The author & the award Andrea Pilotta is an Italian writer, and a friend of mine since the last century. He is one of the most fascinating souls and minds I have ever met, and he recently read to me one of his latest essays, Economia alla Bubka (Bubka‑Style
The first steps Footsteps. From somewhere outside. Slow. Deliberate. Marcus looked up and saw a shape detach from the darkness. Short, wrapped in layers of patched fabric, moving with the ease of someone who belonged out here. In her hand, something long and curved caught the faint starlight. She walked
The breadmaker Emma was ten, or ten-and-most, the way the count went before the Naming, and she had stopped the lesson three times already, which the archive did not mind. The archive never minded. It only ever said good question and then, sometimes, I don't know,
The road to nowhere Marcus' phone lost the route somewhere past the old solar farm. The little blue dot drifted off the road and stayed there, hovering over nothing, while the voice navigation went silent mid-sentence. In 400 meters, take exit one-tw…— Then nothing. Marcus squinted at
A couple of centuries from now, a young girl named Emma studies the "barbarism of the past" with an Archive Intelligence. She learns about a world where bread was destroyed on purpose so the hungry couldn't eat it, where violence and poverty were called necessary, where
Acceptance, Complacency, and Complicity Acceptance of the world around me is acknowledging how it is. It allows me to see what I can influence and to what degree. I have much more control of my mindset than how far off politicians behave, for example. I can control where I spend
My hands are covered in drywall dust. My back aches and my shoulders are exhausted from sanding the ceilings, something I never thought to do before starting my home renovation. For the last three weeks, I have been tearing apart and rebuilding most of my house. I am not a
If you turn on the news or scroll through your feed, it is easy to feel like the world is splitting at the seams. Every issue is presented as a cage match. Us vs. Them. Good vs. Bad. Left vs. Right. The media model is built on polarization. It thrives
If you turn on the news or scroll through social media, it’s easy to feel like the world is broken. Politics feels like a circus. The economy feels rigged. The "system" seems to be grinding people down. Only a few seem to benefit from the way the
I was recently talking to someone about the idea of mutual aid. They asked me what those words really meant, but they seemed very skeptical about the whole thing. To them, the idea of helping people just to be nice sounded impossible or fake. They thought it sounded like a
How the politics of fear paralyzes us, and why the path to true freedom is a daily, uncomfortable act.
How consumerism leads to debt, a self-imposed form of slavery. Consumerism functions as the necessary cultural logic for a capitalist system, which must perpetually create new markets and desires to ensure its own reproduction.