A Meditation on Afro-NOWism
There are several things this fellowship provided me the space to remember; a few being the understanding of interconnectivity, the feeling of humility transmuted into reverence and gratitude, the healing power of radical imagination, and the tangible power of visualization. However, above all, this fellowship has given me the gift of knowing nine innovators who take the form of activists, organizers, poets, architects, urban planners, animators, and technologists. In short, this fellowship has gifted me a sense of belonging and community. Our conversations each week held a sense of sacredness, of communion in the realm of radical imagination. The space we nurtured was founded on mutual respect and inclusion. As a queer first-generation Afrolatina I felt, seemingly for the first time, the space and ability to present a complete version of myself without compromise or scrutiny. This in itself is a form of liberation and restitution.
Even within my personal research practice based in AI and application development, I find the need to remind myself to embody hope and stand firm in the strength generations of blood, laughter, tears of joy and sorrow have yielded. Looking at the extractive nature of the current technological standards and the seemingly monolithic power of Big Tech to create and enforce their own self-interested agendas, it’s difficult to embody optimism. However, as an afronowist, I find optimism to bloom out of individual and collective planning.
Baratunde Thurston’s essay “A New Tech Manifesto” outlines six demands from a citizen to Big Tech. He asserts several points surrounding transparency around data collection and usage, respecting our right to our own data, diversifying the individuals building the technology, changing data defaults from open to closed, and implementing new laws and regulations. This is an example of a framework intended to yield real and tangible change and action that we can all collectively demand. On an individual level, I feel compelled to continuously reflect on the intentions of my work to ensure, as much as possible, it aligns with Black empowerment. As Nina Simone expressed “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times in which we live”. This mentality has given birth to projects like Algorithmic Equity, a communal knowledge base of NYPD police officer behavior designed to cultivate and support community-led accountability and autonomy; and Ancestral Archives, a collection of chatbots modeled after historical significant people of color (ie. Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Anglea Davis) to continue to engage in dialogue with our revolutionary ancestors.
In his essay “Technology & Ethos”, Amiri Baraka asserts that machines are inherently an extension of those who create it and the control Western culture has in shaping modern technology is oppressive in nature. He encourages us to think of technology from the lens of a “post-Western” world. In this manner, technology will begin to “reflect the essence of the freed people”, freed from both the oppressor and the oppressor’s spirit. Spirit, according to Baraka, is the “emotional construct that can manifest as expression, as art or technology or any form”. Baraka reminds us that the spirit embodied by technologists, developers, and designers has the ability to change the trajectory of discursive tech. The technology created is more than algorithms and mechanisms, it’s a reflection of the inventor. Therefore, it must be the objective of all technologists, artists, and radical thinkers to challenge the societal standard while maintaining an essence of spirit. This concept is summarized succinctly by Baraka who states that “The new technology must be spiritually oriented because it must aspire to raise man’s spirituality and expand man’s consciousness. It must begin by being humanistic…the technology itself must represent human striving. It must represent at each point the temporary perfection of the evolutional man. And be obsolete only because nothing is ever perfect, the only constant is change.”
While establishing my personal meditative practice, I’ve found points of intersection between the speculative and radical process of imagineering and spirituality, the ongoing study of the interwoven nature of all life. In Tibetan Buddhism, sitting meditation is an activity that deals with the body and mind simultaneously. During mindfulness practice, one follows the breath going in and out of the body, focusing on the path of the out-breath. According to Chogyam Trungpa, a master of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, “Out-breathing is an expression of stepping out of your system. It has nothing to do with centralizing your body. Usually everything is bottled up, but here you are sharing, you are giving something out.” He goes on to explain that since we need oxygen to live, the in-breath becomes a confirmation of our existence while the out-breath is an expression of that existence. Exhaling has a feeling of relaxation and well-being which creates space for openness, expansion, and the dissolution of the individual into the universal. Reflecting on the momentum of these individual inspirations allowed me to build a reconstructed understanding of the NOW: We are the past, the result of generations of human experiences, of singularized and continuous big bangs, all, individually cascading and flowing into this present moment. We are the future, as in the actions we currently take, visualize and imbue with collective ingenuity is the NOW yet to be manifested, that which is yet to be actualized. From this perspective, all of time is carried through seamlessly in the form of a collective exhalation, a shared communion in the NOW.
In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler paints the picture of California in the year 2025 devastated by climate change. Lauren, the protagonist, is an empath, someone who shares the emotions of others. As passive observers, we see her challenge the accepted norms of the world and, through determination and preparation, change it. “All that you touch, You change. All that you change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.” And that change is happening now. This moment, the NOW, is pregnant with infinite possibilities, there are infinite shapes that Change can fall into. The outcome then hinges on focused intention. Where is my attention now? Where is it focused and how is it directed? In what ways am I sowing seeds of prosperity and unity, in what ways are my doubts and fears clouding my vision? Radical imagination, understood in this case to be the act of contextualizing the past while also framing the future with intention, becomes the organic raw material with which we can fashion our future out of. Such a powerful tool, sharp and untrained, demands continuous use and practice since use is the only condition of possession.
Exercising this tool of radical imagination with nine other internationally-located Black innovators was a priceless experience. Focusing on revisioning sustainable and healthy Black futures emphasized the malleability of our individual and collective trajectory. Readings like “Parable of the Sower’’ by Octavia Butler and Olalekan Jeyifous’s futuristic renditions of African cities inspired specific values to take into consideration when designing for a sustainable future. How can we cultivate the ability to adapt, to strengthen our intuitive foresight, and to foster bravery in the face of doubt and fear?
In the face of white supremacy, the patriarchy, homophobia, and climate change I’m inclined to remain optimistic about the future we can create and share. As James Baldwin once powerfully said, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” However, in my option, survival should no longer be the goal, to thrive has become the minimum requirement. I believe we, as a collective, can take hold of our individual autonomy to demand a revolutionized world. This can take the form of organizing locally, within friend groups and neighborhoods; it can take the form of attending protests and sharing resources, of standing up for each other and validating the precious nature of each individual, of visualizing harmonic futures through sketching or storytelling. As this fellowship showed me, the people and resources you need are already there, waiting for you to connect and utilize, you simply have to claim it, to affirm it. So, the main intention of this thought piece is to serve as a gentle reminder of the importance you as an individual have in visualizing the future you want to see and the power you have to reject the imbalances of our world in exchange for something new. While we are all given cards to play, some better or worse than others, it is important to remind oneself that the game is not over.
