Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library, and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up.

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 244

What Augustine (in Petrarch’s imagining) suggests is a new manner of reading: neither using the book as a prop for thought, nor trusting it as one would trust the authority of a sage, but taking from it an idea, a phrase, an image, linking it to another culled from a distant text preserved in memory, tying the whole together with reflections of one’s one—producing, in fact, a new text authored by the reader.

Manguel, A History of Reading, page 63

Two definitions of technology inform and thread their way through the writing here: technology as practice, as the way we do things, which I borrow from Ursula Franklin. And technology as the active human interface with the material world, which I take from Ursula K. Le Guin. The former captures that technology is something we do rather than something we have, while the latter makes plain that technology encompasses everything from a computer to an algorithm to a kitchen knife, a matchstick, a bolt of cloth, a chair, a roof, a good pair of sturdy boots, a coffee grinder, a rocket ship, a toothbrush, a bag to carry your books. I am interested in how we think with and through that technology, how it mediates our interactions with the world, and how we articulate, negotiate, adopt, and refuse the ideologies that are inevitably coupled to it.

It is work to think with and through these things, and it is our work that is so often the field in which these observations and negotiations take place. I use “work” to mean not only our waged work, but our care work, our art work, the work of activism and of community building. I seek to rescue work from the coercion of waged labor and from reduction to mere drudgery, using it instead to mean all the change that we make in the world, all the ways we contribute to a living world, for ourselves and for our human and more-than-human kin. In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a book that is never far from hand, the word for work is the word for play; I hope for a world in which we could say the same, in which all work is chosen, and meaningful, and where there is never too much nor too little of it, for everyone.

The writing here consists of:

• regular reading notes, in which I use reading to reflect on the author’s thinking and further develop my own;
• (forthcoming) practice notes, which will dig into the practice of reading, writing, and publishing at play here, and how those practices can be used to counter the programming and anesthetizing forces of late capitalism and fascism;
• and essays, in the original sense of the word, where I try to bring together the often disparate and contradictory notions that emerge out of that reading and writing practice, and point the way to different worlds.

With the generous support of my readers, I am also working towards several longer writing projects, about which more will be shared when the time is right.

—Lenapehoking/Philadelphia, June 2026