Tara McMullin

Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.

The experience of affective friction is similar as well: a loss of fluency combined with negative emotional signals arising from the gap between social expectations and realities. Even when the difference between an old norm and a new one replacing it seems trivial, the disruptions caused by the shift can create feelings of anxiety, awkwardness –... See more

Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down,... See more

We need a politics of time that would enable more people to have time to do work that gives them satisfaction and to participate in real leisure, in the ancient Greek sense, rather than just snatch moments of relief. A progressive politics of time would also combat two frightening trends – the spread of the ‘panopticon state’ and ‘banopticon state’... See more

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the machine process them in alien and opaque ways.