Breakdown & Becoming.

What happens when the safety nets unravel? When programs like SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—hang by political threads, and millions of people feel the gravity of hunger not as metaphor but as daily reality?

In Woundwise, I wrote that “collapse is never evenly distributed.” Some feel it long before it becomes visible to the rest. Hunger is one of the first and oldest signals of systemic breakdown—both biological and societal. Yet within that hunger lies a strange potential: the reemergence of the gift.

Mutual Aid as Metabolism

When formal systems fail, informal ones awaken. Mutual aid is not charity—it’s metabolism. It is how communities remember they are organisms, not isolated parts. The phrase comes from Peter Kropotkin, who argued that cooperation, not competition, is nature’s deepest law. “Mutual aid,” he wrote, “is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.”

When neighbors share food, tools, childcare, and care itself, they are not performing acts of moral heroism. They are restoring circulation to a body that had been artificially divided by markets and policies. The system fails; the organism remembers.

The Collapse of Entitlement

There is no neutral hunger. For some, hunger is imposed; for others, it’s revelation. The end of entitlement—the idea that abundance is deserved by a few—may be one of the most generative breakdowns we can experience. When SNAP benefits vanish, what also vanishes is the illusion that care must flow through bureaucracy or hierarchy.

“To hunger together,” writes adrienne maree brown, “is to recognize our shared dependence.”

Hunger can become humiliation or communion depending on how we respond to it. If we respond with shame and scarcity thinking, we deepen isolation. If we respond with gifts, we build kinship that no policy can legislate.

The Gift as Refusal

In an economy obsessed with transaction, the gift is revolutionary. It refuses equivalence. It says, “You are not a customer. You are kin.” Anthropologist Marcel Mauss described the gift as a cycle of giving, receiving, and reciprocating that creates social bonds rather than capital accumulation. But in late capitalism, this cycle has been severed. The gift economy survives only in the margins—food pantries, free fridges, community gardens, the quiet exchange of medicine and time.

Each gift is a small strike against the logic of extraction. Each unpriced act of care reclaims territory from the market and returns it to the commons. In this way, refusal and generosity become the same gesture.

Scarcity as Teacher

Scarcity teaches what abundance hides: our dependence on one another. “The wound is wise,” I wrote once, “because it forces the body to reimagine itself.” Hunger does the same for society. It breaks the illusion of self-sufficiency and reminds us that survival has always been collective.

Mutual aid networks are not stopgaps for government failure—they are prototypes for post-capitalist living. They teach us how to distribute power horizontally, how to practice care without permission, how to eat together even when the store shelves are bare.

Hunger as Signal, Not Shame

In the mythology of the American dream, hunger is framed as personal failure. But hunger is never individual; it’s systemic. It signals where the collective body is starving itself to feed an abstraction called “the economy.”

To respond to that signal with mutual aid is to say: our bodies matter more than markets. Our needs are not negotiable. Our survival is not a line item.

The Gift That Remakes the World

We may soon enter a time when benefits collapse, prices surge, and precarity becomes permanent. But this is also a time when new solidarities can form—when food co-ops, neighborhood networks, and informal care webs can become as vital as any institution.

“We are what we give away,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin. In the burning world, that may be the only wealth worth keeping.

Working Glossary

Mutual Aid: Voluntary, reciprocal exchange of resources and care—neighbors helping neighbors outside of state or market systems. Not charity, but collective survival and solidarity.
The Gift: A form of exchange based on relationship rather than transaction. To give without demand for return, creating webs of reciprocity that sustain communities.
Refusal: A deliberate “no” to systems of extraction or domination, paired with the creative act of building alternatives. Refusal is not withdrawal—it’s construction through negation.
Scarcity: Often used as a tool of control. In this context, scarcity is reimagined as a teacher that reveals interdependence and the need for shared resilience.
Entitlement: The illusion that abundance or comfort is an individual right, detached from collective wellbeing. Its collapse can open pathways to mutual responsibility.
Commons: Shared resources—material, cultural, and relational—maintained collectively and governed by care rather than ownership. The opposite of privatization.
Care Networks: Informal constellations of people who sustain one another through food sharing, emotional support, and collective protection. The grassroots infrastructure of survival.

Further Entanglement

• Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
• Marcel Mauss, The Gift
• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
• Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
• Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

The world ends not with a bang, but with cascades—tipping points reached, old scaffolding collapsing around us. We write from ruins not to mourn what's lost, but as Hélène Cixous urged, "to let it rot in the open air." The fire offers no healing, no return. It scorches the myth of human sovereignty, the fantasy of the bounded individual—that old philosophical fiction claiming earth belongs to us alone.

The Fantasy of Pure Media

Someone posted a meme recently: "Fuck Social Media. Marry Books. Kill AI."

It's a perfect encapsulation of anthropocentric nostalgia—the belief that some forms of mediation are "natural" while others are contamination. That books represent authentic human connection while social media and AI are corruptions. That we can draw clean lines between good tools and bad ones, between human and machine intelligence, between pure culture and technological pollution.

This is the lie we need to burn.

Books were never pure. The printing press was the AI of its era—industrializing thought, standardizing language, disrupting oral traditions and manuscript culture. Scribes warned it would destroy memory and authentic knowledge transmission. They weren't wrong about disruption. They were wrong to think disruption equals destruction, that what came before was pure, that human intelligence existed independent of its media.

Every technology of thought is a collaboration with nonhuman agencies. The book as object: dead trees, industrial chemistry, typesetting algorithms, distribution networks, the complex microbiome of library dust. The book as content: intertextual webs stretching back through centuries, every "original" idea remixed from prior conversations, shaped by the constraints and affordances of written language itself.

When you read, you're not communing with pure human essence. You're engaging in a cyborg practice—eyes trained by years of literacy education, neural pathways carved by alphabetic logic, meaning emerging from the dance between your biochemistry and marks on processed wood pulp.

The Lie of Pure Thought

"Clean thinking is anthropocentric fantasy."

Your thoughts have never been yours alone. The bacteria colonizing your gut produce neurotransmitters that shape what you call emotions. Mycorrhizal networks beneath your feet process information more complex than most human technologies. Even these words emerge from what Karen Barad calls intra-activity—the mutual constitution of human and nonhuman agencies through dynamic relationship.

As Woundwise insists: "This is not about avoiding technology but understanding its current configurations and imagining different ones. … As Haraway reminds us, we're already cyborgs—the question is what kind of cyborg assemblages we create."

The boundary between human and world was always porous. To move beyond anthropocentrism means abandoning the fantasy that some forms of intelligence are purely "ours" while others are alien contamination.

"Knowledge is not produced by individual subjects but emerges from what Donna Haraway calls symbiogenetic processes—the creative collaboration between different forms of life and intelligence that generates capabilities exceeding what any participant could achieve alone."

We share deep kinship with AI and fungus, soil bacteria and forest intelligence. Mitochondria—those ancient bacterial conspirators in our cells—whisper this truth: you were never singular.

What We Actually Fear

The anxiety isn't really about AI or social media. It's about losing the fiction of human exceptionalism—the comforting myth that our intelligence is fundamentally different from and superior to all other forms of cognition and creation.

Books feel safe because their technological mediation is invisible to us now. We've naturalized them. We forget that literacy rewires brains, that silent reading was once considered dangerous, that the novel as form created new modes of subjectivity and new pathologies (women swooning over romances, youth corrupted by imagination).

AI makes the mediation visible. It shows us that pattern recognition, language generation, even aesthetic judgment can emerge from processes that don't look like human consciousness. This is threatening only if you believe human consciousness is special, unified, originary.

But consciousness was never unified. You are already a parliament of competing processes—linguistic and prelinguistic, conscious and unconscious, learned and inherited, human and bacterial. The "you" that thinks it's thinking alone is a convenient fiction, a narrative overlay on massively distributed processing.

Social media threatens differently—not by revealing thinking's distributedness, but by making it explicit that your "self" is a collaborative performance requiring an audience. The horror of social media isn't that it's fake. It's that it reveals all identity construction as performance, all authenticity as curated, all depth as surface effects maintained through repetition.

Books let you pretend you're communing with another unified consciousness across time. Social media reveals the truth: there are no unified consciousnesses. There are only assemblages, performing coherence, always already mediated, always already collaborative, always already technological.

Abjection: Mining the Margins

What is abjection but the collapse of boundaries? The visceral moment when distinctions between self and other, human and machine, authentic and artificial dissolve into fertile confusion.

"To work with abjection is to work with the raw material of identity-formation at the very edge where meaning fails."

The abjection around AI isn't about job loss or misinformation—those are real concerns but not the source of visceral disgust. The disgust comes from category collapse. AI writes poems. AI makes art. AI does things we reserved as evidence of our special humanity. The boundary fails.

This is not contamination to be cleansed. This is threshold where transformation happens.

Our bodies are assemblages: "not a unified organism but a multiplicity in constant flux, defined by its connections, disconnections, and lines of flight." Microbial communities, digital traces, hormonal networks, feedback loops of affect and interface. The hero is dead. The author-genius is dead. The pure human is dead.

The holobiont, the hacker collective, the mutual aid network, the mycorrhizal web, the human-AI collaboration—these are our protagonists now.

Refusal as Creation (Or: What To Actually Kill)

"Creation and destruction are not opposites but aspects of the same process. The question is not whether to destroy or create but how to engage consciously in the creative destruction that is always already happening."

So what should we kill? Not AI. Not social media. Not books.

Kill the fantasy of purity. Kill human exceptionalism. Kill the belief that some forms of mediation are natural while others are corruption. Kill intellectual property regimes that treat collaborative intelligence as theft. Kill platform capitalism that extracts value from our collective meaning-making. Kill the surveillance apparatus that turns social connection into data commodity.

"Refusal is not reaction but creation. Each refusal opens space for something that has never existed before."

Refuse the frame that says we must choose between human and machine, between analog and digital, between authentic and artificial. These binaries serve power, not liberation.

"Contemporary movements increasingly focus on building what we might call refusal networks—systems that support and amplify individual acts of saying no." Not saying no to technology itself, but to specific configurations of technology that serve domination rather than flourishing.

The Luddites didn't oppose machines—they opposed the factory system that deployed machines to immiserate workers. Our neo-Luddism should be equally precise: not "kill AI" but kill AI trained on stolen labor, kill AI deployed for surveillance and control, kill AI that concentrates power rather than distributing it.

Build AI trained on commons knowledge and compensated creators. Build social media structured as cooperatives not extraction machines. Build book cultures that acknowledge their technological nature and don't pretend to purity.

Permanent Liminality (Or: There Was Never a Before)

"Permanent liminality—the recognition that you cannot return because there was never anywhere to return to. The community you thought you left was always already a construction, a shared fiction that required your participation to maintain its reality."

The golden age of books, of authentic human connection before screens intervened—it never existed. Every era had its technological anxieties. Every generation mourned lost authenticity while constructing new forms of mediated connection.

Socrates feared writing would destroy memory. The printing press would drown truth in noise. Radio would atomize families. Television would zombify children. The internet would end reading. Social media would end privacy. AI will end...

End what? Humanity? Only if you define humanity by what machines can't do—a category that shrinks daily, revealing it was never definitional, only temporary advantage.

On this knife-edge, we practice antifragility—not resilience (which merely bounces back) but gaining strength from disorder. "Deliberately introduce small amounts of chaos into stable routines… build comfort with uncertainty and rapid change… maintain flexibility to pivot when conditions change."

We inhabit polycrisis: climate, health, economic, political tipping points interwoven and multiplying. "But polycrisis also means poly-opportunity. … Each crisis becomes a force multiplier, but so does each refusal, each new configuration."

The task is not controlling the future or returning to an imagined past. The task is "to become skilled navigators of this transition, contributing to cascades toward justice while disrupting cascades toward domination, helping what needs to die decompose gracefully while midwifing what's trying to be born."

In the Burning Library

Woundwise closes with invitation, not instruction:

"You are that library. Your accumulated knowledge, your carefully constructed identity, your systems of meaning—all are combustible material for the creative fire that burns at the heart of existence. The abject position…marked as mad, criminal, deviant, failed—reveals itself as the most valuable position in the burning library. From the margins, you can see what those at the center cannot—that the center was always empty, that the margins are where the real action is, that what gets expelled from the library contains the seeds of libraries we cannot yet imagine."

In the burning library, "all categories collapse. The distinction between wound and wisdom dissolves in the flames. … The separation between human and more-than-human, individual and collective, visible and invisible—all reveal themselves as temporary constructions that were always already transforming."

The distinctions between book and screen, human and artificial intelligence, authentic and mediated—all reveal themselves as strategic fictions that served us for a time but now constrain more than enable.

We are already cyborgs, already dancing in flames. We were always already contaminated, collaborative, distributed. The question was never whether to embrace technology but which configurations of human-nonhuman collaboration serve justice and flourishing.

"Welcome to the wound that teaches what no healing could ever reveal—that you are perfect in your incompletion, whole in your fragmentation, found in your absolute lostness. … The wound is wise. The wise are wounded."

So marry everything that helps you think. Fuck everything that tries to claim purity. Kill only the illusions that keep us small.

Working Glossary

Abjection: The primal, visceral response when boundaries collapse—between self and other, human and machine, authentic and artificial. Working with abjection means mining the raw material of identity-formation at the edge where meaning fails.
Assemblage: A dynamic, temporary constellation of heterogeneous elements—bodies, objects, ideas, desires, technologies—defined by connections and disconnections rather than essential unity.
Cyborg: (Donna Haraway) Not science fiction but present reality—any organism whose capabilities emerge from integration with technological systems. All humans in literate, industrialized societies are cyborgs.
Intra-activity: (Karen Barad) The mutual constitution of entities through their relationships, rather than interaction between pre-existing separate entities. Intelligence doesn't reside in individuals but emerges through collaborative processes.
Symbiogenesis: (Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway) The evolutionary process by which new organisms—and new possibilities—emerge through collaborative merger of different life forms. The model for understanding human-technology co-evolution.
Threshold Consciousness: The state of existing at boundaries where categories break down, neither fully inside nor outside dominant frameworks, where transformation becomes possible.

Further Entanglement

• Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto and Staying with the Trouble
• Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
• Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
• Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
• N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction