-year-old boy, get her to fall in love with justin89, and then break up with her because “u r too ugly :(”. It’s defi nitely taken her down a notch! But this week, I didn’t do that, which is kind of just my way of being the change.

split with age. It was just light enough in my New York bedroom to see the shapes of things but not their colors. You would hold my hand under your thumb, and your nail had waves in it like a tiny ocean—from playing the clarinet a long time ago, you would say.

As a kid I knew songs not by their titles but by their melodies, or by the words that snagged most surely in my brain. I learned “The Circle Game” before I knew it was called that, and before I’d heard the McCartney masterpiece whose first lyric it shares.

Joni Mitchell wrote “The Circle Game” a year after The Beatles released “Yesterday”—in 1966, eight years before you were born. Thirty-nine years before my first birthday, and 56 years ago now. That part I know.

A child came out

Of where?

Not our apartment in New York, suspended between fire escapes above the uptown streets, no. I used to think of a large house, with two or three slanted roofs. Shingles, a screen porch. I could only ever see it in side-view, just enough to feel the warmth from the windows lit up yellow. It’s night. Next to the house there’s a small yard, flat, grass cut short with little patches of soft soil here and there. It’s surrounded by trees on three sides, dense, dark greenery, big leaves, maybe magnolias.

Somehow I know we’re in Westport, Connecticut, where my great-grandmother Gigi lived. My family visited Westport twice. The first time I was five or six and Gigi was in bed after a fall. She lay in a dark room in an old creaky house, and we rubbed Purell on our hands before we went inside.

When I try to remember Gigi now, I can sometimes pick up on her smile or the cadence of her voice. But these are really speculations, deliv ered secondhand, by grandparents and cousins closer to her in age. Mostly I picture dust, and the corners of things.

More than a year after that first visit, over breakfast, Mama told me she had passed away. My only feeling was one of guilt, for not feeling what I knew I should. “You may not have known her very well,” Mama said, “but remember she was Daddy’s grandmother. And Grammy’s mother.”

We returned to Westport for the memorial. The covers of the programs were meant to look like Scrabble boards—that part I know. A few weeks later, you and Grammy sold the house in Westport to a stranger.

Came out to wander

You sat next to me on that old and creaky bed— sat, because there was no room to lie down without your toes pressing into the footboard. I think you said the bed had been my grand mother’s, but I’m not sure which one, your mother or my mother’s mother. You sang, and I liked to chime in when I could, which probably annoyed you. I knew most of the lyrics, but not all of them. You sang wander. I sang wonder

To wonder

And the seasons they go round and round, And the painted ponies go up and down We’re captive on a carousel of time

The year of my second grade we lived in Syracuse, New York, where Mama had gotten her first job out of grad school. We thought we were going to live there forever. We bought a little house on Livingston Avenue, with potted plants that hung from the gingerbread trim, a splintery staircase inside, and second-floor bedrooms with slanted ceilings. To a city-dweller, this was a castle.

Fifteen minutes away there was an old-timey shopping mall named after the carousel nestled inside. One weekend, we drove out for kitchen houseware and cheap entertainment. Mama had been testing the breeze from the front seat and, not noticing, you rolled up the window before she had time to pull her hand back inside the car. I was terrified by her pain, a pain which was also yours, and which I’d never seen so clearly before.

Caught a dragon-fly inside a jar

Let’s go back to the Westport backyard that I have conjured out of memories that do not exist, although they do come from somewhere. The perfect squareness of the area, surrounded on three sides by greenery—that is my grandfather’s basketball court in Alexandria, paved in grass instead of gridded vinyl, surrounded by magno lias instead of bamboo. In reality—the hard and wooden kind—there is only one magnolia. And it’s on the other side of my grandfather’s house.

The screen porch, that’s my grandmother’s, at her summer house in Delaware. You had a childhood there, too; you spent your mild Augusts there when you weren’t at camp. You might have tossed your sunscreen and sandals over the second-floor banister, and my grand mother might have told you to just bring them down the stairs, for God’s sake.

But right now we’re in Westport. Instead of an insect, there’s a tiny dragon just the size of your hand, and it flies inside a jar. It’s a mason jar, a Bonne-Maman jam jar from Fairway Market in Manhattan. Mama likes to soak them in water until the label falls off. Sometimes she has to work at them a bit with her fingernails.

Fearful when the sky was full of thunder

I was never too afraid of thunder. One night in New York when I was six or so, there was an incredible lightning storm. My little sister Tessa couldn’t stop crying, but I was in delight. Look! Look! I scrunched up my body to perch on the radiator cover, and watched Harlem and Queens vault back into a momentary midday.

To wonder

: To stand in awe of something bigger than you, something unknowable, which is impossible to measure or understand.

And tearful at the falling of a star

The boy in the backyard is wearing long tan pants and sandals, and his hair is a dark color. Even though your hair has always been blond, I think it’s you. When I see you, still holding a glass jar with a dragon inside, your tears are their own falling stars.

I’ve never seen you cry, although one time I walked into yours and Mama’s bedroom and you were sitting on the bed facing away from me with

When we got home, you filled up a blue porcelain saucer with scalding water, pulled out a bar of dish soap, some Neosporin. I stood in the entrance to the bathroom while Mama soaked her hand. Eventually, you came up to me and said, “Give her some space.”

A few months later, you were sick of the snow and Mama got another job in New York, so we sold the house with the gingerbread and moved back to another apartment in Manhattan.

We can’t return, we can only look Behind from where we came

By the time we were back in New York, I’d moved four times: once from Nashville to New York, once from apartment to apartment in the city, and then to Syracuse and back. A few years later we’d head to Argentina for six months when Mama got a sabbatical from work. And a few years after that I’d be in college, on my own.

But here was one thing that never changed. Every summer, at the end of August, we went to the beach in Delaware to visit Grammy. I always wondered how a house could stand on stilts and never fall.

And go round and round and round in the circle game.

+++

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons

I learned this verse at camp, the same one where you spent your summers as a kid and a teenager

TEXT LILY SELTZ

ANNA WANG

and a college student. My first night there, when I was nine or ten, the counselors sang to us at bedtime, and they sang your songs, Dad. I sat up almost in a sweat when I heard the first notes. They sang your songs, but differently: there was an end section to “Moonshadow” I’d never heard before; there was a descant to “You Can Close Your Eyes.” And there was this verse of “The Circle Game,” which you’d skipped over when you sang to me at bedtime. Thirty years ago when they taught you the song, did the coun selors omit that verse by habit? Or did you just forget it over the years?

I guess all this music is only yours in the way that it’s also mine—learned, given, unknowingly rewritten.

Skated over ten clear frozen streams

I think of the creek that runs through the ceme tery in Alexandria. When I was ten or eleven my grandmother and I went down there and built a dam out of the soft-looking stones along the bank. We called it Pillow Rock Dam. I imagine that the frozen stream is narrow and full of rocks that peek out above the ice, but you skate on anyway, unfazed. It’s funny. The last time we went skating together at the rink in New York, you slipped and fell backwards and I heard the dull thud of your head against the ice.

Words like “when you’re older” must appease him

And promises of someday make his dreams

There was a picture book you used to read to me before you sang me to sleep. It was called, Someday is Not a Day of the Week!

And the seasons they go round and round

Sixth or seventh grade, and another August in Delaware. Grammy had hung new photos over the dining room sideboard. They showed a beach besieged. There were tidelines of broken shells and strangled seaweed, lying on damp sand that I had only ever seen dry. One week that winter, Grammy said, the waves had hurtled all the way to the dunes.

The ocean had not yet breached the second boardwalk, but you told me that the stilts were built to protect the house from the floodwaters. They are so spindly, I thought. How could they ever protect anything?

I didn’t ask you the question. There are some things I’m scared to push on.

together in a circle at the intersection of the trails that led to the girls’ tents and the boys’. When we reached that lyric of “The Circle Game,” we all turned our heads over our shoulders and made eye contact with our neighbors. Sometimes people banged heads.

Nowhere was this ritual written down. I couldn’t have known, as a camper, how little the counselors were given when they arrived—a scrappy pink manual, a costume bucket filled with mismatched cowboy boots, and the tents, of course. Just wooden platforms and heavy canvas that the counselors strung up in early May. What a flimsy foundation for the castle I remembered. Behind from where we came

Years later I’m in college and you tell me, on one of our weekly FaceTime calls, that Grammy has sold the house in Delaware. She found an agent last week and put the property on the market yesterday, and it sold in a little over three hours.

And go round and round and round in the circle game.

+++

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now

One time in high school you got back from a long day at work and told me to fold up my music stand, for once, Jesus Christ, it was always in the way. I said I would a little later. I was busy. You are the calmest person I’ve ever met, and I don’t understand it, maybe I never will, but that night something switched. You were livid, you shouted at me. I shouted back hurtful things that I have chosen not to remember, and then I went back to my room and cried like the world was ending.

But I knew it wasn’t. I was sure that when I woke up, you would be in the kitchen packing Tessa’s lunch and listening to Ira Glass or Ezra Klein or another two-syllable one-syllable radio type, and I would say good morning, and you would give me a hug before I left for school, and everything would be fine.

Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town

When I was in the backseat at night and you and Mama would talk to each other with your faces turned toward the windshield, I learned to stop clinging onto what phrases I could discern and instead succumb quietly to the itchy leather car seat and the gentle murmur of your speech. The melody, the music: that strange thread that holds family together.

To wonder

: To accept that you are small.

And they tell him, take your time, it won’t be long now Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.

I imagine the boy on a dusty carousel dragging his feet, shuffle shuffle, and maybe your mother would say: pick up your feet when you walk!

And the seasons they go round and round And the painted ponies go up and down

I try to describe you and Mama to my friends, and I struggle. You were always the one who asked the questions.

We can’t return, we can only look

In my creative writing class I’m told to practice characterization, so I say things like: His parents went to Brandeis and he grew up playing in the All-State orchestra on weekends, playing Little League, bleaching his hair in the Alexandria sun. I’m immediately skeptical of my construction— all simplicity and idyll—but I read the lines again and again, and eventually I believe them.

To wonder

: to let the stories we tell fill in the gaps.

Behind from where we came

I’m doing it again—building a house out of little pieces, misheard lyrics. Maybe I’m wrong in doing it. But the house I’ve built is mine now. It suits me.

And go round and round and round in the circle game

One summer when I was seven or eight, you and I had a water-gun fight in the driveway in Delaware. I was not very good at hitting you and mostly bounced water off the beams of the deck above us, showering us both with chilly glitter. Then I would dart around the stilts and pretend not to notice the gravel that sliced into my feet. We kept at it until the driveway was half flooded and water was streaming down the stilts. You let me win.

+++

Years spin by and now the child is twenty

There is no room for me in our apartment anymore. My toes press against the footboard of my bed. And I’m always bumping into you in the kitchen.

Manhattan will be underwater soon, anyway—beset by seaweed and broken shells.

Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true

The apartment in Manhattan; the house in Syracuse, with the slanted roof; Grammy’s beach house in Delaware; the Westport house with dusty corners: These houses are gone, or soon to be.

There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams, and plenty

The song that was yours will never be mine. But you gave it to me still, when you sang.

Before the last revolving year is through.

Sometime after graduation, I’ll move into a new house. It may not have a screened-in porch or magnolia trees around back, but I know it will be standing on stilts. You’ll come over to visit, and we’ll both wonder at how the house still stands. But it will. It will keep on standing, somehow.

It will be a blanket fort and a canvas tent and a castle. It will be as real as the lyrics to a song.

And the painted ponies go up and down We’re captive on the carousel of time We can’t return, we can only look—

When I sing the chorus now I put an emphasis on look, and a pause for a second before going on. I got this from camp. At 15 I was old enough to come back as a counselor, and it was my turn to sing the bedtime songs. The staff would all come

You are not that boy on the carousel; that part, to some extent, I know. The boy on the carousel is only mine, and when you hear this song you don’t think of him, just as you don’t hear the lyric wonder.

We’re captive on the carousel of time

I go away to college and I leave New York behind.

LILY SELTZ B’25 is sad that Joni Mitchell is no longer on Spotify.

Lurching Through the

verse

Every object is embedded in a socio-historical matrix that points toward the future. Technologies’ fraying threads—discourses, materials, fantasies—contain and gesture at potentialities. Here, I present a possible critical framework for three art pieces, and follow it by constructing a world knotted together with some of the threads within and around these objects.

This narrative triptych contains three separate worlds that explore the potential futures of a different technological art object. Each of these worlds is partial, subjective, a flash of pos sibility filled with as much myth, substance, and (mis)use as the artworks that inspir The first passage of each section is a suggested lens through which to view the second (and every fiction piece below)—neither rose-colored glasses nor transparent, but a shade pushing toward liberation.

WarNymph is singer-songwriter Grimes’ dig ital pop star protégé, a virtual avatar created “from a pixel DNA of [Grimes], the organic human.” Grimes calls this avatar a tool for “techno-feminism,” letting her unwind while WarNymph does interviews, album promo, and glossy collaborations with Balenciaga, Spotify, and NFT platform Nifty. However, this avatar ‘feminism’ falls into the exclusionary, girlboss neoliberalism trap because of its inaccessible construction of the woman—not everyone has a marketing team to manage their virtual selves. This specific iteration of avatar-creation seems to prioritize pixels-per-square inch over artistic innovation, and proffers little more than a flat, aestheticized politics, a future of techno-angels ruling a post-apocalyptic digital wasteland. However, virtual bodies might have uses outside PR stunts.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière defines politics as the policing of the sensible, the “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise.” Here, communication becomes the locus of the political. Today Silicon Valley and their pluto cratic funders seem to be at the switchboard of the sensible, with massive censorship and promotion algorithms that have significant po litical influence. However, techno-utopic visions coming from these very companies argue that virtual embodiment could instrumentalize the connective power of the internet to usher in a rejuvenation of the public sphere. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta argues its metaverse “enables everyone to participate in new ways,” creating a technocratic commons that will allow new forms of equality and access.

However, central to Rancièrian politics is a distinction between presence and legibility. It is not enough to simply be there—to gain real po litical power and liberation, one must pass from noise to speech. Any social media user can tell you this: being on Instagram is little more than being a consumer of recycled reels and target ed advertising, distinctly different from having

the followers and influence to turn your noise (posts seen by dozens) into speech (brand deals and viral content). In fact, minoritarian presence can be valued even in undemocratic systems; noise is the background to the foreground of speech, as followers are to influencers. The question is not simply whether virtual bodies can allow expanded presence, but whether this presence is routed to a furthering of inequality and apolitical spectacle, or something far more radical.

+++

She wasn’t sure what felt real anymore—sure, when she woke up, she woke up in her filthy corrugated sheet metal apartment, more con tainer than home, but all that faded away when she logged into the digital world. Here, she could wear whatever she wanted, change her voice; hell, she could escape corporeal form entirely and interact as a wisp of smoke. The seemingly infinite variety of forms, scattered around her in the stadium seats of the people’s assembly, made her feel less self-conscious— subsumed and held by a singular plane of differ ence—even while surrounded by so many eyes.

If she didn’t engage them in conversation, the faces around her flickered in and out of exis tence every few minutes, constantly reminding her of the hundreds of millions of people who were loading into this assembly meeting. They had even begun to implement the five-sense en gine, spraying scented water into her apartment to simulate a crowded assembly hall. She tended to leave that setting off. Before, she could have never afforded a headset that could support this number of avatars, but after the government took over the digi-verse and sent everyone over the age of 16 the newest model, she reveled in the high definition, loading into each digi-na tional park, roaming around subsidized artists’ playgrounds.

While these simulations had started as federal projects to reinvest in the arts, political parties quickly caught on to their potential and began to create elaborate party offices filled with

renderings from the trendiest contemporary ar chitects. Massive meetings and rallies were held in these surreal environments—she remem bered a farmers’ lobby press conference where the speakers had transmogrified themselves into gleaming rods of wheat, then slowly wilted into flaccid, rotten mush as they described the consequences of proposed tax hikes.

Elaborate performance art was more the ex ception than the norm—most often politicians turned gatherings into an EDM lightshow with the melodrama of a Greek tragedy, apocalyptic visions of an unjust, crumbling world playing over attacks on opposition policy and saccha rine house piano melodies accompanying the announcement of a glossy new space station. Sometimes she and her friends would make biting parodies of these productions, slapping politicians’ faces onto every object in a massive mansion or turning a particularly volatile speech into a kabuki show, which they spread around their housing complex on a slim, unlabeled USB.

She excitedly thrust her hand into the air when the colossal green YES materialized in front of her. This was the much-anticipated flat wealth tax, which promised every member of the assembly an extra $250 a month. These were the types of mega-populist policies that reached enough consensus to pass. She had tried to engage with some of the less-attended forums, like ones on church funding and private schools, and even chatted with the required ran dom sample of participants, but found her head spinning in the specificity. The local vernaculars, technical specifics, and seemingly endless lists of stakeholders started to blur into an indistinct mass in her mind. She relished the opportunity that the digi-verse gave her to explore music videos from India and political speeches from New Zealand and minigames from the Nether lands, but more often than not, she ended up headed to her local Midwest animal fair, show ing off her new digi-plant creations. Her latest creation was a corn cereal that was pre-soaked with sugar milk in the seed husk.

Biophilic Circuitboards

In Adham Faramawy’s My fingers distended as hon ey dripped from your lips and we danced in a circular motion, a rotating cast of people flail, shudder, and bounce in a green-tinged room on 360° immersive video, with squishy club beats and the sounds of dripping water soundtracking. Animated mushrooms sprout out of the wall and mold spreads across the screen. Faramawy utilizes the trendiest mycelial language, pre senting these spores as symbols of non-linear connection, decentralized organization, queer ness, and alterity. In this piece, the combination of solo and duet dances with a multitude of partners, inspired by promiscuous fungal bonds, is meant to embrace queer desire in the face of what his promotional materials call “the historic form of the duet, [which] produces and rein forces rigid gender roles.”

Mushrooms are in—from the careful an thropological work of Anna Tsing in Mushroom at the End of the World to the mom-favorite Entan gled Life by Meldrin Sheldrake to the cartoonish designs on Urban Outfitters bucket hats, the radical, non-hierarchical, non-linear possibilities of fungi seem to shine in comparison to fascist cornfields. As many in the fast-growing field of radical mycology write, mushrooms are a glowing example of mutual aid. And there are serious historical, material backings to this con tradistinction; as Silvia Federici has explored, mushrooms and other foraged goods were central to eking out a non-capitalist life during the expansion of capitalism, which involved the capture of the commons in rigid, fenced-in fields of crops.

However, sometimes the spores might be clouding our vision. Flexibility and openness to surprising connections are certainly key to effective organizing. But if there’s anything that the fast-but-quick burn of the anti-globalization Occupy movement and a decade of internet ‘activism’ has shown, it’s that a flat rejection of hierarchy is often antithetical to any sort of power-building. The increasingly decentralized explosions of protest in the last decade drew massive crowds and instantaneous power from their lack of hierarchy, but were missing the sort of structure and organization that helped the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights groups build and sustain power from protests. In the face of brutally unequal capitalism, a subversive presentation of fungi is deeply alluring. However, its met aphoric weight can sometimes hinder critical engagement with the radical ethics we project onto mushrooms, and the political economy underneath the mythos.

Faramawy has received funding and assis tance from tech companies and VR boosters such as HTC, Fusion Works, and Cambridge Consulting. While any digital media project of this scale using expensive 360° video technology and lots of animation is going to require creative funding approaches, the ‘homophilic’ fungal packaging of his video overshadows any critique of the political economy of hype tech projects. This falls into a long lineage of corporate tech no-utopic visions grounded in folksy naturalist language—when the California countercultural back-to-the-land communalists of the 1960s and ‘70s reached middle age, they joined forces with Silicon Valley to imbue emerging communica tion technology with an endless supply of hip, faux-subversive biological language: immanent planetary ecology, man-computer symbiosis, coevolution.

Stewart Brand, a post-war writer, scientist, and communalist, advertised new tech wrapped in discourses of ecological systems theory, decentral ization, and personal liberation in his

Whole Earth Catalog—shrouding the rise of corporate libertarians like Newt Gingrich and other California conservatives in counter-cul tural naturalism. Faramawy’s embrace of HTC’s VR technology continues this precedent by refusing to engage in the political economy of Big Tech. In 2018, Taiwanese labor rights orga nization Serve the People Association alleged that HTC committed legal and contractual in fractions: deducting worker pay illegally, laying off workers without warning, and even seizing personal property. This adds to a long history of tech labor exploitation, particularly of migrant workers.

While mushrooms are not to blame for techno-capitalism, when Silicon Valley presents immersive technologies as radical worldbuild ing, dressing its circuitry in the language of queer dance and earthy mycology, anti-worker, anti-environment stances can become woven into the mycorrhizal network. While there’s a limit to the ability of one artist or piece to critically engage with every injustice of contem porary capitalism, it’s important we don’t let a fungal façade represent liberation.

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comes with entering a space that is trying too hard to look natural––the architectural uncan ny valley. Then the smell hit her. In the middle of this plaster cave, a pungent powder-white steam seeped out of a giant fluorescent purple mushroom cap and a knotty mix of musk, dank soil, and what seemed to be a kale-sandalwood infusion hung in the air. Scattered around the dripping grotto walls, dozens of couples, trios, groups too entwined to individuate, and an occasional bashful solo traveler, all grinded against plant-themed sex toys, the giant cen tral spore, and each other. She walked up to a particularly alluring root and gave it a squeeze, recoiling slightly at the bipartite construction, a spongy spray-painted layer giving way to a solid, smooth plastic interior.

As she walked around the outside of space, trying to stay in the shadows to best orient herself, she noticed a flash in the indent of a soaked stucco wall. She walked up to it and peered through a crack, where she saw a whir ring network of wires, flashing red lights, and fans set at full blast, hurriedly pushing back the encroaching moistness and drowning out the cave dwellers’ grunts. As she looked up, she could just make out what looked like a control room, an industrial balcony with a few headsetand-visor-clad people with clipboards clustering around a wall of computer monitors. Peering around the massive warehouse, she noticed a thin line of moss snaking across the mottled ce ment floor. Slipping through the crack, her eyes adjusting to the dim space, she started to follow the moss, watching it spread outwards like a patchwork carpet. A dewy vine crawled up the shuttered windows, wrapping itself around the scaffolding that held up the massive drywall ter rarium at the center of the room. On the outside of this massive sphere she could make out what looked like colonies of barnacles, soaking in the condensation of the fog machines and ACs.

She wasn’t quite sure what a mushroom orgy entailed, but she saw “biophilia” splashed across every sensorial billboard, the mildewy stench dripping off the ultra-high definition pixelated fungal perfume advert, and figured she could use a little earth in her life. She used to love her local 4-H, but as the city folk be gan to take home every blue ribbon with their boutique black raspberry milk hybrid breeds, she figured it was time to turn away from the

Up on the balcony, she saw a lone man wearing a duct-taped gas mask scrub at a set of gears encrusted with mud and roots, which seemed to power the swaying plastic plants back inside the dome. Moving closer, she stepped into a shower of dirt and plant matter barely visible in the murky lot, wafting down from the futile work of the janitor, who clearly needed about ten times the labor power working along side him. Maybe the venue could have afforded that if the proprietors hadn’t given out so many 70-percent-off Groupon deals.

She backed up from the dank loft, heels punching little holes through the lichen-floor, and pushed her way back into the mushroom heaven. Glancing around the room, her eyes fell upon a throuple clustered around an undu lating weeping willow. She pushed through the branches and towards the trunk.

3. Technology and the ‘Human Strike’

Claire Fontaine is a conceptual artist created by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, who are her ‘assistants,’ making the art pieces but es chewing identification as the artist—both a bold ploy for attention and a dig at the exploitation and absurdity of flashy contemporary artists’ use of underpaid assistants. Fontaine presents herself as a sinkhole of subjectivity, a “human strike” against the roles and requirements of capital, whether that’s being a woman, a worker, or simply a sovereign subject.

Coming out of feminist interpretations of Italian autonomous Marxism—a movement that emerged in the 1960s and emphasizes self-organized, bottom-up worker resistance in all aspects of life—Fontaine is a reaction to the ways capital infiltrates our lives outside of the workplace, from unpaid feminized housework to the commodification of social interaction exemplified by networking. Fontaine presents the readymade as an artistic intervention in this political morass.

The readymade is an artistic technique popularized by French artist Marcel DuChamp, where ‘ordinary’ manufactured objects are turned into art pieces solely through the agen cy of the artist—choosing, titling, signing, and showing the work. Fontaine gestures towards the readymade in both her work and her name. She creates neon signs proclaiming that “Beauty is a Readymade” and a series where the actu al covers of classic texts are stretched around bricks; her artistic persona is appropriated from the French stationery company Clairefontaine, an exemplar of mass-produced capitalist manu facturing.

Because there is no Claire Fontaine be yond the shifting, implacable idea of a Claire Fontaine, she is the readymade taken to the extreme, the gesture and nothing else, no material, no use-value, and, therefore, nothing to be taken up and co-opted by capital. In the best case, the readymade can reorient towards production processes and be a critique of capi talism’s elision of use-value through exemplify ing the absurdity of exchange-value, valuation based solely on the market. However, Fontaine’s attempt to twist the readymade into a shape that can respond to contemporary capitalism— heavily theorized, high-profile contemporary art—might reveal the limits of art as revolution.

As a rejection of capitalist identity, Fon taine is an attempt at a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) of personhood—a delimited space of escape. Anarchist Hakim Bey theorized the TAZ in 1991, arguing that instead of a cycle of “revolution”—waiting for the perfect time to re volt, just to fall back to the state—radical action should include the nurturing of TAZs: spaces, times, or ‘imaginaries’ which don’t directly engage with the state but instead evade it. Fon taine engages in a similar politics of invisibility, a refusal to normatively engage with artistic and political institutions—attempting to reject the art world’s economy of networking, presence, and gendered, raced synecdoche or stereotype.

Bey is particularly entranced by the illegal, subversive communication on the internet, the ways that TAZs can be cultivated through data compilation, peer to peer file sharing, and piracy—technologies which can make up for temporary-ness of TAZs through efficiency and compaction. Here, he contends that taking and appropriating specific technologies and tech niques is necessary for political change—from flyering to Signal chats, technology accomplish es clear-cut goals and provides the material chassis for revolution, inspiring and embodying new worlds.

In the early 1900s, Duchamp’s appropria tion of consumer goods functioned as a passion ate defense of individual craftwork in the face of

industrial capitalism. In 2022, low-paid, precar ious Etsy shops, influencer-entrepreneurs, and gig workers reflect a world in which handmade, individual labor and authorial ownership is just as volatile and exploitational as any factory floor. Fontaine’s critique attempts pure refusal, a subjective void within capitalism, so that even one’s identity can’t be appropriated by capital. Yet puzzling decisions, such as collaborating with Dior on a runway show and trite, symbolic institutional critique (a neon STRIKE sign in the window of the Tate Modern), compromise her political economic critique and allow spar kling institutions to take on the illusory sheen of radical politics without material transforma tion. While Fontaine writes that “art should perform an interruption of the usual percep tion,” radical messaging fêted by luxury fashion houses and Sackler-Bezos funded museums is more the norm than the exception these days.

Yes, there is no outside to contemporary global capitalism, but one of the central roles of a revolutionary artist-thinker is to identify what technologies created by capital can be re-appro priated for resistance. Hakim Bey identified the less-regulated underbelly of cyberspace in the ‘90s, while Fontaine seems to pinpoint symbolic critique and de-subjectification that does little to unsettle the glossy urban centers it’s shown in. What would it look like to occupy and chal lenge these centers of capital in a more material way?

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When she pressed enter, she heard the icy hum of electronics stutter and drop for a millisecond, then whir back up, returning with a quiet tick ing overlaying the dripping of coolant streaming through the walls around her. She pressed her keyboard again, sending a precise geo-loca tion that traveled from her overheated laptop to a wire-clad smartphone in their collectively maintained server. As long as it kept ticking, they were protected—not so much off the grid as on it, perched on the scaffolding trying not to make a sound. In minutes, people started to show up, ducking under the curtain that led to the outside. They met in a different gleaming conference room every week, splicing videos of an empty room into the video feeds and careful ly shifting each scheduled meeting to another open room. Smartly clad in ironed suits and conservative skirts, they looked like any other business meeting droning on in the office park, visible through the barely frosted cubicle glass.

She pulled up an intricate 3-D rendering on the massive, interactive screen, sipping a cappuccino from the break room. Pictured was a glistening skyscraper, with an ornate bar and steakhouse on the first floor, and three layers of

pool and spa equipment. She overlaid this sche matic with an undulating green haze that ran up and down the entire building, shifting position and shape as simulated new tenants, extermi nators, realtors, and supers strolled around the floors. Every couple levels, an entire floor would glow electric green, throbbing in time with the ticking that vibrated around the conference table—an extended elevator shaft, a servants’ quarters, the 13th floor, a kitchen sub-base ment. In this conference room they mapped out their commune. From the pool they would filter water, from the restaurant they would serve food, from the spas they would administer medicine, from the bar they would prove that revolutionary life didn’t have to be austere.

The very precarity of their home upheld their political purity—constantly evading capture and discovery by the real tenants and owners of the high-rise meant that the bed you slept in one night might be filled by an ogligarch the next, making the concept of private property impossible. Consumption was also tightly con trolled, skimming off the top of tenants’ grocery orders and diverting choice items from the trash chute for early-morning undercover cooking ses sions. Without massive storehouses and walk-in freezers, food must be distributed and eaten as quickly as possible, with sustenance as the only goal.

However, liminal need not mean precar ious: their easy attitudes and elaborate notes projected confidence as they carefully discussed graphics and contingency plans, tapping away at expensive built-in workstations. In a folder hidden on one of their computers was a chunky, pixelated rendering, another shifting green map, a cartography of the resistance, but unlike the other ones, this one was moving across an entire city, holding blocks at a time. Instead of furtive strikes into storerooms and tense nights sharing stolen beds, this model included organized work teams marching in lockstep to massive horticultural warehouses, manufactur ing assault rifles, and making massive batches of medicine. Further, this model didn’t remain locked at a certain square footage, loop around showing the same infinite permutations of the green haze at a specific size—it expanded and kept on expanding, slowly but surely painting the city with a bright green glow until it stopped at the edges of the frame, humming with inten sity until the screen faded to black.

They hadn’t yet simulated what came next.

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 pronounces biennale incorrectly.

DEEP FAKE

TikTok Now, “Casual” Instagram, and the quest for authenticity

On September 15, 2022, TikTok announced the creation of “TikTok Now”—a new feature on the app’s homepage that will prompt users to post a ‘candid’ photo of themselves at a different moment every day. According to a statement released by the company, this not-sothinly veiled attempt to replicate the popular photo-sharing app “BeReal” was designed to “bring the authenticity of TikTok to a whole new creative experience.”

Even TikTok can’t deny the writing on the wall: At least when it comes to social media, “authenticity” is the new standard that Gen Z is chasing. Long gone are the days of preplanned Instagram themes, posting schedules, and the Millennial-pink ‘Instagram Aesthetic.’ In this new, supposedly more ‘authentic’ social media era, fans worship influencers for being ‘just-like-us’ and disparage celebrities for their un-relatability: Emma Chamberlain’s dark eye circles and crying selfies now reign supreme while the Kardashians have come under fire for photoshopping their classic glam shots. The mid-aughts ‘Indy Sleaze’ aesthetic is back— bringing with it the return of bootcut jeans,

flash photography, messy makeup, cigarettes, and even irony itself (at least according to trend forecaster Sean Monahan). Whether you’re posting deep fried memes, ‘Being Real’ or car rying a disposable camera, the vibe shift is well underway, and TikTok doesn’t want to be left behind.

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BeReal, and presumably TikTok Now, certainly aren’t shy about demanding ‘authenticity’ from their users (Be REAL! Right NOW!). However, even without such direct instructions, users from across various platforms have been slowly gravitating towards more ‘authentic’ posting styles for the past several years.

For instance, 2020 lockdowns gave rise to the now ubiquitous Instagram ‘photo dump.’ These 10 picture carousels tend to be a hodge podge of selfies, pictures with friends, sunsets, and blurry snapshots of random objects: funny road signs, chipped coffee mugs, literal garbage, you name it. The caption is generally something casual, yet vaguely contemplative. Maybe “life lately”—no capital letters.

For some users, photo dumps are merely one element of the broader push to ‘make Instagram casual again’—a phrase which first rose to prom inence on TikTok during the early months of the pandemic. Amongst its Gen Z proponents, this common refrain is a refer ence to the app’s earliest days, when it wasn’t uncommon to post red-eyed group shots, highly saturated selfies, and pictures of the spaghetti you ate for dinner last night. It implicitly assumes that the app’s first users in the early 2010s thought relatively little about how their content was going to be perceived—a belief with realistically little historical basis, but one cer tainly fueled by Gen Z’s general nostalgia for the mid-aughts (or maybe just the Instagram we remember from middle school). While the ‘casual’ Instagram movement might reference a largely imagined past, anything might seem more casual than the era of hyper-curation we’re just now crawling out of. The ring lights, the Facetune, the BBL’s—from at least 2015 on wards, social media users have been chasing an increasingly unrealistic set of beauty and posting standards. So at the very least, BeReal devotees and casual Instagram users seem desperate to escape this culture of perfectionism.

They’re calling bullshit on like counts, on phony filters, on the pressure to conform. Instead, we’re meant to be casual. Be real. Be authentic

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But have they succeeded?

“Reality TV is not reality,” concluded @ cozyakili in a December 2021 TikTok, referring to photo dumps and ‘casual’ Instagram. “It is at tempting to convince the viewer that what they are watching is, in fact, real life, but it’s not.” As someone who’s more than once spent sever al hours trying to make a photo dump appear more ‘effortlessly cool,’ I’m inclined to agree. While BeReal is still the most popular app on the U.S. iOS App Store, for some members of Gen Z this enthusiasm has already begun to curdle. It’s becoming more and more common to see friends conveniently post a few hours ‘late,’ when they just so happen to be at a party, walking through an apple orchard, or scaling Mount Everest. Sooo unreal of them.

Try as we may, we can’t quite seem to act ‘casual’ on Instagram or ‘be real’ on BeReal. We can only pretend to be. ‘Casual’ Instagram hasn’t actually freed us from the pressure to perform. It’s merely given us a new, ‘too-coolto-care’ aesthetic to performatively replicate.

But you already knew that, didn’t you? After all, self-awareness is part of the aesthetic.

In fact, self-awareness might be closer to what we’re chasing than ‘authenticity’ when it really comes down to it. ‘Casual’ Instagram has become obsessively self-referential. If being ‘casual’ really means being ‘too-cool-to-care,’ then it seems only fitting that the most ‘casual’ posts and users have learned to poke fun at the fact that they’re even posting at all.

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In a viral (and immediately memeified) i-D arti cle, Rayne Fisher-Quann identified an increas ingly popular form of selfie-face: a distant, yet vaguely seductive glare that she fittingly names “the dissociative pout.” This alleged “duck face of a nihilistic age” often appears within what writer Amy Francobe has deemed the “meta-selfie.” While mirror selfies are nothing new, today’s most popular iterations tend to be, well, even more meta—users often contort their phones to show the act of taking the photo from behind, snap a selfie in their MacBook’s PhotoBooth, or even hold a physical camera. These ‘meta-selfies’ draw unique attention to the photo-taking process itself, creating a sharp contrast between the ‘self’ taking the selfie and the ‘self’ being showcased. I may be objectifying myself, but at least I’m aware—or as my pout suggests, at least I’m unhappy about it. In the same way, crying selfies or otherwise ‘embar rassing’ pictures offer a meta-comment about the absurdity of posting itself. Wouldn’t it be soo funny if I were to seriously post this? If I were

to earnestly overshare my eye infection on social media? I’m not just performing, but overtly performing my performativity in order to let you know that I know I’m performing.

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At least for a certain subset of chronically online Zoomers, this distant, even ironic approach to posting has slowly become the default. It’s also the polar opposite of what we saw in the mid-2010s. In May of 2015, Kim Kardashian published Selfish, a picture-book collection of her favorite selfies. Despite the inevitable backlash she received, Kim’s ability to own the selfie—duckface and all—feels quite emblematic of the previous era’s general attitude towards social media curation. In fact, even just posting a #SelfieSunday back in the day required some level of earnest participation in the exercise of social media itself. Performance simply was the goal—take it or leave it.

Gen Z has by no means abandoned this de sire to perform, but we do find it pretty cringey to commit to such performances. To post with anything that might resemble Millennial-level earnestness. No, the duck face was too sincere, too desperate, too humorless—too cloyingly performative. Instead, we post vaguely detached selfies, nihilistic captions, and ‘unpolished’ dumps somewhat begrudgingly, somewhat ironically—like we’re all supposed to know by now that Instagram is stupid and a sham. After all, if we’re desperate for authenticity but still utterly adverse to earnestness or even displays of outright optimism, we’re inevitably going to land on nihilism. Or at least the aesthetics of it.

While many Gen Z-ers may consider themselves more evolved than their cringey millennial counterparts, it probably goes with out saying that the shift from Kim K to Emma Chamberlain as ‘It’ Girl hasn’t exactly been a breakthrough in terms of representation—both are white, thin, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive. And just like these representational shifts have been largely superficial, Gen Z hasn’t actually left performativity behind so much as we’ve doubled down on it. Today, the goal is no longer just to perform, but to let everyone know that you’re performing. And in this attempt to show how much we don’t care, we’re actively copping to the fact that we do. In the case of the meta-selfie, our obsession with proving this ‘authenticity’ has actually allowed the perfor mance to permeate yet another layer—cannibal izing the actor in addition to the character we’ve chosen to portray.

We often discuss authenticity as an issue of self-congruence: We want the freedom to let our outer self reflect our true inner-self. However, I’m struck by just how often these allegedly ‘authentic’ trends, such as the meta-selfie,

paradoxically draw attention to my own split existence. To the fact that I am first and fore most a self conceiving of a different self. To how, on social media—as in real life—I can’t quite seem to observe the world straight through my own eyes. Instead, I’m perpetually looking down at an image of myself going through the world. It’s why I bring my New Yorker tote bag to the coffee shop, so I can seem mysterious and informed and Rory-Gilmore-esque. It’s why I took up running, because I liked the idea of be ing someone who runs. It’s why my childhood bedroom is still filled with half-filled journals, because when I was 10 (and then again when I was 11 and then again when I was 12) I decided that Clever Girls always keep a journal and that I would like to be Clever like them.

In order to know myself, I must first con sume myself, as if I am not myself at all. I am perpetually conducting my own character study, writing and then performing my own narrative as fast as I am living it. And social media turns this vaguely annoying habit (or potentially un avoidable feature of consciousness) into some thing urgent, undeniable, and willful. Posting physically requires us to adopt the perspective of an outsider, to engage in an active form of self-surveillance.

On Instagram, I want to seem cool and en chanting and effortlessly ravishing. On BeReal, I want to seem funny and popular and oh-so-in teresting. I authentically want to be authentic, but the fact that I want it so badly makes it im possible to approach the project without some level of premeditation. This desire is entirely antithetical to the idea that we can simply be as we are, in the moment that we are. I first must imagine the specific type of ‘authentic’ person I would like to become—someone cooler, more down to earth, less neurotic, more authentical ly ‘authentic’ than who I really am. So, when the BeReal notification sounds off, I might just switch my computer tab from my crowded email inbox to the readings for my Emily Dickinson seminar. Maybe that’s less authentic according to the BeReal purists, but it certainly makes me

seem more interesting, which I authentically want to be. In fact, maybe there’s something even more authentic about my desire to perform this more coveted form of authenticity. Who am I if not someone who’s desperate to be and appear more interesting, more likable?

Whereas online, I’m fixated on lighting and angles and designing witty captions, offline, I’m picking up hobbies like props and wearing clothes like costumes (do these earrings seem like something a Cool English Major would wear?). I don’t have many draft tweets, but I am constantly filtering my own thoughts, attempt ing to be more profound and less self-centered and more romantic. Because to be a character rather than a ‘self’ is such a deeply seductive fantasy. Because offline, I’m not actually ‘real’ in a Girl Who Doesn’t Know She’s Beautiful type way, but in a way where I compulsively buy tank tops and I cry when my hair looks greasy and I sometimes forget to listen when other people talk. And when I fail to make eye contact, I’m afraid it’s not quite as endearing as a ‘dissocia tive pout,’ but off-putting and unattractive. And while offline I want to be liked so desperately, so urgently, social media allows me to pretend that I just don’t care at all.

Yes, The Girl Who Doesn’t Care What Any one Thinks of Her is yet another character I can attempt to play. And even though I know it’s a sham, I’m also not quite ready to give up the act. To hope that one day, I could simply become a bit more one-dimensional—that my essence could be confined to the screen just like the girls in books are confined to the page. To hope that one day, I could actually become the type of girl I post as, a deliriously likable archetype, a heroine of my own creation. Someone who is exactly how she intends to be seen. Someone who I authentically want to be.

SARAH MCGRATH B’24 really hopes you like her.

THE “ELEGANT” ALTERNATIVE:

Gleaning as a Practice in Combating Food Insecurity in RI

The term “food desert” is used by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to measure food insecurity. A “food desert” de scribes low-income areas in which households are more than a mile away from large-scale grocery stores. In Rhode Island, 91% of low-in come areas qualify as deserts, the highest in the nation. Yet many take issue with this phrase, arguing that it does not implicate the policy and market decisions which produce this phenom enon. Food justice activists have proposed the phrase “food apartheid” to better capture the true causes and complexities of food insecurity.

Eva Agudelo, who has a decade of experi ence with food non-profits, is an advocate for this adjustment in terminology. “‘Food apart heid’ brings agency back into the picture,” she said in an interview with the College Hill Independent, “and shows that there are reasons why people are living in circumstances where they don’t have access to fresh healthy food.” Food insecurity is nothing like a “desert,” which

is naturally occurring and presumed to be inevitable. The alternative term of ‘food apart heid’ places food insecurity within a history of systemic injustice. The current situation is not about a lack of food, but a matter of faulty and uneven distribution. “Foundationally, there’s plenty of food for everyone,” Agudelo asserted. “There’s more than enough. It is about how that food gets distributed and how we make sure everybody has access to it. You know, [food is] a resource that has to be distributed appropriate ly, and we can do that.”

The “we” refers to Hope’s Harvest, a nonprofit she founded in 2018. Hope’s Harvest is a part of the emergency food system, the network of organizations working to aid Rhode Islanders experiencing food insecurity. The nonprofit oc cupies a unique space in this system; although Hope’s Harvest does not produce food, as of last

spring it had served an average of 35,000 people per month since its inception in 2018. Hope’s Harvest achieves this through the age-old prac tice of gleaning: the collection of surplus crops by or for those experiencing food insecurity.

Crop surplus occurs for a multitude of rea sons: perhaps the farmer does not have enough time to harvest everything; or the food is too blemished to sell but adequate to eat; or current demand makes it unprofitable to harvest all of the food. The appeal of gleaning, Agudelo says, is straightforward: “If there is food that would be wasted, we should go get that food and bring it to people who need it. It is so elegant in its simplicity.” Hope’s Harvest pays local farmers for having grown the crops, invites volunteers to harvest them, and coordinates with food distribution networks in Rhode Island. Working outside of the profit-driven food system, which artificially produces unused surplus and food insecurity, gleaning asserts that farmers deserve compensation for their labor and that food-re

lated needs should be met regardless of profit incentives or market demands.

So why isn’t gleaning the standard answer to food insecurity in the United States? After all, 13.9 million tons of food went unharvested in 2019, according to the food waste monitor ReFED. Gleaning’s prevalence, though now experiencing a surge, has been hindered by the conception of private property for the last few centuries. As these notions of land ownership became codified in law, gleaning faced legal challenges and marginalization.

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The genesis of gleaning is difficult to ascertain, as it has appeared in various societies, occur ring alongside established agricultural practic es. Agudelo calls it a “foundationally human practice.” It would make sense that if there were excess food, there would be the desire to get it to people who could eat it. The term “gleaning” itself originated in the Torah. In Leviticus, a book of laws for Judaic societies to live by, verse 19:9-10 states:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigners.”

This commandment serves an obvious social good: by not taking all crops into the mar ket, those who need emergency food can access it without having to ‘deserve it.’ This biblical law is not only fair on a societal and religious basis, but also logistically sensible for farmers. Agudelo notes how the resource of time was as scarce for farmers in ancient times as it is now: “[Farmers] didn’t have time to be [harvesting surplus] but as long as they left it, they were right with God.” By codifying gleaning in reli gious law, ancient Hebrew societies enshrined a practice that improved social welfare.

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Gleaning faced extinction in proto-capitalist societies. During the 18th century, England enacted a series of laws collectively known as the Enclosure Acts that introduced land proper ty rights over the ‘commons’—fields previously shared by small, independent farmers. The Enclosure Acts consolidated this land into the hands of a few wealthy individuals, rendering small farmers landless and without the means to make a living. The former ‘commoners’ began either renting land from the new landlords or trading their labor for wages in cities. Both options left farmers worse off than before the passing of the Enclosure Acts.

Among the commons, gleaning was an ac cepted and intuitive part of life. The commoners really had no stake in whether someone picked unharvested crops or not, as there was no sense of ownership or entitlement. No commoner had greater claim over the leftover crops than another.

With the introduction of private land own ership, gleaning faced a challenge on the basis that the fields, and therefore the crops on it, were no longer considered public property. The matter was brought to court in a trial amusingly known as “The Great Gleaning Case of 1788.” In this case, a landlord challenged the presumed protections around gleaning on the grounds that it was adjacent to “trespassing.” Three out of the four presiding judges decided that people had “no right to glean” and admonished the gleaners as “arrogantly assuming” they had a right to participate in the established custom.

This neglect of tradition and social welfare in favor of private property rights was crucial to the establishment of capitalism in England. Pri vate property forged an artificial scarcity, both in land and in food, which produced a labor force without the capital to sustain itself. In this rul ing, we see the cruel justification for starvation and scarcity that persists today: the legal system privileges the right for landowners to pursue profits over the right of individuals to eat.

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The clash between the commons model and privatization ideology also appeared in North America as Native Americans strove to maintain sovereignty. Part of the European colonization efforts included an attempt to “reeducate” Native Americans to understand the “advantage of individual ownership of property” and to abandon the communal ownership of land, the predominant understanding among Indigenous nations.

Resistance to privatization has been signif icant in preserving Indigenous sovereignty, as captured in the story of the Wisconsin-based Menominee tribe. In 1856, the Menominee were forced to cede most of their land and move to a 235,000 acre reservation located within their former territory. Despite the pressures from local businesses and government to sell their land, the Menominee have maintained their tribal sovereignty. The solution to resist colo nial pressures and to maintain sovereignty was inextricably linked with common ownership of the land. The Menominee harvest and sell lumber for economic survival, doing so in an ecologically sustainable manner. While most lumber companies indiscriminately clear forests with devastating effect, the Menominee reseed their land while keeping enough trees to not destroy the forests. The discretion shown in the Menominee lumbering practices alludes to the sense of responsibility which comes with the ‘common’ model of land ownership; the Menominee’s efforts to maintain sovereign ty were bound with the forest’s survival and well-being. The ideology of common ownership currently manifests in Rhode Island through organizations like Movement Ground Farms, which advocates for collective land stewardship as a way to empower communities.

“Gleaning is something that brings us close to the source, it is something that puts our hands directly on the plants and in the earth,” Agudelo says. The practice encourages us to consider resources as more than something we use or distribute, but as something with meaning outside of its relation to profit-driven economics. Gleaning offers a chance to break outside from marketized thinking. We are invit ed to think about the vegetables not as surplus or as resources with market value, but as resources which could go to feed people or to be harvested for social good. The food can be eaten. No other qualifica tion or rationaliza tion needed.

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Hope’s Harvest and other glean ing agencies in the United States have to contend with legal prece dents like The Great Gleaning Case of 1788.

There is no legal codification for gleaning in the United States; farmers have no obligation to do nate their surplus crops. Unlike some historical gleaning models, Hope’s Harvest compensates the farmers for the crops they harvest, meaning the organization relies on outside funding for its operations.

But Agudelo does not see purchasing crops as an impediment. Instead, Agudelo sees com pensating farmers for their labor as a key com ponent of Hope’s Harvest’s philosophy. “The highest possible outcome that I can envision is where farmers are getting fairly compensated for the work they do, which is essential and nec essary, and everyone has access to their food,” she told the Indy. Hope’s Harvest purchases their food from small- to mid-sized farmers. Farmers designate fields to be harvested, then the gleaners do the rest of the work. Without these farmers, there would be no “fresh, healthy food” to glean.

Hope’s Harvest’s labor force relies on a community of volunteers who are willing to get their hands dirty to help alleviate food insecu rity. “I think that people have to understand that generosity isn’t just coming from a place of magnanimity or wanting to feel good about yourself,” says Agudelo. “Generosity is some thing that allows human societies to function well.”

Gleaning is difficult, strenuous work— something Agudelo acknowledges. Hope’s Harvest’s community of volunteers continue signing up for gleaning trips because they have come to find joy in the practice. Hope’s Har vest seeks to challenge conceptions around volunteerism; they seek to value the activity of gleaning as much as they value the socially positive fruits of their labor. To participate in a glean means more than just doing community service. By gleaning, you engage in an age-old practice and embody an alternative imagining of volunteer labor. “I don’t get to decide how an oil company makes their policies, and I am never going to be the person deciding that,” Agudelo says. “But I can go harvest 500 pounds of corn and put it in boxes … and make sure [people] have food that day, [which] feels very tangible and direct and meaningful. We all need mean ingful work to be able to sustain ourselves.”

MARK BUCKLEY B’23 needs to start a garden.

WFH (WORKING FROM HELL)

Severance and the Horrors of Work-Life Balance

Apple TV’s Severance opens on a bird’s-eye shot of a disoriented Helly R. (Britt Lower) lying facedown on a conference table. An unknown voice comes through the room’s speaker, asking, “Who are you?” The voice is cool, slightly up beat, verging on automated.

Helly looks around and scoffs: “That’s the first question?” Then she goes silent. She can’t answer it. This realization is as unsettling for us as viewers as it is for Helly. We don’t know who she is, or where she is, much less why she’s waking up on top of a conference table. She starts banging on what seems to be the room’s only door. The voice remains steady, ignoring her cries by moving through the rest of the questions––such as, “What is, or was, the color of your mother’s eyes?”––none of which Helly can answer. The show’s lead, Mark S. (Adam Scott), comes out from behind the door after the last question.

“That’s a perfect score,” he says.

Severance first aired in February of this year, quickly becoming the number-one moststreamed series in March. Throughout the spring semester, friends and relatives couldn’t stop referencing the show, which gained pop ularity just as employees began expressing a desire to continue working from home, rather than returning to the workplace. Severance, then, seemed to capture this cultural push toward

finding ways to maintain personal autonomy in the context of our work.

As Mark begins to explain what he calls the surgical “severance procedure” to Helly, we learn that the conference room belongs to Lu mon Industries. Anyone who chooses to work at Lumon agrees to be “severed,” a process through which their perceptual chronologies are split. This splitting ultimately separates the “work” and “life” versions of each employee: A person’s “innie,” or work-self, has no memory of their outside life, while their “outie” has no memory of the workplace. Helly, then, has just been severed.

The gravity of Mark’s explanation––that Helly’s innie will experience life as a perpetual series of workdays––seems to hit her exactly as it hits us. Beyond the questions we have about the procedure, this moment endows Severance with a sudden sense of grief––an immediate and all-consuming sadness for innie-Helly’s loss of self (or at least, her emotional access to her outie’s self). It’s a feeling that lingers through out the rest of the season, structuring the series around the question of how we might be able to grieve for parts of ourselves we’ll never know. Ultimately, the show’s horror is wrapped up in these pendulum swings between self and other, and the losses we face when we exclude our selves from our own minds.

Mark, oblivious, drones on about “the work-life balance.”

“To start, imagine yourself as a seesaw—” Helly throws a speaker at his forehead.

She asks Mark if she has the option to leave this new job at Lumon.

“Well, every time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back,” Mark says, raising the issue that seems to orbit the rest of the series: The “you” who finds herself in the office and the “you” who chooses to return each day represent two versions of Helly (her innie and her outie). By nature of the severance procedure, each “self” has no knowledge of the other, and thus, Mark’s instinct to conflate the two suddenly feels wrong. The question of what

constitutes “Helly” and what constitutes “not Helly” is surprisingly complicated, as her two selves are distinct, yet unified within a single body.

Halfway through the first episode, for example, Helly asks to leave Lumon. She walks toward the door quickly at first, then pauses to stare through its window into the stairwell. The camera shifts to watch her face through the win dow, and then again to show us her view of the stairs. This back-and-forth of the camera seems to mimic the feeling of separation between Helly’s selves. We see her innie still stuck inside Lumon, and then the empty stairway––where we expect her outie to be as soon as she opens the door. Yet, her outie isn’t there. In the same way that Helly can’t access this other piece of herself as an innie, the camera refuses to give us access to it, too.

This is exemplified when Helly does walk out the door, only to end up back in the same hallway. This happens again and again, even as she runs at the door, attempting to fling herself through it. The disruption of space seems to intensify the mental fracturing between Helly’s innie and outie: As the inside of Lumon starts to feel more like a self-perpetuating maze than any kind of reality, it mimics the way in which innie-Helly is trapped in an endless interiority, never finding the door to the outside world.

“Am I dead?” she says to Mark. “This isn’t like, hell or something?”

“No,” Mark says.

“Then why can’t I leave?”

“Well you did leave, just now. Out into the stairwell at least. You left, but you came back,” Mark says.

This, of course, only confuses Helly more. In conjunction with her face-down introduction at the beginning of the episode, this moment shows us how little control Helly seems to have over her own body, much less her mind.

This is not only the case for Helly, but every character in the show. At the end of the episode, Mark’s outie walks to his car to drive home. He finds a note and gift card reward on his dash board saying he slipped and cut his forehead at work. Yet, we already know the cut is from Helly, and the note makes us wonder how often an innie’s narratives are erased to fit the struc ture of Lumon’s world. Mark simply touches the blue bandaid on his forehead.

In this sense, Mark’s initial “seesaw” reference is partially realized––each end of the seesaw is connected to the other by the same pole, but from wherever we sit, we can’t reach the other side. If an innie is on one side and her outie is on the other, each self is connected by a singular body––injuries sustained by the innie are still felt by the outie. And yet, despite this

connective tissue, they come to feel completely discordant.

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Not only is Helly separated from herself on a cognitive level, but also a physical one: things as simple as the effects of rest or relaxation become tasks for her innie to imagine, rather than experience. In one episode of the show, for example, Helly’s innie asks Mark how he deals with the inherent loss of experience that comes with being an innie––things like sleep, or weekends.

Mark responds, “I find it helps to focus on the effects of sleep since we don’t get to experi ence it.”

This moment reminded me of Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel argues that we are more than just our neural and physical processes, and that all organisms have some subjective con scious experience separate from their actions. He writes that, if we assume bats, for example, have experiences, we inherently assume there “is something that it is like to be a bat.” There are qualia, or properties of experience, we can imagine about bats––what it might be like to fly, or echolocate––but we will never completely understand their experience of simply being. This may seem obvious, but it comes to feel ter rifying in the context of Severance, where the real horror lies in each character’s struggle not just to understand other organisms, but to know what it is like to truly have access to themselves (even basic actions, like sleep). Thus, on an even more essential level than understanding themselves, characters yearn to be––to simply experience life without daily interruptions to their own existence.

In this sense, Mark’s comment about “the effects of sleep” reminds us of the grief present within this disconnection from one’s own mind, body, and self-experience: for lost time, lost agency, and knowledge of the self. The remain der of the show stays laden with this loss; as Severance progresses, we learn that Mark initially opted to undergo the severance procedure as a means of avoiding coping with the death of his wife. While Mark’s innie has no knowledge of this, we as viewers associate the workplace itself with his unprocessed grief. Just as Nagel reminds us that we inherently lack a full un derstanding of another organism’s experience, we are always aware that Mark himself lacks a complete understanding of his own mind.

In Severance, rather than holding two opposing beliefs, characters hold two versions of the same self within one mind and body. The result is a constant maintenance of two states of being. It’s exhausting, both for the characters and for us as viewers, as we’re forced to hold the doubling of each character within our own bodies, constant ly fighting our inherent human instinct to unify them.

In one scene, Lumon’s therapist, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), offers an employee, Irving (John Turturro), a wellness session. As they sit in the wellness room, Ms. Casey turns up the volume on the bird songs playing in the back ground. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath through her nose, as if to say, “Settle in.”

Each time I’ve rewatched this scene, I’ve unconsciously taken a breath as soon as Ms. Casey does––it’s almost reflective, like a yawn, signaling to my own body that it might get some rest from the tension which saturates the rest of the show.

Ms. Casey tells Irving that outside of work, he is “an exemplary person,” and that she’s going to give him more information about his outie.

“These facts are not to be shared outside this room,” she says. “But for now, they’re yours to enjoy.”

And with that, our rest is over. The scene reminds us that while Ms. Casey is technically presenting Irving with facts about himself, they seem more like facts about a complete stranger. This concept of a split-self seems to literalize the term “cognitive dissonance,” or the psycho logical conflict when one simultaneously holds two opposing beliefs. As human beings, we seek consistency within ourselves and others. Thus, when we hold dissonance within our minds, we often come to feel stressed, anxious, uncomfort able, and depressed. This stress often appears as physical discomfort––an anxiety that insists upon making itself known through and within the body.

This discomfort is emphasized when Irving smiles and laughs in response to one of his outie’s traits.

“That’s ten points off. You have ninety points remaining,” Ms. Casey says. “Please don’t speak.”

She tells Irving he should not show prefer ence for one fact over another. His expression twists into confusion, but his body remains relatively motionless throughout this moment and the rest of the scene. He sits in his chair with his hands on his knees, his body seeming to tense up with each fact, working hard not to react. Thus, even given information about themselves, each piece of the self must resist humanizing the other. We can almost feel the effort it takes for Irving to remain still, the desire to know himself oozing from every one of his pores. Yet, as Ms. Casey reminds him, he must maintain this dissonance, this separation between his two selves.

In this scene, Ms. Casey presents Irving with a slight gesture toward autonomy, but takes it back just as quickly as it arrived. The moment forces Irving’s innie to work hard to maintain his composure, a brief unbalancing of the metaphorical work-life balance seesaw Mark referenced in the beginning of the series.

Even Ms. Casey’s office seems to mimic this perpetual balancing act between inside and outside worlds, with its fake trees and back ground chirps of bird songs. The rest of the Lumon offices are characterized by fluorescent lighting, maze-like hallways, and carpets that look like fake grass, again highlighting the ways in which innies are constantly presented with the illusion of outside experience, only to be re minded that they will never actually understand it. The lights offer an image of sunlight, the fake grass a gesture toward realness that will never be felt. In fact, the interior of the Lumon offices seem more bright and lively than the outside world––the “real world”––in the show, which is most often shown in wintery colors and dark lighting. For viewers, this effect confuses the boundaries between work and life, a gnarling together of spaces which only heightens the stomach-churning horror of each innie’s loss of the world.

Throughout Severance, it’s difficult not to see the workplace as a site of loss. Characters become increasingly fed up with their experi ence of dissonance as the season progresses. Moments like Irving’s wellness session, in which he is directly confronted with his loss of self, seem to push characters toward the ques tion of whether severance was ever in their best interest. Even outies start wondering about the lives of their innies––Mark begins trying to leave his innie warnings about Lumon, which his innie can’t decipher. In this way, one version of each character becomes more like a carica ture of the other than an autonomous being. In fact, in the show’s second episode, one employ ee (played by Zach Cherry) gleefully lists the rewards Lumon offers innies when they reach certain benchmark goals. Finger traps, erasers, caricature drawings of themselves. By the end of the show, this last example feels more horrific than anything else––a reminder of the sense that each innie’s mind is being slowly pulled out from within them. Eventually, it comes to feel like all they’ll be left with is an image of them selves, a haunting sense of deja vu for a piece of their lives they have no way of knowing.

Severance’s horror in the idea of making work into one’s life is also reproduced for the show’s audiences. While episodes blend seamlessly into one another, the very nature of a weekly-release television series disrupts formal continuity––a reflection of the internal dissonance characters experience throughout the season. The screen and camera themselves seem to enhance this disruption, always high lighting our distance from each character. At the same time, in watching the show, we’re inviting the workplace (even if it isn’t our own) into our lives. Thus, we simultaneously experience a distance from the show via the constructed lens of the camera, and effectively erase any separation from the idea of work-life balance we might have otherwise had. The horror of the show, then, comes when we realize that we’ve been trapped in the same cycle as the characters in the show: one in which we want to separate ourselves from our actions or work, but come to find it impossible to compartmentalize work and life. Even if we could, Severance makes us question whether we’d really want to do so at all. In this sense, we experience a grief of our own, wrapped up in the complexities of trying to distinguish who we are from what we do.

RACHEL CARLSON B’23 is definitely watching TV.

HUMANITARIAN HYPOCRISY

International response to floods fails Pakistani citizens

“Everywhere I travel, I see the same story,” Ha mid Mir, a GeoTV Pakistani journalist, says in a recent news broadcast. “I was here during [the] 2010 [floods], when aid was still successfully reaching people … but now reaching people has been impossible for NGOs, governments, and the media.” Mir stands against a backdrop of makeshift tents, next to what seems like a boundless lake—but in fact it is land that has been completely submerged by the catastrophic floods in Sindh, Pakistan.

According to satellite images taken by the European Space Agency, a third of Pakistan seems to be completely underwater. As of Sep tember 30, approximately 7.9 million people are assumed to be displaced, around 1,693 killed, (a third of whom were children) and around 13,000 injured. Two million houses have been damaged, nearly 800 thousand of which have been damaged beyond repair. Thousands of kilometers of roads and hundreds of bridges have been destroyed, preventing aid workers from reaching affected communities and dis placed people from traveling to safety. Pakistan has faced flood calamities every year for the past few decades; in 2010, the nation faced one of comparable proportions that impacted approximately a fifth of Pakistan’s total land area, claiming thousands of lives and displacing millions from their homes.

National and international NGOs, nonprof its, community actors, government agencies, and other humanitarian actors are attempting to control what is quickly looking like an irrevers ible disaster. However, most of these responses have been inadequate due to scarce funding that barely reaches the most affected populations. Meanwhile, powerful actors in the Global North refuse to acknowledge their culpability in this crisis—namely, environmental injustices toward the Global South, neocolonial narratives around international aid and funding, and systemic issues within the international humanitarian aid industry itself. Pakistan and its people continue to suffer while receiving next to no reparations from these wealthy actors, who shamelessly dismiss them as ‘helpless victims’ of Nature and its forces.

Forum deploying response operations across the country. But by then there were already more than a thousand casualties, several million people displaced, and the infrastructure, agri culture, health, and economic prospects of an entire population were in critical danger.

The 2022 floods have been particularly catastrophic, with the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan receiving nearly eight times the nor mal amount of rainfall and the entire country receiving more than triple normal levels, which are themselves relatively high. Heat waves exac erbated by climate change have caused glaciers in Pakistan to melt at an unprecedented rate, leading to extreme flooding.

Floods in Pakistan, though, are not in themselves “unprecedented” disasters. In the past two decades, the densely populated South Asian country has experienced several devas tating monsoon floods. Floods of smaller yet still-fatal proportions occur in the same period of July to September every year, and the Global Climate Risk Index of 2021 has called Pakistan the eighth most-vulnerable country to climate change in the world—even though Pakistan emits less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. When Pakistanis are not deal ing with floods, they are dealing with severe droughts and extreme heat waves. Long-term recovery from such a disaster takes years, and when the recovery period keeps being inter spersed with more disasters, recovery almost becomes a distant dream.

Consistent climate catastrophes layered in with the incompetency of former Prime Min ister Imran Khan’s administration, a growing immigrant population, and rising food and fuel prices from global supply chain disruptions and the Russia-Ukraine war have made the impact of these constant floods deadly for Pakistani citizens.

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ing to reach affected communities. Meanwhile, smaller local groups and individuals are actually in those communities, doing the bulk of the ac tual response. Organizations like the Women’s Democratic Front, the Balochistan Rural Sup port programme, and the EHSAR foundation are attempting to reach survivors with cash and in-kind assistance, and set up makeshift shel ters and medical camps across affected areas. Despite being under-resourced, unlike their international counterparts, these groups have been far more impactful; they have been a part of these communities for years already, deliver ing needs-based assistance to households.

The Pakistani government’s response to the floods has been too little, too late, especially for marginalized communities and regions in the country. Balochistan is one such region, where an armed insurgency against the Pakistani state has been going on for several decades now. The government has also ignored citizens in rural communities and informal urban settlements in cities like Karachi and Islamabad, where floods pose more danger. The first few reports of flood casualties were those of citizens belonging to these communities and regions, and they con tinue to be the most heavily impacted.

As long as people who have been histor ically ignored by the state were the ones hav ing their lives and livelihoods taken away, the situation was just another normalized ‘natural’ disaster. Only after the floods started moving into urban and financial centers of the country, like Karachi and Islamabad, and began impact ing the upper middle class, did the Pakistani government spring to action.

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Moreover, international agencies, especially whose executive control rests in the Global North, often assume that ‘beneficiaries’ of a re sponse all have the same basic human needs. As long as these needs are met following the disas ter, the perception is that humanitarian workers are doing their job. What is now slowly being recognized, however, is that people belonging to systematically marginalized groups, like wom en, gender minorities, people with disabilities, people belonging to minority religions, com munities, castes, etc. often have different needs during humanitarian emergencies.

Around mid-June of this year, flood reports from the four major provinces of the country— Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Sindh—started pouring in from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) in Pakistan. By mid-July, there were already several hundred reported casualties. Bridges and roads had all but vanished under the ravaging floods, and entire kha’cha homes and villages had been swept away, disproportionately impacting hundreds of rural, immigrant, and low-income communities.

Only after July 28 did the Pakistani govern ment finally spring into action, according to The Express Tribune, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif forming a federal committee to assess flood damage, raise and distribute aid funds, and guide relief efforts across the country. Around the same time, the international hu manitarian sector slowly began to take notice, with the Red Cross Red Crescent society and some members of the Pakistan Humanitarian

None of this is news to the Pakistani govern ment. Even worse, none of it is news to govern ments like the U.S. and the U.K., to the human itarian sector at large, or to West-dominated international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For years, the world has been aware of the fact that Pakistan and other postcolonial countries in the Global South suffer the consequences of untold levels of consump tion and emissions in ‘developed,’ industrial ized countries in the Global North. After each flood Pakistan has faced, these very institutions and authorities have come up with numerous reports and ‘action plans’ which aspire to better their ‘disaster preparedness’ capabilities in Pa kistan and make vulnerable communities more ‘resilient’ to such floods.

It seems that these numerous promises and plans received no follow-through. Every time a new disaster in the Global South catches enough international media attention, humani tarian actors swoop into the area with different ‘clusters’ involved in distributing food, building shelters, providing WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) facilities, and protection services. Several reports, articles, and spokespeople are deployed by international humanitarian agen cies, each dominating the spotlight and claim

For example, “gender-sensitive” response plans for the Pakistan floods only include wom en and perpetuate a reproductive or ‘helpless victim’ narrative. Gender is mentioned only in terms of pregnancy and health, menstrual health and hygiene, or gender-based violence. This not only ignores other gender minorities completely, but also ignores the impact on the social, economic, and political lives and realities of women after a disaster. For example, during such humanitarian emergencies, the nature and quantity of care and domestic responsibilities, the distribution of these responsibilities, and the time and effort they require to be fulfilled undergo significant changes. These conditions can lead to increased labor, vulnerability, trau ma, and negative coping mechanisms (dropping out of school, quitting the workforce, decreased food intake) for care providers, who tend to be women and girls in most societies.

Overlooking these essential facets of an individual’s experience during a disaster and ignoring the impact of an emergency on inter sectional identities can actually cause long-term harm for communities which have already been historically marginalized. Thus, when human itarian actors just come into a country and do what they assume is needed for the affected population, the aid itself becomes a significant part of the population’s experience and trauma of the disaster—and has tangible long-term impact. Such agencies gradually leave once it seems like the disaster has sufficiently blown over, which can take years, and they take their funding with them. Meanwhile, what is left is a recovering population that must rebuild entire lives, families, communities in the wake of huge physical, social, economic, and psychological damage.

The kind of reach and response needed for a ca lamity of this magnitude requires a much higher level of funding and resources than what is cur rently available in Pakistan, despite the amounts Western countries, the UN, and the World Bank are announcing in donations. But if such floods and natural disasters in Pakistan are now an annual occurrence, then shouldn’t funding and response systems already be in place?

Most of these systems are centered around the narrative of victimized ‘helpless’ Pakistani citizens, putting the onus on them to be ‘resil ient.’ They comprise the usual band-aid solu tions of temporary shelters, food provision, health assistance, etc., as opposed to actual systemic solutions.

While these systems recognize that Pakistan has become increasingly vulnerable to climate change despite being a negligible contributor to it, none of them seem to address the core issue: the dumping of climate crisis consequences onto nations like Pakistan.

The humanitarian sector, the internation al nonprofit sector, and Western governments would rather brush their own actions under the carpet, blaming the economies, consumption patterns, emissions, and political leadership in the Global South for consistently facing disaster after disaster. No one seems willing to address the uncomfortable truth: that these industri alized authorities and consumerist economies owe reparations to the South—climate repara tions.

Pakistan will take years, maybe decades, to recover from these floods. The agricultural sector of the country is now under even heavier strain, with irrigation systems and acres of crops going under water, implying dire food insecu rity for at least 8 million people in the country in the coming months. On top of this, several affected communities are already dealing with contagious flood-borne diseases, while having virtually no access to health support systems, implying further loss of lives and livelihoods in the future. Pakistan needs funds and resources to pull itself out of this, for the sake of preserving its present and its future.

Meanwhile, these so-called ‘developed

countries,’ with their higher levels of wealth and supposedly stable political institutions, are barely contributing to the recovery from a disaster that they have essentially caused, while the Pakistani government, already resource-con strained, has contributed the bulk of all recovery funds, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In fact, even recent international aid has self-serv ing economic agendas underlying it. In early September, international media hailed the fact that Pakistan was “able to secure” IMF funding for the flood response. What is left unsaid is that this funding was conditional: the Pakistani government had to repeal protective food and fuel subsidies it had passed earlier this year in response to soaring inflation. Now, even if the funds do help Pakistan initially recover, the population faces rampant inflation during a fatal emergency.

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Earlier this year, the intense international cov erage and discourse around the Russia-Ukraine war and the blatant disregard of loss of life in Palestine already showed the world that the lives of those living in the Global South, the lives of people of color, have always mattered less than those in the North. Even now, Queen Elizabeth II’s death has been dominating media discourse for the past month, while Pakistan has barely been mentioned. Why should we bother talking about the Pakistan floods, the water shortage in Jackson, Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico, or the feminist political movements in Iran? Why not focus instead on an extremely elaborate and overpriced funeral of a 96-year-old white woman who was the face of imperialism for most of a century?

Meanwhile, videos of rushing volumes of water swallowing up entire houses, bridges, and villages, satellite before-and-after images of dif ferent districts completely submerged, and vid eos of affected people attempting to ‘escape’ to safer grounds, have been circulating all over the internet. The ‘developed’ world idly watches on, with social media users and major news anchors remarking on the brutal and destructive force of

the floods, or marveling at the ingenious ways Pakistani locals are avoiding the water (like a recent trending video of volunteers creatively using a bedframe for rescue). Rarely does such media incite discourse in regular conversation.

The Global North has simply cast aside the floods as it does with all other such disasters in the South—normalizing these occurrences alto gether while entire communities are uprooted. As if all of this is just trauma porn, occurring in a different world altogether, and not connected to every one of us on the planet. Local Pakistani journalists however—such as Hamid Mir from GeoTV—have been risking their lives traveling directly to affected areas to provide full flood coverage and amplify Pakistani voices. Still, the most widely shared ‘content’ about the situa tion is coming from white creators and western media channels based in the U.S. and the U.K., while the people like Mir have been confined mostly to South Asian echo chambers.

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The damage caused by the floods in Pakistan includes not just the quantifiable losses of life, property, and socioeconomic prospects for the country, but also tangible and intangible losses of generationally owned land and livelihoods for entire communities, alongside immeasurable grief for an entire nation. What is happening in Pakistan is a catastrophe caused and worsened by a plethora of systemic failures: climate injus tice, neocolonialism, racism, global inequality, and willful ignorance. Unless these systemic issues are acknowledged and addressed in time by power holders within these structures, di sasters like the Pakistan floods will continue to exponentially ravage the Global South until they finally reach the North. By then, it might be too late.

ANUSHKA KATARUKA B’24 cares about debt to the Global South.

Sapphina Roller

Presents...INDIE MIX

Dear Indie,

My boyfriend is in a band, and he’s really invested in it. Unfortunately, the band is terrible. I want to support his passions and aspira tions, but I don’t know how to encourage something that I find legitimately awful. On top of that, I’m embarrassed to be seen at his “concerts” and in his ugly homemade merch. What do I do?

Love, Time to Pretend

Dear Time to Pretend,

If music be the food of love, play on! I don’t really know what that means, but this week’s questions are all about music. Even the most harmonious of relationships have their moments of discord, so it’s a good thing I’m here to prevent any tone-deaf deci sions.

As a general rule, lying is kind of bad. One lie leads to another lie, and then another, and then you’ve got yourself a whole web of deception, and webs of deception are a big mess to deal with. In your situation, however, I think telling the whole truth—that you think your boyfriend’s band is terrible—would be kind of bad, too.

Is it possible to focus not on the music of the band itself, but rather on your boyfriend’s passion for it? Can you find a way to believe in how much he cares, and maybe not necessarily his bass-playing* skills?

If not, then it’s time to tell the kind-of truth! Tell him you love the energy of his concerts, but the strobe lights are a little too much for you; can you meet him afterward to celebrate? You’d love to sit in on the next rehearsal, but wouldn’t having a significant other in the room throw off the Radiohead incel vibe he’s been aiming for in his music? You think the band t-shirt has a cool design, and even though mustard yellow isn’t your color, you will wear it as pajamas! If full-blown lying is like Spotify Premium, this is like lying with ads. It’s not the real thing, and it’s a little less costly.

Dear Indie,

Is it possible to catch feelings for someone based on their music taste? I’m currently hooking up with someone I was sure I had zero emotional attachment to—no interest in dating them at all. Then I stalked their Spotify playlists, and now I see them in a totally different light. Am I in love or insane?

Love, First Day of My Life

Dear First Day of My Life,

You know that part of every high school romcom where the nerdy girl takes off her glasses and the doofus-jock love-interest guy realizes she was beautiful the whole time, because prior to this point, for one reason or another, he couldn’t conceptualize what her face looked like without glasses on?

This isn’t like that. I know it must feel like you’re seeing them in a new light (or seeing “New Light” by John Mayer on a playlist entitled “Summer 19 Vibes ”). Is it possible that having better music taste than expected reveals some kind of emotional depth that wasn’t there before? Sure. Well, actually, no, not if they’re listening to John Mayer.

But maybe there is a little more to them than you thought. Does that mean you’re in love, that you’re compatible and meant to be to gether? Probably not! Is “The Less I Know The Better” by Tame Impala a banger? Yes! Does that mean I’m gonna go kiss every guy who asks me if I’ve ever heard of “The Less I Know The Better”? Actually, maybe, but I really shouldn’t!

Dear Hot & Heavy,

The College Hill Independent takes a strong stance against sex playlists. Why do you want to hear someone else’s disembodied voice while you’re having sex? Why do you want to interrupt the moment while you wait to hear the JBL speaker-turning-on noise? Why do you want to risk getting thrown off rhythm because the beat of the music is the wrong speed? Or risk having it shuffle in a bad order? Why do you want to think about your ill-advised first-semester friends with benefits arrangement every time you hear a certain song on the radio? Don’t do it.

But if you really must do it, use a Spotify-generated one. Then you can’t be blamed for any wreckage that occurs. Don’t say Indie didn’t warn you.

The nerdy-girl-taking-off-her-glasses

trope works because the doo fus-jock already likes her for her quirky, dorky self. The glasses removal moment brings to the surface what he already knew was buried deep down. Unless you already had some deep-down hidden feelings, this new information isn’t enough of a basis for real ones. What you’re feel ing isn’t love—it’s just Summer 19 Vibes .

*He plays thebass, doesn’t he?

DearHowIndie, do you make a good sex playlist?Love, Hot & Heavy

TEXT ANNIE STEIN DESIGN SAM STEWART

SAM

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Saturday 10/15 @ 11AM-2PM: Autumn Vegan Social

Are you vegan? Passionate about environmental issues? Want to make some friends? Swing by this year’s annual Autumn Vegan Social, hosted by Rhode Island Vegan Awareness! Grab tickets for $10 and enjoy cider, donuts, lawn games, crafts, raffles, information about veganism and sustainability, and more. tinyurl.com/vegan-social

Location: Johnston Memorial Park, 1583 Hartford Avenue, Johnston, RI 02919

Saturday 10/15 @ 3PM-5PM: Raices Colombian Folk Dance Group

Join Raices for an exciting performance of Colombian folk dance to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month! The performance is free and open to the public. Snacks from La Casona Restaurant will be available for purchase. tinyurl.com/raices-group

Location: Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906

Saturday 10/15 @ 10AM-4PM: State Street Harvest Festival and Crafts Fair-Oktoberfest

Pop by this Oktoberfest presented by Bristol Merchant Association to check out vendor booths by local artisans, live music, and different foods from local vendors. Admission is free!

Location: State Street State Street, Bristol, RI 02809

Saturday 10/15 and Sunday 10/16 @ 11AM-6PM: Rain

Harvest Arts Festival

Check out this community celebration of water, science, and art hosted by Providence Stormwater Innovation Center! Learn about the importance of clean water through hands-on workshops, science experiments, demonstrations, performances, and more. Admission is free and all are welcome.

Location: Roger Williams Park, 1000 Elmwood Ave., Providence, RI 02907

Sunday 10/16 @ 12PM-4PM: 2nd Annual Harvest Market

With free admission, come welcome in the fall with the second annual Harvest Market presented by the Tiverton Farmers Market and Tiverton Land Trust! Check out an array of local food trucks, artists, vendors, live music, and more.

Location: Pardon Gray Preserve, 3328 Main Road, Tiverton, RI 02878

Sunday 10/16 @ 10AM-2PM: Heart & Sole Walk for Animals

Join the Potter League’s 33rd annual Heart & Sole Walk for Animals in Newport, RI! Enjoy a festive atmosphere celebrating the special bond between animals and people featuring a fun-filled dog walk, music, a sponsor & vendor marketplace, food trucks, and special activities for pets and kids. tinyurl.com/heart-n-sole

Location: Fort Adams State Park, 80 Fort Adams Dr, Newport, RI 02840

Arts

All Day until December 18th: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

This art exhibition, featured daily until December 18th, portrays and explores the relationship between the U.S. carceral system and visual art. There is no cost to attend the exhibit, and it highlights work from currently and formerly incarcerated folks.

Location: The David Winton Bell Gallery in the List Art Building, 64 College St, Providence, RI 02912 & the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell St, Providence, RI 02906

Saturday 10/15 @ 3PM: Open Mic Show- Music/Poetry/ Singers/ Rappers/Comedy

Attend this Open Mic event for artists and lovers of creativity such as singers, rappers, poets, comedians, and more. Performances will be voted on by audience members, and the performer with the most votes will win a $100 cash prize! Performer tickets cost $10 and audience/voter tickets cost $5. They can be purchased on Eventbrite.

Location: 110-100 Roosevelt Ave, Pawtucket, RI 02860

Saturday 10/15 @10AM-12PM: Learn to “Make Your Own Kind of Movie” at Imago

Katherine Reaves is a filmmaker, video artist, educator, and commu nity member of the Imago Foundation for the Arts who is offering this free public workshop. She will be teaching how to take basic shots and angles and use simple editing apps. Each participant will create a 20- to 30-second film and share their product at the end of the workshop. Class size is limited to 10 people, so register on Eventbrite ASAP!

Location: 36 Market Street Warren, RI 02885

Sunday 10/16 @ 8PM-1AM: LA Noche RI

Immerse yourself in the cultures of Salsa, Bachata, and Kizomba at this monthly dance social for $10 at the door (with valid college ID)! Salsa/ Bachata workshops are from 8-8:45p.m., and Kizomba is from 8:4510p.m. The next events are November 20 and December 18, which include performances, announcements, and space to meet new people.

Location: Alchemy 171 Chestnut Street, Providence, RI 02903

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

+ Amenity Aid Rhode Island

Donate at amenityaid.org/donate-money

Amenity Aid works to provide hygiene resources to marginalized communities and low-income people in need. On top of serving individuals, Amenity Aid partners with local shelters, food pantries, anti-domestic violence organiza tions, and other community groups who support underserved communities to distribute hygiene resources to those in need.

+ Project LETS Providence COVID-19 Relief Fund

Donate at projectlets.org/covid19

Project Let’s Erase The Stigma (LETS) is working in coalition with various grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to support marginalized groups in our community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. All donations will directly help individuals, children, and families meet their basic needs.

+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund

Donate at tinyurl.com/oceanstateass

Support sex workers statewide, priority given to BIPOC sex workers, trans sex workers, and sex workers who have been impacted the pandemic

+ Queer & Trans Mutual Aid Providence

Venmo: @qtmapvd; Paypal: qtma.pvd@gmail.com / Info: tinyurl. com/qtma-pvd

QTMA PVD is a small, volunteer-run mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence, RI area. They do payouts once per week and have distributed over $80,000 since their founding in June 2020. They currently have over 30 outstanding requests for aid and would appreciate any donations!