If you’ve been with me at GARMI for long enough, you know I deal in past, present, and future: I love learning history, navigating current events, and world-building for the future. Sometimes these explorations put me in contact with speculative futurism, a field of inquiry and practice that explores how present-day actions and decisions can shape better tomorrows. I find speculative work to be a form of wayfinding in uncertain times, of metabolizing, of cultivating proactive agency. Recently, I’ve been engaging with a new kind of speculative work: speculative history. Specifically, I’m reading a book called Begin the World Over by Kung Li Sun, and I knew from the first page that it’s prime GARMI Canon material — so obviously I came running to tell y’all all about it.

In Begin the World Over, we tumble headfirst into a gay love story set in 1793. Revolutionaries in the West Indies are taking up arms. James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef, isn’t super keen on joining the fight for liberty. He’s talented and favored, and he’d like to protect his relative comforts, thank you very much. But then he meets first mate Denmark Vesey, who’s all deep voice, piercing gaze, commanding presence. You can guess: Sparks. Fly.

And it’s so GARMI-coded, y’all, because desire basically becomes the entry point into revolution.

Brilliant chef meets revolutionary pirate, food becomes a sensuous space for decolonization, and as the Haitian revolution spreads to the United States, coalitions activate between Indigenous nations and runaway slaves. There’s romance, historical fiction, gastronomy, and rebellion. I can’t decide which is most scrumptious.

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In intensifying political times, we have a powerful opportunity to participate in building a better world by exercising our right to vote in the 2026 primaries leading up to this fall’s midterms. Here in California, those primaries are coming up on June 2nd. So California voters: to help us navigate our ballots, GARMI partnered up with to bring you the 2026 CA Primary Voter Cheat Sheet.

Access the Voter Cheat Sheet

In this collaborative guide, you’ll find:

✅ One-Stop Voting Cheat Sheet

This quick resource cross-references six voter guides from climate and social justice organizations based in California. All you have to do is check out the first column, highlighted purple, to easily find and fill in the candidates around whom there seems to be consensus. Where there isn’t consensus or where you’d like to dig a little deeper, explore the other columns in this resource to see what different organizations are recommending. To learn their reasoning, click into the voter guides linked at the top of each column to decide what speaks to you most. This resource is designed to be as speedy or as in-depth as you want it to be.

The candidates named in this resource are not endorsements from GARMI or Better Future Club; rather, they’re a cohesion of recommendations we’re seeing from opinions we value.

The statewide races are relevant for all who are registered to vote in California. The local races listed are LA-specific. If you’re outside LA City, we highly recommend a peek at the Working Families Party, LA Forward, or local DSA chapter guides for your city council and local officials, whose offices directly impact your day-to-day life. Voting down ballot is decision-making about the things that are closest to home.

🗳️ Ballot Propositions

• LA City Measures

• LA County Measures

• California Statewide Measures

🔍 Research Tools

Tools we used to help create the Voter Cheat Sheet + additional links to learn more about this election.

Whether you prefer a quick glance or a deeper dive, we’ve got you. And don’t forget to get your ballots in by June 2nd.

🌿🌞Want to fill out your ballot IRL?

If you’re in LA, join and me for Ballots in the Garden at the Fountain Community Garden on May 30th, from 1:00pm - 4:00pm. It’s civic engagement meets garden social meets potluck. Bring a plant-based dish and your ballots, and we’ll see you there for, in BFC’s words, “good food, thoughtful conversation, and a chance to take part in democracy alongside your community.”

Register here — space is limited.

Based in Los Angeles, Better Future Club is an IRL membership club for co-creating a future that is equitable, sustainable, and connected. We’re creating a third place for you to find your people and make an impact together.

Join as a member here, or plug in on Substack and Instagram to support the work.

Civic engagement is a social activity. Let’s build the world we deserve, together. This is what I mean at GARMI when I say “the planet is getting hotter, but so are we.” Times are crazy — but we’re rising to the occasion.

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Also, to my grandma, who faithfully reads GARMI: Ammamma, it’s okay to skip this one. Or maybe not, if you’re feeling saucy.

Billionaires have bad sex. This is just a fact*. You can look it up — it’s widely reported in numerous academic studies**.

* It is a fact I made up. Though GARMI is an auto-ethnographic project, I have not tested this fact myself. (Yet.)

** The numerous academic studies all happened in my head and not in real life.

For example, according to a 2026 study***:

• 98% of billionaires reported measurable arousal at the term “net gain”

• 96% of billionaires report climaxing only if it’s tax deductible

• 100% of billionaires could not define “enough”

*** By me and my imagination. (Sekhar, 2026)

You may say, “not all billionaires” and “not just billionaires” to which I say “maybe” and “yes,” respectively. And indeed, I know there are some sexy billionaires — hey, Rihanna and Beyoncé. With folks like those two in particular, there is absolutely something incredibly powerful about Black wealth in a system designed to exclude, deprive, and actively vaporize Black economic and political power. And yes, they do community work. Yes, I’m sure it helps many people.

But also: yes, though they give back to some community efforts, their wealth is still built on the backs of other communities’ exploitation. The system is still engineered to concentrate wealth upward, and no individual, however iconic, escapes that architecture entirely.

This is all to say that I’m coming (not in that way, get your mind out of the gutter) for the system, not necessarily the individual people.

Let me also be clear: nothing I’m writing today is intended on the flip side to romanticize poverty or fetishize working class people. Nor is it to say that toxic, patriarchal, and extractive dynamics are limited to the wealthy. Both harm and healing exist at all strata of society.

What I mean when I say “billionaires have bad sex” is that billionairism — the phenomenon, the systems and policies that allow such concentrated wealth accumulation — breeds coercive, extractive, and ultimately hollow relationships — with ourselves, with others, and with the planet.

Hear me out.

What is “good” sex, actually?

There are plenty of ways to define “good” sex. Sex and sexuality are diverse and uniquely flavored across individuals and cultures and creeds, whether we’re talking attraction, turn-ons, preferences, frequencies, kinks, and so on. What feels good to one person might be different from what feels good to the next person, from energy and dynamics all the way down to rhythm and touch. But in the midst of the medley, I think there are two common denominators:

1: At its most basic, sex itself must be consensual.

One thing all good sex (and even any kind of “neutral” sex, however you’d define that) has in common — the one core foundational requirement — is that it’s fully and continuously consensual.

In fact, can we agree that if there’s no consent, it’s not sex at all — it’s assault? I once heard someone illustrate this point by noting that there’s no such thing as “breathing swimming” and “non-breathing swimming.” It’s swimming and drowning. Similarly, consent is the absolute baseline for sexual activity to be considered “sex” in the first place.

2: Good sex is reciprocal.

I’m not talking tit-for-tat (or tit-for-tit, depending on your preferences). I mean: any and all parties involved are part of a circular, generative sense of giving-and-receiving. You feel seen. You feel enthusiastic. You feel alive. Or, at the very least, everyone leaves feeling like, “Cool. That was nice.”

Basic sex requires consent. I think good sex requires reciprocity. You care about my experience, and I care about yours.

I’m not saying every single sexual experience must be a thing of mind-blowing spiritual transcendence. We all have moments of clumsiness, awkwardness, disconnection, even disappointment — within ourselves and with others. What I am saying is: reciprocity means acting in good faith to engage in something mutually enjoyable, to the best of everyone’s abilities, and to make an effort to deepen our understanding of our own and another’s pleasure so that it may bloom.

So there you have it. There’s so much more we could say, but for the purposes of this Ramble, I’m defining “good sex” by simply these two requirements: consent and reciprocity.

Why are we even talking about sex?

Way back in college, I spent three years co-running peer workshops on consent and bystander education. The “cause” I grounded in for years was feminism, gender equity, and women’s sexual liberation. Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” was (and still is) my holy text.

When I later moved into climate storytelling, I used to struggle to explain what seemed like a switch to a different “cause.” But everything is connected. Audre Lorde’s writings joined the likes of Vandana Shiva’s work and adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good to weave for me an understanding of systems, not just “causes” or “issues.” I began learning how systems of oppression are connected — and therefore so are systems of liberation.

And so I understood that when I moved into climate work, it wasn’t a departure from but an evolution of my feminism. I am today what I’d call an ecofeminist. I engage with the way that our current systems extract from women’s bodies, minds, and labor in the same way they extract from our Earth body. The same narrative warfare that seeks to tear down climate justice (e.g. Big Oil’s campaigns that promote petroculture and petromasculinity) are the same ones that seek to oppress women (ex: the manosphere and right wing policy). These systems harm women, men, and all expansive genders. Which means that addressing them, dismantling them, building something better — those efforts benefit us all.

This is how GARMI was born. It’s why I’m here, writing this, trying to arouse our collective lust for a better world.

Last month, April, was both Earth Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about consent and pleasure — where are these capacities violated and where are they regenerated? This Ramble has been composing itself in the back of my mind for a long time. And now, here we are.

Extractive economies are not consensual.

Many of the ways in which our world works today are predicated on assault. We’re not asked for consent before AI is installed on our laptops and phones and everyday applications. We’re not asked for consent before pipelines tear through our communities. We’re not asked for consent before data centers make our utilities bills go up. We’re not asked for consent before the LAPD spends $3,000/hour (adding up to $46.6 million a year) of our city’s budget on the daily helicopter patrols that rattle our windows. We are not asked for consent before our tax dollars fund wars. We’re not asked for consent before fossil fuel infrastructure is built in our backyards, poisoning our air, water, and soil. We’re not asked for consent when the administration pays $1 billion in taxpayer money to cancel offshore wind projects, redirecting the investment toward fossil fuel infrastructure. We’re not asked for consent for surveillance technology in public spaces, for pharmaceutical pricing, for zoning and development decisions that displace communities, and so on and so forth.

In short, we’re not asked for consent about most of the things that affect our lives. This is especially biting when you consider that it is we who pay — financially, mentally, emotionally, physically — for the very things we didn’t ask for. Our tax dollars subsidize corporate bailouts and fossil fuel companies to the tune of billions annually. Our bodies absorb the pollution, the stress, and the health crises that follow. Our mental health bears the weight of systems that were never designed with our well-being in mind.

The systems and policies that create the phenomenon of billionairism — and that, next year, will make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire — are exactly what they sound like: extractive. Take, take, take, to transfer wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of the few. There’s a linear flow that concentrates power at the very top, at the expense of the majority.

Using resources is a normal part of life. But a key feature of extractive systems is that they are only about taking. Taking is where value is created, so taking is all that counts. It’s this very extractive logic that tells us land is a resource to be used, labor is a cost to be minimized, and women’s bodies (especially Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working class women) are objects to be controlled. Giving — if it happens — is a charitable afterthought.

And so we have things like children mining cobalt for Big Tech in the Congo, garment workers in Bangladesh dying in preventable factory fires, Amazon warehouse workers denied bathroom breaks, underpaid care workers — mostly women of color — sustaining entire economies invisibly. These conditions are forced, without a meaningful way for people to opt out; thus, billionaires become billionaires by violating informed consent. Even the “best” billionaire wealth exists within and depends upon supply chains and systems that exploit labor somewhere.

But what about voting, you may ask? Isn’t that a chance for us to give or withhold consent?

Voting alone was never designed to survive this level of concentrated wealth. Billionaires buy democracy: Through Citizens United, which opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate and dark money in elections. Through ownership of media platforms that shape what we believe is possible. Through lobbying, through think tanks, through the installation of allies into regulatory bodies. Representative democracy requires that representatives actually represent us. When Elon Musk can spend $250 million on an election cycle, our votes and his are not the same thing. Billionaire wealth meddles in democracy — the one place where we supposedly are able to exercise our voices to give or withhold consent for the society we’d like to live in.

Nothing exemplifies this point more gravely than Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein Class, who not only engaged in underage sex trafficking of young girls, the barbarous details of which still evoke bile from my belly, but who also were deeply connected to and embedded in both domestic and foreign affairs. Epstein’s contact books alone — over 1,700 names, including sitting heads of state, royals, and intelligence-connected figures across the U.S., UK, Israel, and Saudi Arabia — tell you everything you need to know about the reach of this cozy little club of ultra-wealthy people who do what they want and believe they own the world and everyone in it. They don’t believe they have to ask permission, because to them, power is pillage. And they have a lot of power.

Beyond Epstein, there’s actual scholarship that connects concentrated power with entitlement and predatory behavior (for example: Weinstein and the #MeToo movement and so many others, and all those who participate and protect predators).

But while billionaire meddling means voting isn’t always indicative of an electorate’s enthusiastic consent, none of this means don’t vote. Please do. We’re seeing campaigns (for example: Mamdani’s) where our participation genuinely matters. And by participating, we encourage a more responsive government. We literally take back power. This is true not just of voting, but of anywhere where we can exert our collective influence, of game-changing collective organizing and power-building. If we want to reclaim our right to consent, we have to get involved with the decision-making that affects our lives. Our voices matter because it’s only us together that can outweigh the power of concentrated wealth.

Extractive economies are not reciprocal.

Billionairism isn’t just non-consensual — it’s the polar opposite of reciprocity.

Reciprocity is a cyclical give-and-receive, an ongoing conversation between what is needed and what can be given. It’s not theoretical — it’s been practiced across human and non-human life since the dawn of time.

To me, reciprocity feels like a healthy flow, a circulation of ideas, energies, and resources. Every thriving system depends on good circulation. In our own bodies, our blood circulates oxygen for us to survive. Good circulation supports cardiovascular health, cognitive function, immune response, and cellular repair. Good circulation is, in fact, a precursor to good sex — it is quite literally blood flow that expresses sexual arousal and heightens sensation.

Accumulation, meanwhile, leads to biological crisis: blood clots, kidney stones, arterial plaque. And tumors, where unfettered growth is what we diagnose as cancer.

Creating reciprocal relationships on Earth — nurturing this circulation and flow — is an act of self-care. It’s a call and response, a question and answer, a jugalbandi, a dance of give and receive, of where there is shortage and where there is abundance. Reciprocity is a creative, balancing, connective. It’s a form of lovemaking.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that lovemaking is not how the status quo currently approaches life. The systems under which we live are less about flow and circulation and reciprocity and more about a dictatorial, linear gluttony for more. More, more, more. More for less. More always. Infinitely more.

This mentality runs wild in the mainstream because our narratives intentionally cut out anyone who might argue against accumulation. Whose knowledge does mainstream culture see as valuable, authoritative, relevant, and wise? Is it the mother, the Indigenous elder, the local leader? Or is it the oh-so-wealthy, boneless, skinless chicken breast of a tech billionaire sporting an Armani suit?

Any pearls of wisdom we might collect on reciprocity are purposely sidelined, caricatured, or Devil’s advocated out of legitimacy. That forced absence allows pillage culture to prevail, deteriorating our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our planet.

So it’s not just about harm or coercion but also about quality of life — or, for argument’s sake, the quality of sex. Those who worship at the altar of extraction and excess can hardly be rooted in the divinity of mutual benefit, deep care, or toe-curling pleasure.

Extraction fundamentally cannot understand pleasure.

Good sex, like good politics, requires the capacity to be genuinely affected by another person. To let what matters to them matter to you. Extraction forecloses that. You can’t be a good lover and also be someone who has trained yourself to treat other people, other entities, as resources to use. It’s a question of how you derive your pleasure — from hoarding or from sharing? Is your pleasure built on your power to make yourself feel good with no care to another, or does your pleasure blossom from your power to make yourself and someone else feel good?

Extraction is fundamentally unable to understand pleasure itself, because capitalism struggles to value anything that isn’t scarce, transactional, or own-able. Pleasure is none of those things. Pleasure is abundant. It’s not zero-sum. Capitalism doesn’t have the language to account for it. How do you put, “mmm, that feels good” on a profit and loss statement? There is simply no valuation model for something so valuable.

Women’s power, nature’s power, instinctive power, ancestral power, erotic power — these intelligences are so expansive that the system sweats with fear. The billionaire class, its affiliates, and its apologists have a desire to control that which is too magical for them to handle. They seek to constrain and humiliate lands and cultures and bodies. Some of them seek to constrain life itself.

I think of billionaire transhumanists like Peter Thiel of Palantir, who are obsessed with some kind of post-human cyber immortality that, if you ask me, sounds lame as f*ck. I heard a quote somewhere, and for the life of me I cannot remember where I found it (if you know, please let a gal know), but it sat with me: “The billionaire transhumanists who seek immortality want to defeat death, but this also means they want to defeat birth and rebirth. That attempt to hoard life, and freeze it in place, and to break cycles of renewal and decay isn’t a celebration of life. It’s an attempt to make life more like death — to make it stable and endless, rather than fleeting and precious.”

Hoarding not just wealth, but life itself? Come the f*ck on. Touch some grass!

In All About Love, bell hooks talks about how capitalism and patriarchy produce men who are emotionally unavailable and incapable of genuine intimacy, so wealth accumulation and dominance become substitute structures for connection. To me, anywhere that wealth accumulation and dominance become substitutions for real intimacy is a place where pleasure goes to die.

Is hoarding wealth actually so bad, or are you just jealous?

“Don’t billionaires deserve their money — didn’t they work hard to accumulate this wealth? Don’t they employ lots of people, so we need them? Aren’t they really smart, because otherwise how did they get rich? Why would taxing them more be a good idea — they’ll leave the state, not spend their money, not do business, and then the economy will be bad? Doesn’t their wealth trickle down? What about all the philanthropy they do? Instead of complaining about them, why not just work hard and get smart so you can become one of them?”

Okay, let’s first understand what a billion dollars actually looks like. I don’t know about you, but I can’t really fathom a billion of anything. So I visited whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website for us to understand the scale together.

You can check out for yourself the page’s visualizer, or pause and play your way through the screen recording below of my endless scrolling down the one billion pixels block.

Now, if the above alone is not enough to make the case that amassing a billion dollars — not a few million or even a few hundred million, but a billion, which is one thousand million — in wealth is hoarding at a scale that may constitute mental illness (like, are you okay?), then let’s actually dig into the questions above.

Didn’t billionaires work hard to accumulate this wealth? Maybe. But hard work is not limited to billionaires. Most people work really hard. Harder, even, than most billionaires. On top of that, roughly 60% of current billionaires inherited significant wealth or had substantial family wealth as a launchpad (per Oxfam and Forbes). In the U.S., studies show that access to capital, elite education, and social networks (i.e. existing privilege) are stronger predictors of billionaire status than individual effort or intelligence. And structures like our tax codes and campaign finance laws protect the ultra-rich to the point that billionaires are used to being coddled within a welfare state for the wealthy. So wealth stays protected, stagnant, concentrated.

Don’t they employ lots of people, so we need them? I can cite all kinds of economic studies that debunk this myth, but they’re boring and easily available online, so all I’ll say is: there were plenty of jobs before the first billionaire, and there will be plenty of jobs after the last. Billionaires are not the ones creating jobs, they’re the ones accumulating the fruits of everyone else’s labor.

Aren’t they really smart, because otherwise how did they get rich? Money does not mean wisdom. This conflation is how we end up with tech billionaires being treated as authorities on public health, education, and governance. Also, many billionaires benefited from timing, inherited capital, access, and luck. Not just their own wits.

Why would taxing them more be a good idea — they’ll leave the state, not spend their money, not do business, and then the economy will be bad? Empirical evidence disproves this on every level. “They’ll leave” is a threat, and almost always a bluff.

Doesn’t their wealth trickle down? Trickle-down economics has been studied for decades and is pretty much not a real thing. Wealth concentrated at the top stays concentrated. It goes into assets, financial instruments, and capital markets, not into workers’ wages. Real wages for American workers have been quite stagnant since the 1970s, while executive compensation has skyrocketed: according to the Economic Policy Institute, back in 1965, the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay in the U.S. was approximately 21-to-1. By 2023 it was approximately 290-to-1. That’s pretty nuts.

What about all the philanthropy they do? The shortest answer to this is that billionaire philanthropy is more often than not another form of top-down decision-making by people who don’t have wisdom about or stake in the decisions being made. Billionaire philanthropy is often born of one dude’s arrogant ignorance, surrounded by people who don’t dare challenge him. “Me and my people know what’s best for you poor folks.” This makes traditional philanthropy another violation of consent.

Like imagine if a lover kept biting your finger, completely convinced that this was your erogenous zone, even if you had said it was not, but he — thinking himself a great and generous lover — continued to do it anyway. You’d wind up deeply unsatisfied and covered in bite marks. That’s how I think about most billionaire philanthropy.

There are, of course, times when billionaire philanthropy may have positive effects if it is community rooted. But on the whole, the structures that allow for the hoarding of wealth are the very reason why communities are in need of philanthropy in the first place. And charity does not make for good sex. Who wants pity or paternalism in the bedroom?

Instead of complaining about them, why not just work hard and get smart so you can become one of them? The pathways to billionaire wealth — access to capital, elite networks, inherited advantage, and exploitation of labor and regulatory systems — are not democratically available to all. Telling people to “just work harder” to become billionaires is kind of like telling people to win the lottery as their retirement plan.

More importantly, it sidesteps the actual question: should any system allow this level of accumulation in the first place?

And: is becoming a billionaire even desirable to everyone? I have more longing for sunsets and accessible nutritious food and days of leisure and play than I do for becoming a hoarder of wealth in a world where others starve. I would give myself the ick if I ever let myself get to that level.

Because it’s a billion. These people get not only seconds but thirds, fifteenths, 700ths, 1,456,092ths, 1,000,000,000ths — all before others even get a first helping.

Despite all this, y’all, the ferocity with which ordinary folks defend billionaires — billionaires who will never know their names, never fight for their interests, never share with them their own windfalls — is one of the most effective propaganda achievements in modern history.

And that propaganda is juicy. For example, I think it’s fascinating how many pieces of media we have (Fifty Shades of Grey, Iron Man, Batman, and so on) to convince us that billionaires have good sex. Great sex. The best sex. We have entire fictional universes dedicated to stories of working class women meeting, winning the hearts of, and “changing” a billionaire playboy. It’s like we have a sick fascination with the way a woman’s labor can soften and heal capitalist men. I, too, have fallen prey and romanticized this trope in the past. Instead of encouraging women to channel those efforts into movement building against systems, mainstream stories focus on women softening wealthy men as if this entire dynamic is individualized rather than a structural evil.

These narratives are just one way that the mythology of the sexy billionaire is manufactured. By whom and to what end? It’s here I remember that today more than ever, the media itself is owned by billionaires. It’s like they’re telling us: “I swear we’re good at sex!”

The erotics of equity: the orgasmic YES

If today’s world is predicated on pillage culture, if violations of consent and reciprocity are the norm, what can something better even look like?

This is, as always, my favorite line of thinking. What can better look like? Let’s adventure.

Can you imagine the world we could create if we could not just say no to what feels wrong, but say a full-hearted, enthusiastic yes to the things that feel right?

In Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown calls this the “orgasmic yes.” She describes the orgasmic yes as a visceral bodily signal, a guide toward justice, liberation, and personal aliveness. If we made choices from this place, we’d organize around what we love, not just against what we hate.

An orgasmic yes is embodied: a smile you can’t swallow, a pounding heart, butterflies, a tiny shiver down the curve of your back. Our internal compass signals aliveness and alignment.

An orgasmic yes also requires the ability to safely say “no.” In order for a “yes” to mean something, it must be a genuine, empowered choice.

And an orgasmic yes is political: when we center aliveness, social change becomes a collective pleasure rather than a burden.

AMB writes: “What would I be doing with my time and energy if I made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic, orgasmic yes?“

Can you imagine an entire society, a whole civilization, that reaches towards the orgasmic yes as a core value?

Imagine being genuinely asked how your tax dollars should be spent through participatory budgeting processes. Imagine land use proposals shaped by the local community. Imagine tech tools rooted in the data sovereignty of the people whose information builds them. Imagine a city where the helicopter budget gets redirected to affordable housing and community wellness response, because that’s what residents said they actually needed. As a response to the madness of the current moment, more and more participatory systems are being forged or regenerated with every passing day. This reality is being built as we speak.

Because why would we want to have relationships to each other or to the earth that feel bad for any party involved? That’s not hot. Enthusiasm is hot. The orgasmic yes is hot. Whatever it is we’re up to, I want to know that you want to be here with me.

You can call a world like this an idealistic pipe dream, but I think the notion that anything less will suffice is the real delusion. After all, pleasure is our birthright, from our very first giggle as infants to every subsequent moment of awe, contentment, euphoria, peace, growth, and play we may experience up until the day we die. Pleasure is a birthright we will keep seeking to restore — generation after generation, if that’s what it takes — until it’s accessible to all.

When we move towards pleasure and the orgasmic yes, towards consent and reciprocity and equity, we unlock good sex. There’s plenty of research (real research this time, not studies from the imaginary lab in my head) that tells us that in more gender-equal societies and relationships, both partners report better sex. In other words, when everybody is empowered, everybody has better sex. The research confirms what most of us already suspected.

So equity generates pleasure. Equity also unlocks eroticism. Audre Lorde defines the erotic as not merely a sexual experience, but as a profound source of power, knowledge, and creative energy rooted in a deeply “spiritual plane.” It is a wisdom, a vitality, a satisfaction that can bloom from not just sex but any of life’s activities: dancing, yapping, gardening, running, playing, woodworking, cooking, eating, breathing, and so on. The erotic is the richness of life. The real wealth. The kind that Peter Thiel in his transhumanist frenzy will never have (pray for him).

Lorde and AMB teach me that sensuality and social justice are mutually inclusive; similarly, extraction is a cohesively evil system whether we’re talking about the pillaging of Earth, the exploitation of labor and bodies, or our forced disconnection to our own intuitions. However hard we have to work our imaginations to conceive of something better, let’s do it. Because I will not damn us to a world of coercion. I believe that we deserve systems that ask us what we want from them, systems that respond not to the greed of a handful of people, but to the wildest dreams of every beating heart, every sprightly molecule, every vibrant life force that shares this planet.

It’s up to all of us to define our society for ourselves. That is resistance. In the face of an extractive culture that’s forced upon us top-down, we fight back bottom-up with our vision for the world. It is labor. It is love. It is what it means to be a good lover to ourselves, each other, and our Earth.

Come, now. To the better world.

I don’t expect it, the way the room takes me in.

Someone presses a warm cup of chai into my hands at the door, fingers flitting briefly over mine like evening butterflies, and says glad you’re here like they mean my specific body, my specific presence, like they’ve been waiting. The room hums with energy. It glows. Or maybe that’s me. Someone has strung lights over the greenery and someone else has brought food that took all day to prepare. I know this because I can smell the slow-cooked hours of it, the steady sear of coriander, turmeric, red chili, cumin, black peppercorn.

Children’s laughter drifts from somewhere in the back. At the front, at the top of the agenda, there’s one item to attend to. Four words that make something catch in my throat: What do you need?

I sit with it. It’s how we start the council gathering every month. The room is already alive with the question, with the care of it, with the quality of attention that feels close to unbearable for the sheer force of it. People speak and the room doesn’t only listen, it receives.

It’s been messy lately. The council has many disagreements. I missed the last two meetings, but I heard about the push back. Tonight, I watch a woman across from me say something she’s been holding for several meetings now, and I watch it land, watch it be held, even with its rough edges, and I have to look away because it’s almost too much. How did we manage it? To get from where we were to this level of care, against all odds? To maintain that care even in the discomfort of these sticky moments, these moments when even the children pause their play to observe the back-and-forth?

When it’s my turn I speak slowly, uncertainly, feeling for the words like I’m finding my way in the dark, and someone writes down everything I say as though my stumbling sentences mean something here.

Walking home later, the night air moves across my skin, moves through my hair, a fond caress. I turn the feeling of being in that room over, trying to name it. It feels older than time. Like a place where joy and belonging, wonder and determination, electricity and relief all mingle together into a current in my body, moving through me, guiding me.

What it is, I begin to suspect, is pleasure. The pleasure of participating. Of being asked and answered. Of engaging in something that feels good. It’s the thrill that rushes down my spine when my body says yes, yes. All the way down. Yes.

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When it feels like the world is burning, it’s so important to stay connected to the efforts that remind us of how glorious the world can be; of how beauty and dignity exist where we cultivate them; of how, in the face of systems that seek to destroy and control and disenfranchise, generations of people have cultivated survival and even flourishing.

I always come back to this: the only way out of where we are is through. The only way from here, where we are, to there, where we want to be, is by all of us participating in the journey — not personally or individually, but collectively.

So if even a part of you — or maybe all of you — is like, “Something is wrong in the world right now,” and if even a part of you — or if all of you — believes that not only do we deserve better than this, but because you have experienced proof of compassion and equity and abundance, you will settle for nothing less in life, then listen up: You are my people. And there are so many more like us out there.

Engaging in collective power is my secret sauce to staying sane, to finding wellness in unwell times. I am healed everyday by learning, imagining, participating. By doing so out in the world. Out with others. Out where divine rage and rebellious joy and visionary futures dance together.

You can get in on that intoxicating energy with me this week. Friday is International Workers’ Day, or May Day 2026: a rally and a strike across the world — and across the country right here in America — in support of everyday people power.

This is a groundswell moment, y’all! So today, let’s dig into everything you need to know for Friday.

Do you like the weekend? If so, May Day is for you.

Let’s start with a quick snippet of history.

May Day — celebrated every May 1st around the world as International Workers’ Day — has its roots in one of the most consequential moments in American labor history. In May of 1886, over 300,000 workers across America went on strike demanding an eight-hour workday, because they were regularly working 10-, 12-, and even 16-hour days. 40,000 rallied in Chicago under the rallying cry: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

On May 4th, 1886, a demonstration in Haymarket Square, Chicago turned into a massacre when police opened fire on the crowd and a bomb exploded. The controversial witch hunt that followed ended in the hanging of four labor activists.

So after all that horror, did the Haymarket Affair immediately lead to the desired 8-hour workday? No. Those who like to exploit labor don’t give up so easily.

But you know what the Haymarket Affair did do? It created the foundation of a persistent labor movement that then did indeed go on to win not just the 8-hour workday, but also the weekend, the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, minimum wage, the right to unionize, workplace safety standards, an end to child labor, employee benefits, anti-discrimination laws, and so much more.

In the immediate, the 1886 Haymarket Affair went global. Three years after the Haymarket Affair, the international labor movement designated May 1st as a global day of solidarity in its memory: International Workers’ Day. People around the world celebrate the day as a commitment to uplifting the lives of working class people everywhere.

I meaaaaaan, how empowering does this look?!:

But get this: here in the U.S., our government created a separate Labor Day in September — specifically to distance the holiday from its radical roots (how crazy is that?). This is why most of us Americans don’t know that the workers’ holiday that the rest of the world celebrates was born right in Chicago.

This Friday is your chance to add your magic to one of the biggest movements in history.

In just a couple days, on Friday, May 1, 2026, workers, students, and families across the country are taking to the streets — and many are going further, participating in a general work stoppage: no school, no work, no shopping. The mobilization is anchored by a network of hundreds of organizations demanding “workers over billionaires.” They’re calling for:

• taxing the rich

• protecting Medicaid and Social Security

• fully funded schools

• healthcare and housing for all

• an end to attacks on immigrants and BIPOC communities

And it’s not just fluff. Over 100 pieces of legislation are already in motion connected to this agenda. It’s a reminder that May Day was never just a commemoration — it’s always been an organizing call.

Labor organizing is a living, breathing effort. We owe to it the current protections we take for granted — and we owe it our time and attention for the ways in which labor movements continue to rally for a healthier future of work — and of life — for us all.

So let’s continue the labor legacy. On Friday, answer the call: no work, no school, no shopping.

To the streets we go!

If no work or no school is financially impossible for you, then no shopping it is. If you have to buy something for whatever reason, buy from a local business — bonus points if you pay in cash.

No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

The idea is to disrupt business as usual, especially because right now “business as usual” is the fascist slide — and none of us want to be ensnared in its oily grip.

This is a unifying chance to DO something about the things that you feel aren’t working right now. It’s a chance to add your voice to a rising tide. It’s a chance to feel the magic of the groundswell in your very bones, and to add your magic to the movement.

May Day is an example of collective power in action. It’s a reminder that collective power works. The history of May Day itself proves that. It’s also a reminder that political movements for a better world have always been led by working class people and by the most marginalized, and it’s up to those of us with any ounce of privilege to not just think but act in solidarity. Because when the baseline of society rises, it does so for all of us.

Just imagine a world where we tax billionaire wealth, so we can:

end child hunger,

provide free pre-K for every kid,

protect Medicaid and Social Security,

fund schools,

expand affordable housing nationwide,

cancel all medical debt in the country,

invest in renewable energy,

and so much more.

A society where it’s just a given that everyone is housed, fed, and educated? Where people can count on clean air, water, and food? Where resources circulate amongst us all rather than stagnating in the hands of the few? Having a society like would mean everyone can contribute their fullest potential to people and planet. Think of what we can be, what we can do, if we distribute our resources in such a way! Think of the science, the art, the media, the architecture, the philosophy, the trades, the lives we could live if everyone got firsts before anyone got seconds. I long for that societal glow-up. Especially because I know it’s not just possible — it’s pragmatic. It’s an investment in our collective future, one where the cancer of hoarding billions is cured by the wisdom of community investment, wealth rebalancing, and luxurious public commons.

So grab your friends, your coworkers, your partner, your neighbor — whoever — and make your May Day plan.

Craft a cheeky out-of-office.

Support a local business.

Find a rally near you.

Breathe some fresh air.

And get drunk on the vision for what the world can be, when everyone’s needs are met, when safety and health are the baseline of society, when we are free together.

Find your local May Day action here.

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

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The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

An important note: GARMI is returning to its core. Two Rambles a month, occasional (not weekly) Groundswells when something genuinely moves me (like today), Canon when culture demands it.

If GARMI has been valuable to you, I’d be so, so happy if you shared it and/or upgraded to a paid subscription. Y’all are quite literally the reason I get to do what fulfills me most, and I’m grateful for that everyday!

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So, yesterday I was reading the news and the first thing I read was the following opening paragraph over at Drop Site News:

What the [insert colorful expletive here] does one do with this information? It’s like “bombs, destruction, death, disaster, corruption, fraud, evil people doing evil things!!!” With every passing sentence, I felt the slimy rise of bile in my gut.

Now listen, I’m grateful for Drop Site’s reporting. They’re an incredible independent newsroom, and a valuable part of my news ecosystem. But when this is the news in the world, I get why people turn it off.

Add to this the fact that all the “bombs, destruction, death, disaster, corruption, fraud, evil people doing evil things!!!” is paid for by the tax dollars of everyday people — and meanwhile, the sticker shock of our everyday lives grows worse: from healthcare to groceries to our go-to products and services, the cost of day-to-day living goes up, while nationwide (worldwide?), economic stability seems to go down.

On top of that, the whole FBI-increasing-focus-on-”domestic-terrorism” thing really got to me. We talked about NSPM-7 back in the October 3, 2025 Groundswell. Here’s a refresher:

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7

Last Friday, Trump signed NSPM-7. This memo criminalizes dissent. It says: if you’re anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-Christian, or if you support migrants, racial justice, and freedom of sexual and gender expression, you might be a domestic terrorist.

This designation of “domestic terrorism” could include things like the Groundswell you’re reading right now. Mutual aid could be “terrorism.” Protesting, tweeting dissent, nonprofits, volunteers feeding the homeless – any of this could be considered “terrorism.”

The admin is broadening the definition of terrorism to include political dissent and ideological difference. It’s authorizing its arms of investigation and criminalization to go after any individual or group suspected of supporting or spreading ideology the admin doesn’t like. It also makes “domestic terrorism” a priority area, which means more funding for surveillance.

Read the memo here. And here’s an explainer.

This week, all this freaked me out again because I was reading a Zeteo piece called, “Trump’s New Red Scare is Coming to State and Local Police Near You: Internal emails show the FBI is instructing state and local police on how to enforce the president’s crackdown on left-wing dissent.” I was like…oh my god, are they going to crack down on lil ol’ GARMI? I’m just a nerd, trying to tell my fellow nerds about things I’m learning. Help!

It often feels like we’re trapped. Like the game is rigged, fighting back is scary, and all we can do is try to survive and mind our own business. I know. I get it.

Reading the above news, thinking about how hyper-militarization at home and abroad benefits the ultra-wealthy while actively harming literally everyone else, while destroying our health and wellness and equity and chance of an abundant future on our home planet, while trying to criminalize our efforts to do something about it, I had a moment yesterday where I just wanted to run far, far away.

“Don’t look away.” From what?

I know people say that we mustn’t run away, turn away, choose ignorance. That we have a responsibility to stay informed, that we must not look away, that we must pay attention. But today, I want us to consider: stay informed of what? Don’t look away from what? Pay attention to what?

I’m actually not here to tell you that you should immerse yourself in distressing news. A few years ago, that is what I would have said. “Don’t look away.” Meaning: drown yourself in that which disturbs you, because it’s your moral duty. But today, with a better understanding of how catalytic change works, my advice is: read the news that will motivate you to get involved. I don’t mean turn a blind eye. Never that. Instead, now when I say “don’t look away,” I mean focus your energy not on the information that paralyzes you, but on the information that moves you to act — and then make sure you act.

Yes, we must be aware of the evils of the world — for too long, these evils have persisted purely because our culture has convinced us all to turn a blind eye. So I want to be very clear: I don’t believe in disengaging. I’m actually saying: engage better. Engage fruitfully. Engage in a way that moves us collectively towards equity, wellness, abundance for all. Don’t look away — but more importantly, look towards. Look towards people who are doing something about the evils of the world. Towards the work that needs your help. Towards the efforts that are working. That are changing something.

In the process of engaging with this — with solutions, with liberation work — you will naturally learn more about the injustices of the world, because those truths are embedded into collective action towards justice. We are fighting against something and fighting for something. We have to know both. That is literally what the Groundswell is all about.

How would our understanding of the world — of people power, of our own power change if every morning we woke up to news roundups like this:

None of the above is turning away from the problems. We understand: there’s war, there’s homelessness, there’s corruption, there’s fossil fuel monopoly. But we also understand: someone is trying to do something about it. So maybe we can, too.

Where to start: action is the antidote to anxiety

In an age of destruction we must create. Life depends on it.

We must get completely, absolutely, bacchanalianly, off-the-deep end drunk on all the ways in which people are bravely creating a better world. Surround yourself by not just the spirit of hope, but the practice and proof thereof. We are all lighting matches in the dark.

Here are some things that are lighting me up right now, that you can do with me:

Subscribe to solutions journalism

As defined by Solutions Journalism Network, solutions journalism is all about “how people try to solve widely shared problems. While journalists usually define news as ‘what’s gone wrong’; solutions journalism tries to expand that definition: Responses to problems are also newsworthy.”

It’s not PR puff pieces, but rather a lens on problem-solving initiatives. What insights can we glean from people actually trying to fix homelessness or climate crisis or low voter turnout? Amplifying “solutions stories can change the tone of public discourse, making it less divisive and more constructive. By revealing what has worked, such stories have led to meaningful change.”

In an effort to not just not look away but look toward, here are two resources:

Grist Fix — Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. Grist Fix is their solutions lab, where you can find past issues of their topic-specific solutions round-ups, as well as a database aggregating the “Grist 50”: yearly highlights of 50 people doing incredible work across various intersectional climate fields.

Check out Grist Fix

Solutions Journalism Network’s Solutions Story Tracker — This collection allows you to explore stories of “creativity, agency, and problem-solving” across issue areas, across the world.

SJN's Story Tracker

Mark your calendars for May Day: May 1, 2026

After last month’s No Kings, you might be wondering, “What next?”

Here’s what: May Day 2026.

What is May Day? A quick and critical history tidbit.

May Day — celebrated every May 1st around the world — has its roots in one of the most consequential moments in American labor history. In 1886, over 300,000 workers across the country went on strike demanding an eight-hour workday, with 40,000 rallying in Chicago under the rallying cry: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. On May 4th, a demonstration in Haymarket Square in Chicago turned into a massacre when police opened fire on the crowd and a bomb exploded — and in the witch hunt that followed, four labor activists (Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel) were hanged. Three years later, the international labor movement designated May 1st as a global day of solidarity in their memory. The U.S. eventually created a separate Labor Day in September — specifically to distance the holiday from its radical roots (how crazy is that?) — which is why most Americans don't know that the workers' holiday the rest of the world celebrates was born right here in Chicago.

May Day 2026

This May Day, that history is very much alive. On May 1, 2026, workers, students, and families across the country are taking to the streets — and many are going further, participating in a general work stoppage: no school, no work, no shopping. The mobilization is being anchored by a network of hundreds of organizations demanding, in their words, "workers over billionaires" — calling for taxing the rich, protecting Medicaid and Social Security, fully funded schools, healthcare and housing for all, and an end to attacks on immigrants and BIPOC communities. Over 100 pieces of legislation are already in motion connected to this agenda. It's a reminder that May Day was never just a commemoration — it's always been an organizing call.

This May, answer the call.

Find your local May Day action here.

Join a local group or national organizing effort

What is something you care about? Iran? ICE? Healthcare? Nutritious food? Affordable housing? Fertility? Childcare? Neighborhood oil drilling? Protecting sacred land? Nontoxic skincare and beauty? Safe neighborhoods? Microplastics in testicles?

Who is doing something about it? How can you pay attention to that effort, support further, get involved yourself?

If you don’t know where to begin, I am genuinely so happy to help. Drop me a note anytime and we can get cookin’.

One great resource to find efforts local to you is ’s Database of organizations across the nation and across fields of interest.

Search the database.

Do something, dammit!

Y’all: it would be a great shame if you or someone you know has the capacity to be a part of collective power-building, has encouragement to get involved, has the resources to figure out where to start, and chooses not to act.

Staying out of it — or only engaging theoretically — is throwing your support behind the status quo.

I have watched so many of you enter the unknown, enter new spaces, spaces where you’re out of your comfort zone — I have watched you tap into your deepest determination, your curiosity, your aptitude — I’ve watched you put your mind to it, whether it’s law school or med school or an engineering degree, whether it’s running a marathon or growing your confidence or caring for a loved one, whether it’s building financial stability or addressing childhood trauma or making ends meet in uncertain times — I’ve watched so many of us in this GARMI community persist and even blossom under pressure.

We are under pressure collectively right now, whether we like it or not. It’s time to step up — the way we all know how to do — and join those who have been resisting forever. There’s nothing new to create, no new genius needed — just our time, attention, and helping hands towards everything that’s already in motion. We stand on the shoulders of giants. So let us stand tall.

When I’m scared of what it means to stand tall and resist in this moment in time, I remind myself that Martin Luther King Jr. was at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. That Nelson Mandel was considered by the United States to be a terrorist all the way until 2008. That threats against dissent intensify only when dissent itself has intensified, when dissent itself poses a real threat to an existing power dynamic.

As we rise, the system will thrash against us. But we must keep rising, because history provides proof — time and again — of how powerful we are together: Civil Rights, anti-apartheid, labor movements, suffrage, immigration defense, anti-pipeline activism, anti-data center efforts, anti-war movements. We have — and we will — win for justice.

It’s never a question of whether we have enough to take care of each other. It’s a question of where political will directs our resources. Luckily we have power to influence political will. “Change does not come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.” From the bottom up. From the Groundswell. From each of us caring enough to not just talk about it, but to actually join a group, go to a mutual aid event, participate in May Day, drop off groceries for a family sheltering in place, learn the language of resistance, stay informed of growing solutions, boycott Starbucks…the list goes on because there are countless opportunities to engage in whatever way you are personally able to.

The best thing we can each do as individuals is to join collective action.

So my wee bit of tough love is: pay attention to those who are doing something about the evils of the world, and then join them, dammit!

This is how we alchemize the news in a world on fire.

For those that are new here, Rambles have always been the core of GARMI. Here’s a bit about them and how they’re different from the column I added last year called “The GARMI Groundswell,” which is usually what you’d be getting on a Wednesday like today were it not for my otherwise-inspired cerebrum.

• The weekly Wednesday Groundswell: solutions-focused commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

• Monthly Rambles: in-depth essays exploring the ways in which our personal, political, and planetary healing are one and the same, and our thriving futures are deeply and deliciously intertwined.

If you were looking forward to some news commentary today — I know so much is going on in the world — don’t be too disappointed. While today isn’t a Groundswell, it’s a big picture idea that applies to current events. We’re about to dig into a topic feels like a North Star on how to navigate intensifying geopolitics and domestic crackdowns — drawing from a key way that people have always cared for each other and risen up together, both in the quotidian and in crisis.

Today, I want to talk about a skill that I think is going to save us all: the practice of being a villager. A friend resurfaced the term “villager” for me a few months ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it. So much so that today, I have decided to force these thoughts (lovingly) upon you, my dearest nerds!

Airport pickups: an unlock.

I’ll never forget how, years ago as I traveled back to LA, I got a text from my roommate offering to pick me up from the airport. I was new to LA then, but I clocked it as a big deal: someone — someone who is not my parent or my sibling or my partner — would brave traffic — LAX traffic, no less — for me? My first instinct was shock, confusion: Wait what? Really? Why would you do that? Then: What a delight. Not an Uber. Not a Lyft. A person — someone who knows me — just saying, “I’ll get you.”

I think a lot of us actually know this feeling of everyday care. We crave it. We’re good at it when we have the space for it. The problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to show up for each other — it’s that the demands of surviving in this economy make it so hard to actually do so. The rising cost of living, the overwork, the subscription services that have commodified what communities used to just... do for each other. All so we can work more? So we can consume more content and more products? So we can pay the rising bills that cover our diminishing basic needs and afford the apps that replace the neighbors?

We know how to be villagers. We’re just being squeezed out of the time and space to practice that knowledge.

And I think we’re hungry — so freakin’ hungry — for that time and space. For the reclamation of this mindset. For its normalization. For a reminder that villagerism (I made that up, don’t you like it?) is not only possible but necessary.

Because here’s what’s true right now: the structures we were told to rely on are failing us or — more accurately — were never built for us in the first place.

Public goods are being rolled back, the economic squeeze is real, climate grief is real. Underneath all of it, there’s a loneliness crisis so significant that the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory about it in 2023, treating social disconnection as a public health emergency. Systems are designed to isolate us, and we’re feeling the psychosomatic affects of that isolation deeply. (I can speak for, at least, the tenor of America.)

We all know the ways in which connection has been so commodified: wellness is a product or service, community is sold back to us as a premium subscription, third spaces are scarce. All the while, the attacks on our basic needs and our public goods (healthcare, affordable housing, nutritious food, robust education, clean air and water) are accelerating. The vibe is very “pull yourself up by the bootstraps while the oligarchy hacks those straps right off your boots.”

This can all sound very depressing indeed until you remember that people have never actually waited for institutions to save them. Though we may participate in extractive systems — after all, hermits aside, most of us live under them — we simultaneously find ways to defy them. People have always, always, taken care of ourselves. (We got us.)

Enter: the village.

Let’s first be clear: villages are not ancient history. They are not a romanticized past. Most of the world still lives this way. Tight-knit communities built around interdependence, shared resources, collective care, and proximity are not a lost art. They’re a living reality for billions of people — both in cities and in literal villages — right now. What we’re talking about today isn’t recovering something extinct. It’s recovering something that was taken from some of us, bolstering something that’s under attack. Maybe more than anything it’s a remembering, an amplifying, a centering of something we already know but must uplift vigorously to navigate the way forward from this moment in time.

I also want to be clear: I’m not flattening village life into a utopia. It has its own hierarchies, its own limitations, its own hardships. I’m actually not even talking about literal villages. And so I’m not saying that we should dissolve cities and somehow engineer tiny villages out of hundreds of millions of metropolitan dwellers. No. I am a city girl myself, thank you very much.

What I’m reaching for is the logic of villagerism.

The village works not because everyone is self-sufficient. It works because everyone is usefully dependent on each other. The farm or the garden feeds people because someone tends it. The kids are safe because multiple adults are watching them. Someone has a skill you don’t, and you have a skill they need, and that exchange isn’t charity or debt, it’s just how things function. Interdependence isn’t a weakness; it’s the whole architecture.

And proximity is core infrastructure. Knowing the people around you — your neighbors, your local growers, your elders, the kids on your block — your presentness, your engagement in that world around you, that’s a literal safety net.

It follows that with a mindset like this, with social infrastructure like this, mutual aid isn’t a crisis response but a baseline. You share before someone has to ask. You check in before someone breaks. And someone does the same for you.

Just typing these words, reminding myself of how we thrive when we can surrender to our natural craving for cooperation — it makes my breath come easier, lifts the tightness that too often descends in my chest when I stray too far from my inner villager.

While villaging is a practice that billions around the world — and many of you reading this right now — have always embodied, I was late to the game.

Yes, my DNA is from a collectivist culture. But once in America, my mom and I were rarely able to immerse in that culture beyond our own home: for most of my life, we were a little island of our own in a very white suburban town, no family or same-culture family friends anywhere in the state. On top of that, as many of you know, I lost my dad when I was eleven. And I don’t have siblings. What I learned, therefore, was hyper-independence. With the privilege of newly-built financial security, my mom and I got very, very good at doing it alone. And as I grew up, the more that daily needs got commodified, the more I could do all by myself.

In college — that always too brief, always so electric period of time — something shifted. I didn’t have language for it then, but I was a good villager in college. We all kind of were: borrowing each other’s stuff, feeding each other, showing up, building little rituals. But I don’t know how much I consciously did these things. I just followed the lead of my friends, tentative and curious and excited about the ways in which our lives seemed to tangle up with each other. My hyper-independence still led the way, but sometimes my inner villager sashayed forward instead to take her place at the helm of my mind.

It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles as an adult that this inner villager started to permanently establish herself. I’d seen glimmers of her my whole life, but after moving to LA she stepped into the light. As I learn to let her guide me, it feels like a return to my gut instinct, a quenching of a deep thirst for the self-permission and societal validation to move away from hyper-independence and towards not co-dependence (the other extreme), but towards interdependence, where you are you and you are also we — at the same time.

The airport pickups from LAX are a real unlock, y’all.

So what does being a “villager” look like, practically?

It of course looks like the big things: being together for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, moments of grief. The ceremonies that mark a life.

But more than anything it looks like the everyday things: A spare couch, when there’s nowhere else to go. A ride to work or a co-working morning. A Tuesday evening walking buddy. A meal swap. A tool share. A community fridge. A neighborhood meet-up. A group text that exists for ordinary activities. A neighbor whose name you actually know.

It’s the community resilience things: The community self-defense trainings, the Know Your Rights workshops, the shared ride to a protest, the grocery distribution, the free clinics, the locally-run disaster relief.

It’s more than human: The hummingbird that visits the plumeria outside my living room window, the birds that are definitely talking shit about me in the mornings, the humongous spider that nearly fell on my head the other day (who I chased around my couch until I could trap in a jar and take firmly outside), and the crickets on the sidewalk outside that I have to remind myself are not cockroaches.

It’s oiling each other’s hair on a Friday night. It’s running errands together. It’s shared streaming platform accounts and rebelliously expanded subscription family plans. It’s the “what part are you at” texts that fire back and forth when you’re reading the same book on opposite coasts. It’s knowledge sharing about the important stuff: safety, finances, health, current events, spirituality. It’s “I made extra” and “do you want some guavas” and “want to carpool?"

Villagerism looks like favors, even when they’re inconvenient. Because that’s actually what endears us to each other — not just the breezy stuff, but the moments where we choose each other. And in doing so over and over, favors dissolve from distinct phenomena and diffuse into an interwoven everyday flow of life.

But you know what I, personally, have learned about being a villager? It’s that providing care is only half of the whole. What makes a system reciprocal is to also receive care. This is where I stumble most often, and where I know I must open myself further to survive and thrive in a world on fire.

I’m learning that a big part of being a villager is: “Can I come over and do laundry?” “Can you bring some paneer on your way over?” “Can I borrow your swiffer?” “Can you help me hang my gallery wall?” “Do you have something I can wear tonight?” “I need to dance, will you go with me?” “Can you bring back that book for me from India?” “Thanks for listening.”

It’s asking the trees to breathe with me and the soil to catch my tears, it’s requesting to hold a best friend’s baby close so I can revel in the miracle of life, it’s letting care caress me back.

Part of being a villager is asking for a ride from the airport.

What I mean to say, in short, is that the village is not a place. It’s a practice. And it’s available to us in urban apartments, in friend groups, in long distance phone calls, in online communities, and so on. We can build villages wherever we are through these intentional, repeated, low-stakes acts of showing up for others and letting others show up for us.

You can be a part of multiple villages: your physical village of immediate surroundings and neighborhood, your emotional village that may include people far away that are close to your heart, your spiritual or intellectual village that may include plants and people and ideas currently on this earth or somewhere in the beyond.

Now, five years into my Los Angeles chapter of life, at a time when the heated energy of the world fills life with uncertainty, I am so grateful to those that have inspired me and taught me how to be a villager. I swear I feel my inner child healing, rejoicing. I feel cracked open and lit up.

What I sit with most is that being a villager is deeply political.

Isolated people are easier to control. They’re easier to exhaust. They’re easier to keep from organizing. When we’re each managing our own crises in our own silo, we don’t have the relational trust or muscle required to act collectively. I have gone through this firsthand.

When we build webs of care, we’re also building the infrastructure of resistance. When we share resources, when we keep our needs inside the collective rather than outsourcing them to a marketplace, we’re doing something that’s radical in today’s mainstream culture. In many ways, the horrors of this political moment are creating a necessity to reinvigorate village mentality where it’s been lost, to build it where it never existed, and to deepen it where it’s always been. Climate resilience, mutual aid, and collective empowerment all start here. In the village.

adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy about how small, fractal acts of care and connection scale into movements. Yes, the mutual aid chapter, the tenant union, the local coalition against data centers or Big Oil — and also this practice is how our own healing, our own joy, our own strength multiplies. It’s how we build movements for liberation — personally, politically, planetarily.

In sharing how my mom and I got good at operating in a little silo in white suburbia, I mentioned our nascent financial stability as a key player in the hyper-independence I used to embody. I mentioned that because I don’t know how we would’ve survived without community and without financial stability. There’s something to be said for the connection between financial privilege and hyper-independence, just as there’s something to be said for how so many people lean on each other not out of choice but out of necessity. There are different ways to survive in this world under each of our circumstances. But what I’ve learned is that stability — financial or otherwise — comes and goes. The skill of being a villager endures. Not even a billion dollars and an apocalypse bunker can substitute for the muscle of connecting, engaging, villaging. (In my opinion, this is why every tech CEO comes across as anti-human and deeply disconnected from lifeforce. What will you do in your bunker down there all by yourself, dearest broligarch?)

As extractive systems become increasingly unstable, as the veil continues to get pulled back, the village is how we hold each other through it. It’s how we survive. How we’ve always survived. And it’s how we build the kind of lives — full of wellness and reciprocity and genuine presence — that remind us what we’re actually fighting for.

That’s how to be a villager.

Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

Note: There will be no GARMI Groundswell or GARMI Canon for the next two weeks! Hang tight — I’ll see y’all real soon.

Okay, so: imagine you’re in a city. But the buildings are draped in living green, rooftops thick with gardens, solar panels winking from every surface. The streets are walkable and full of people. The tech works with nature instead of against it. There’s no smog. There’s no all-powerful Muskian billionaire. Power is decentralized, communities are in charge of their own resources, and the dominant culture isn’t extraction — it’s reciprocity.

That’s the world solarpunk asks us to imagine. And imagining it might be one of the most radical acts available to us right now.

What is solarpunk?

Solarpunk is a literary, artistic, and social movement that envisions what a sustainable, just future could actually look like — and then works backward to figure out how to get there. The name is a mash-up: “solar” for renewable energy and an optimistic orientation toward the future, “punk” for the countercultural, anti-capitalist, DIY ethos that refuses to accept the world as-is.

From what I understand, the term was first coined in 2008, in an anonymous blog post titled “From Steampunk to Solarpunk” that imagined a new speculative fiction subgenre. It grew through online art communities, researchers, and speculative practitioners. A 2019 Solarpunk Manifesto defines solarpunk as “a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the questions ‘what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?’”

But the story of solarpunk is not one that temporally in the 21st century, and it’s also not one that starts geographically in Silicon Valley or Brooklyn. The ethos of solarpunk started in places that have been living with extraction’s consequences for a long time. In many ways, the practice of imagining the way out of extractive systems and towards equity and sustainability is a deep, centuries-long practice in the “Global South” (i.e. in Rich Nations — if you read a recent GARMI Canon about my pitch on geographic semantics).

Stylistically, solarpunk trends towards flowing organic lines, sinuous plant forms, blending in African and Asian and Native and Latin American artistic traditions, as well as traditions like Afrofuturism. Much like me, solarpunk loves color. It loves texture. It loves the meeting point between the handmade and the high-tech.

Think: stained glass solar panels. Seed libraries in old phone booths. Vertical forests on apartment buildings. The idea that beauty, equity, and sustainability are mutually inclusive.

And the element of “punk” isn’t decorative. Solarpunk is an explicity political aesthetic, one of rebellious hope, cooperation, and imagination. It’s explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and committed to the idea that technology needs to be decentralized and community-owned to actually serve liberation. It’s not just green aesthetics slapped on an otherwise unchanged world — that’s greenwashing, and the solarpunk community is vocal about calling it out. Corporations borrowing the look while leaving extractive economies untouched? That’s not solarpunk. That’s aesthetic larceny.

Why we need this.

Okay because here’s the thing: in mainstream media, the narrative that’s been doing the imaginative work for decades is dystopia. And it’s making us sick. Y’all know me — I hate dystopia. I think it functions to depress and disengage us, and it’s also always this horrible envisioning of a Western capitalist world in peril. Post-apocalyptic landscapes. Climate doom. Megacorporations controlling every last data point of our lives. These aren’t just stories — they’re almost like proposals or playbooks. They shape what we believe is possible. And when the dominant speculative imagination says “the future is collapse, and the best you can hope for is just getting by” people internalize that. Climate anxiety is already epidemic, especially among young people. And then we’re told we can’t hope for better. We can’t build better.

Dystopia also annoys me because so many people around the world are actually, as many Native folks say, “post-apocalyptic people,” meaning that they’ve survived the worst — and in many cases continue to live in a world that can feel dystopian for their culture and experience. This is something colonized people around the world understand. It’s something that people in war-torn regions today understand. It’s often something that women globally understand.

So dystopia to me feels like a Western way of saying: patriarchal, capitalist, colonial culture is inevitable, and if or when bad things happen to this kind of world that we’ve built with this worldview of ours, everything will be destroyed and horrible and there’s probably no reason to fight it or imagine better. Instead of imagining how to make the world better, then, let’s just consume stories of worst case scenarios.

Solarpunk is a direct intervention in that crisis of imagination. It says: the only other options are denial or despair, and we refuse both.

This isn’t naive optimism. It’s not utopia. (I don’t like that term either — who defines utopia? I’d argue that right now, we’re living in billionaire men’s utopia, and I’m not feeling it.) Solarpunk doesn’t pretend the crises aren’t real. It holds them, and then keeps building anyway.

What I love about solarpunk as a genre and as an approach to life is that it practices what theorists call prefigurative politics: creating spaces, communities, and stories that enact the principles of a better world right now, not waiting for some far-off revolution. Guerrilla gardens. Community solar co-ops. Open-source seed banks. These are all solarpunk in practice.

To fight for a new world, we have to imagine it. We have to practice it. In that process, we build it.

Solarpunk from a feminist and “Global South” perspective

Here’s something the mainstream conversation about solarpunk sometimes glosses over: the movement’s deepest intellectual roots aren’t in Anglo-American tech optimism. They run through feminist theory, ecofeminism, and “Global South” thought, and understanding those roots changes what solarpunk means and who it’s for.

In Latin America, the concept that rhymes most with solarpunk is Buen Vivir, or “good living,” an Indigenous framework from Andean communities (particularly Quechua and Aymara peoples) that organizes life around harmony with nature and collective wellbeing rather than individual accumulation. Bolivia and Ecuador have both incorporated Buen Vivir into their constitutions — it’s apparently imperfect and contested, but is still worth naming as an actual instantiation of these ideas in law. Buen Vivir predates solarpunk, is not derived from it, and is arguably more radical. The best solarpunk thinking, in my opinon, is in dialogue with it.

If you want to understand how deep these feminist and “Global South” roots of solarpunk actually run, go back with me to 1905 and a short story I cherish called Sultana’s Dream, written by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali Muslim feminist, writer, and social reformer living under British colonial rule in what is now Bangladesh. In Hossain’s feminist utopia, women rule the world as society lives peacefully and prospers through their inventions of solar energy, flying cars, and cloud condensers offering abundant, clean water to the population of “Ladyland.” The men, deemed unfit for public life, are secluded indoors — a deliberate inversion of the purdah system that confined women like Hossain herself. Ladyland, with its two-hour workday (!!), solar technology, and flower-paved streets, all made possible by female scientists and leaders, is so visionary — and it’s over 120 years old. This is a woman writing feminist solar-powered utopian science fiction in colonial Bengal in 1905.

UNESCO recognized the work in 2024 as part of its Memory of the World register, noting that Hossain “imagined both helicopters and solar panels before they had been invented.” The solarpunk community talks a lot about imagining a future that doesn’t exist yet. Hossain was doing that from inside a zenana, writing in a second language she’d taught herself in secret. The term “solarpunk” didn’t exist then. The aesthetic didn’t exist. But guess what? The politics absolutely did.

The literary tradition of feminist perspectives is strong. I recently also learned about (but haven’t yet read) Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which many solarpunk reading lists include. The protagonist, Connie Ramos, is a poor Mexican American woman who has been unjustly committed to a psychiatric institution. From inside that institution, she makes contact with an envoy from the year 2137 and glimpses the future society of Mattapoisett — a decentralized, anarchist-inflected world that has achieved what Piercy describes as genuine ecological, racial, and gender equality. Mattapoisett is explicitly described in feminist scholarship as an ecofeminist society: “nonhierarchical forms of organization, recycling of wastes, simpler living styles involving less-polluting technologies, and labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive economic methods.” The novel insists that the future isn’t guaranteed. Instead, Connie, a person with zero institutional power, must fight for it. Super solarpunk.

From Brazil, the 2012 anthology Solarpunk: Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em um Mundo Sustentável features South American authors who re-imagine old Mayan and Aztec cultures in new histories and futures. The antholoy moves from the context of communities that have already been living with extraction’s consequences — colonialism, monoculture agriculture, resource exploitation — and have therefore been fighting for different futures for a long time.

Nnedi Okorafor’s work feels so relevant here too. She’s on my to-be-read because I hear that her Afrofuturism explicitly decouples Black futures from both Western science fiction conventions and from white-centered solarpunk aesthetics. Her Binti series centers an Indigenous Himba girl from Namibia whose cultural knowledge and biological relationship with the living world is precisely what makes her capable of navigating conflicts that pure tech intelligence cannot solve. This is the ecofeminist narrative: the knowledge systems that have been dismissed as “primitive” or “irrational” or “emotional” or “feminine” are often the ones most attuned to what it takes to actually live on Earth.

Another notable woman author here is Ursula K. Le Guin. Her book The Dispossessed (1974) portrays an anarchist society on the moon Anarres that has organized itself around sustainability and mutual aid over capitalism. It’s explicitly subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” — Le Guin wasn’t interested in perfect worlds, only honest ones. And her novel Always Coming Home (1985) imagines a future California society living in ecological balance, recovering from a prior civilization’s collapse. Neither of these are escapist fantasies. They’re philosophical arguments intended to push us towards action.

All of this matters because solarpunk, like any movement, can be appropriated — stripped of its politics, turned into an aesthetic to be defanged, packaged, and sold. The feminist and Global South lineage is a useful check on that tendency.

It insists on us asking: Who is centered in the future we’re imagining? Whose knowledge do we see as valuable and authoritative? And is the future genuinely different, or is it just the present wearing a costume of solar panels?

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In art, technology, and the built environment

Visually, solarpunk has been circulating on Tumblr and Instagram for over a decade: luminous digital paintings of cities that breathe, concept art that makes you want to live somewhere that doesn’t exist yet.

In film, I’d cite Wakanda from Marvel’s Black Panther as an example of solarpunk. There’s also Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animated film studio which is often cited as a kind of solarpunk ancestor, especially Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke, all of which grapple with industrialization, ecological collapse, and the possibility of coexistence.

In technology, solarpunk is drawn to decentralized, open-source tools — community mesh networks, peer-to-peer platforms, open-source libraries, repair cafes, tool libraries. The ethos is: technology should increase local resilience and communal capacity, not extract data and concentrate power. Darius Kazemi’s projects — including Run Your Own Social, a guide to running small social network sites for communities of friends — are sometimes cited as examples of solarpunk-inflected tech thinking.

In architecture, Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay and Boeri Studio’s Bosco Verticale in Milan often come up as aesthetically adjacent examples. Ecovillages, urban farming collectives, community-owned solar projects, cooperative housing — these are all where solarpunk theory meets the built environment.

At the same time, there are contradictions. Solar panels and batteries still require extractive mining. Rare earth metals for green tech come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually the Global South, and the labor conditions are often brutal. To me, part of solarpunk is imagining abundant clean energy with equitable ownership and supply chains. Otherwise, it’s just a future that looks equitable in imagery while reproducing the same injustices under a green color palette.

I think the best solarpunk thinkers hold this tension. It’s not about resolving it all but about evolving it all. The aesthetic is not the politics. The politics are the politics.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass — which I think should live on every solarpunk reading list even though it’s nonfiction — gets at this more honestly than most: Indigenous wisdom about reciprocal relationship with the land isn’t a vibe. It’s a whole different ontology. Solarpunk at its best is trying to reckon with that.

Why solarpunk should be in our GARMI Canon

Here’s what I think is true: we cannot build futures we cannot imagine. And for a long time, the dominant imaginaries available to people who care about justice have been either dystopian collapse or incremental reform, aka catastrophe or managed decline. Neither one is actually motivating. Neither one is gorgeous.

Solarpunk insists on the gorgeous.

It insists that the world we’re fighting for should be beautiful — not just livable, not just less bad, but genuinely worth wanting. That insistence is saying: Abundance is possible. Community is the infrastructure. Reciprocity is the economy. The sun is actually enough. If we step up, we got us.

It’s a counter-canon to the one we inherited — which, let’s be honest, has been pretty committed to the idea that the future belongs to whoever has the most weapons, money, or processing power. Yikes. Solarpunk says instead: what if the future belongs to whoever figures out how to live well with each other and the land?

That sounds pretty delicious to me.

⭐ Before I take your leave, I will submit to you an anthology in which you’ll find a story from me that I believe counts as solarpunk:

Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future

(published by Milkweed, edited by Grist)

In it, you’ll find my story Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography: “Across generations and a changing world, an Indian family preserves its traditions through food, dance, and the latest communication fads.” The story features my mom and grandma, and my imaginary daughter and granddaughter. It’s a cozy one, and I hope you’ll enjoy the read.

Grab a copy here!

👇🏽 You can also learn more about my process writing the story here in GARMI ramble #9. If you read the story itself, let me know what you think!

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

Today we’re talking about resistance to AI-driven hyperscale data center construction. Researching and composing this one got me so hype because this topic is a great example of the Groundswell in action.

🔉 Listen here and drop me your thoughts in the comments!

Sources & Further Reading

NAACP, “Stop Dirty Data Centers” campaign page

MediaJustice: “The People Say No — Resisting Data Centers in the South” (September 2025)

Capital B News, “From Mississippi to Maryland, Black Communities Are Taking On Big Tech” (Adam Mahoney, October 2025)

Essence, “AI Data Centers Are The New Environmental Burden Black Communities Didn’t Ask For” (January 2026)

Truthout, “Big Tech Data Centers Compound Decades of Environmental Racism in the South” (September 2025)

Black Agenda Report, “Data Center Boom, Corporate Extraction, and the Obfuscation of the Land Question in the US”

The Lens (New Orleans), “Data Centers Spark Fears of a ‘Digital Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana” (September 2025)

Final Call News, “Digital Redlining: Data Center Surge Raises Environmental Racism Concerns” (October 2025)

Inside Climate News, “Big Tech Signs Trump Pledge to Pay Data-Center Power Costs. Fulfilling It Is the Hard Part.” (March 2026)

Yale Insights, “This Is How the AI Bubble Bursts” (2025)

NPR, “Here’s Why Concerns About an AI Bubble Are Bigger Than Ever” (November 2025)

Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

A few years ago, I sat in a theater by myself — a cherished experience, truly one of life’s underrated pleasures — and watched How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I didn’t know exactly what I was walking into. I’d heard about the book, vaguely, the way you hear about a lot of things in activist circles: referenced in scholarship, cited on social media, and so on. But the movie was way more baller than I was expecting. Here was a climate film that wasn’t asking me to feel sad about polar bears or hopeful about solar panels. It was a heist movie. A thriller.

Taut and grimy and propulsive, with a cast that actually looks like the world: a young Indigenous man, a Black woman, a working-class guy from oil country, a college-educated white radical, a queer couple, people with different reasons for being there, different amounts they stood to lose, all united over a common goal: to blow up a pipeline in West Texas.

I loved it. I sat in that theater and I felt, genuinely, the particular pleasure of watching filmmakers take a political idea seriously enough to wrap it in adrenaline and inject it into the mainstream.

Then I told my family to watch it.

And honestly what followed was fun: a spirited, extended, occasionally heated debate about a question that the movie provokes in you: What counts as violence? Is blowing up a pipeline violent? Is vandalism of private property violent? Is it an act of self-defense or terrorism? Is it meaningfully different from the slow, sanctioned destruction of human and ecological health that the pipeline itself inflicts? My family, ranging across ideological persuasions and generations, had a lot of feelings. And I let ‘em cook, because the debate was delicious.

Today, I want to tell you about the movie, the book, the central question, and why I think these works should be a part of the GARMI Canon.

Read more

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

“The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.”

This quote, attributed to George Orwell, captures the idea that perpetual war isn’t a failure of policy but rather its goal: war keeps power concentrated and the profit machinery of extractive systems running.

With US policy, we’ve seen it so many times, and we’re seeing it again today. It’s a pattern, and it often begins with a country’s democratically-elected government deciding that its natural resources — usually oil or rare earth minerals — should benefit its own people. Then, the United States, through covert or military means, is like, “No, you can’t nationalize your resources, American corporations should have monopoly.” But the way they say it is: “You guys are a communist threat; we’re going to come in and bring you democracy.”

It’s worth noting here that not only is the allegation of communism threat in these regions usually unsubstantiated, but also “communism vs. democracy” is a false contrast: communism is an economic system, while democracy is a political system. Economic and political systems are related and in conversation with each other, but they are not the same thing, and conflating them confuses our understanding of how the world actually works. A more accurate contrast would be communism vs. capitalism, but this is less useful for propaganda.

Under this aforementioned false binary (and with the narrative protection of media outlets like The New York Times), the US goes in to “liberate” the country in question through some kind of violent intervention. It topples the democratically-elected government and installs a US-friendly government. Decades of instability follow. The country’s resources flow outward into corporate coffers (benefiting regular people neither in that country nor in America). And within it, militarization — in some form or another — continues.

This is sometimes called resource imperialism, and it’s happening right now, as we speak, from Venezuela to Iran to Greenland. The links between oil, minerals, and militarism run deep. People die, taxpayer money is burned, systems of care face divestment, and society as a whole struggles to maintain a baseline of safety, dignity, and wellness. All this for bloated bottom lines.

As we approach tax season, I’m thinking about how our tax money that’s used to destabilize Iran is fighting with our tax money that’s used to prop up Israel, and so much of this is tied up in our dependency on oil, and what it leads to is that none of our tax money goes towards basic needs like healthcare, education, food, and childcare. So basically we get free war and expensive life.

But when it feels grim, here’s what I want us to hold onto: The war is meant to be continuous. But so is the fight against it. And that fight has been going on a lot longer than the entire existence of the American Empire.

Today’s Groundswell is an audio piece.

Listen here for what I’ve been learning — the grim and the inspiring — and what questions I’ve been sitting with as I learn. Oh, and! Tell me things you know, are questioning, or are pondering, in the comments below.

Also, keep an eye out for Sunday’s GARMI Canon for a recommendation related to this topic of folks fighting oil-inspired imperialism.

🔉 Listen here: Oil, Empire, and Sovereignty | The Groundswell

Even in the face of oil-crazed imperialism, the only thing more persistent than war is resistance.

For further learning

Democracy Now! “‘It’s Always About Oil’: CIA & MI6 Staged Coup in Iran 70 Years Ago, Destroying Democracy in Iran” 👇🏽

CNN: “Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil” (2013)

Georgetown Environmental Law Review: “Oil, Sovereignty, and Environmental Collapse: Environmental Law and U.S. Intervention in Venezuela” (2026)

Zinn Education Project: “Aug. 19, 1953: U.S. and Britain Topple Democratically Elected Government of Iran”

Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

“First World.” “Third World.” “Developed.” “Developing.” “Global North.” “Global South.”

These phrases roll off the tongue like neutral descriptors, a shorthand for naming the world, like we’re simply sorting countries into lil categories based on GDP or infrastructure or “stability.” But language is never neutral. It’s a map of power.

Today’s GARMI Canon is all about semantics. I have a verbiage pitch for you and I want to know your thoughts. Because language is a part of our canon, and when we change it, we change how we see the world.

First, before I present to you my idea, some historical context to explain the current linguistic canon:

Read more

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

"You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.” — Tiny Fey

We all saw it. The video of Team USA’s men’s hockey players in the locker room on the phone with Trump after their gold medal-winning game against Canada.

If you didn’t catch it, here’s the situation: both the US men’s and women’s hockey teams won gold at the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics. The women won first, beating Canada in overtime. Then the men won, also beating Canada in overtime — their first gold in 46 years.

Right after the men’s win, FBI Director Kash Patel — who had flown to Milan on taxpayer dime, reportedly claiming it was for official FBI business — showed up in the locker room chugging beers and trying on players’ gold medals.

Then the President called the men’s team on speakerphone to congratulate them and invite them to the State of the Union and a White House visit. One line from this call that took off online: instead of sincerely acknowledging that the women’s team, which also won gold, deserved equivalent celebration, Trump made a joke like, “we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team … or I’d probably be impeached.”

And almost everyone in the men’s locker room laughed.

Why does this matter?

I could talk to you about misplaced priorities and misuse of funds: why is an FBI director partying with athletes on a trip funded by taxpayers? I could dig into sexism from the top: Trump’s joke about “having to” invite the women’s team is some 1950s sexism straight from the President of the United States. In the context of the Epstein files and the fact that, since the 70s, at least 28 women have accused Trump of various acts of sexual misconduct, this comment is not a one-off, but rather indicative of a persistent pattern.

But what I actually want to talk to you about is bigger than that: I want to dig into complicity versus solidarity.

Because this is where we can learn how oppression continues versus how it’s challenged, healed, and replaced by justice and freedom.

The men’s team’s laughter at the casual sexism of our current Commander in Chief is a distinct deficiency of solidarity.

Listen, I’ll be the first to admit that many, many times in my younger life, I went along with things I felt were wrong. In those instances, I was complicit in whatever was going on — whether it was racist or sexist aggressions, cultural insensitivities, or toxic interpersonal behaviors, and whether it was directed at someone else or even right at me.

Complicity means being involved with wrongdoing, acting as an accomplice through assistance, encouragement, or collusion.

I’ve realized this, so I’m able to learn more and do better. Because otherwise the wrongness continues. Not because of the wrongdoer, but because of all the witnesses who could intervene — even subtly — but don’t.

When I led active bystander trainings and consent education for fellow college students years ago, a core theme we discussed was that “intervening” can look a lot of different ways. Intervention doesn’t have to be raising a stink. It can be simply not laughing at a joke. It can be redirecting and deescalating. It can be saying, “No, thank you,” or “I disagree,” or “Are you okay?” It can be calling someone in — even gently. It can also, of course, be calling someone out directly. It can be soft, it can be assertive, it can be whatever the situation needs and whatever we feel safe doing. But to avoid complicity, we must always do something. In the face of Trump’s comment on his call to the hockey players, and in the midst of the rowdy celebratory atmosphere, I don’t imagine it was a useful forum to challenge the President’s ties to pedophilia, his sexual misconduct, or his other instances of dangerous misogyny. But it was a great moment to challenge his denigration of the women’s team. Intervention after “I probably have to invite the women’s team or get impeached” could’ve simply been a boisterous cheer like, “Woohoo, the women’s team is so awesome!” To say: their victory deserves respect. A statement like that is certainly well within the wheelhouse of Olympic athletes.

A player from the men’s hockey team, in response to the backlash, went on about how “everyone in that locker room knows how much we support [the women’s team], how proud we are of them.” But I think of it like this: if my friend supports me to my face but laughs at me behind my back, is that my friend? Is that someone who actually supports me? Who’s proud of me?

Because let’s say it’s only one out of ten men who say or do something outright harmful. If the other nine respond with some combination of laughing with the first man or looking away, it’s effectively all ten men who’ve upheld the system of patriarchy.

Social justice as a whole works the same way. Maybe it’s just one out of ten people — or even one out of ten million — carrying out acts of cruelty. But cruelty continues because the other 9 (or the other 9,999,999) don’t do anything about it.

This is all so simple and so logical. But in a society where the mainstream is designed to sedate us into complicity, we require reminders and outright training in what solidarity, instead, looks like. In simple terms, solidarity just means having someone’s back. Just like if someone’s talking shit about my friend, it’s on me to speak up, not just in front of them but even in rooms they’re not in; similarly, solidarity means standing together with each other — through joy and hardship — in unity, responsibility, and collective action around a common goal. Solidarity is a form of love.

While complicity has always been regressive, locking us in status quo or even sending us tumbling backwards on the continuum of human evolution, solidarity is what’s always pushed us forwards towards more equitable, vibrant futures. Solidarity was a key ingredient of the American Civil Rights Movement, the global movement to end apartheid in South Africa, the South Asian independence movement against British rule, the labor uprisings that won the eight-hour workday, the United Farm Workers movement, the environmental justice mobilization sparked by protests in Warren County, the Indigenous-led resistance at Standing Rock Indian Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the global climate justice movement galvanized by the Paris Agreement, the sovereignty struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the anti-colonial liberation movements across Africa, and the land back and treaty rights campaigns led by Indigenous nations across Turtle Island and Australia. The freedoms we have today — even things like the weekend — we owe to solidarity movements.

It is people having each other’s backs that I see in the face of police brutality and immigration attacks in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and New York and so on — in 2020, in 2025, in 2026. It’s people having each other’s backs — even when those at the top don’t help — that I see during fossil fueled extreme weather events like Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey and Helene. It’s people having each other’s backs that I see in dedicated mutual aid: water drop offs to Skid Row, grocery distribution in West Adams, community fridges around the city.

If you don’t have people’s back, you have nothing.

When I say we have to have each other’s backs, I obviously don’t mean just back people up no matter what all the time. I’m also not saying we can’t indulge in some harmless chisme or even some drama here and there. What I’m saying is that when it comes to structures of power like patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism, we need to learn how to disrupt the flow and be there for one another. We need to be active participants in the world around us. We need to be meaningfully in solidarity with each other.

Solidarity is about unity and collective action around a common goal. So if someone is not in solidarity with you, it’s fair to question whether they share the same goal as you. Which is why, to me, it’s quite empty to hear that the men’s team is supposedly buddy-buddy with the women’s team. You might be buddies, but you’re not in solidarity with women. And that tells me that you don’t see gender equity as a common goal.

You might say that it’s easy for me to sit and judge all of this as someone who’s never played hockey, never known a thing about the inner workings of Olympic teams, never been in a celebratory huddle in a men’s locker room, and so on. And you’re right. On top of that, as I’ve admitted myself, I’m far from perfect on these matters myself. But it’s not about perfection. It’s about participation. These are public figures who influence countless people and are currently in the spotlight (of their own volition). The way that they engage has an impact, one way or the other.

Because sports are political, and the tension between solidarity and complicity has always been a part of sports.

In response to the backlash around the locker room’s reaction to the President, Jack and Quinn Hughes, star players on the men’s team, cried about how everyone’s being so “negative” and “everything’s so political.”

And, well, yes.

Allow me to explain why sports are political: sporting events involve human beings, and human beings are political — whether intentionally or not. The choices we make don’t occur in some neutral space. They exist in this world, on this Earth, in this moment, alongside each other. So it follows that sports aren’t some activity existing in a vacuum. They take place within historical and cultural context.

Want a great example?

Lacrosse

Lacrosse was stolen from Native people, and they’re working to reclaim it:

I grew up in Southwestern Connecticut, where lacrosse was a white sport. I thought it always had been. But actually, lacrosse was created over 1,000 years ago by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose lands primarily span what’s known today as New York State and Ontario. According to Scott L. Price, the game was used “as recreation, as a way to settle boundary disputes and train warriors, but centrally as a way to entertain the Creator, and not only that, but used as a way to heal the community. It's a spiritual practice for the Haudenosaunee.”

But in the late 1800s, a Canadian dentist took it upon himself to appropriate lacrosse and codify a set of rules into a regulated game. After the game was formalized, rulebooks and association policies were established that explicitly forbade or restricted Indigenous players from joining white lacrosse clubs or competing in championships.

I watched a PBS News Hour segment, “The lesser-known history of lacrosse, a uniquely American sport,” in which there’s an archival clip from decades ago with a narrator literally saying: “Lacrosse was originally part of a red Indian’s training for war, but now it’s a civilized sport.” (An ironic line, coming from the savagely warmongering West.)

Decades of forced cultural removal impacted the Haudenosaunee’s ability to practice this spiritual sport. But in 1983, Haudenosaunee activist Oren Lyons set out to reclaim Native access to and presence in lacrosse. He began an official team: the Iroquois Nationals. This team is the comeback story of the century, because despite facing the stacked odds of erasure, the Iroquois Nationals went from being a fledging squad to now ranking third in the world.

As Price says, this sport “contains the experience of the Native Americans in a way that no other sport does. That includes the collision of white society with Native American cultures, the appropriation and some would say theft, obviously, of Native American lands, the genocide.”

Lacrosse was last a medal event in the Olympics in 1908, and is returning again for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The Haudenosaunee, who are not recognized as a nation by the International Olympic Committee, will not be allowed to compete. Read about their quest for eligibility here.

A few more U.S. and Olympic sport moments you might consider to be political

• Married women being outright banned from the ancient Greek Olympics: According to ancient sources, unmarried women (girls) were allowed to watch the Olympic Games, but married women were barred from attending entirely — not just from competing. The penalty, according to the Greek writer Pausanias, was being thrown off a nearby cliff called Mount Typaion.

• Pierre de Coubertin, the guy who founded the modern Olympics in 1896, explicitly didn’t want women there — he called female participation “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect.” Women still made their way into events like golf and tennis starting in 1900.

• The Olympics didn’t hit 50/50 gender parity in athletes until Paris 2024.

• John Baxter Taylor becoming the first Black American Olympic gold medalist in 1908, competing in track and field for a country that didn’t treat him as fully human.

• Jesse Owens, Black American record-setting trackstar, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Games, embarrassing Nazi “Aryan supremacy” ideology on its home turf.

• Jackie Robinson breaking the baseball color barrier on April 15, 1947 and all major league sports integrating in the late 40s and 50s.

• Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Games — and getting expelled from the Olympic Village and receiving death threats for it.

• Sustained activist pressure getting apartheid South Africa banned from the Olympics in 1964.

• The global boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games by the US and 65 other countries over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet-led counter-boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games. The Olympics as Cold War proxy.

• The US men’s Olympic basketball team refusing to play the national anthem or stand on the podium after winning bronze in 1972 to protest the controversial loss to the Soviet Union — sports and Cold War nationalism again all tangled together.

• Colin Kaepernick.

• Russia being banned from competing under its flag at multiple Games following the invasion of Ukraine. Russian athletes are allowed only as “neutral” competitors.

• Calls to ban Israel from the 2024 Paris Olympics and 2026 Winter Games over the genocide in Gaza. The IOC refused, so Israel competed in 2024 and is competing again in 2026. Both times under its official flag. (Which many — including myself — consider a double standard given the ban on Russia’s official participation.)

• Palestinian athletes competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics under impossible circumstances — circumstances created by…politics.

• Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.

I could go on. The point is: not only is everything political, but sports have always been one of the most political forums of mainstream culture. Add to that the fact that the Olympics are international, and no matter how floofy you want to be about “unity” or whatever, you can’t be naive to the fact that at any international gathering, geopolitics sits at the head of the table. And so in sports, like anywhere else, levels of solidarity matter.

Shoutout to Olympic hockey players Brock Nelson, Jake Guentzel, Jake Oettinger, Jackson LaCombe, and Kyle Connor, all of whom declined POTUS’s invite to the State of the Union. In this State of the Union, one of POTUS’s many disturbing remarks was: “The Somali pirates who ransack Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption, and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception. […] Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the USA.” The utter delusion one must be under to say this as the leader of one of the most corrupt and lawless administrations in history is staggering. While their teammates took photos with Trump and let him try on their medals after this nationalist SOTU speech, these five players — four of whom are from or have deep ties to Minnesota, site of the administration’s most recent immigration attacks — broke with the herd.

The women’s team declined the White House’s invitation, too. But I did see that Ellen Hughes — who is a former women’s ice hockey player, was a player development consultant for the U.S. women's hockey team at the 2026 Games, and is the mom of aforementioned Olympic hockey stars Jack and Quinn Hughes — was quite complicit herself:

“If you could see what we see from the inside, and the men and women sharing, you know, dorm rooms and halls and flex floors and the camaraderie and the synergy and the way the women cheered on the men and the way the men cheered on the women — that’s what it’s all about," she said. "And the other things they cannot control. They care about humanity. They care about unity and they care about the country.”

This bland statement is a reminder that patriarchy is upheld by women, too. And you know what? You might not be able to control the admin or the macro political situation — but you sure as hell can control your own actions. Caring about “unity,” “humanity,” and “country” is not a passive emotion. Care is a behavioral practice rooted in solidarity.

Her comments gave me “boys will be boys” energy. Without a muscle for solidarity, boys will stay boys. Practicing solidarity is the only thing that evolves us beyond patriarchy. It’s what marks the difference between boys and men.

The cover photo for this post is from Indy Star and is of the women’s team because I didn’t feel like highlighting the men’s team.

Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

You know what used to happen to me all the time? I’d stumble upon a song and fall in love with its beat, its rhythm, its melodies. I’d let its sonic space permeate the corridors of my subconscious and enmesh me in an aural embrace.

And then, a week later, I’d finally pay attention to the lyrics. And time and again, the actual words of the song would leave me shaken — like, what the hell, I didn’t realize this was so misogynistic? Or consumerist? Or creepy?

So I started developing a new craving: for music that sounds good and does good.

As someone who prefers songs in the realms of R&B, hip-hop, Desi, Latin, Afrobeats, and so on, I have a fresh hunger for tracks that suit my taste profile, are a bop, are delicious, and are also about things that matter to me: joy, love, grief, heartache, confidence, celebration — but also feminism, social justice, indigeneity, climate futures. I want to know the women artists. The decolonizing artists. The imaginative artists. The environmentalist artists. The collectivist artists. The artists who reclaim and provoke and add the subaltern to the mainstream.

Lucky for me, there are many who fit the bill. Today, I want to tell you about one: Ruby Ibarra.

Read more

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

The tech broligarchy is getting out of hand, y’all. I’m speaking, of course, of the CEOs and higher-ups of these massive corporations (OpenAI, Google, Oracle, Palantir, xAI, and so many more), who throw around their money and clout to influence government, extract from people and planet, and chart an egregious path ahead for humankind. When did this collection of no good, good-for-nothing dingleberries become the puppeteers of human futures?

The timeline along which Big Tech is pulling civilization is repugnant. It’s repulsive. It’s robotic. It’s so the opposite of liveliness and sensuality and luxury and wonder. It’s devoid of all of the things that make life profound, luscious, and magical. And I cannot believe that we (myself included) willfully submit to these broligarchs, these creatures of mass impotence and minute wisdom. But we can learn better. And we can join those who are building better — even if it takes time, and especially if it’s an adventure.

Because not only does Big Tech exploit and destroy — at scale — the home planet we depend on for life itself, it also exploits us and destroys both our ancient and modern intelligence, and our social and personal wellness infrastructure.

What blows my mind is that America will accuse China of being a surveillance state, and meanwhile, we are sedated into acquiescing to a surveillance state right here in America — often on our own dime. We pay for phones that spy on us, cameras that watch us, websites that track us, Waymos that record us in full 360 degrees (interior and exterior), and so on.

I am as caught in this tangle as the next person. And I’m not saying these technologies don’t have any utility or use cases whatsoever. I’m saying we have to change who controls their usage and their progression. We have to mutiny the current captains of the ship, for they steer us towards peril. We have to upend and reshape the power structures that guide their approach, application, and regulation. We have to captain the ship ourselves, collectively, and guide it through safe passages.

After all, technology is a tool. How can we make sure that it’s one that we use, rather than one that uses us?

Today I want to share some recent developments, headlines, and thoughts that have been on my mind regarding Big Tech. And then I want to dig into what I’m exploring right now to progress beyond the vampiric clutches of Big Tech and hopefully towards better tech futures. I am such a student in this space, and I hope you’ll learn with me.

First, what the f*** was that Ring Super Bowl commercial?

For those who missed it, Ring (the security camera owned by Amazon) aired a Super Bowl ad for a new feature called “Search Party.”

“Pets are family,” the ad begins, as B-roll of kids and puppies fades in on screen, “and every year, 10 million go missing.” Cue photos of “missing dog” flyers in neighborhoods. (Real? AI? You tell me.)

Enter Ring. Now, you can upload a photo of your missing dog and Ring’s new Search Party feature will activate the cameras in your neighborhood to use AI to identify and sift through every image captured, all in search of your dog.

“Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now,” the ad concludes.

This might sound nice and fuzzy — who doesn’t want to see a lost dog returned home — but netizens everywhere are sounding the alarm that this new, unregulated feature (which, like most new AI additions, will likely be turned on by default) actually bolsters our growing surveillance state.

Why is this so alarming?

Scholar and expert on surveillance Matthew Guariglia wrote on Bluesky: “It starts with searching for a ‘brown dog’ but means the tech is there for license plate reading, face recognition, searching for suspects by description, etc. We already know [Ring has] a form cops can fill out to get access to footage without warrant or permission in an ‘emergency’ as determined by them. What will this mean for new features?”

As Truthout reports:

“Indeed, Ring has come under intense scrutiny for its collaboration with the criminal legal system, especially through its partnerships directly with police and with surveillance companies Flock and Axon, which grant law enforcement access to an enormous amount of information, including tracking of individuals, license plate recognition, and more.

Flock’s dragnet has been used by federal immigration agents to track immigrants and search for a person who received an abortion. It has also helped corporations make watch lists, following in the history of corporate blacklists of labor and social movement organizers.

While Flock’s hardware is largely in use in public locations, Ring cameras are ubiquitous in neighborhoods today. According to Consumer Reports, 30 percent of U.S. households have a video doorbell camera, with Ring being one of the most popular brands. Access to that network gives Flock and law enforcement eyes in neighborhoods across the U.S., with the ability to track millions of Americans.”

This is scary.

And also, people have a voice. In fact, because of the enormous backlash following the Search Party ad, Ring announced that it’s cancelling its partnership with Flock. The surveillance element of Search Party still exists, but public pressure can guide corporate action.

What I’m saying is: don’t read all this and feel defeated. Read it and feel resolute: we will stand up against this and in favor of safe, healthy futures for ourselves, our loved ones, and our neighbors.

ChatGPT to run ads

Last week, ChatGPT announced that it would run ads for users on its free plan. ChatGPT running ads is especially freaky because a lot of people pour their deepest thoughts into that platform, so I shudder to think what ad personalization will look like as the technology combs through people’s chat history to target their wallets.

Of course, this personalization feature is automatically toggled on.

If you use ChatGPT’s free plan, make sure you toggle that sh*t off in your settings.

AI researchers are raising red flags as they quit their jobs

“‘The world is in peril,’ warned the former head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research team as he headed for the exit.” (CNN)

A waaaave of AI researchers — notably at OpenAI (which runs ChatGPT), Anthropic (which runs Claude), and xAI (Grok) — are leaving their jobs and sounding the alarm on their way out. Many of these folks (such as Mrinank Sharma, the head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research team) were in roles related to AI safety or a now-disbanded “mission alignment” team at OpenAI, or were cofounders like those who recently quit xAI — very possibly after xAI’s Grok chatbot faced global backlash because it “was allowed to generate nonconsensual pornographic images of women and children for weeks before the team stepped in to stop it.”

These departures “underscore the tension between some researchers worried about safety and top executives eager to generate revenue” (CNN).

It’s one more example of executives deciding to prioritize profit over people and planet. The story is so old and redundant that it would almost be dull if it weren’t so dangerous.

Demand is top-down, not bottom-up

According to Truthout, “A huge proportion of the ads during the Super Bowl were for or featured AI, frustrating many viewers.”

Demand for AI is being pushed top-down. It’s essentially being forced upon us — you can’t opt-out across many of the platforms you probably were already using on a daily basis. Socialized through force, our habits are beginning to shift to incorporate the thing that’s being forced upon us.

I’m not saying there’s no room for artificial intelligence anywhere in the world. I’m saying that where it’s applied should be decided by bottom-up demand and democratic decision-making, not by billionaires who hoard wealth, manipulate government, avoid taxes, exploit labor, and think their “innovations” ought to be above the law because regulation is evil.

All this is not even scratching the surface of the racist, sexist, classist soundbites from several Big Tech execs. It’s not even counting the “AI bubble” that might burst all over our financial markets. It’s not counting the environmental impact and environmental racism of data centers. It’s not counting the war profiteering. And so on. I’d need to write a whole book to get into it. But the good news is that people much smarter than me have already written books about it. Here are some I’m eyeing as I learn more:

• Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

• Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis: a speculative fiction model of post-capitalist digital democracy

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

• Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock

• Race After Technology: Abolitionist Rules for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

So what do we do about this?!

Look, I don’t work in tech or tech policy or anything of the sort. What I’ll share with you is my perspective as a regular person just trying to live my life in a way where these tools are helpful and not harmful.

The annoying thing about tech oligarchy is that whether you want to deal with it or not you kind of have to. These platforms are around every corner and integrated into culture and lifestyle and all kinds of things. And again, that’s the problem with the tech oligarchs — they make decisions on our behalf, despite being unelected and undesirable.

The thing is, there are deep links between Big Tech, fascism, and climate crisis. Therefore, there are deep links between climate justice, democracy, and community-centered technology. How can we build the muscles for the latter so we can redistribute power away from the top and back among the people?

I am experimenting with building my own muscles here: I’m re-imagining the way I move through the world and interact with these platforms. I’m experimenting and exploring, and in the process, the world feels so full of possibility. This is bigger than boycotting or digital security. It’s about how technology can help us co-create a better, more livable world. The world we really want to live in.

Let me share a bit of my current explorations with you. And I’ll be honest about the pain points and pleasure points along the way.

🟢 Digital security

• No cookies: I always take the literally 5 seconds to opt out of cookies on every website. Seriously, do it. It’s the easiest thing ever.

• A VPN: I use a VPN almost always when I’m out and about. Sometimes I forget. I do my best. As I understand it, VPNs are less about standing up against surveillance and more about general security especially on public WiFi. I use Mullvad, if anyone’s curious. Btw: many big VPNs are actually owned by Israel. Mullvad is not. A VPN is an easy add to your life!

• DeleteMe: I pay for this to help delete my personal information from the internet. You can do it yourself by requesting that data brokers delete your information, but obviously it’s easier and way faster to have someone else do it for you. If you’re public-facing in any way, I recommend DeleteMe. I was alarmed a couple years ago when I looked up my name on fastpeoplesearch.com and discovered that this site, which is just one free data broker, had every home address I’ve ever had + information on my parents + phone numbers, etc. DeleteMe helps erase such records.

• Toggling off ad tracking and AI personalization: I have been studiously going through my settings on various platforms to find and toggle off the suddenly built-in AI tracking settings. (Like in Gmail and even Pinterest!) This is very annoying, but feels so essential because I had no ideaaa how much all these platforms were extracting from me. 10/10 would recommend for the feeling of accomplishment and relief after you fix up your settings!

• Cleaning up my iPhone privacy: I’ve also been checking my iPhone privacy settings to heavily limit what apps have photo and location access. Why did so many random apps have not only my photos but also my photo metadata, like precise location the photo was taken? No, thank you. I am also somewhat curious about a “dumbphone.” TBD if/how I take that plunge.

🟢 Social media: UpScolled

I was never really on TikTok much, but I deleted it fully and switched over to UpScrolled.

UpScrolled offers an alternative social media, with different governance and transparency. It was founded in June 2025 by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian developer Isam Hijazi, with support from Tech for Palestine. Hijazi left Big Tech to create something better: out of frustration with the way mainstream platforms suppress voices, he built UpScrolled to prioritize a more transparent, less algorithmically manipulative space where people can share short videos, text posts, and photos. From what I can tell so far, it feels like Instagram’s visual storytelling meets X’s public conversation model, but with a more chronological and lightly curated feed instead of the typical tangle of attention-economy algorithms, constant consumerism, and AI around every corner.

I’m starting to experiment with it!

Read more in the last GARMI Canon.

Also, on Instagram, make sure your location sharing is off so it can’t track you in its new(ish) maps feature!

I constantly fantasize about leaving Meta altogether, but Instagram reels always have me cracking up, and Facebook marketplace still has me in a chokehold. That is the status so far, let’s see how/if I evolve.

🟢 Moving my book nerdiness away from Amazon

Fellow nerds:

• I moved off of Goodreads and onto Storygraph, which I’m loving. You can migrate your data with just a few clicks!

• When the time came for me to finally join the e-reader train last year, I opted for a Kobo instead of Kindle. Kobo is repairable, made of recycled material, has its own e-book store, and is compatible with Libby. I got the stylus version. If you’re looking for an e-reader, highly recommend!

• For physical books, the library always wins, but otherwise I’m a local bookstore or Bookshop girl.

🟢 Migrating from G-Suite to Proton

DeGoogling is not new, but I am new to it. And I have to say, it’s kind of awesome.

I’ve been slowly but surely switching my Google accounts to Proton Mail, which is a Swiss company with pretty stellar privacy and full end-to-end encryption. Proton has an ecosystem like Google: mail, docs, sheets, drive, etc. There’s a free version, and a paid version with more drive space + an allowance of 15 email addresses for one account.

Google is notorious for tracking your every move, and so far, Proton feels like a breath of fresh air. I feel so free, like I don’t have to be ensnared in the clutches of this one company, reliant on it for like 230238502 of my daily activities.

There’s so much more to deGoogling life, and I don’t know if I’ll ever fully eliminate Google products, but I’m enjoying upgrading whatever I can out of the Google ecosystem and onto better horizons.

Also on my list: moving away from Google Maps (maybe to Apple for now, until something better comes along?), Google Chrome (Firefox?), and Google search (DuckDuckGo? Brave? Ecosia?). As you can tell, I’m in the research phase. (Any knowledge or thoughts on the subject? Let me know!)

🟢 Qobuz versus Spotify

Okay, so everyone got mad at Spotify for airing ads for ICE + because of the CEO’s nearly $1 billion investment in Helsing, a defense tech company which develops AI for military drones and apparently for autonomous weapons + because it’s criticized for promoting AI-generated images + because of its poor ethics around artist compensation. Many people recommended Qobuz instead, so I decided to give it a try. My thoughts so far during this trial phase: Qobuz is great, has a great interface, great features, and almost all the music I listen to. BUT guys, I have put so much effort into my Spotify algorithm and I kinda miss it. So we’ll see. But if you’re curious about Qobuz, it’s worth a try.

Here are the steps I took:

• Create Qobuz account for a free one-month trial

• Transfer your Spotify library in minutes via Soundiiz, with a free code from Qobuz here.

• I am using Spotify free version to keep exploring new music as Qobuz (hopefully) catches up to my taste.

Stay tuned for how this journey goes. This one’s been tough for me so far.

I admire friends with vinyl collections, and recently was thinking about how new cars don’t even have CD slots. We used to pay to own things. Now we’re meant to rent everything, forever.

Maybe it’s time for shared libraries: vinyl, CDs, DVDs, hard drives of files among friends and community members.

This brings me to:

🟢 Recentering libraries

As a kid, my hot babysitter that I had a crush on was the library. The public library was my after school program, my caretaker, my babysitter. And damn was she fine!

It’s time to recenter the library. Here’s a reminder of how amazing public libraries are — you can borrow and use things like:

• Books

• Ebooks and audio books on Libby

• Newspaper and magazine subscriptions

• 3D printers, sewing machines, podcast studios, computers loaded with Adobe Creative Suite (like at the Octavia Lab at the Los Angeles Public Library)

• National and state parks passes

• Museum and culture passes

• Language learning platforms

• Seeds (!!!) for gardening

• Board games, tools, etc.

• Battery recycling services

• Movies and TV on streaming services like Kanopy

• Databases (like Consumer Reports, Britannica, Gale, Morningstar, Ancestry, and more)

• Courses (ex: Coursera)

Check with your local librarian to see what your library offers!

This is a snapshot of my current explorations. On the horizon I see endless possibilities.

We’re often convinced to submit to the gross visions of Big Tech under the guise of convenience. Big Tech asks us to give away more of our freedom, more of our wellness, more of our minds and bodies and souls to its whims, promising in exchange to give us speed, productivity, ease, more, more, more, bigger, better, faster.

I don’t know about you but it doesn’t feel convenient to me to have Big Tech up my butt at all times. It doesn’t feel like an upgrade to my life. It feels like a creepy old man who won’t leave me the f*ck alone.

So it’s powerful to reclaim our choice, our agency. To stand up and fight for our futures.

The reason I wanted to share my own explorations with transparency is to show you that it’s not all or nothing. I don’t want us to feel like, “Oh, I can’t do all of this, so I might as well do none of it.” Even if you only build the habit of rejecting cookies, that’s better than nothing at all. Even if you forget to opt out half the time but start remembering sometimes, that’s better than saying yes habitually every time. And if you can build that muscle, you can build others, too.

And know that you’re in good company. Everything I’ve learned so far, I’ve learned from the countless people who are deep in the work of better tech futures. I’ve been inspired by people on my feed and in my real life who are exploring alternatives to Big Tech with enthusiasm. I’ve been in awe of communities rising up to kick data centers off their land, to boycott corporations’ defense contracts, to call for justice and protection of democracy, and so on. Countries around the world are finding better ways to regulate privacy, to criminalize planned obsolescence, and more. If we all join in, we shift humanity onto a much wiser, more equitable, more delightful timeline than the one Big Tech envisions for us.

Security culture is like herd immunity: we need a critical mass of people to build better tech habits so we can all be safe together, so that security, not tech extractivism, becomes a cultural norm. Every single step you take strengthens our digital spaces and makes them healthier places for us to be.

I believe that wisdom — actual intelligence — is greater than artificial intelligence. And it is wisdom, not the naiveté of profit motives or algorithm economics or tech broligarchs, that we ought to lean on to innovate the way forward.

Get ready: a tech workshop coming soon!

I’m super excited to share an upcoming Tech Futures workshop in collaboration with a dear friend and tech futures advocate. This workshop will not just provide context around Big Tech in the world today, it’ll also equip you with tactical options for how you can navigate today’s tech landscape with informed choice wherever possible. Each workshop session will have some working time we’ll take some guided action together. We’ll go over what we know, and you can ideate and question with us: maybe you’re wondering about some of the explorations mentioned in this Groundswell, like Proton or Storygraph or VPNs or phone settings. Maybe you’re curious about processes or features or decision-making. We’ll also be learning with you, digging into our questions together, getting a taste of alternatives, and imagining tech futures where technology is for the people.

The workshop will be designed for everyday folks. Our goal is to help us all create a security culture, where we’re all literate in healthy tech habits and therefore able to democratically make choices that are good for us and for the people we care about.

So whether you’re a tech junkie who loves having everything integrated and tech-ified in your life, or a casual user who is less screen- and gadget-giddy, there are so many ways we can reclaim the internet for good.

Stay tuned for updates as we launch this in the coming months! To be first on the list, drop me a comment or reach out directly. We can’t wait to share more soon!

To close: Saikat Chakrabarti on

Better Future’s with Saikat Chakrabarti is an interview worth watching.

One topic that really caught my eye was the idea of tech being publicly owned. Instead of a handful of CEOs deciding the future of the country, it should be we the people who steer the course of our own futures. In some respects, this is a bold and revolutionary concept. In other ways, it’s just pure common sense. If you think about it, it’s the current system, the one in which control is concentrated in the hands of the few, that is radical and ridiculous and naive. I love learning about people who are pushing to upend the status quo in favor of something livable and liberating.

What do y’all think?

What do you use, what do you like, what are you experimenting with?

What are pain and pleasure points so far in your digital lives?

What else should I / we know about the platforms mentioned in this piece?

What questions and ideas do you have?

Tell me in the good ol’ comments!

Read more

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

Today we’re going to talk about a frequent topic of ours (Mamdani) and a trending topic of the moment (Bad Bunny). Let’s dig in, and then I promise I’ll tie together why they’ve been on my mind this week.

First: Mayor Mamdani enters his second month in office and it turns out that things may actually (possibly) get done if politicians practice sincere politics and everyday people practice civic engagement.

You know how sometimes something lands in your feed and you go wait, that’s actually interesting and weirdly uplifting? That’s been the vibe with some of Zohran Mamdani’s moves as mayor of New York City so far. Not perfect, not without friction, but stuff that made me go “huh, okay, that feels… alive.”

To the continued dismay of the establishment and the growing delight of everyday people, this man has been at work. And in the process, he’s showing us that there might be hope yet for better politics.

Okay first: childcare. You might’ve seen clips online, like of him with Ms. Rachel and a bunch of toddlers at a preschool gym talking about expanding free childcare for 2-year-olds and singing songs with the kids while reporters circled. Or of that really cute moment when a kid interrupted him while he was speaking at a podium and he embraced the silliness. These instances weren’t slick and polished the way press events usually are. It was goofy and sweet and real, and a lot of folks online responded with genuine joy. Because childcare costs in the city are ridiculous, from what I hear, and this new universal childcare program for toddlers may provide actual relief.

Then there were those January blizzards. Instead of just a press release, we saw Mamdani out in the cold helping people shovel snow on a Brooklyn sidewalk. He was doing the slog with folks, and social media comments were full of neighbors thanking him for being visible rather than remote. (Never forget: Ted Cruz jetting away from Texas during destabilizing weather events.) It sounds small, but it feels like it’s different out there with this mayor. Some people were like “it’s performative,” and other people were like “yes, he is performing his duties as mayor.”

And then there are the labor and justice moments: he announced a settlement with Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda over wage theft, which resulted in more than $5 million in restitution to delivery workers and better enforcement of the ~$21.44 hourly minimum wage. Folks talked about how that actually impacts people’s pockets and respect on the job.

Another big pick was his appointment of Stanley Richards, a formerly incarcerated person, to lead the city’s Department of Correction — the first time someone with that background has been put in charge of the agency. That choice sets up a city corrections system that could lean toward rehabilitation instead of purely punishment.

And yeah, there are debates. Over how to handle crime, about budget decisions and proposed tax changes, about public safety, about what’s “realistic” and enforceable — all of these conversations can and should happen. Some people think his posture is too soft, others say he’s not biting hard enough into entrenched problems. That’s the point: it’s not hero worship, it’s messy, human governance. You can critique the man and still talk about moments where people said they felt seen, where government feels a little closer.

Mamdani’s spirit of complete and utter helpfulness is such a stark contrast to not only the current commander-in-chief of the country and his cronies, but also to all establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle.

What’s caught my eye is the energy of these moments: the unexpected, the weirdly warm, the little human flashes in bigger bureaucratic systems. That joy matters right now.

And then there was Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

Everyone saw it. What Bad Bunny did on that stage was something else. Nothing and no one is above some healthy critique, but undeniably that halftime show meant something to millions at a time when we badly need an infusion of cultural courage in our mainstream media ecosystems.

But first some context so it makes sense why this matters.

Puerto Rico: a very brief little intro

Puerto Rico became part of the United States in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. Under the Treaty of Paris, Spain formally ceded the island to the U.S, and U.S. forces occupied the island on October 18, 1898.

But Puerto Rico isn’t a U.S. state. It’s an unincorporated territory of the United States, which is a fancy term for “colony.” Since a 1917 bill signed by Woodrow Wilson, folks born in PR are U.S. citizens but still can’t vote for president and don’t have voting members in Congress. In 1952, the island adopted a constitution, allowing for a form of self-government as a commonwealth of the United States. Often, “commonwealth” can also be – you guessed it – a fancy term for “colony.”

The United States exploits Puerto Rico primarily through this colonial relationship, which allows for economic extraction, limited political rights, and structural dependency. The U.S. imposes restrictive maritime laws, dictates trade policies, and imposes a financial oversight board, leading to high debt and economic inequality for residents.

This power structure flows out of colonial history in the Caribbean, and it’s deeply tied to questions of who gets heard and who doesn’t. For example, in the mid-20th century, Puerto Rican women were subjected to widespread sterilization campaigns with coercion and without consent. They were also used as subjects for birth control trials. (Read more about reproductive rights in Puerto Rico.) Another example: in 2017, after Hurricane Maria, much of the island was left without reliable power for months, in long periods of darkness that were technical as much as they were political.

At the same time, and within these colonial tangles, the people of Puerto Rico not only endure but carve out rich cultural futures. The resistance – from what I’m learning – has always been strong in Puerto Rico, from way back to the revolts against the Spanish a century and a half ago to the continuing movement for independence today.

Against this historical and contemporary background, Bad Bunny’s halftime choices feel loaded with meaning.

Here are some of the historical and political references in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl set that I found striking:

• A recreated sugar cane field and jíbaro imagery nodding to Puerto Rico’s agricultural and colonial labor history.

• Utility-pole dancers during “El Apagón,” visually connecting to the island’s post-Maria electrical grid collapse and community resilience.

• A light-blue Puerto Rican flag, associated with independence and anti-colonial identity. (The official flag is a darker blue. This light blue version signifies independence and was banned from being flow for years in an effort to suppress PR’s independence movement.)

• Scenes of everyday life: piragua vendors, nail techs, coco frío, a taco stand, plastic chairs galore, domino players, a replica casita. It was the people, central and visible in a stadium spectacle.

• Musical tributes to reggaetón and plena that tie back to working-class and Afro-Caribbean roots.

• The real fan wedding that took place (and the little kid sleeping across the chairs – a very brown experience).

• Local highlights like LA’s famous Villa’s Tacos, and the iconic Toñita, the owner of Williamsburg’s famous Caribbean Social Club (who Bad Bunny references in “NEUVAYoL”).

These elements weren’t just set decoration. They were a history lesson in joy and resistance mashed up together. It’s like a collage that says “this place exists, its people are here, and we matter.”

The show was mostly in Spanish, which is historic for a Super Bowl halftime. Many everyday viewers said something like: “I didn’t speak the language, I may not have known all the songs, but I felt something there.” On Reddit a bunch of people said exactly that: that watching the performance felt like vibes and joy and identity being shared even without full linguistic comprehension. My feed was full of videos of people dancing – with varying degrees of grace or awkwardness – in front of their living room TVs. Over 126 million people watched and loved it. Artists, athletes, and everyday people praised the unity and inclusivity — “Made me feel proudly American,” was a common thread, as people pointed to the way the show named or displayed the flags of every single North, South, and Central America country as part of America and closed with “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

But, of course, some oddballs straight-up rejected it in favor of an “alternative” halftime show: the Turning Point USA halftime show.

The TPUSA halftime show was like unseasoned gruel in comparison. For those who don’t know, Turning Point and their headliner Kid Rock threw a right-wing attempt at providing viewers with an “All-American” show for those intent on boycotting Bad Bunny. However you may feel about it, you must admit that TPUSA accomplished their goal of providing something completely opposite of Bad Bunny’s inspired artistry. Drawing only 4% of the audience that Bad Bunny pulled in, the TPUSA halftime show was a feeble experience fully free of rhythm, artistry, and soul. It ended up as this odd counter-programming moment where a separate group of performers tried to recast the halftime vibe as “faith, family, and freedom.” Apparently one bar owner in Florida chose to air the Turning Point USA alternative show instead and got review bombed on Yelp for it.

Let’s forgive each other for being revolted by the vision for the world that the creators and supports of this alternative show are trying to steer our country towards. It’s a vision for a tasteless, colorless, odorless, rhythmless, utterly bland mass of cultlike conformity that spends its days trying desperately to eclipse the unabashed bloom spilling gregariously out of people of the global majority.

As of yesterday, Republican lawmakers are trying to literally open an investigation into the show for “indecency.” To me, this feels like a modern day iteration of colonizers looking at those they seek to colonize and saying, “Savages.” I think that it’s only those who envy, fear, or covet the sensuality and sensory vibrancy of colonized cultures who brandish such puritanical accusations in the face of cultural expression. (And who, mind you, are quicker to accuse Bad Bunny of indecency than they are to accuse anyone in the Epstein files of the same.)

By the way: despite POTUS shitting on Bad Bunny leading up to (and after) the show, guess whether his Super Bowl viewing party played Benito or TPUSA? (The answer is Benito. He watched Benito.)

Ultimately, the performance felt powerful because it wasn’t just the spectacle or the music. It was pleasure politics, the joy of politics and the politics of joy — the sense that a big global audience got to see a culture lifted up in its own language, in its own symbols. And that matters because it reminds us, as many said online, that unity and shared humanity can come through joy itself.

Joy is a common tongue. Get fluent.

When I look at what Mamdani’s been doing — settling wage theft cases, curating a visionary team, wholeheartedly humoring kids, and showing up with a shovel in the snow — and I look at how Bad Bunny’s halftime show filled millions of living rooms with music, identity, and delight, what strikes me is this:

Joy is a common tongue because we understand it in any form — any act, any language, any glance. That’s why we’re talking about these two figures today. Not because they’re heroes up on pedestals — no one’s above critique, and it’s always fair to question intentions, impacts, and limits — but because they each opened little cracks in otherwise bleak moments where people could feel something jubilant, something shared, something hopeful. And in times like these, that matters. Joy doesn’t undo struggle, but it does remind us that we’re still here, speaking the same language even when our words are different.

What are your thoughts? Any details I missed — whether about joy or about tempering our optimism? Any insights to share, ideas that sparked, reflections on your mind? Tell me in the comments.

Chilli: one easy action

Today, thanks to the civic participation app Chilli, take one small action for immigration defense by telling Hilton to stop hosting ICE agents.

Participate here.

Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

Over the last couple years, my frustration with social media has deepened intensely. On the one hand, I learn so much from spaces like Instagram – about politics, about life, about my friends and family. I laugh at videos of dogs playing with babies; I send New Girl memes back and forth to my long-distance best friend; I marvel at people’s odd talents or enviable aesthetics; I find out about mutual aid and local rallies and breaking news; I learn how to make my eyeliner work for my round, hooded eyes. As a writer and storyteller, I also depend on social media to market my work, broaden my network, and stay current in my field.

At the same time, my disdain for the tightening chokehold of ads, AI slop, and algorithm economics is starting to eclipse my gratitude for the benefits these platforms provide, significant though they are. This shift is because of the ballooning of Big Tech’s influence. The tech broligarchy is revealing itself to be a collection of odd, often disturbing, and always unelected billionaires who, through their well-branded digital weaponry and outsized political influence, are not only psychologically dominating us but are also deciding the very future of civilization – without a shred of our input.

I think about how every minute I spend scrolling on Instagram, heart rate escalating and eyes straining, I make Meta and Mark Zuckerberg richer. I think about how “the Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration” (TechCrunch). Or about how several accounts speaking out against ICE have apparently faced suspension on Instagram. Or about how whenever I post something political, I feel like I have to “make it up” to the algorithm boss by posting a consumable selfie. About how I intentionally misspell words that invoke a conflict or a controversy (like genocide, aka jenoside) to avoid getting shadowbanned.

Most of my personal frustration is directed at Instagram, where I’m most active. But users across mainstream platforms feel similar tension. Recently, the focus of the frustration in American digital spaces has been TikTok.

Today, I want to talk about why everyone’s switching from TikTok to a potentially exciting new alternative called UpScrolled.

But first, in case you missed it, here’s what’s been going on with TikTok:

Read more

The GARMI Groundswell’s vision is to present commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

This is a space for political literacy and civic empowerment. Because things are scary. And: how can we learn from, support, and join those who are doing something about it?

Hello GARMI gremlins, and welcome back to the GARMI Groundswell. This one’s lengthy, so let’s dig right in.

I spent the past month out of the country in places that don’t have ICE. There are other problems in those places, but watching the news here in the United States was not only deeply distressing, it was a stark contrast to my immediate surroundings at the time. That stark contrast was a constant reminder that the way things are in America is not the way they have to be. There are other civic possibilities, better available systems of care and governance. Not only do We The People deserve those better systems, we can and must build them.

Migration is, after all, the most natural behavior across planetary ecosystems: Arctic tern and hummingbirds, humpbacks and gray whales, wildebeests and caribou, monarch butterflies and dragonflies, salmon and sea turtles and eels and geese and gazelle and – throughout history – human beings ourselves. I dream of a world beyond borders that nestles us back into natural rhythms and patterns of life.

Add to this the real remnants, extensions, and continuations of colonialism – which, by the way, due to its extractive nature, is remarkably distinct from migration, because the former seeks exploitation of life and the latter seeks reciprocity and furtherance thereof. So migration feels not just natural but critical. A consequence of imperialism.

With the onslaught of news I was ingesting while away, my fingers were itching to write to you. I had to remind myself that GARMI is not a newsroom for breaking news. It is, instead, a place I hope we gather to contextualize, digest, and participate in the current moment. So today, let’s do just that. How can we contextualize, digest, and do something about immigration raids across the country?

Contextualize: why is all of this happening?

First of all, this isn’t new. It’s distinctly American.

I often hear people comparing ICE to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo. But the reality is that ICE is a continuation of American ideology. And in fact, so was the Gestapo. The Nazi regime looked specifically to American segregation as its ideological inspiration. The Nuremberg Laws were created after the Nazis studied American Jim Crow laws. They also “were interested in how the U.S. had designated Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as ‘nationals.’” (History.com)

Secondly, we have private prisons and detention centers.

Let me remind us all that being undocumented is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. Other civil offenses include things like speeding, contract violations, slander, trespassing, and parking tickets. In other words, nothing near the realm of violent crime. Add to that the fact that nearly 75% of those that have been detained by this administration have no criminal conviction whatsoever, and that of those with a criminal conviction, most were petty crimes like traffic violations. In fact, of the tens of thousands who’ve been kidnapped away without due process, only 5% have violent criminal convictions (CATO).

So why are we wasting resources on locking up thousands of innocent people?

As the Brennan Center for Justice points out, those that stand to gain are the major players of the prison-industrial complex. ICE handed out nearly $4 billion in contracts in 2025. This includes to software companies like Palantir and to big private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group. And “With new, unparalleled funding, corporations that support the growth of detention infrastructure will continue to see soaring profits. And the danger – and reality – is that because these corporations exist, it allows for a rapid expansion of the detention and removal infrastructure in the United States.”

As it turns out, detaining innocent people makes a few greedy rich people even richer.

Thirdly, who’s heard of the imperial boomerang?

The imperial boomerang is a concept in political theory that describes how methods of oppression developed by imperial or colonial powers to control foreign populations eventual return (aka boomerang) back home and are used domestically against the imperial power’s own citizens. In other words, America oppresses people abroad then comes home and oppresses Americans.

Here’s how we see the imperial boomerang within the imperial heartland itself:

Militarized policing

Tactics, tools, and formations used in domestic policing (like SWAT units, riot gear, counter-insurgency-style operations, and surveillance) have a clear lineage from imperial military practices or were developed in colonial warfare contexts abroad. Then, domestically, when we have moments of heightened racial tension or protest, our police treat us like we’re “insurgents,” too.

Ex 1: Early US police units adopted techniques originally used in the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). (Read more.)

Ex 2: Techniques used in occupation and control of Palestinians are shared with local American police departments, as many police departments have “exchange programs” with the Israeli military. (Read more.)

We’re seeing this militarized policing flare up again today as protests grow against ICE raids, and ICE officers – with the complicity of local police departments – target, harass, attack, tear gas, and even kill community members.

Watch the New York Times just now figure out what the imperial boomerang is (though it’s a decades-old concept written about by postcolonial thinkers) in this useful video:

Harsh border control

Controlling a population’s movement – and determining who gets to move freely and who does not – is a tried and trusted colonial protocol.

“Where are your papers?” is a mentality that dates back to slave patrols and Indigenous displacement here in America, and to American or American-sponsored occupation in the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and more.

Immigrants are treated as a threat, and this is used to justify wider expansions of policing and control mechanisms.

Surveillance

Surveillance tech was originally developed and refined in war zones. Then, it was turned inward in FBI wiretapping of Civil Rights leaders like Dr. King, in the Patriot Act, in Islamophobia-fueled mass surveillance of domestic Muslim populations, in data aggregation, and so on.

Surveillance is also a part of our everyday life. Not only do we get convinced by promises of convenience and shorter lines to enroll in Digital ID and biometrics at airports, we also live in a world where algorithms, self-driving cars, phone microphones, and internet service providers see all. TikTok and Instagram can censor you, the authorities can show up at your door because you express dissent on social media, your Global Entry reportedly can get canceled for disagreeing with the administration.

And this can all be legally justified by labeling you a “domestic terrorist.”

The imperial boomerang is the chickens coming home to roost.

“Fascism is colonialism turned inwards.” – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

Digest: the news can feel scary, so let’s tackle it together.

What’s going on now is that the authoritarian powers that be are desperately trying to flex their might in the face of rapidly growing pushback from us, the general public.

For a moment, let’s not shy away from the news. I’m telling you the following not to make you feel frozen in fear but to provoke your action (which comes in the next section). Bear with me here, this bit is tough.

January’s imperial powers at work

ICE has killed 9 people in 2026: Keith Porter, Parady La, Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Alex Pretti, and Renee Good. (Pretti and Good were killed within 2 miles of where George Floyd was killed.) These are just the names we know.

Though immigration raids continue full force across the country, Minneapolis has been a hotspot in January for immigration attacks. Recently, in Minneapolis:

🔺 Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes for the week for the whole district after ICE agents tackled students and deployed tear gas during school dismissal. The school system has OK’ed remote learning through at least February 12 due to threats to student safety (Minnesota Public Radio). Similar incidents have also taken place in Chicago, Portland, and Southern California.

🔺 A woman was trying to drive down the street in front of a home where neighbors had gathered to protest an ongoing ICE raid. She told agents she had a doctor’s appointment to get to. They responded by busting her windows, cutting her seatbelt, pulling her out of her car, and arresting her. She is now released and safe. But in the video, you might catch agents giving her conflicting directions: “Stop!” “Go!” “Drive!” “Don’t move!” “Get out of the car!”

This is not a one-off. ICE gave conflicting directions to Renee Good after surrounding her car. Agents regularly break car windows, cut seatbelts, and drag people out to arrest them. One could be forgiven for speculating that conflicting demands are a tactic to escalate situations and justify arrest and even violence by arguing noncompliance.

🔺 Devastatingly, a mother had to perform CPR on her 6-month-old baby after ICE agents deployed tear gas (which is a chemical weapon, let’s not forget) near her car. The baby was literally “foaming at the mouth” – but was revived and survived the attack. The mother was was trapped in her car with her family (including 6 children) until bystanders helped them escape the tear gas.

🔺 Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned because the Justice Department pushed to investigate the widow of Renee Good, while expressing reluctance to investigate the shooter.

🔺 KPTV Fox 12 reports: “A Mexican restaurant in Minnesota closed after agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited the spot for lunch then detained its owners and another worker.” Revolting behavior.

🔺 ICE detained preschooler Liam Ramos and his father in Minneapolis and sent them to detention centers in Texas. They’ve since been released after public outcry and a judge’s ruling.

🔺 Toy store owners criticized ICE on a TV segment and then ICE agents showed up to hand-deliver store owners an audit notice (The Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Beyond MN:

🔺 Warning that this one made me cry, but in Texas, 62-year-old Maher Tarabishi was detained by ICE back in October while leaving from a routine check-in. He was the only caregiver for his 30-year-old son Wael who suffered from Pompe disease and required daily care. After Maher’s detention, Wael’s health rapidly declined, and he passed away on January 23, 2026. They never got to say goodbye. Maher is a long-time tax-paying U.S. resident with no criminal record who always attended all immigration check-ins (The Guardian). DHS refused to allow him to attend his son’s funeral.

🔺 In Houston, ICE agents chased and then choked out a 16 year old (citizen) and then stole and sold his phone to an electronic vending machine (Now This Impact).

🔺 DHS has apparently been subpoenaing tech companies to demand user information for some social media accounts that criticize the Trump administration’s immigration attacks.

🔺 In Washington last week, the Senate voted to reject an amendment proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders that would have repealed the $75 billion in additional funding for ICE provided by Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” and transferred that money to healthcare. So that you know they had the option and decided to fund attacks on our communities instead of investing in baseline necessities.

🔺 Also, ICE is at the Olympics in Italy and Italians are having none of it. (Read more on NPR.)

There’s more, and it feels never-ending and alarming and oh my god and it’s an onslaught designed to exhaust us and psychologically drain us so that we don’t resist.

But boy do we resist anyway.

January’s Resistance

💚 According to BreakThrough News, “Community members quickly chased off ICE agents when they descended upon Wrecktangle Pizza, a popular restaurant in Minneapolis. The agents even deployed chemical weapons, but bystanders kicked it right back undeterred. Now these community members are standing guard outside of nearby businesses making sure federal agents don’t come back.” Community patrols continue nationwide.

💚 Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the U.S. Customs and Border Control headquarters in D.C. to demand the defunding of ICE.

💚 Kids are protesting ICE on Roblox, the online gaming platform (don’t ask me what that is, I just know it’s important to the youths).

💚 A restaurant in Minneapolis kicked ICE agents out. (Watch it here.) Many small businesses have been taking similar stands across the country.

💚 Celebrities are activating their platforms. Professional athletes across major league sports are speaking out against ICE – and ESPN is even reporting about it. The Grammys were full of “f*ck ICE” speeches. Rallies in NYC and LA see celebrities in their crowds, bringing visibility to this movement.

💚 University of Minneapolis students gathered outside a hotel where ICE was reportedly staying to blast guitars and bang on drums to disturb agents’ sleep. This tactic has been used in LA, New York, and other cities as mischievous resistance called No Sleep for ICE.

💚 And, of course there was Minnesota’s historic General Strike and student walkout on January 23rd, and the following nationwide General Strike on January 30th. Hundreds of thousands rallied in protests across cities, towns, and college campuses.

Of all the videos of resistance I’ve seen, the following was easily a favorite — like, don’t you want to be a part of this crowd?

Participate: how to meaningfully join the resistance (if you haven’t already)

To put it bluntly, donating and calling your reps is not the work right now. Or, rather, it’s not the entirety of the work.

This moment asks you to do something you already know how to do, but perhaps have not yet done in your political life: it asks you to build a new habit, learn a new skill, strengthen a fledgling muscle. Perhaps in the past you’ve committed your mind and time to a new workout routine or a more nourishing diet, perhaps you’ve trained for your first marathon or worked towards reading one book a month. Perhaps you’ve recently started therapy, or you’re exploring a new business idea, educational course, budgeting goal, singing class, or journaling practice. I’ve seen so many of you fearlessly grow in many of these ways.

And I encourage you to lean into this ability to expand. The personal is political and the political is personal, so if you apply the familiar mindset of self-growth to your civic engagement, you effortlessly join collective action.

What does this look like? Well, the same way you might carve out time everyday or every week to build any lifestyle habit (an hour at the gym, morning asanas, a Sunday to meal prep, a daily walk, a nighttime reading ritual), perhaps once a month you begin attending a meeting for your local Sunrise Movement chapter, becoming one of countless fresh faces eager to outmaneuver the twin evils of climate crisis and authoritarianism. Perhaps you start to participate in weekly grocery distribution for families that are sheltering in place for safety. Perhaps you change your weekend plans to go with some friends to a rally for immigration defense. Perhaps you practice making plans for civic action with your friends, just like you make social plans. Perhaps after a community training, you join your neighborhood ICE watch and start doing a quick loop in your area once a week after your regular grocery runs to report if there is any ICE activity on your block.

The common thread is that doing something means that — if your body allows you — you physically leave your house and gather with others to perform some kind of action. It’s different from being alone and calling your senators or making a donation. Don’t come at me – those things are also so important. But they are not a replacement for being physically outside in the company of other everyday people who are building care together. Joining in not just adds to effective action; it also fuels you. It recharges your battery.

We have to realize that civic action is part of self-growth, that we are part of a collective and that the health of that collective is inextricable from our personal well-being.

There are always extenuating circumstances that may preclude us from such participation — you know if you have them. But anyone with even an ounce of privilege, it’s time to get meaningfully involved.

The civic muscle is already sharp in frontlines communities. The rest of us need to realize that we, too, are the frontlines of the change we wish to see in the world. As such, we must lock the fuck in.

Because imagine all this happening around you, thirsty for your help, and you’re just sitting on the sidelines and watching. How embarrassing would that be? To save you from this fate, here’s what you can do right now.

Get trained.

TOMORROW’s virtual call: Eyes on ICE: Document and Record. 8-9pm ET. RSVP here for the link to join.

Know Your Rights

For real. If not for yourself, then for a loved one or a stranger whose life your knowledge could save.

Take it from Mayor Mamdani:

For more information including specifics on how to identify ICE & CPB; what to do if they approach you outside, at your home, or at your place of business; or if they come to a home, school, or place of business where you employ or are responsible for community members who are immigrants, check out the Immigration Defenders Law Center resource page here.

At Protests, Rallies, or On the Street (via ACLU, because I’m no lawyer):

• You don’t need a permit to protest in the streets or on sidewalks (as long as you aren’t obstructing traffic or access to buildings).

• You have a right to film the police, other federal agents, and anything else in plain view.

• Without a valid warrant, you do not have to consent to a search of yourself or your belongings. Say, “I do not consent to a search.”

• If law enforcement issues a dispersal order, sticking around may risk arrest.

• If detained or arrested, ask for a lawyer immediately and exercise your right to remain silent. Do not say or sign anything without a lawyer present.

Join a national organizing hub or local mutual aid effort

Organizations like Sunrise Movement have been working tirelessly to stop authoritarianism, to win on climate action, and to protect human and planetary futures. To be a part of their powerful national strategy, join a local chapter at sunrisemovement.org/become-a-member.

Report ICE activity.

FIND AND SAVE AS CONTACT: the rapid response hotline number for your area. Community groups rely on everyday people to help monitor ICE. If you feel safe to do so, record and report activity you see.

Do a quick online search to find the hotline numbers in your area. Here are some California hotlines:

• San Francisco: 415-200-1548

• Sacramento: 916-382-0256

• San Bernardino/Riverside: 909-361-4588

• Southern Central Coast: 805-870-8855

• Los Angeles: 888-624-4752

• West LA Rapid Response: 310-513-5539

• Orange County: 714-881-1558

• San Diego: 619-536-0823

Think global, act local.

You can support from afar. But nothing, NOTHING, replaces being ready to participate in YOUR neighborhood when ICE comes to your streets. We’re all a part of local resilience. Engage in:

• Local vendor buyouts.

• Grocery distribution for those sheltering at home.

• Community legal defense funds.

• Local rallies.

• Neighborhood ICE watch (Signal groups).

• Local immigration defense trainings.

• National corporate boycotts (buy local).

You can look these opportunities up in your area. Here are some Minnesota resources as examples to inspire your search: linktr.ee/mplsmutualaid.

In NYC? Find your organizing home here.

ICE has been doubling down. Tripling down. The politicians aren’t helping us. The police aren’t helping us. Neither were ever meant to help us. So we have to realize that we save us. We build our futures. Everyday people have each other’s backs. The people at the top are cowards, but We the People? Our courage is contagious.

Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

Pregnancy: beautiful, miraculous, literally life-giving. The most creative thing a person can do, for real. Also: disruptive to daily schedules, deeply intense on the body, and possibly disastrous for a woman’s career in a still patriarchal world?

So what if there was a solve for the pesky problems of pregnancy? A new technology for reproductive freedom? A way to keep running the race, like all the girls riding horses and windsurfing in tampon commercials? A way to continue the supposedly feminist furtherance of career goals or productivity benchmarks or whatever else a woman might want to do instead of being occupied – literally – for nine months? Another choice?

The Pod Generation, a 2023 sci-fi/comedy film explores exactly this question and gives us a rather spooky answer to how far we might take productivity culture if corporations are allowed to continue their “innovation” and profit schemes unchecked. The story centers around a young, smart, professional couple, Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in a hyper-optimized near-future New York City.

In this world, a new reproductive innovation is the talk of the town: a biotech company named Pegasus has a cutting-edge technology on the market called “pods.” These Pods are artificial wombs that allow pregnancy to be fully eternalized into sleek, portable capsules where fetuses develop outside the human body. Notably, these Pods are not marketed as a medical necessity for women who perhaps cannot conceive another way. Instead, they’re marketed as a lifestyle upgrade.

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Because if we want a different world – one that evolves us beyond extraction, exploitation, patriarchy, hyperindividualism, and the like – then we need a different canon. One that’s not rooted in the very things we yearn to evolve beyond. One that instead catalyzes a better world for all.

When I was little, my mom, dad, and I would play hours-long games of Monopoly. It was a heated event, taken seriously and battled fiercely. My dad won most often, and when I was cunning enough to beat him, I was smug with pride.

Monopoly is a cultural cornerstone of capitalism. To win Monopoly, you acquire property as early as possible, leverage it to extract rent relentlessly, and eliminate all other players through bankruptcy. Subliminally, my seven-year-old brain was normalizing landlords and rent and the zero-sum perspective of total domination on the game board. That’s how games work: they condition not only what success looks like but how it ought to be achieved.

Games are a special form of storytelling: a game is a story you practice. Unlike novels or films, games don’t merely depict values; they ask us as players to actively repeat specific values, which are defined by the rules of said game. Games, of course, depend on rules. But how often do we look at the rules critically and consider the worldviews they may impart unto us?

Monopoly doesn’t argue that rent extraction is moral or efficient. It just normalizes it by making it the primary verb of play. You don’t debate whether to charge rent; you simply do, because that’s how the game proceeds.

The real world also has rules of the game that, if repeated enough, feel like just the way things are. Capitalism feels like an obvious state of the world, and rent is an obvious part of capitalism. Natural. Unquestionable. The game board mirrors and reinforces real life.

But Monopoly began very differently. It began, actually, as a critique of capitalism.

In 1904, a woman named Elizabeth Magie patented something called The Landlord’s Game as an explicitly political teaching tool. Magie, a feminist and a progressive, was influenced by an economist named Henry George, who argued that land should be publicly owned and its value should be taxed to fund public services. So Magie designed a game to demonstrate how private ownership of land and rent-seeking inevitably produce inequality. The board, mechanics, and flow of money were meant to make players actually feel the consequences of monopolization rather than understand them only in the abstract.

Here’s the important part: Magie included multiple rule sets: one in which wealth pooled and prosperity was shared (the Prosperity rules), and another in which monopolies were allowed to form (the Monopolist rules). The contrast was the lesson. By playing both versions, players could see that economic outcomes were not the result of human nature or skill alone, but of the systems governing ownership and distribution. Quite literally: the rules of the game.

Magie’s Landlord’s Game was widely popular in many circles at the time.

So how did The Landlord’s Game become Monopoly?

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