A SPELL FOR MARCH

we are besieged, on all sides, by shadows. where they walk, the city parts open. for three days, the city was recast in their image; offering their eyes, mouths, wallets and feet a promise of what is to come.

for three days in march, in the middle of the hottest week this year, tech tourists from technocorp elsewheres swarmed the five blocks of downtown for a global assembly of AI led by Nvidia^[1].

they came pouring in from the east: neon plastic conference cards dangling from stiff necks, shoes printing confusion on the sidewalk. they are smiling and talking with all their teeth out and eyes open. faces frozen in that unnatural mask, work has a way of arranging facial features into. at the many traffic stops to my destination, i idle behind throngs of conference goers waiting for the walk sign. streaming out of the last panel talk / AI demo, they are ecstatic. they have been handed a vision of a future modeled specially for them. they recognise other pilgrimagers from similarly organized tech conferences spreading like a rash across other sluggish cities and immediately strike up networking pitches on the crossing. with hundreds of thousands of tech workers laid off in recent years, this three-day conference, if nothing else, is a networking ball.

a sudden stroll into the city sweating in the spell of a heatwave earns us four used books, an agoraphobic attack and a renewed dislike for neon green. like us, other city residents had no inkling this ambush was happening until we had been surrounded by an offensive neon green. to welcome the surge of newcomers, the glass hotels and steel edifices emblazon their entrances in the same hideous shade of green. the bar establishments of san pedro normally indifferent, had taster kiosks wagging low prices to visitors parched from a day of conference-traipsing. self driving taxis and convertible cycle rickshaws at the ready beckon of the intoxicated and inebriated the bar crawl spits back out^[2]. i overhear one tipsy conference-goer ask a rickshaw driver how to get back to her hotel three blocks away. the city has gone to great lengths to ensure they never had to walk by foot if they pleased.

san josé is surburban sprawl with techno-politan ambitions^[3]. unlike it's sister city of angels, billboards here advertise injury claims, data centers and AI cloud storage.

it would seem we awoke to a city streaked overnight but the signs were there all along. just a month earlier, the public library had a grand opening for a new AI center for civic and social good, in partnership with the city of san josé and san josé state university. the unholy trinity of state government, private industry and academia materializing as shadowy phantoms to manufacture consent, accelerate adoption and neutralize social dissent^[4]. the terms used here, civic and social good --- not dissimilar to use of the word agentic AI in their GTC marketing kit --- are used in perverse ways that it would seem that it's only real function is to distort our shape of the meaning of the words. i want to summon Christina Sharpe's words here to show what is at stake in these contests of meaning^[5].

Meaning is in crisis. And we are embroiled, everywhere, in contests over meaning—which are also contests of power, contests over living. And dying.

there are many requests library patrons have of the library. high on the list of priorities include, increasing the number of comfortable furniture in branch buildings. installing shower stalls in the bathrooms so patrons can groom themselves can use regardless of residence status. removing the certification process for the library-by-mail program that makes disabled patrons jump through medical hoops in order to access physical media from the library. organizing more fun, intergenerational events to foster community across ages. For all it's myriad shortcomings, a center for AI does not float up as the solution for any. neither does it feature in the hierarchy of civic concerns for library patrons. who then, wants this newfangled tech so bad, they are willing to manufacture consent for it? well, Nvidia for one. the current mayor of san josé who is currently gunning for the gubernatorial races with the help of financial donor, Peter Thiel, for two.

we told our last born about this Nvidia conference and her remarks were at once, funny and illuminating. if even a social recluse, such as myself, could not escape the AI gospel, imagine how cloistering and suffocating it was going to class with believers and techvangelists. the third word on everyone's lips all over campus was AI. a new field of study called "prompt" engineering was being birthed. course instructors who punished students for using earlier iterations of these open AI models, have taken to giving diabolical and unsolvable assignments, forcing them to ramp up their use and dependence on these models. school endowments and investments were the missing equations

it is not enough that students are not given any other option beyond user capitulation. they are also being groomed to understand this problematic tool as messianic. the meaning of the words, AI, has been masticated into techno-marketing slop for an imagined vision of the future. no one had a clue what is being said whenever someone injects AI into conversations these days. heads nod in agreement anyways.

the day after the clouds burst, we received a visitor. a friend who works at google. we talk a great many things: blocked noses, brothers, babies and bosses. she tells us two interesting stories.

the first one, the most bewildering involved pregnancy labor, an emergency landing and a sudden death, all in an airplane. these are people's lives and going into further detail will cheapen their lives. furthermore, this story while riveting has nothing to do with A.I.

the other two stories has relevance for these set of notes. first to set context, F. joined the conversation after going off on the side to have a call with their sibling. that very day, Oracle had just laid off 30,000 workers without prior notice. suffice to say F. was concerned about whether or not their sibling still had a job. since job stability is no longer promised "even" to the generation of children who were sold promises of STEM future, a collective anxiety has overtaken them.

it would seem like the "kind" of disposability in favor of these LMMs was doing a significant amount of damage to their pride as software engineers and coders. perhaps some of them, in the earlier years of automation hysteria, had thought their jobs relatively insulated from this disruption but the companies they clocked into daily had no qualms shelving these top rate coders for sub-optimal A.I generated code. they had sunk too much money playing catch up with chatGPT to be able to pay employees a decent wage while still turning massive profits. this line of conversation led to more discussions about the leap frog increase in the capabilities of newer iteirations of these Large Language Models (ambitiously marketed as A.I) versus when they were first unveiled to the public. F. names what we have all been feeling in water: the massive professional underclass— made up of field experts laid off from work due to job automation— are now being hired by third-party, venture funded A.I startups to moderate and train these LLM technologies on a contractual basis. these third party start-ups are in turn hired by these multi-national techcorps who laid off thousands of workers in favor for automation. in their desperation, these experts are refining the very technologies that will put more of them out of job permanently. this factory model of content moderation that designed and tested and refined in third-world countries is now being replicated in dizzying scales all over the world with the entrenchment of these LLMs.

our visitor then reveals that between the constant acceleration of work life and the expectation that code productivity quadruple with use of these LLMs,it is only a matter of time before she is retired from her job. it seems some members of her team are engaging the full spectrum of their cognitive dissonance by taking joy in the ability to integrate these generative LLMs to solve their mindnumbing work tasks: emails. even in the deranged dietritus of modern life, humor still has to come from somewhere so three of us laughed at the image that somewhere in the world, two LLM models have been programmed to send emails to each other, generating words endlessly into the void.

somewhere, a white autistic writer writes that these generative models are crucial to his ability to access a verbal iteirative process his mind does not make possible because he has no mind-voice. they are being used as an adaptive, access-centered tool in a world that is not built for autistic and non-verbal minds. this writer makes this post to add nuance for what he sees as an uncritical disavowal of this new technology. in this frame, the access needs of disabled and autistic people and the extractive, ecological and human costs required to make this technology possible are positioned as somehow at odds with each other. in this way, a strain of disabled folks who may have more in common with the factory workers whose labor is exploited to power this models, make personal justifications for the inevitable adoption of this technology. i wonder if this writer understands that the very labor that makes this iteirative companionship with microsoft copilot possible is undoubtedly human. humans that have been disappeared into code. perhaps there are no easy answers here.

A.I is on the lower order of priority for the city this month. folks who work for the city are in a scramble looking for a way to quietly disappear the legacy of a labour movement leader who was also a known predator and groomer. a national media exposé has made it impossible to continue to ignore the allegations that had been muzzled for more than five decades. murals are painted overnight, commemorations are retitled to acknowledge the frontline farmers of the movement who have been there all along. the schools and nonprofits have been deployed for containment and rebranding. lest disgruntled folks draw obvious parallels between then and now. we are given the remains of a day restored from a movement tyrant. meanwhile the names and lives of farmworkers today are freely offered to ICE by these organizations. as you can see, march put all the public facing arms of the city government through the grinder.

CYBERSPACE CRUISIN'

space adventures in the digi-age

BTS & the paradox of universal fame:

a global multimedia rollout has accompanied BTS's latest album release: arirang. from Netflix to Vogue everyone is eager to cash in on their return to the world stage after a four year hiatus.

why then does this release feel more depressing than triumphant?

we watched the Netflix documentary with F. and C. and we all had the sense that this album felt more obligatory for the members than actually authentic to their musical desires. most of the songs including the title, single and the conceptual direction felt imposed from the top rather than organic. the album itself lacked sonic coherence and felt more like an uneasy mash of powerpoint chart on global trendy sounds for the moment™️. to be fair, we are not sure that organic experimentation was even possible given the arbitrary timeline decided by the label to release the music after their military services. it is not news that fame can dull an artists' instincts and unmoor them from their own music such they have no grounded perspective nor distance from their own art. but it is always sad to see when it happens. this unmooring, already evident even before their military enlistment, comes into sharp focus with this release. their music no longer has any lyrical depth, emotional center, tether or direction beyond vague aspirations and the cliché agony of maintaining their global ascendancy as the "biggest k-pop group in the world. unfortunately for them, this ennui and debilitating anxiety hinting at a deeper emotional crisis at hand has been hijacked and managed by their label executives and routed into a cinematic treatise on artistic jitters or pre-release apprehension. they are pacified with words (that one scene with the team in a meeting with Bang Si Hyuk is textbook coercion) offering a vague commitment towards accepting this direction as the inevitable conclusion if they want to maintain their universal appeal to an amorphous mass of undefined "foreign" fans.

and so it happens: the more the group seeks to maintain their grip on global ascendancy, the more alienated and disconnected they become from the music they make, the more they lose the very essence that made their music so resonant in the first place. It's almost sickening how this paradox plays out over and over across genres, time and places. under capitalism, all of this doesn't matter though — the fanatic, cult-like listenership they have amassed means they will sell out tickets regardless. for the profit-mongers who love money for money's sake, that is all that matters. this documentary showed just how malleable BTS members themselves have become to contradictory global trends and vapid marketing drivel. far from being celebratory, the visual shots of their two months in LA leading up to the album release felt more like a cry for help. they traded the narrow confines of a two year military barrack for a palatial but gilded cage rented by their label on the other side of the world. they completed their military service, a spirit destroying ordeal, only to be sucked another vicious boot camp.

the music that was supposed to herald their return did not emotionally or creatively resonate with any of the members and they spent the entire screentime IV dripping through severe exhaustion, second guessing their instincts or spiraling mentally under the pressure of oppressive expectations that they come back bigger and better than their departure. they had to perform change when in truth, very little had actually changed for them both inside and out. it's hard to change when you barely have time to stop.

fragile archives//paper memories:

collective memory is very easy thing to distort. we remember less than we think we do. the little we remember are rarely the events as they happen. archives and memorials exist to not only to help us remember but to shape what we remember. call it a personal form of mourning, around this time of the year, we seek narratives written in the early years of the COVID pandemic. these written archives, fragile proofs of humane sentiment, disintegrate in the water of mass denial and death normalcy. this month, we roamed the WWB series: voices from the pandemic searching for others haunted world(s) lost with the pandemic(s). we found two voices that held the shape of our grief in their minscularity and mundanity: Wuhan Lockdown Diary by Guo Jing; translated from Chinese by Hongwei Bao and Toward a Vision of Post-COVID Urban Space: Joseph Roth’s City of Miniatures by Alexander Wells.

nigerian modernism//afromodernism(s):

some folks in the art world and various african digi-countries seem to have decided on an agenda to infuse these assemblages, Nigerian modernism and afro-modernism with new life. The specificity of Nigerian modernism here, seems to be part of broader agenda-setting to bring critical viewership or direct public attention to an ongoing art exhibition of the same title at the tate modern that attempts to weave into a cohesive whole, many conversational strands around afro-modernism that is popping up in many places online. in line with their vision of new modernity, the tate modern tapped NATIVE mag, self-proclaimed pulse for the new african millenial, for a collaborative marketing rollout and we find the curator of the exhibition under the this recorded interview with Obongjayer, Mowalola and Soldier they recently released,

Curated by Osei Bonsu, the ongoing exhibition is open to the public at Tate Modern until May 10th, 2026. nigerian Modernism takes us on a visual journey through the state of the country in real time, from the sacred groves of Osun in Oshogbo to the pre-independence rebellion of the Zaria Art Society and the Nsukka Art School, which created the intellectual backbone for what we know as Modernism today.

invocations of modernity make our nose itch. we are too far into the afterlife of european modernity, which is to say the afterlifes of slavery, to speak about modernity without laying bare what it means^[1]. this is even more true for Africans, whose histories, families, bodies, land, lives, art and dreams are routinely sacrificed and derailed in the service of other modernist projects. in one of the few [videos] on YouTube that circulate on afromodernism(s), the fashion historian Khensani Mohlatlole proposes afromodernism as a timely indent to other failed modern and futurist projects like afropolitanism and afrofuturism, we are told the afro placed before modernity is meant to do interrogative work^[2]. this may be so. we do not think that that is all it is doing.

it is not inevitable that we ping-pong between these contrived discursive frames around modernity and tradition in the first place.

perhaps, in a misguided attempt at reclamation and interrogation, these young africans are now being invited to laden this corrupted word with their ambitions, anxieties, privilege, disillusions and aspirations. if we are permitted to generalize, it would seem young Nigerians (young africans from other african neo-colonies may see similar echoes in their own cultural history) in response to the failed declarations of independence, are desperate to carve out a new terrain of social struggle using their youth as political category and symbolic currency. This category has since formed the backbone of cultural milieu that is obsessed with fashioning and mobilizing distinctive artistic, aesthetic and musical identities by reviving the symbols, codes and language of a nostalgia drenched past. afrobeats, y2k nolly, alte/fusion music, nigerian modern art, fashion week, afromodernist architecture, new nollywood and the phalanges of micro-cultural, artistic movements that ebb and flow accross Nigeria's post-colonial and diasporic timelines.

the throughline among these disparate movements and divergent cultural communities is a larger disconnection from a relationship of rigor with their personal, situational, migratory and transective geohistories^[3].

interior and architectural designs, street photographs and archival fashion images are scrubbed of their context and made to endlessly circulate on social media.

in the seams of historical erasure, colonial narratives and improper citational practices, nostalgic fantasies begin to emerge.

it is not really their fault. people have to be taught to look differently. but this vulnerabilty makes them unwitting pawns for various nationalistic projects and origin myths. protean pasts are collapsed into chronological timelines and mythological futures are invented at will. decades after the spasmodic decline of a european modernist turn, helmed by despairing and ambitious intellectuals of a bygone age, modernism is being revived as the vessel of hope for the new black wretched. they may be hoping as one tends to do in these seismic moments, that in order to survive the collapse and enter the future, the descendants of modernists will have no choice but to finally concede that they, too, have always been modern.

if readers are curious about what we mean by this wall of long text, it is worth watching both the full interview, and the video essay by Khensani Mohlatlole on YouTube for context before returning to our words:

M:USICAL DREAMBOAT

sonic fantasies of a music nerd

FULL-MOON MEDIA

Shiny bits of visual flotsam bread-crumbing for our attention during our orbit

Like the moon, each new spell is uploaded approximately 30 days from the last one, some months take longer. This is the pace that feels most compatible for our energy levels. Included in this section are the different cinematic, written or animated media that we either started, continued or completed during our orbit. These aren't really recommendations or reviews or anything of the sort. At most they are two liner notes of hypertexts we are currently orbiting at any given month.

1. Judy Blume - Fudge.a.mania.: found this inside a neighborhood little library and realized we had never read a Judy Blume before.
2. Lois Yamanaka - Blu's hanging: Got at the secondhand bookshop. Started reading but took a break because writing is so febrile and story is so sad.
3. Grantchester S1 & S2: honestly don't know why we watch this. it's not that good but thinking about the time period it's set in is fun.
4. Talia Lakshmi Kolluri - What We Fed to the Manticore: returned back to the library after months in loan. stories reach deep inside and make me weep for the world.
5. Hayashi Fumiya - Kemutai Hanashi [煙たい話]: devoured in two nights. never want these magical slice of life with these characters to end.
6. Sachiko Kashiwaba - The House of the Lost on the Cape: everything we read that Kashiwaba writes and Udogawa-Fischer translates is a delight. very sophisticated haunting.
7. Stella & Sam - this is everything we look for in a children's cartoon. warm illustrations, characters with imagination and heart and funny dialogue.

until we surface again.

💡did you know💡 is intended and used as a kind of section break in these vignettes to introduce new information we stumbled into each month that we previously did not know. When we were a child, we remember loving these random unexpected bits of information that would come into our known orbital world about things we did not know, previously took for granted and/or simply never had the time to pursue with attention. that feeling of wonder-awe at all the things we did not know and the unknowable non-limits of the world that sizzled in those moments would continue to lure us past our teenage years when even admitting you did not know something was seen as the most uncool thing.

🛸Cyberspace cruisin'🛸: part of the heady pleasure of falling in love with something is sharing it with people. we want our love for blogs to bleed into these sprawling missives we send out monthly so this little corner will be where we share blogs we stumbled on that had us visiting almost daily throughout the month. these are mini-universes onto themselves and we hope that they morph into portals for to other people to slide down one lazy afternoon. sometimes, it is a small inflect to remember the ephemeral lives of these blogs.

🎐musical dreamboats🎐: is this musical nerd's version of sailing a wish lantern. the ships sailed are magical collaborations we wish to happen in our lifetime. these are musical bells we can hear, imagine striking a sonic chord with each other. it is an avid wish that we write into paper boats and sail into the sonic void. we hope that these artists, or sonic alchemists, find each other, record and or re-interpret moar and moar beautiful music that they will then share with the rest of the world. some of these wishes have already happened.

🌘full-moon media🌒:like the moon, each new spell is uploaded approximately 30 days from the last one, some months take longer. this is the pace that feels most compatible for our energy levels. included in this section are the different cinematic, written or animated media that we either started, continued or completed during our orbit. these aren't really recommendations or reviews or anything of the sort. at most they are two liner notes of hypertexts we are currently orbiting at any given month. Shiny bits of visual flotsam breadcrumbing for our attention.