Questions for my friends #5: Spencer

With Spencer, some of the things we talked about include Tumblr; what to do with conservatives and right-wingers after the revolution comes; the commune, friendship, and what it was like to live together; and, of course, the dangers of AI. Thank you so much for your time and hospitality, Spencer! 

If you're getting this as a newsletter, read the properly formatted post here: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-5-spencer

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The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.

Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”

The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Loom and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).

1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.

2. How did you become politically engaged?

3. How did you and I meet?

4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?

5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?

6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?

Thank you <3

With thanks to CM for helping me plug the audio files into Loom!

This interview was conducted in-person in London in April 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.

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Jiaqi Kang: Hello, Spencer. Thank you for doing this. Is there anything you'd like to say before we begin?

Spencer: I think that I'm going to make more tea. 

JK: Please introduce yourself and your background in any way you'd like.

S: There's a leaf in here. That's not part of my background. Hi, I'm Spencer. I'm American, but now I live in the UK, and I am trying to be some kind of writer. And I'm Chinese, in addition to being American. 

JK: How did you become politically engaged? 

S: I would like to shout out tumblr.com.

But specifically, a combination of factors, because I was allowed on the internet at a very, very, very young age with minimal supervision. I had a very reactive, oppositional nature, because of the fact that as soon as I got savvy enough to use the internet [I started] assimilating a bunch of different viewpoints going on on the internet. My parents then really wanted me off the internet. So a lot of my childhood was spent evading their paltry efforts to kick me off the internet.

I also want to shout out this one Korean guy, who doesn't know I exist, but whose blog I stumbled onto at the age of 11, on Tumblr. I no longer remember much about him. At one point, I think the URL was “depressingfacts,” but he changed it a lot. I also don't know about pronouns actually, so I guess I'll say they, but I'm pretty sure they were a guy. [Their posts were] some of the first time in the wild that I was seeing, like, Karl Marx quotes, just… there, you know what I mean? A lot of stuff about the Korean War. It was not a political blog, it was a personal blog, clearly, but it was someone who was living personally in a very political way. Again, just a random person in Korea, who was posting this stuff. I was like, “Wow, what a way to be, what a way to live, what a way to think.” And then I was that annoying kid at 11 years old being obnoxious in my courses, like, “Excuse me, but I thought that, this and this and communism!” And then all my teachers would be like, please shut the fuck up and do the lesson.

I think that a lot of my opinions happened to me without my full, like, conscious knowledge. Because I remember being really mad at someone in middle school that they were defending Israel.

I remember being really annoyed and telling my parents about it. And obviously me and my parents don't see eye to eye about this, and they were like, “How could you not defend Israel?” And I was like, “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” At that point, something had already penetrated, and I actually don't know what it was. My parents are very conservative, and have always been.

Another instance of glimmerings of, like, a wakefulness was: I was on the playground in, like, third grade, and George Bush was president or something like that. I remember two kids were making fun of me because it came out that my parents had voted for Bush. At the time I was like, “Wow, obviously it feels bad to be made fun of.” I tried to go to a teacher being like, “I don't understand why I'm being made fun of because my parents voted for George Bush.” And I felt the teacher really having trouble explaining to me in a way that wouldn't be like, “Well… because that’s kind of evil.” 

So, yeah. These are a collection of little vignettes from when I was becoming, I guess, politically engaged.

JK: I know that you sometimes have this narrative where… You are someone who is, today, very informed about contemporary politics, internationally. [You sometimes say] it was partly because you had to do so much research to argue with your parents.

S: That too. That stuff, it would bother me. I think that I continue to have a really weird complex of ‘person with conservative parents’ where it's almost like I start infantilizing them a little bit. [Their conservatism is] very informed by their weird class background and the fact that they grew up in a certain time and place. But then you get into all these questions, like, “Am I just absolving them of being the way that they are?” Obviously, no, right? They should have had many opportunities from which to grow and learn and not be like this.

In terms of arguing with them, I do think that I had to really dig in. I think one of the things that was a big kickoff thing was actually in 2010-2011 with the Syrian refugee crisis that was kicking off, and discourse about taking refugees. There was a lot of like, thinking about the impact, and it bothered me to think of the responsibility for people who are displaced because of conflict being completely out of the same realm of conversation [as conversations] about US responsibility for regional disruption and foreign-backed operations that created this instability and destruction [in the first place], that was pushing people out of their homes. I was like, “We have to keep connecting the dots,” whereas obviously everyone in the US wanted to keep separating the dots. “We must not make the connections, as much as possible.” 

It was very early stuff when I was trying to talk about it, and then I continued to have these kinds of labyrinthine conversations with my father about foreign affairs. [These are] easier to engage with him on. But I think, over the years, it's definitely been an interesting case where like he's continued to be open to certain new perspectives—like he's willing to read [Edward] Said with me, and willing to think about what could have gone differently throughout the 20th century with US involvement in different places, and he's really into reading about CIA operations and the 50s and 60s and 70s. So that's been interesting, because now he has that underlying understanding, even if it's created an interesting political beast, [a] weird Frankenstein. But I can't really have the same level of conversation with my mother, so I don't. 

JK: It is a lot to feel this, that you have a duty to engage.

S: I think it gives me a lot of terror. I don't know. Sometimes it's like two steps forward, one step back. I've stopped feeling as though I need to be… There's no longer the emotional feeling of needing to be close to my parents, or needing the emotional support, or, you know, other things that people get from their parents. I'm just like, “I'm not having that and that's fine.” So in this case, now I feel almost like, “What if I am the only social link they have to alternative thought patterns and alternative ways of seeing the world, because they've alienated everyone who doesn't already think that from their life, except for me?” I've tied it up in a bunch of convoluted things where if I'm like, “Oh I'm an abolitionist, therefore I think everyone can be rehabilitated,” therefore I should at least try—if I have the privilege to try—rehabilitating them. But I don't live anywhere near them so this is happening in fits and bursts, and every day they wake up and watch Fox News. So what am I doing? What can I do?

JK: I was wondering whether you wanted to talk a little bit about growing up the way that you grew up—the racial environment, that is perhaps somewhat unique, that you grew up in. And then also, if you wanted to talk about growing up queer and what that was like.

S: Sure. So I grew up in one of those very ethnic enclaves where you're surrounded by Asian people. The neighborhood and city that I grew up in was extremely diverse, and then also, specifically, the school environment that I went to was really distortedly diverse. Diverse in the sense of: the racial and ethnic makeup was very, very, very predominantly East and South Asian. But not diverse in the sense that I think everyone had the same class background. It was just diverse in a very angular way, and not even representative of the surrounding city, so that has its own problems. However, it did mean that I felt, culturally, like it was a fact—and not a source of anxiety or weirdness—that I was mixed, and that I was very in touch with the diasporic Chinese side. I wouldn't say I was, quote, unquote, ‘culturally in touch with Chineseness.’ I was very culturally in touch with diasporic Chineseness, which is its own third thing, a secret third thing, if you will. 

And so I was surrounded by that. I was going to Chinese school on weekends. I think that that made it so that I was feeling not super complicated about being diaspora Chinese until maybe later on in my teenagehood when I started realizing that… Because at that point, I had seen a bit more of the United States and [realised] that other people didn't, [weren’t] experiencing the United States like it was a diasporic outpost of China and India. It was interesting, because I would be going to, like, random stuff—I would travel in a summer, for example, and I would be like, “Oh, wow, this city is really white.” Whereas [in my regular life] the only white person I would be talking to for days on end would be a member of my family. So that was interesting.

And growing up queer… I tried to kiss my best friend when I was really small, I was like, “This is a normal thing to do.” It was really ingrained in me, so I don't even think I had a moment of fully coming out to myself, or ever being in denial about it. I was also weird and disaffected, or not really all that self-aware as I would have liked to be. For example, I think my parents really suspected— my mom was suspecting me, that I was trying to engage in queerness, maybe, with my best friend in like fifth or sixth grade, because she kept having this intervention with me, being like, “You two are awfully close, like really close.” I kept being like, “Well, that's my best friend so yeah, it's pretty cool, right?” Because it wasn't on my radar yet… I wasn't really old enough yet to try to date someone, but I was like, “Yeah, I like this person's company a lot.” And I guess it was a cause for alarm because I felt like actions were taken to separate us. But I didn't even process [those actions] as [trying to separate us] because I was so not in control of my own day to day. So I was like, “Oh, okay, now I'm really busy now and so is she. So I guess we'll just see each other at school and stuff.” And then we just kind of grew apart. 

I didn't have a girlfriend until… I don't know, people kept reading me as queer too, even queerer than I felt. For example, I think going into [my] second year of high school, someone tried to set me up with a friend of theirs. I was like, “Who's the friend?” And it was this girl. And I was like, “I don't even think I've ever consciously… I don't think you were ever told that I liked women, but I guess people think that I do. So that's fine.” But I'm not out to my parents, even to this day. I think that it's because they don't believe bisexuality exists. Basically they just think it's not remotely a possibility because I've dated men, and they've known that I've dated men, so then they're like, “Oh well then…”

JK: They're like, sigh of relief. 

S: Yeah, sigh of relief, “That's not possible.” It was interesting because it [was] the weird cusp of generations where you're not getting called the F-slur and shoved into lockers or anything like that. But there was a lot of really merciless rumor-type ostracization still happening to gay people and people with non-normative gender and sexuality, for a couple of years, especially in the kind of crux of my schooling. And then, shortly thereafter, I think we had the whole, “same love, hashtag, Macklemore, no hate, Glee, everyone thinks it's cool now to be gay.” That happened toward the end of my school experience and so it was very abrupt… It took some time, I think, to register, but then suddenly, especially in more liberal enclave states, people are not having the same experience anymore at all. Or it's manifested so differently. 

The thing is, I was extremely an internet kid. I didn't have friends (other than that one [who set me up with their friend]). Between the ages [of] 10 [to] 16 and 17, I didn't really have friends in real life.

JK: Is there anything you'd like to say about your political engagement post-the age of 18, nowadays?

S: Yeah. There's a lot to say. Do you want to ask a more specific question?

JK: As you know, for example, with my interview with Irwin, we talked a bit about how the question, “How did you become politically engaged?” is quite a loaded question. It kind of structures, like, it asks people to think about the way that they grew up and their first coming to consciousness, but I guess I'm realizing that, obviously, there's a lot of stuff that happens after that. How we continue to be politically engaged. And I think something that I'm interested—

S: Oh. Let the record show: I just spilled tea on myself. 

JK: Would you like a tissue?

S: No, I'm fine. 

JK: I guess something that I'm personally interested in, recently, is elite spheres. If I may be so frank, you and I both attended really elite universities for undergrad. We both went to private school and then elite university undergrad, and then elite university grad. We have never really even experienced non-elite circles, in some ways. That's something that I've been thinking about a lot. How do you deal with being elite, not just because of your class background, but also because of cultural capital or intellectual capital? I was wondering whether you had thoughts about… We are now in our mid-20s and stuff… That’s not a question. It was just something… Food for thought.

S: I agree that it's an inescapable force from which we are continuing to engage… with politics, in the world. The sort of background you described that we have in common. I worry that, because of the factors you've just described, I'm not going to be saying anything particularly exciting, you know what I mean? Nothing I say will be particularly exciting about this discussion topic—or new or revolutionary. 

Political engagement as an adult has obviously been the source of most of my lasting and faithful connections, as this very rich tapestry of communities of care. It's the way that love and solidarity run so much deeper than other forms of relationships that I have in my life. I think that's why I live my life in a really friend-oriented way, because those ties have become really important to me. 

I guess I'll just go on kind of a tangent here because I feel like, in the sense that it's all of our duties to continue to show up and be present, one of the ways that I'm thinking about using this specific [elite] background is… It goes back to the extremely personal for me… In the vision of what I liked about Everything for Everyone (which I'm still reading—I'm like 80% of the way through, so let me not speak on the ending because I don't know how it ends). It's one of those works where I'm really intrigued by it because it has such a very strong vision for the ‘after’ of a revolution, regardless of whether you think it's plausible that we're getting to that ‘after’ through this means. I'm always struck whenever I go back to the US and have to travel through a lot of circles, a lot of cities, and a lot of people, a lot of areas where there's just… I'm not framing this in terms of pessimism, but just so many people whose views I would find abhorrent. The majority who voted in Donald Trump, and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, “What do you do with all these people?” You know what I mean? So many previous political movements have had to deal with that question, that very question of: what combination of transitional justice, and reparation, and addressing harm, and the [keeping in mind] communist abolitionist mindset of not being able to wish away whole groups of people that you find abhorrent for any reason, and jail being bad…?? Guillotine-ing aside, what I mean is, you have huge populations of people who continue to be products of the same [hateful] environment. I'm thinking a lot these days about: what do you actually do with an entire country of people who continue to vote twice in a row [for Trump], and are wishing death and deportation upon people?

It's the situation where I think that you and I have an interesting intersectionality, where we are from a very privileged background, and often are the ones who are less in the grips of direct kinds of trauma and harm from existing systems. And so we have the brain space and energy to turn potentially outward. I think that I've seen my ‘experimentation’ with the mind of my father being this interesting very, very, very micro-scale exercise to try and figure out what is actually possible. What is to be done with all of these types of people when the revolution comes? What do you think we do with all of these people? Do we separate entirely? I don't know, because it feels like all of these questions are global, and then the revolution happens out of such a local level.

JK: I agree. I mean, that's the main thing that I think was hard for me to believe about Everything for Everyone, is that they were like, “Oh yeah, we had this spontaneous Conquest of Bread riot situation and we set up mutual aid and then everyone kind of fell in line.” Everyone was happy to do it. Well, they had this convenient thing where a lot of the rich people were on Mars. (Sorry if that's a spoiler.) 

S: Yes. They left them up, they cut them off there. So to be fair, there's many possibilities here. I wouldn't try to close off any possibilities here, is what I'm saying.

JK: There's a section in Everything for Everyone where they say, “Anyone that was willing to give up property and power was welcome in our commune.” Sometimes I’m like, “Is that true? Would all these people—who are either rich or racist or just totally embedded within these violent systems and ideologies—are they happy to do that?” To me, that was something that I found really hard, that they would just be willing to do that. 

S: Yeah, because it would be a stranger coming to you, telling you to give up everything that used to make you secure, that you know. I’m trying to maintain this idea where I have empathy for the people where any change and any sudden rupturing of a whole system of belief [would be a huge shock]. 

A lot of right-wing politics today, I think, is playing off of a lot of conspiracy-mindedness. It becomes much more about that. It's not a rational thought ecosystem. Instead—Irwin might have thoughts on this—it's based on religion. I think it's formulated types of religions, with the way that people ardently believe that the US election was stolen in 2020 or something like that. That's just an arbitrary example, but people are really into this as a conspiracy and as you keep pulling out the brick that constructs this [conspiracy wall], they just jump to the next level. It's levels all the way down. You can hold on to this. Similarly, [for example] the transphobia side of stuff where, in the US at least, they have this pizzagate type stuff, this convoluted ‘child predators’ system of belief. You start being like, “Well statistics show that no one is doing this from the trans community etc,” people can do a lot of arguments with numbers and science and being like, “The papers say this about gender and sexuality and sex,” and stuff like that… [But] they just keep [believing it]. It's the vaccines and autism thing. It's all of these things. 

The new politics of today is very much in this proto-religious form, of a pantheon of beliefs that you ascribe to and get meaning in your life from, essentially. If that's what all of these politics have been built up as, I'm empathetic in the situation where, like, a revolution happens and then someone knocks on your door and says, “Hey, by the way, everything you've believed for the past 40 years is a complete lie.” You can expect that folks in the Everything for Everyone situation probably wouldn't come quietly. 

And then the question is, “What do you do?” It's really hard because it's a lot of cycles of violence, and questions about adequate systems for transitional justice… This is also, post-genocide, what a lot of different communities and organizations have had to deal with to provide justice and reparation. 

Blanket statement for all of this: I'm not trying to say that marginalized groups really have to care for the far-right wackos from anywhere. It's just questions that I'm thinking about and engaging with lately. I don't know… Especially because we're gonna have to deal with the fact that like 300 million people [n.b. This number refers to the US population] are pro-genocide, you know what I mean? Sometimes, the numbers are staggering and they get to you and they make you cry.

JK: When I went to Provincetown [in October 2024], I went in really cynical because I arrived at the height of the election. I was like, “Oh, these fake Kamala liberals. It's just white, rich gays, liberal bubble.” But then I recently went on a vacation to Florida with my parents. I was in the Everglades and we walked past this family of two parents and three teenage boys, and one of the boys was wearing a MAGA hat, and made full eye contact with me. In that moment, first I felt rage. I was like, “Oh, the impunity of these people.” And then I was like, “Well, of course they have impunity. They won the election. Like, they're the majority.” Actually, he's looking at me thinking that I should be ashamed. I'm the loser. That really brought me back psychologically to my childhood, of being like, “Wow, I'm the one who should be ashamed and humiliated.” 

And then I started feeling really crazy, because also a lot of the news [at the time] were really disconcerting and continue to be. But in that moment, during that week that I was in Florida, I started thinking about how everyone I passed on the street could be a Trump-er. It started making me feel so paranoid and so unsafe. And then I was like, “Oh my god, I kind of miss Provincetown, because at least they're wearing a mask.” At least they nominally say that they care about racism and stuff. And yeah, it's an interesting space to be, because I know that I purposefully often put myself in an echo chamber, because I don't like to debate people.

S: I've had to have so many hard conversations. It takes me back to potentially a very revealing anecdote. One of the moments that also was crazy was [when] I was asked to give a talk to a group of grad students who were about to go to Palestine—as part of a university department delegation there. It's because I had been involved, I was in some of the student orgs and I guess they were looking for someone who'd be willing to do this. It was gonna be a bit of a teach-in about history, as they were going to go in the intermittent years after “Operation Protective Edge” [in 2014], so there was the most recent major military devastation in Gaza, and it was around the time Trump [was] recognising the embassy in Jerusalem. It was that era. 

It was just supposed to be a very basic talk, so I was like, “Sure, I can give a very basic talk. I have citations and stuff, and we can do that.” I didn't really think that much of it, because I was just gonna go in and basically be like, “There's been systematic dispossession of people from their land for decades, and so on and so forth.” And then, about an hour before, I get a text being like, “Hey, so our Israeli liaison has heard that you're doing this talk and is gonna come. Hope that's okay.” And I was like, “Are you f—?” So I went in nervous as fuck. And predictably, obviously, he started shouting me down as soon as I had my first slide up. He kept interrupting me. I was probably 18 or 19, and he's this, like, 40-something-year-old guy who's served in the military. 

JK: Who was he to the department?

S: It's a complicated situation that I don't remember that much of, because I've also repressed it, because this was a very hard experience for me, to be honest. It’s also just such a joke to call it a hard experience, because obviously, like, no one died. I was just shouted at. Please note that I have a lot of perspective about the fact that this wasn't actually hard. It was just emotionally fraught in the moment. No one died. 

Basically, this trip was set up with the idea that they would visit the West Bank, and so they had to get government clearance. Obviously, Israel is on full PR mode anytime a wealthy institution wants to come and visit, if they say they want to come to the West Bank. And so, the Israelis provided this “liaison.” And I don't know what he was doing in the college town at the time, or whether it was just timing, or whether he heard that I was doing this and drove six hours immediately to come. Or he had some affiliation to the institution and was part of setting up the trip or something like that, I don't know. Ultimately I was like, “Maybe some of these grad students will come to my talk and decide they don't want to go [on this trip]. Maybe I could do that to help or something like that, you know, because I'll ultimately talk about why there's a boycott movement, for example.” 

But anyway, I was going to have a much more candid conversation, but then I started getting shouted down from slide one, when I started to say that Israel provides rights on the basis of ethnicity and not citizenship. He was like, “That's a lie.” I was like, “How can you say that's a lie? That's the entire… That's in the constitution (or whatever they call it).” 

I'm spending too long talking about this. TL;DR, eventually, everyone in the audience asked him to leave because he was disrupting and being really aggressive. After he left though, I never really could bounce back to my confident demeanor so it ended up being as if I was begging these older adults, “Please don't go.” 

[That experience] made me feel: if I wasn't going to be able to shout back at that guy, who would? You know what I mean? It made me feel as though I had to get better at it and be less afraid.

I carried that with me for a while. I was very embarrassed by it, because I'd let it rattle me so much. It was [a] 1v1 with an audience. I could tell that the audience perceived him as an authority on all of these matters because of his nationality, I suppose. I wanted to eat the microphone or something and just die. But I couldn't do that, so I had to get better at confrontation and debate.

That's like how I feel about debate. I feel like eating the microphone and dying, but sometimes, you gotta do it.

JK: There's a lot to say about that… It's funny how psychologically harrowing it is to have these kinds of experiences. One of my memories that I actually repressed for a very long time is this Facebook fight that I had with someone.

S: I was always fighting people on Facebook. I forgot that as a key inciting moment, but from, like, 2012 to 2017, I was always fighting people on Facebook. 

JK: Something about that, right? Like, I was not usually fighting people on Facebook, but I ended up having this huge Facebook fight with this guy from my year, but everyone at my school was reading all the comments. I was kind of winning [initially], but then this guy from an older year came in right as the fight was winding down and re-instigated it. He carried authority as this older kid and it was this really horrible experience, because I had never… It was basically like a public humiliation, online. 

I think something that was really important is that I was crying, I was really upset because I was being called an SJW and stuff—and my mom obviously noticed that I was crying and she was like, “Well, this is why you [should] never say anything.” She was like, “Okay, now you're going to apologize to this person and you're going to end this moment. You know you're right, but you just have to end this.” That marked me a lot because I started to associate… It really drove in the sense of embarrassment for me, and the sense of just being completely powerless, even though I knew I was right.

Anyway, I have a lot of examples of that. A couple of those examples are so emotionally wounding, and it's funny because, as you say, no one died.

S: No one died, yeah. I always have these crazy mood swings around my progress with, for example, my father. If I can't change my dad's mind about something, how the fuck can I change anyone else who doesn't have to listen to me, because they're not my dad, you know what I mean?

It's given me very intimate looks at this really sophisticated right-wing propaganda machine, such that it's really hard for me to be like… I still think I'm a fundamentally hopeful person. I think that Palestine will be free. [But] sometimes I have thoughts about, “Maybe I need to set up a left-wing propaganda machine.” Kind of like left-wing slop, like communist slop. I was like talking to Irwin and someone else about this, and I think Irwin was like, “We used to have some kind of left-wing tabloid,” but it just hasn't caught on. Obviously, it comes down to the fact that the right-wing slop machine is backed by billionaires who can just afford to give everyone on the Tube a tabloid for free, which, like, scrappy left-wing printing operations could never afford. Anyway, I'm just rambling. But yeah. The slot machine is crazy. 

JK: Slop is such a big threat to our world, increasingly. 

S: It's a big threat to being able to work out the nice arrangement, post-Everything for Everyone revolution, with swaths of the population who have been fed nothing but slop for their entire lives. We need to change the slop diet before… I don't know. Because then I'm like, “At one point is it too late?” Anyway, I'm thinking about this too much because obviously, people are actually dying. But I mean, a lot of the time, these are also very working-class populations who are also being expropriated in their own way, so that they're implicated in the same machine that's doing that to global populations as well. 

I'm jumping around a lot, but [for instance] the kind of argument around, “Oh, military enlistment is fine because it gets poor people out of poverty.” I want to shake [people who say this] by their shoulders. But it's also not an individual problem, it's a system problem. Both of these groups are being victimized in different ways.

I think that we need to figure out a way to deal with the victimization of both groups, but not in a way that further victimizes the entire Global South population that they are shooting up and bombing. 

JK: What I was thinking about—which may or may not set you off on another thing, you don't have to respond [at length]—is the fact that the challenge has become meaningfully more challenging now that AI slop can just make itself. Before that, at least someone had to be out there making it by hand.

S: Organic slop. Now we have factory mass-produced slop. 

JK: Obviously, we shouldn't have slop at all.

S: We shouldn't have slop. 

I also want to caveat this whole… I'll say this again at the end, so this is what I'm probably gonna say again at the end: I'm caveatting this whole interview by saying that, even though I feel like a lot of this conversation is very personal, so it's based off of [my] personal positionality, and what I'm best suited to be thinking about, and [what] I think [my] personal experiences have given me a second glimpse at, based off of my current seat and position within empire… But I guess what I mean is that, I acknowledge that this is a disproportionate amount of time to be thinking about right-wing weirdos, compared to genocide. I am not nearly as much of an expert on the answer to Palestine and genocide. So that's why, I guess, this is where my mind is going. I just want to make that clear in case people are reading this being like, “Wow, you think a lot about [the] right-wing, and you don't think at all about Palestine, for example.”

Anyway, AI Slop is crazy. I keep watching these theories of where the internet is going to go, because I also think about this in terms of… the openness and genuine[ness], the authenticity you could find on the internet, especially in our teenage years, was so important. [It was important] for us to find political alternatives for thinking about the world. I've had conversations with my partner where I'm thinking about children-rearing just in the abstract; questions about devices and platforms and access division. 

On the one hand, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, [I would have thought of it] as a gift I could give my children, to also have free run of all of these places and sites and platforms. In some ways, I believe in a very autonomous ideal of child-rearing. 

There's the side of me where I'm like, “I had such a great time learning about ideals on the internet!” and the other side of this is, “I had such a great time catfishing older men on MMORPGs on the internet!” I don't know if I actually want my child to be doing that, even though I had, because it could have gone wrong. There's many different off-ramps [in my childhood] where it could have been going wrong, but didn't go wrong, because I had such a restrictive environment [in real life], so it's not like I could, like, run out of the house and meet up with men—thankfully. (The silver lining of the situation.) Now the internet is like the Nazi Breeder 9000, is what I hear. It's going crazy. 

There are all of these essays on the future of the internet being two-tiered [and on] the open internet being dead. Tiered systems based off of subscriber-only, closed communities, versus AI-slop that will take over the entire thing. Don't know what's gonna happen next. 

JK: This is something that maybe I was gonna bring up as associated with the next question, [but] I might as well now. There were a couple of years where you and I, and our mutual friends were really interested in the post-apocalyptic commune.

S: I'm still interested. 

JK:  I have to say, like, this is maybe a tangent, but I think that the whole cannibalism stuff, though, is kind of over now.

S: I was never on the cannibalism stuff. 

JK: Okay. I was on the cannibalism stuff. I think there was a time where everyone thought that they were so unique for talking about cannibalism, [but] actually everyone was talking about it. It's actually not cool to talk about cannibalism anymore. We've already covered everything about cannibalism. Like, let's just move on. 

Anyway, the point is, for your birthday one year, I made you a card—

S: Yeah, I still have that. 

JK: —where I drew the map of our post-apocalyptic commune and where everything would be. This is still something that I'm thinking about, but I also think back to that time when I was really invested in it. Also obviously naive and escapist. This is something that we've talked about before, where, the idea of, “Oh, there's gonna be an apocalypse, and everyone's gonna lose everything, and we start from scratch”—that is also a utopian fantasy in its way, because of the fact that, actually, the real apocalypse is slow, and there's always going to be a class of wealthy people.

S: It's happening right now. 

JK: Yeah. Currently, those of us in the West, in these pockets in the wealthy parts of the West, get to continue to experience normality. As is showcased in Parable of the Sower, there are always going to be people who get to keep living ‘normal’ life whilst everything else is [apocalyptic]. That class is going to get smaller and smaller, but it's not going to be a clean break.

I wanted to bring up that on the record, this idea of the commune, which also goes [with what we were just talking about]: what's gonna happen after the revolution.

S: [There are inseparable], but different, ways of considering the commune. It's [commune as] political future, as opposed to [commune as] a personal choice made to live a better social life. I think they go together and would be great. So that's why I'm like, “Oh, commune, great, fun.” I dream about being walking distance from a great number of my friends, where we could all raise children together and work agriculture in a small scale, like a patch to grow vegetables—I'm not talking about the fields. I don't yearn for the fields, personally. We've been talking with one of our other friends about forming that quasi-insurance pool, for example, where we pool money and then it goes [to a different member of the group each month—a mutual aid practice inspired by informal, women-led chit funds in South Asia].

The commune, both as a political future, but as a social reality, or as an aspiration. Because it's an escapist fantasy, which is why I think of it in terms of aspirational social terms. Politically, I think

that, increasingly, there's much to be done at a local level that doesn't involve co-location. In my mind, my vision of a commune [was originally] just all my friends. But then I guess the point of the commune is that you also make friends where you're at. So I stopped thinking about teleporting my friends from across the world and started looking into building local community, and it's nice.

JK: How did you and I meet? 

S: We met on the internet. We met because of your friend—who I've since met, which is exciting to me. I was angsting increasingly about ways that I could plot to escape where I was living early, [i.e.] before [university, when I could leave] for real. I was like, “What if I did a year abroad?” And then I think I found your friend's blog from when she was doing a year abroad in China, and I was following it, and I was like, “What other blogs should I follow?” I saw that you were interacting with [this blog’s] posts, and you had a blog that was very, like, diaspora Chinese content in addition to aesthetic stuff. I was crawling my way out of my niche fandom subculture, which we won't discuss here, and getting into other ways of seeing Tumblr, so then I was like, “Let's follow.” 

I think we were mutuals for a while, and I had occasionally posted writing and poetry on my blog. We began working on a writing project together shortly thereafter, because we had found each other through that platform. I think it was nice and special. For a while, I thought you were—well, I still think you're one of the coolest people ever—but I think that at the time I was like, “Wow.” Because I also had a really bad propensity of having internet crushes on people that I met on Tumblr, of which there were a handful before. I was continuously being like, “Wow, look at all these cool people who live in other countries, who are thinking so deeply about Leslie Cheung movies and have a lot of opinions about cinema and know French.” I'm like, “Wow, very cool.”

JK: Thank you. Wow, I love it. I also thought you were really cool. 

S: I don't remember what part of my internet persona I was broadcasting at that point in time. I don't know whether I was still emo.

JK: And ever since then, we have been— 

S: —entangled in friendship— 

JK: —and eventually we became housemates—

S: —housemate-hood— 

JK: —for four years.

S: Yes. 

JK: I'm sad that that era is over. You are one of my oldest friends and we know so much about each other. 

S: We do. 

JK: About having met on the internet first… I think I have a lot of boundary issues with the internet. I've always found it a lot easier to reveal a lot about myself and my feelings to people who are my online friends, because it doesn’t feel like they're going to impact my real life.

S: Surprise. 

JK: Surprise! Anyway, we know a lot about each other, and—

S: Yes, because of our writing project, in 2019, when we finally met in person, it was almost anticlimactic, as you told me. Because, from the year we started talking up to 2019, we were messaging each other every single day. 

JK: And I cannot imagine the person that I would be if I had never met you.

S: Likewise. 

JK: Thank you for being one of my best friends of all time. 

S: Thank you for being one of my best friends of all time.

JK: And making me who I am. 

S: And making me who I am.

You continue to be one of the people that I love bringing up and talking about random ideas and possibilities with, because I feel like you have a mind that is… I like the way in which you engage with all of the personal relationships that you have in terms of the sense that… We can build a utopia, you know? It's possible. I love that you're continuing to be engaged in possibilities. 

JK: Thank you. 

S: I'm very caught up in the almost anti-religion, in terms of Karl Marx's [line where] he was talking about religion being the opiate of the masses. [One of the things he was saying through that] was that focusing all your energy on being good and then being rewarded with utopia in the afterlife… I feel like, fundamentally, one of the things that is eminently possible on earth is to make it that utopia whilst we are alive. But then: many such cases where we are not [doing that]. So I am thinking about that a lot and [how] to live that way, period.

JK: I feel like I'm about to be honest in a way that's so crazy, because it's recorded. For the past year, there are so many friendships that I feel really distant in, or much more distant than I have been before. It's partly because when we lived together, we lived together. Our lives slotted together so easily. That was probably because of COVID, and probably it's just because we're really compatible. But I think that I did start taking you for granted, as [if] you were with a family member in that way. Being apart from you this past year—you left the city that we were living in, and then I went on my fellowship—it's been strange. But through this conversation, just talking for a long time about our past selves, it's reinforced my love for you, and my deep admiration and appreciation of you. You've been such an important presence in my life. I think, for a while, I kind of forgot to remember how important you are. And I'm sorry about that, but I'm happy I get to feel a rush of, like, affectionate love.

S: That's so nice. I'm really glad that we did this, or are doing this still, because it's not over yet. I love that. And I love you. 

The time in our house was also so important to me because I felt like I was… It's hard because in that first year, especially during COVID, I was still in this cocoon where I wasn't fully me. It's weird because I feel like, in all of the years prior to that, I was still incubating—I don't know. Like, I arrived when I was 21 and it was crazy that I was 21, but I was still not out of my cocoon, basically. I was incubating and incubating and then I think that, over the years, in that house, I kind of became, was able to become a normal… Not normal. Never normal. But I was able to become a whole human being. 

JK: What makes you say that? That's quite interesting.

S: I don't know. I also think it's very retrospective. 

JK: Or I guess, how would you define the ‘whole human being’ that are now? 

S: Learning from everybody around me, I think? It's less to do with autonomy. It's more to do with sense of self and personal feeling. First of all, it was like the ultimate brag that I could move in during the pandemic and have a whole group of friends, basically, because of you. Everyone I talked to in [that city] was like “Oh, it must be so hard to have moved here during the pandemic, I can't imagine a worst fate,” and I was always like, “Haha, I actually have loads of friends, because of my best friend Jiaqi, heard of them?” It was, like, the ultimate flex, and it really made it so that I wasn't depressed. It made it so that my primary depression [in that time] came from my relationship, and not from anything to do with my social [life]. Well, I mean, I don't know—obviously it was still two of us in a house for ages—

JK: We didn't break any COVID rules. 

S: We didn't break any COVID rules, is what I'm trying to say. 

Also, being American, and then coming here, being like, “I'm here for two years, and then I have to go [back and] join the rat race in some major city on the east coast of the US, and eventually work towards [success].” I didn't really think this, but it's so internalized to Americans, especially if you are used to living in big cities with cars and living 20+ minutes away by car from your friends. The fact that we were doing this [social setup]—even though we never set out to do a radical project by living together—it really was nice how [the house where] we lived ended up becoming this real social hinge for everybody. It felt like, for a solid two to three years, everybody was coming through and hanging out at any given time. We'd always be doing group dinners. We were always around. And it was really, really nice and I'm really gonna miss that I think.

JK: Me too, I have been missing that.

S: Yeah, I have been missing that, and I will continue to be missing that. I also don't want to close this off from the possibilities of something similar taking place across two spaces that we might 

occupy one day, in this city for example. But you can never go back. Anyway, this is a really long, roundabout way of saying that you were so integral to that and a really incredible part of that. At the core, you and I really made that work and it was great. 

JK: Sorry, this is really long. 

S: Sorry it's so long. I spent ages talking about right-wingers, so that's on me. 

JK: What does the word care mean for you? 

S: There's an interpersonal layer, where it's really wanting somebody to thrive. If I care for you, then I'm in your life and I want to see you be exactly who and what you want to be, and thrive and [be] happy. 

Care, also, in the political sense: I liked what Irwin said about care being core to political practice [and how they referenced] “I don't care for Gob.” I'm going to bring that one up. In terms of the ultimate wanting: I may not care for everybody, but I care about everybody and I want to care for everybody, because everything, everybody is connected and I love everybody. I just want no bombs and [a world in which] everybody can thrive. So it's that same feeling [as the interpersonal version of ‘care’], I guess, but applied very vastly. 

That [idea of] care is what animates why I'm trying to, like, redeem? Save? some members of my family, even though that sounds very hubristic. Maybe I can't do it, I don't know. We'll see. I think it's ultimately because I care about them as people, but I think that has to underpin all of the revolutionary struggle anyway.

JK: Again, you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to, but I think something that interests me about this question for you, is the question of care work. You and I are both, I guess you could say, quite high functioning people, who tend to take on a lot of work that is often ‘support’ work or organizing or admin work, house work and stuff like that. It's just our personality; we tend to take on some of the stuff [in situations in which] we can detect that other people cannot, or I guess, in a way,I have learned to anticipate people's needs. 

Earlier today, when we were sitting in the park, you just offered—you could tell that I wanted water. I didn't ask for it, and you just gave it to me, right? And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that, but you are trained to notice that kind of stuff. [However], that sometimes breeds resentment, if it's not acknowledged [by the recipients of that support].

I wonder, how do we navigate that? How do you navigate being the kind of person… 

S: I think this is [one of] the biggest challenge[s] in my life right now. I [am] thinking about this all the time because I think it contributes to [the fact that] I'm so physically sick inside of me if people around me are in conflict with each other. It's crazy because, like, I'm not a child of divorce. What is this? But, growing up, one of my family members was extremely emotionally dysregulated and very volcanic. It [took] a lot of my and my sibling’s efforts [to enact what was] basically forced stalling—anticipating, forced stalling, any and all [emotional] managing. 

It took me a really long time to be able to go into conversation—even just political conversations—knowing that I would be in conflict with somebody. [The] feeling inside of me [was as though] I was going to war. It was giving me such terror to be able to sit there and be like, “Someone is mad at me. And what about it?” As opposed to feeling: if someone is mad, even if they're not mad at me, I have to patch that [up] and get them to calm down. It's resulted in me trying to [fill] the vacuum a lot—filling needs when needs arise. 

The obvious [issue with] that, though, is that I need to understand that people are adults [who can] take care of themselves. [I need to] not be so crazy about it, honestly, because it was manifesting in [my] relationships, where I was trying to fix everyone's problems before they had problems [or] before they were able to sit in those problems as adults and deal with those problems [themselves]. 

Then, on the non-personal relationship side, there's also the management side, which is just being the person who's the brain of any [operation]. You and I have talked about this—it's exhausting. Trying to calibrate that, it's changed my approach to things. Now I will take [only] things on to…  For me the goal of ‘something happening’ isn't enough. If it's supposed to be a sustainable structure or [related to the] function of an org, it has to be structured that way, so that there's not just one brain [responsible for the function]. Our [joint] experiences through this have made it so that we know we can know better what to look at in terms of: “There's this organization, or this operation that we need to potentially support and organize, but we can ask a bunch more questions about how is this fundamentally structured, and what are the expectations afterward? [In order] to decide whether it's a good idea—because, many times, it's not a good idea.” 

How do you feel about it now?

JK: I think it's something that I've been working on a lot, moving away from the way that I used to be. I was gonna say, “It's such ‘elder daughter syndrome’”—even though you [Spencer] are not actually the elder daughter. The sense of, “No one's gonna do this. It's not gonna get done if I don't do it, so I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna be so mad about it the whole time.” It just sucks. It sucks for everyone; it really sucks for you. For me, I would always do things because I felt like I had to, because I had the skills or the capacity, or even I just felt like this was just a complete obligation—I didn't even think about [whether I wanted to do] it. 

So much, for me, in the past few years, has been about repeating the mantra of: “Do what you want to do, and don't do what you don't want to do.” Which is really hard! And being like, “Okay, well what's actually useful for everyone in the situation? If I [do or] don't do this, will I feel bad? What do I feel around this?” It's a lot to work through, but it's definitely much more useful to move out of just feeling like I have to do stuff and then being mad about it.

S: I've gotten used to saying, “Not my circus…” if I see someone making a blunder. [If] someone in an organization that I'm in is just making a series of blunders—I'm not even better than them. Once upon a time, I was the one making blunders. What happened to me was that I would learn from said blunders because it wasn't as though there was another me stepping in to be like, “Stop. I'm taking over now.” You know? So I have to also restrain myself along those lines: “I'm not better than this younger person who's making missteps. It's not my issue to fix.” 

JK: The other side of that is being like, “Well, even if this fails, it's not the end of the world.” It's actually so okay. I still feel that way, but [I’m] not acting on it—in terms of feeling like I'm responsible for literally everything all the time.

S: Like, if one person in this room is having a bad day, I should kill myself.

When both of us have friends who are prone to not be having a good time. It's almost as though, for the sake of continuing to be friends with them, I need to be okay with the fact that they're obviously not going to be having a good time all the time. But it's still something that I'm working through where I'm like, “I feel like I need to jump in front of a car for them” or something.

JK: What are some things that you're looking to learn or learn about right now?

S: I'm thinking about human-computer teaming right now. What I mean by that is: the extent to which we're going to be able to smash all the servers and turn back the clock is troubling to me. I still think, fundamentally, that there is some labor that people shouldn't have to do, and that it's probably good to automate. None of that is the creative fields that we're automating for some ungodly reason. I'm thinking about what a more utopian sense of what our future relationship with higher levels of automation can and should look like, in a way that is also sustainable and isn't implicated in violence. All of these things [are] the assumed building blocks of what makes a good relationship between humans and automation. 

First of all, obviously, we need to care for the environment, we need to care for the climate, and all of this guzzling of freshwater and so on and so forth [is] really bad. Let me just highlight and say that I think it's bad. From a radical standpoint, all of these reasons [why we’re against AI tools] are very compelling and very good: it's bad for the environment, these companies are profiting off of war. 

[But on the other hand], now, huge swaths of the population are gaining access to what's essentially tools that may potentially—if used right—ease some of the drudgery that they would feel at [certain] tasks, right? [We’re not yet able to] say anything to a lot of working populations about: what should this relationship eventually look like? What should we be working [towards]? [The reason why we can’t even discuss this yet is] because of all of these challenges, [such as on] the supply chain side: what makes these components so monopolized, and so hyper-scaler-heavy? Some of [these challenges are] built into the system, and so it's almost impossible to have that imagination, because everything that we would be using—a lot of these tools built in frontier labs—is going to be concentrated in Big Tech™. 

Philosophically, we do know that some things can probably be automated eventually. [However], I'm still thinking of the meta-questions: Is that worth thinking about right now politically? Because [of the] high stack of problems that I've just covered, obviously the immediate prescription to everybody would be, “Stop.” 

I'm also not a techno-solutionist in the sense that I think that the tech itself would be able to solve a lot of the [unjust] structures that make [certain] people do work that maybe [nobody should] have to do. I'm factoring all of that in, but then still thinking about [how] ultimately there could be some equivalent of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (but not like that.) Anyway, this is something that is on my mind right now, but the things come and go from my mind, you know what I mean? So I don't know if this will last, but I'm thinking about that. I don't know if you have thoughts?

JK: I don't have thoughts on this. I don't know enough. 

S: That's okay. I thought perhaps you would be like, “It's a no from me on the automation front,” or something like that.

JK: I can see why a lot of types of work could be better done by robots. A lot of physical labor could be done by machines.

S: That's kind of what I'm also getting at, but I also think that there's so much to be solved before we get to the point of constructing a positive vision. [We need to be] connecting the dots at a tactical level. If we're trying to get people to mass turn their backs on these companies so that they can't turn a profit, etc, they're already essentially monopolists, so it's really hard to boycott. All of their B2B Cloud SaaS companies, it's hard to boycott. 

Tactically, can we provide people more of a vision, in terms of asking them to turn their backs on this? Can we provide them something a bit more optimistic, [where] if we do all these steps, then eventually we can turn toward this vision of what could be good, and then make it real? “This is what could be good for your own working future.” 

But we can only accomplish that if we solve all of these environmental, political, social [issues that already exist in the AI sphere]. Don't give [people] false technical solutions to help. [Right now the situation is], “These brilliant companies are going to be able to change your life by making sure you never have to write an email again,” and some guy who's like, “I hate writing emails,” is like, “Uh, sign me up!” So we have to be like, “Well, don't do that.” But at the same time, we're not [trying to consign] you to, like, 50 years of only writing emails either. The idea is that we do something else here. 

So, anyway, very half-baked thoughts. There's things that I have to think about for my job [or] degree or whatever, and then I'm [also] thinking about this on the side. I'm learning more about this and trying to think about the meta questions of whether I should [even] be thinking about this or not.

JK: I want to point out, as we're winding down, [that] this is the first interview I've conducted in person, rather than online, and it's super interesting to see how sometimes we're talking to each other, and you're talking and you're looking at me. And sometimes you will talk to my phone because you're trying to assert something ‘for the record.’ It's funny because in that way, you're actually trying to talk to the reader. 

S: Oh, were the other people not trying to talk?

JK: They have, but I think it's funny because I can see it in your body. You're literally looking at my phone and talking to the people [reading this] in the future. I just think that's funny. So I want to point that out.

S: In many ways, I will always be learning, and I will always be a little stupid, and I will always not know the right answer. And I hope that comes through in a lot of what I'm saying, being like, “I have a lot of questions, and I don't know whether I'm right.”

JK: Is there anything else that you would like to say or to ask me?

S: Having more time now [that you’re dropping out of your PhD], you might be doing a part-time job, you might be finding some other stuff, but what do you want to fill your time with, in the ideal, hopeful sense?

JK: I have a lot of questions for my life. Who is my community? Where do I go from here? What are my priorities and where are my energies going? Something that has been different since my fellowship—maybe it's kind of silly, but I was like, “Oh, I'm actually living off of my writing right now… I'm a writer.” What I really want to prioritize is trying to invest real time and space [into] my writing, which is obviously a big [challenge]. 

To me, this [interview series] is part of my writing. Part of my impetus for this project is coming out of just wanting to get to know people's different ideas about politics and political engagement a bit more. In a way, this is almost research, but it's also just because I want to talk to people. I don't know what I want to do. I'm confronting a lot of really, really, really big questions about what kind of life I'm trying to live.

Before COVID, I was such a control freak. I had my whole life planned out. In high school, I was googling how to get a PhD. [The pandemic made me realise that] you literally just can't plan for it.

S: I think COVID was the first big reality check of plans made. Before COVID, I never thought I would be in the UK. And look at me now. 

JK: “There's no point planning more than three years ahead. [I’m] just trying to take things one day at a time.” What's been interesting is [that] it doesn't make me tremble with anxiety and terror, that I don't know what I'm doing, like, a year from now or even six months from now.  Trepidation, but also excitement and possibilities. 

S: Who is your community? What are you thinking about when you ask that question? 

JK: I guess because the city in which I have been living is so different. Those three or four years of the house [share] were so perfect, socially. I was like, “Wow this town is my town, my people. I'm so comfortable and so secure. I'm walking down the street and everyone's saying hi to me, the birds are singing. It's like (500) Days of Summer.” 

But because it’s a university town, it's so transient. A lot of people have moved away. Who is [here] long-term? Who is [here] short-term? [This] past year [with] the encampment, I've met so many new people. There was a time where I was like, “Wow, this so beautiful. This is so utopian. This is exactly what life is about.” But since then, there's been a lot of conflict, predictably… There's just been a lot of things that have made me realize [that] I [had] latched onto this idea that, “Most of my best friends have left [but] I have all these new best friends,” [but] then, this scene… I don't know. 

When I was away, I really missed home, but my home was actively changing. I feel like I'm definitely coming back to a completely different [place] and life [compared to what] I had in the year before I left, or in the couple of years before I left. Especially in this town, I'm like, “Who are my people?”

Right before I left Provincetown, me and my friend [Acie] were getting coffee at my favorite coffee shop, and we were sitting outside, and two people walked past that we knew [Lucas and their dad], and we were like, “Oh my god, hi!” I was like, “Wow, this is my favorite thing in the world: sitting in the sun, drinking a coffee with a friend, and running into other people.” Then I was like, “When I go back to the UK, this will be my life again every day. But wait, who are these people? And what is my relationship to them?” 

Something I've been thinking about now is the whiteness of the town as it has been for me lately. A lot of my non-white friends have left. I look around and I'm like, “There's so few people of colour [I can be] hanging out with right now.” That's really, really disconcerting. It's been a really long time… I've always prided myself in actively cultivating a very racially diverse friend group. 

We're in our mid-20s; people are living their lives, [often] differently now. Our lifestyles are diverging, and all of that is just making me wonder, what do I feel secure about? Right now there's very little that I feel secure about, especially just materially, which is normal, but sometimes sad. 

S: I've been thinking about moving back in with people, as opposed to continuing [to live alone], because this year I've lived alone and I think that's been an interesting experiment. Given that my partner is still coming in and out, like, every week it's not really that alone—but in the sense of this thing to return to, I'm like, “Wow, maybe I don't know if [I want to be] moving back in with people.” I didn't really have any problems living alone, necessarily. It's been nice. But maybe it's a choice that I can make, to be a bit more communally-minded, if I do make the choice [to have] roommates again… 

But I get what you mean about [the town] having really changed. This was occurring to me [when I was] contemplating moving last year. I couldn't imagine living in [that town] and not being at the house we were at. Secondly, [with] all the trouble of moving, [I] might as well move to a cool new city and not just the same city. [Thirdly], the city's transience is bothering me now. It's really stressful. You make new friends and then you're not even sure if you should invest in them because they're gonna be gone in nine months, sometimes. It started to get to me a little bit. I think that I felt this internal stress, [where] I was like, “[If I make] no new friends [for a while] and I could eliminate that as a point of tension or stress in my life…” The problem is that if you don't keep adding to your pool, it just gets smaller and smaller over the years because no one stays there for real, with only a few exceptions. So it was stressing me out a little bit. 

I think London is more diverse for a lot of reasons. The key division in my life right now is: people who are politically engaged and doing art; as opposed to people that I now meet through [working on critical tech issues]. Because humans are social creatures, I'm gonna make friends with people that I see through this, [these issues] that I've worked on, that are part of my life, but some of [the politics of the people in my life are] so disparate and weird, actually.

[Things brings me back to my] experimentation with… not ‘redeeming’ people…  I'm not fucking Jesus, I'm not trying to say I'm better than these people. [But] I've been trying to mix people and introduce new and interesting [social] pairings, and take people to go see things, and maybe expose [them to better ideas], if they've only been working on [tech]. You would think being tech-critical, [like these people are], would then lend itself to a lot of other [radical] political leanings, but it doesn't because there's a lot of other weird culty ways of being tech-critical that are strange and I keep having to deal with every day.

JK: A lot of the people that I know who are aligned with me politically and who I've done political work with are white, and that's weird [for me]. A lot of my other friends, sometimes I feel a bit politically distant from them. Even if we all technically agree, [I feel distance when it comes to things] materially, or actions-wise.

Now that we're getting older, this is the moment where people start to decide what kinds of material comforts they're interested in and what kinds of lifestyles—conventional or not—they want to lead. I find myself very much feeling, “Who do I share my values with?” I

Back when we were younger, [we might] be like, “This person's kind of weird, we don't really agree on this. It's, like, whatever.” Now I feel like it's a bit more important to me. 

S: I think [some] people are having the exact opposite transformations around us, where previously, they would be upset about something, and now they're just like, “Oh, that person’s just weird.” In a way where the energy has sapped, whereas I'm often stuck at the crossroads… Some people, I meet them and they're, like, just a few steps away from being a fascist—but that also means they're just maybe a few steps away from being really not a fascist… So then I'm like, “What do we do here? Do I bring you into community and call you in?” [Other times] I'm like, “Wow, that's crazy. Can you get out of my life?” 

JK: I usually feel the latter. Recently I had this interaction with someone where I was like, “Wow, we literally have nothing in common. We maybe never did. But we definitely don't right now, and there's nothing here. And I'm not even that sad.” 

I was already feeling this in undergrad. All these people would be so interesting and whatever, but all of them have the same plan after graduation, which is they're gonna go work for Goldman Sachs or something. I was like, “This is crazy,” and then I think there was a week-long period where I was like, “Should I go work for Goldman Sachs?”

S: Can you imagine the alternative universe in which you went to go work for Goldman? 

JK: I know! I was like, “I guess I could do it if I really put my mind to it. But I just can't.”

I never had any interest in keeping in touch with the people that went off to work for Goldman Sachs [because it was a relatively straightforward difference between us]. But [nowadays I’m] realizing that there is this [newer] divide where I feel increasingly isolated, politically and in terms of living my values [even in relation to people that aren’t straight-up working for Goldman].

S: I hold this orb in my head and rotate it to look at it sometimes, where I'm like, “One really well-placed saboteur inside of Goldman Sachs could potentially do way more damage to the global financial system than 10 to 50 people picketing from the outside of the building.” [Of course], how many people have gone in thinking they're gonna be that one saboteur…? The organizations are so good at beating that impulse out of you. They're always dangling the opportunity to do ‘change from the inside,’ like a carrot at the end of the hallway, and [they] keep making you jump [through] the Hoops of Disenfranchising People [in order] to get to that carrot. And then at the end, you're like, “I don't even like this carrot anymore.”

What a long conversation. I'm sorry that you have to transcribe it. 

JK: No, it’s getting auto-transcribed. 

S: Okay, thank you Otter.

JK: Actually, Loom.

S: For example, another point of labor: it's probably good that people don't have to manually do this, because that would be very bad for your carpal tunnel. [Transcription is] probably a form of automation [that is] good in an isolated setting.

JK: Automatic subtitles. 

S: Good for accessibility. 

JK: Anyway, thank you so much for talking to me. I love you. 

S: I love you too. That's it.