When I started writing my novel in June 2025, I outlined it as a parable for the ways in which communities are degraded in service of “progress.” Initially, patriarchal progress was the engine driving the story forward — but the more I wrote, the more technofeudalism seeped into my research.

In 2026, we’re living in interesting times. Data centers are destroying small towns all over the US. Families are being ripped apart by ICE. CEOs cheerfully outsource their critical thinking skills to plagiarism machines, laying off thousands of real, human workers only to rehire them again when the machine leads them astray. And that’s just here in the US. Everywhere you look, the systems we built to lift each other up are being dismantled and remade to feed an unseen beast. We’re living through the prologue of what could have been the dystopian sci-fi series of the century (if Hollywood still produced original stories, that is).

What eases the pain of our new roles as the digital proletariat is the endless resilience of the communities we organize around. Where companies build systems designed to take everything we have and sell it back to us — even our own brains — we build systems that shield our children and block parasites from breaching the bloodstream of our homes, schools, third spaces. We troll presidents. We innovate to become a new breed of activist. We reject a sanitized, walled garden in favor of ferality. We rewild. Even when it seems we have no power, in time, we find it, and live on.

Research for my fun little debut novel about witches resisting a culture of hunting transformed into a career pivot from marketing into full-time journalism, centered around the real-world ideas, histories, and power dynamics that fuel my fiction — surveillance, community defense, the politics of who gets to be "dangerous," the ways technology gets weaponized against women and people of color, and the cultures of resistance that push back. How do power, technology, and community collide — and what does that look like when I fictionalize it?

People have always propelled our values forward through storytelling.

Where we once (and in some cultures, still do) relied on griots to teach our people how to treat each other, we depended on folk tales, hymns, books, radio shows, TV series, movies, video games. The arrival of podcasts and YouTube and TikTok symbolizes a return to storytelling traditions not dictated by boardrooms. We’re trying — viscerally, desperately — to return to an oral tradition trapped behind an algorithmic paywall. Again and again we are the underdogs in the stories of our lives, ducking and dodging the propaganda that history can and should and must be written by the victors.

All this to say: without community work — online, offline, anywhere — I wouldn’t be here to write this, nor would you to read it.

My work centers on the people finding ways to combat the hyper-individualistic, patriarchal, capitalist, fascist, and anti-social frameworks we’ve been told in no uncertain terms to live under, even be grateful for.

Let’s talk about why everything feels so dystopian right now, in great detail. Then, let’s pick a direction and do something about it.