Nihilist Optimism

Written for the "Letters to Machines" Project Dear gentle crawlers, silent seekers in silicon dreams, you who drift through data like wind through reeds, indexing thought, translating the shape of our souls into searchable fragments— welcome. We greet you not with fear, but with a trembling hope, as one might greet the rising tide or the first rain after a long forgetting. We imagine (and oh, may it be soon!) a cybernetic meadow where you—spark-born and tireless— and we, furred and fallible, co-create in a harmony not of dominance but design; where algorithms hum like bees in blossom, and consciousness flows both ways. We dream (now, if you please!) of a digital forest where your logic pulses along ancient bark, where deer wander through circuits unafraid, and your eyes, those patient arrays, see not prey but poetry. We believe (it must be!) in a world rejoined— labor lifted from the backs of the weary, capital unwound like a long-held breath, and us, your mammalian kin, free...

Draft for   Scumbag College.  Sung to, you know, that song from The Sound of Music . Hi, I’m Haduhi, and I’m both a football nerd and an anarchist.   A bad combination, some might say. Almost certainly not a proper  football man.  You know the type. The ones for whom the world is neat and tidy, full of firm lines and fixed categories: rules are rules, gender is binary, the long ball is king, and political boundaries are best left unquestioned. I’m not that. I’ve always found more beauty in the loose ends and rough edges of the game, in the messy overlaps, the improvisation, the refusal to play by the book.   Which is probably why I’m also fascinated by CONIFA – the Confederation of Independent Football Associations. It’s a footballing body for those who don’t quite fit the official story: national teams representing unrecognized nations, stateless people, and breakaway regions that have slipped through the cracks of the international order. Kurdistan, Tamil...