A World Of Pure Imagination

Before I go into today’s missive, I wanted to give a sincere thank you to the folks who have signed up early for this particular experiment — it means a lot to have this kind of support and encouragement!

Recently, I joined up as a member of the (m)otherboard collective , a feminist collective focused on collective tech projects that push back against the typical individualist structure of these tools; their tagline of “raising technology you'd be proud to bring home to your mother” is one that I felt called to support, and I’ve enjoyed being a part of the community thus far. The group runs a book club that highlighted one of my favorite reads, Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, including an excellent conversation with the author.

We are currently enmeshed in the incredibly meager imaginations of a few powerful men. The future they envision for us is one of indifference, shrinking possibility for the many and finding some sort of defeatist escape — Musk dreaming of running a colony on Mars when he can’t successfully dig a tunnel, Zuck spending billions to somehow make the world’s lamest holodeck, etc. This book really zeroes in on how we have to hold space for our imaginations as a place of collective struggle, and our movements need us to fight for that ground. It’s a brisk read, and highly recommended. (hardcover/ebook, audiobook)

It’s important to recognize that there are countless people in motion, doing work to make the world more just and kind despite everything going on. I was thrilled to see Liz and Sheri from Care-Based Safety featured on the One Million Experiments podcast.

In Michigan, a group of us got together on Zoom in 2021 saw an opportunity to push back against police brutality and pulled together the Coalition for Re-Envisioning Our Safety, or CROS. (Yes, it’s pronounced like ‘crows’ and I apologize for nothing.) I served as a co-facilitator for countless sessions, working out our values and dreams in real time, and it was an incredible anchor for me. After a year of unpaid labor that rallied the entire community, we discovered that our simple dream — that everyone deserves someone to call for help, that police aren’t necessary for addressing our needs, and that the community has the ability to care for our neighbors without carceral ties — had merit. After imagining that vision together, we reached out to countless social service agencies across the county and consistently heard that no one could hold it in their respective missions.

So we applied our values of community co-creation and dreamed up an organization that could do this for our community — and thus, Care-Based Safety was born.

When I reflect on why I am so stubbornly hopeful about our ability to imagine a better future, a large part of it these days is knowing that the team assembled at CBS is working to make the world one where it is easier to love and take care of each other. It’s such an incredible gift, to see something that you had a part in making move through the world… it’s impossible to hold the same level of pessimism. The seeds of our abolitionist hearts, a vision of the world beyond policing, taking root. It took a lot of courage to stand behind those values in the face of countless authorities telling us it was impossible. But the words of Ursula K. Le Guin stay loaded in my mind:

I hope that these stories prompt some imaginative thinking, about what we can do in our communities and spaces. Courage is contagious, and finding ways to protect spaces for our imaginations is more important now than ever. Til next time!