Corrected an extra space in Mannan interview

.gitlab-ci.yml

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ build_site:
   # Define when this job runs (e.g., only on the main branch)
   # Adjust 'only' or 'rules' as needed for your workflow
   only:
-    - publish # Example: Run only on the main branch
+    - main # builds on commit to main branch
 
 # Job to deploy the built site using cloudron-surfer
 deploy_site:
@@ -63,5 +63,5 @@ deploy_site:
   # Define when this job runs (e.g., only on the main branch after build)
   # Adjust 'only' or 'rules' as needed for your workflow
   only:
-    - publish # Example: Run only on the main branch
+    - main # publishes on commit to main branch
 

README.md

@@ -22,14 +22,13 @@ hugo server
 
 ## Deployment
 
-Thanks to the [MEDLab Hugo template](https://git.medlab.host/dhorn/medlab-hugo-template), the site is set up to deploy automatically to the MEDLab server via GitLab CI. To do so, when developing locally, use these git commands:
+Thanks to the [MEDLab Hugo template](https://git.medlab.host/dhorn/medlab-hugo-template), the site is set up to deploy automatically to the MEDLab server via GitLab CI. To do so, when developing locally, use this git command:
 
 ```
-git push origin
-git push origin main:publish
+git push origin main
 ```
 
-A push to `publish` should trigger a pipeline in GitLab to deploy the site. If it doesn't, check for errors in Gitea and GitLab.
+A push to `main` should trigger a pipeline in GitLab to deploy the site. If it doesn't, check for errors in Gitea and GitLab.
 
 ## Interviews
 

content/interviews/albuquerque-contemporary_dance.md

@@ -0,0 +1,274 @@
+---
+narrator: Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant
+subject: Contemporary dance
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-11-22
+approved: 2025-08-08
+summary: "A choreographer describes how dance helps people learn ways of being in shared space and in their bodies."
+topics: [art, health, family, dance, music]
+location: "Los Angeles USA"
+headshot: "jasmine_albuquerque.jpg"
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://www.jasminealbuquerque.com/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+My name is Jasmine Albuquerque. I'm a choreographer, dancer, storyteller and instructor.
+
+*How do you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start in your life as a dancer and choreographer? Where are you now?*
+
+I grew up on a mountain---which was problematic, because I never had a ride home. In that world of never having a ride home, I would go with my friend Caitlin to dance class and just watch her do ballet. It got to a point where I knew the difference between a *demi-plié* and a *grand plié* more than the girls in class. So I started taking ballet.
+
+There was something really beautiful about the musicality of ballet and the foundations of ballet. I then progressed into jazz. We had a company called the Dance Asylum. It was really sexy, and all the parents protested it because it was so risque. My teacher played Soft Cell and other eighties music and that was what all the older girls did. I finally got into that company and loved it.
+
+By the time I turned 16 I literally grew out of ballet. I was too tall *en pointe*. I was 6'4", so I was taller than my partners, and I was like, I might as well just pick YOU up because I'm bigger than you. My feet were huge. My feet grew out of my *pointe* shoes. It was such a mess! Then I moved to Budapest in my third year of college at UCLA.
+
+That's when I started studying contemporary, which was a huge shift for me. I would take a train outside of the city and take class from a wonderful teacher. It was in Hungarian, but it really made me realize that dance is a universal language, and I could take my shoes off, and I could stick my ass out, and I could do things that were so anti-ballet. I was even counting in Hungarian. I started going to all these contemporary dance shows in Hungary.
+
+That was before they joined the EU. It was 2003. You could go out for $5 and watch an opera or a dance show. Hungarian work then didn't leave Hungary. So I felt like I entered into this very special time. And they also learned contemporary in a very particular way, because of Communism. They weren't allowed to do it. Certain dancers would go to Italy or somewhere West and learn some contemporary then come back. There were two studios- when someone official would come in they would do the communistic dances, and then, when they left, they would do contemporary in the back. So it felt like this secret language that was really special, and it felt good on my body---finally, something that worked for this big body I had.
+
+Then I came back to LA. I started taking class from Ryan Heffington. Ryan Heffington, mind you, is a pioneer of underground contemporary dance in Los Angeles. One of the first times I met him he had a shirt on that said "I love dick" and sequined pants. I said, "Yo, you look like shit," and he's like, "Yeah, I just got out of jail." I'm like, "What'd you go to jail for?" He's like, "I was defending a woman, and I was a little bit drunk." I'm like, "And you're about to teach class?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm about to teach class." I'm like, "...okay."
+
+Then he goes and teaches the most amazing class you ever could possibly go through. There was an earthquake in one of the classes he taught, and I'm like, "Yo, there's an earthquake." He's like, "Whatever. Focus." Ha! Soon he taught me psycho dance. And that's when we started going into nightclubs to perform. This was happening from the eighties on but I was new to it.
+
+By midnight a fully choreographed, fully costumed 30-minute dance show would happen that no one knew was going to happen. Wild stuff went down in these settings. One time a friend of mine, her leg---someone actually stabbed her leg because they forgot to switch out the real knife with a fake knife. My other friend, her hair caught on fire. One time there was a drunk guy walking in the middle of the dance floor and all the lights came crashing down.
+
+At some point I was asked to choreograph a dance but the DJ was on speed and he played my track underneath another track, and I got so pissed because it was a very specific Aphex Twin song, and you couldn't hear the subtilites, so we just sort of melted and I got mad and I shined a light on him. I ran outside. I was wearing some little dress and a rat ran by, and then a dude offered me 20 bucks, and I was like, "Yo, I'm not a prostitute. What the hell?" I ran back inside to my family members who lied through their teeth: "That was great."
+
+With psycho dance, we were very mixed in. I was trained on big stages where you just look out and you see darkness and you just dance. You see the darkness, and then you hear applause. So I kept saying to Ryan, "I don't know how to do this. I'm staring at my ex-boyfriend. I'm staring at my mother. They're in my face. How am I supposed to perform? Where do I go? I'm too big. There's no space." He crawled through my legs, and he said, "There's space." And he crawled through my arm and he said, "There's space. There's always negative space."
+
+That was so beautiful. I love that. It trained me not only to literally face my fears, but to integrate that fourth wall, to walk into the audience and invite them in and to be able to go into a state in my mind.
+
+A lot of these dancers were doing drugs and drinking. I was totally sober. I just didn't like that kind of stuff. So I had to create a veil underneath my eyes that could allow me to have a little bit of separation and go into a state.
+
+The dancers in LA were so special. You have emotional dancers who are super, super amazing emotionally, and then you have physical dancers who are incredible physically. Then you have that rare group of dancers that can do the combo of both of those. And THEN you have that extra rare group of dancers who can channel past lives while they dance and that's what we were. We were called the Fingered Dancers. The show was called Fingered. You would come and get fingered psychologically. It was wild. It was totally crazy. This was around 2008.
+
+After that, the scene died out. Heffington got sort of famous. He made a music video with Sia. He started a band called We Are the World---two dancers and two musicians.
+
+When Heffington got too busy for us, I started a dance company with Nina McNeely and Kristen Leahy called WIFE. We all had looked in the mirror, and we were like, yo, we're getting old. Let's start talking about age, and we also were very into iconography and just these beautiful images that we had been looking at for so long. So we did a photo shoot where we were standing on boxes, on small boxes and projecting images on us to make us look like sculptures. And we actually looked like sculptures. And we were like, well, that's dope. Let's dance in that world.
+
+So we kept standing on those boxes. The confinement, the limitations of being on a two-foot by two-foot box all of a sudden created the most crazy choreography because you couldn't run across the stage. You couldn't leap. That psycho dance stage, which was already smaller than the giant stages I had danced on, all the sudden got even smaller.
+
+I realized that the best dance is when you have a large limitation around it. WIFE happened from 2010 to 2016 and it was a really special time. It was also a very nerve-wracking time. We were not using infrared, we were using regular projections, so our tech rehearsals were close to six hours long. The precision of where you had to be for the projections to map the body were so insane, and I kept blowing my back because I was so nervous about fucking it up. Nina was making all the projections. She's a self-taught animator and editor and incredible, but she was doing a lot of the work, and Leahy and I were producing everything. And we all had jobs, but we were just really trying to make this happen.
+
+And we did. We went to England. We went to Istanbul. We toured with it. People loved it. They would come and emulate some of the movement and be like, "Are you a WIFE?" It was this kind of secret "if you knew you knew" kind of thing.
+
+*It was an amazing show.*
+
+It really did look like those sculptures came to life. It got very popular. People started teaching it in Germany. It unfolded in ways that we didn't even expect. But by the time we did our last show, which was called "Enter the Cave," I think I had blown my back like five times. I had to use Tess Hewlett to be my replacement and this poor woman---an amazing dancer--would learn a piece that took us a year to choreograph in like three hours and perform it because she's my same height. That was the other thing. It couldn't be just anyone. We once used my friend Zak Schlegel because I had blown my back and we had to tuck his penis under so he looked like a woman. It was totally bonkers.
+
+After Enter the Cave, it got to a point where the energy between us was too intense. We were all fighting. The work wasn't distributed equally. We were stressed. Leahy ended up moving to Mexico and Nina continued on with her career in LA which has fully bloomed and blossomed in all sorts of ways and I did too. It crumbled at what was the pinnacle of what we were doing. It was very sad. It felt like I got divorced. Then I really did get divorced and those two literally got married. That's what was happening.
+
+Since then I've been freelance. I've been a freelance dancer and choreographer for a long time, at least fifteen years. I also have to mention that I started teaching when I was 21. I'm 41 now.
+
+Teaching was the experience that really shifted me into a choreographer. All of a sudden I'm in a room with women in their forties and I'm 21. "These are my students? What do I teach them? Shouldn't I be learning from them?"
+
+I asked them to walk across the room and stop in the middle and look in the mirror and not fidget for 10 seconds, and none of them could do it.  I realized that I needed to teach confidence. I needed to teach bodies. I needed to teach that it's okay to look at ourselves, it's ok to be in our bodies. 
+
+It got to a point where women were like---or people, you know I had a few men, but mostly women---saying to me, "I got a job after doing your class." "I slept for the first time after doing your class. "I broke up with my boyfriend." "I was able to be in my body." Doing that for twenty years turned me into a choreographer. I made a new combo every two weeks. I would have one combo one week, and then it'd be the same, and then we'd switch. So I was making a lot of choreography and I continue to. Teaching is a huge part of my career.
+
+And now? I'm in LA, and the industry's kind of bottoming out. It's a very strange time for dance. Covid was super devastating for us. We lost 80 percent of our dance studios. We've all been kind of dissipated and broken apart. The Sweat Spot was Ryan Heffington's dance studio that went under. It was 11 years of a space to create shows, rehearse, gather, teach, perform and party. You name it, everything...where we went to think and talk was in that studio and it went down. And The Edge, which was around for thirty years also shut its doors.
+
+So things shifted in a really weird way during Covid. We felt like we were Covid, because all we did was touch and grope each other and all of a sudden touching each other would kill each other. This was really, really hard for us. But it was interesting, too, because people started reaching out to dancers and saying, "We need you. We need you to teach us. We need you to help us get through this."
+
+I started teaching on Zoom, which was bizarre. I did it for two years and eventually started teaching movement therapy. I'm not a certified therapist. I was just like, you know, let's figure out how to get through this together. I ran into a woman when I was at the Biennale in Italy, and she said, "You saved my life," and I was like, "Who are you?" She's like, "I took your Zoom class during Covid." We became these fountains of health, in a way.
+
+Now I've had another baby. My brain has changed yet again.
+
+I choreographed a piece two weeks ago, which was really wild in a postpartum state. I took an old piece from 2019, took out the men, put it on women, bought silicon bellies for them that were six months pregnant, and turned them into pregnant women---naked, pregnant women. I pumped my breasts onstage and then had them walk around me in trench coats and heels, take off the trench coats, throw the heels away, and start this very psychotic dance to AFX, which is even more gnarly than Aphex Twin-his alias. It took me 10 years to choreograph to this song. It's so---it makes your brain bleed. I wanted to take people into one little element of birth---what it feels like. I don't think you die when you give birth. You are hyper-alive.
+
+Have I answered your question?
+
+*Oh yes---beautifully. So beautifully, Jasmine.*
+
+From a mountain to birth.
+
+*Knowing very, very little about choreography, the image I have in my mind is a piece of paper with Russian ballet movements on them, with foot positions.*
+
+Like actually writing choreography down?
+
+*Right? What does choreography mean for you like? What does it feel like? What does it consist of?*
+
+A lot of dancers don't choreograph because they want to be told what to do. They don't want to have to create it. When I first started choreographing I was writing things down, and it would be [moving hands and body] "Swoop! Wah! Hee haw! Pregnant swipe knife in out, left, right! Turn up up! La, la!"
+
+*Were you using a standard, or were you creating your own?*
+
+No standard at all. There's a name for that standardized choreography. I can't remember what it's called but it does not work at all. It's like this psycho map and also contemporary dance has changed everything. We're dancing to-you know-Philip Glass. How do you count that? Where is the five-six-seven-eight? Where's the one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a? It's not hip-hop. It's not jazz, it's not eights. Or even this song, this AFX song---like, try counting that song, there's elevens, there's tens, there's fives. I realized as I was teaching that I needed to teach from imagery. I didn't exactly realize this---I worked with a guy named Glenn Edgerton, who used to be the artistic director of Netherlands Dans Theater, which is one of my favorite companies in Europe and I took a choreography workshop from him. This was a long time ago...he taught from images. He always said, "Let's show things with images."
+
+That was really helpful for me. I was sometimes writing things down and that was fun. It helped me remember. I had a hard enough time picking up other people's choreography.
+
+When I was in the process of choreographing, I used to be very precious about it. I used to not allow anybody to watch me. That was what was nice about WIFE---we would have to choreograph in front of each other. But normally I would be like, "Don't watch me do this! This is so embarrassing."
+
+But I started being more comfortable choreographing in front of other people. What I do is I go to the most empty space in my mind---the biggest void you could possibly imagine--the blackest nothingness. I have to let everything out...then the song---I open a song, I enter the song into my mind.  The song tells me what to do. Sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's an argument between us and sometimes it just completely flows. It's the weirdest thing---sometimes one minute of a song can take me anywhere from ten minutes to three hours to create depending on the state that I'm in.
+
+But the song is the most important thing to me. The song has to talk to me. If the song does not talk to me, I cannot choreograph to it. So once I stopped writing things down and started working just with my body more, I realized that a dance is really just a repetition of three, you know---once you find a movement that you like, all of a sudden it's a dance. And I told that to my students: you can choreograph by just making a phrase on your body. Start improvising, and then, when you like one little thing, do it three times, and then all of a sudden, you have a dance.
+
+I also used to teach this thing I named "Bomb/Baby" which is where I would have your body experience what it feels like when a bomb goes off and then try to imagine what it's like holding a baby. I would make them do both at the same time. You're experiencing this motion of shock and energy vs. caress and gentleness. Two extremities at one time. I liked what that dichotomy did to the body. 
+
+All dance is a manipulation of energy.
+
+Everybody can dance. But how are you manipulating your energy? What are you doing to manipulate your energy that's manipulating my energy when I watch you? Why are the hairs standing up on the back of my neck when I watch you, but not when I watch *you*? *You*'re not doing anything for me, but you're doing a lot for me. I can watch beautiful dance, but if the person has not opened up their state and allowed me to come in, it's not going to do anything for me.
+
+Choreography is a very strange language. I try to run from it sometimes. I don't like it all the time---it's sort of brutal. It makes me nervous. I'm still nervous to choreograph after god knows how many years I've been doing this. I think now it gets to a point where I just can visualize a feeling.
+
+For example, I'm creating a piece in my head right now, and I know I want to have forty to forty-five bodies on their knees and I want them to be the sea...the grass on the ocean floor...a solid seagrass of humans. But I don't ever want us to see their faces, and I know that there's a future, a chunk of the future walking through that they keep looking at. We don't see their faces, and then I know there's a duet between my friend Maija and Malachi that's happening on top of this sea of bodies---the most abstract, weird stuff.
+
+And then all of a sudden, you have to physicalize that. I used to choreograph when I was on my bicycle, which was really nice because I had motion. I would get a lot of choreography from houseless people. I would watch them doing these moves that were so beautifully kind of psychotic. And I loved it because they were the ones who were watching humans for real, because they were out there seeing it every single day. Whatever they'd experienced in their paths, whether it was war or meth, or just not having money, or whatever it was that brought them to the streets, they communicate with their bodies in ways that's really beautiful.
+
+I'd ride my bike everywhere. I was on a bike for six years in LA and I had this motion underneath me. I'd be listening to music and observing houseless people on the streets and that would bring out a state I could enter into that helped a lot with choreography.
+
+*When you are communicating an idea to dancers, are you telling a story? Are you showing them images? What is the means by which you get your choreography out of your head and into their bodies?*
+
+No, I'm not telling a story. I don't like stories with dance. I think it's too boring. I want half the audience to get up and leave. I want them to be like, "This is shit." I haven't done my work if people like it. You know what I mean? I want them to see it and say, "Oh God, what the hell? This is rude and mean and not fair."
+
+So with my dancers---I told my last dancer, Maija, "Listen, I want you. But I also need a monster. I don't want a dancer, I want a monster."
+
+I had one process of creating a piece where I was teaching them what it felt like to be in a psycho dance situation. I was throwing things at them in the rehearsal space. I was turning the music on and off. I was turning the lights on and off. I was getting aggressive with them. And then when we did the show---it was at a club called Zebulon---which is a very special nightclub---I really loved my main dancer's body movements but her face was frustrating me because she kept doing this little emotional eyebrow thing.
+
+I was doing the piece to Pharmakon, which is super, super gnarly music. There's a section of it where she just coughs for the whole thing, and I came out dancing during the cough, and then the dancers come out, and I had them representing "Liberty, blood, land, justice." It was about immigration, but in a very abstract way. That was the one when my dad played saxophone at the end. He played free jazz and I danced to it. But the woman who was playing me as the Statue of Liberty when we later did this piece at Zebulon---she was doing that eyebrow thing. So during the show, I drank an entire bottle of water and spit it in her face, and she looked at me with an honest expression and I said, "That's the face I want!" She kept going. It was incredible. She tells me, years later, that that moment changed her life in a lot of ways.
+
+I don't know what I do to my dancers. I try to give them enough space that they can translate what's in their heads. But we're meeting at some sort of middle point in the music. I'm giving them movement and sometimes I give them a little bit of a backstory. Like for this last one I did about birth, I showed them what it felt like to be in labor. I screamed. I got on all fours. I ran around. I also had them put the fake bellies on. What does it make you feel like to be pregnant? These were all women who had never had babies. It took 30 minutes of them walking around the studio with their bellies, experiencing that. I asked them, "What do you care for most?"
+
+I don't like "this is the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end, this is the climax, this is what it's about." I don't treat dance as academic. New York has a very academic approach to dance, which I appreciate. Los Angeles is very "dance for fuck sake, dance to dance, dance because we can."
+
+It may seem kind of elitist or weird, but when you find that grit, it's so beautiful, because we're emulating things---again, like a houseless person or someone sitting at a bus stop. We're emulating the things that you see in life. A brief moment or the moment just before something happens. But I don't want to force feed you. Most of my stuff is from a dream or from an experience I've had. It's piecing together abstract elements of my life. My brain is also not normal. I'm an art baby. I'm Lita Albuquerque's daughter---I have cobalt blue pigment and toxins in my mind. That's why I don't need drugs. I am drugs, to quote Salvador Dali.
+
+*I'd love to hear a bit more about that relationship---the role that the dancers play in shaping a piece. How much is it a collective product of everyone who's involved as opposed to something that you are bringing to the dancers?*
+
+Dancers are huge---they are the piece. It's just that I am so particular about picking my music---I'll listen to a track for, I'm not kidding you, 10 years. I work with my dancers in that same way. It's not always the same dancers, but I'm very specific about who I use. Those are the people who can experience past lives when they dance. They're the ones who can throw me off. They have to throw me off. They are bold in their choices. 
+
+There's one woman named Maija Knapp who I just---I'm obsessed with her. She can do anything. She's got these thighs that are like trees and her deep *plié* is practically on the ground. Then all of a sudden, she's frolicking through a meadow, but she looks like she could cut your head off. She's just a beast. She's incredible. I've worked with her since she was 18. She's 26 now. I feel like she's what I always wanted to be in a dancer.
+
+It really depends on the piece. But thinking about who can execute it is a big part of my process, because half the time I don't believe in my work. I don't think it's going to be good enough, and then I put it on the body of a dancer who brings out a different light.
+
+When I was teaching a lot, I remember I would love the mistakes that people made. I would write down the mistakes. If all the bodies drop, and one person stands up because they forgot to drop, I would take that as the next piece of choreography. And Heffington always said, "Live in your mistakes." If you fall to the ground, live in it. Be that mistake, be it even further than you could possibly imagine. Don't run from it. Don't try to pick up the pieces. Thoroughly enjoy your mistake. I try to teach that with dance as well.
+
+*What have been some of your most important decisions in the development of your career, in your practice? What kinds of choices stand out to you?*
+
+I have no idea. What do you mean?
+
+*Did you have moments when you had to choose to go one way or another? When you had to locate what kind of choreographer you would be?*
+
+Yeah, absolutely. The industry in LA is very complicated. You have layers and layers. You have touring dancers, you have hip-hop dancers, you have contemporary dancers. Within the contemporary scene, you have the artsy ones, you have the more normal ones, you have modern dancers which don't really have too big of a place here, because they're more in the academic world---you're going to see them more at universities.
+
+Also contemporary and modern, we kind of butt heads a little bit. Modern dancers are introverted, they're looking down. To me---I'm sorry, modern dancers, I love you, but it looks like a pillow party. There's no guts to it. Rude! 
+
+Contemporary dancers look like they're on drugs but they make eye contact with you. And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh damn!" We always joke, we show each other videos of people walking who are on acid or on meth or whatever, and we're like, "Oh, a contemporary dancer." But then we make eye contact and that's what's powerful about contemporary---we use our eyes to communicate. We use our eyes for connection. We use our eyes for direction. 
+
+I've been in Hollywood for too long. In Hollywood, as a movement director, I'm a punching bag between a photographer who wants weird and a celebrity that only knows sexy. Honestly, that's my job. I'm in the way of the lighting person. It's the weirdest job because you have this celebrity that really knows how to be sexy, but the photographer wants them to look bizarre and is trying to convince them to do this for the cover of *Vogue*. It is not the easiest thing to do.
+
+When I was auditioning as a dancer, I would go to auditions with like three to four hundred people. I would be the one in the back, slow dancing with a ghost. "Can I please leave? Like I really don't want to do this. This is not my style." They were sending me out for like *Frozen* the musical, cruise ship gigs, things that were so out of my wheelhouse, and I kept saying to my agents, "I come from Heffington, I come from Kitty McNamee, Mecca Andrews...that world of contemporary," and they said they get it. But when they were sending me out for this stuff I'm like, "Help, I'm not this dancer."
+
+So eventually I got named the "eclectic dancer," which really drove me bonkers. And then I was the "East Side dancer" which also drove me bonkers. They just keep trying to categorize you, and after being with my agency now for like at least fifteen years---I think I've been with Bloc for a super long time---they finally understand me. It also took me a very long time to be repped as a choreographer. They have a very small choreography department and a very large dance department.
+
+It wasn't until I choreographed for Katy Perry that they accepted me as a choreographer. Then things shifted. All of a sudden, now I'm treated differently. But I'm still kind of low-hanging fruit in that world because there are so many incredible choreographers in LA.
+
+This is another thing about dance which is really weird: It's one of the only art forms where your body disintegrates, but your emotional experiences accelerate. So you're at this weird crossroads where you feel "my body can't do this," but I've experienced sexual assault, or I've experienced being robbed, or I've experienced falling in love, I've experienced having a baby. As a 41-year-old dancer, I can bring that. But I can't kick my leg up high and I can't do triple pirouettes anymore. When you watch an older dancer, it's so beautiful because you're witnessing those things that they've seen. And when you watch a younger dancer, you're like, "You can do all that with your body, but you need to go through a little bit more life."
+
+I feel like now they're trying to take the art out of me. Freelancing is constantly trying to take the art out of you. They always hire you, and they're like, "We want dance, but not *dance*. We want this, but not that." Why do I have all this skill but can't utilize it properly? Lack of funding in America for the arts. 
+
+I never became a touring dancer because I was always too tall. You have to look like---you have to blend in. You can't threaten the lead singer. I've always stayed in the art world of dancing. I've made like twelve collaborations with my mother. That kind of puts me in a different category, too.
+
+I don't know about the decisions. I think I've---I mean half the time I wonder why I still do this. It's totally crazy. It's such a weird thing.
+
+*Maybe decision is not the right word for what moved you along.*
+
+Yeah, I mean, I've surrounded myself with the people who move me, and then kept those people close to me as much as I could. I think now I've gotten to a point where I'm one of the people who moves other people, so that feels really nice, you know, for people to gravitate towards me. Some of my dancers were like, "I did this show even though we weren't getting paid because you're a legend." And I'm like, "A legend?!" Okay, that's nice.
+
+But I think it's just---I don't know. I don't know how I got here. I tell people I've tried to run from dance my whole life and it's obviously my passion, because it just keeps eating me.
+
+*It seems like actually the work has grown around you. Your turn to choreography grew out of the mismatch of your body to a certain set of expectations, right? And it grew out of relationships and out of need in the context of the pandemic and scenes you found yourself in, rather than something where you're directing it with an intention or plan.*
+
+And teaching---teaching really turned me into a choreographer.
+
+*Yes, that's right. That's not what one might expect.*
+
+Teaching was huge, because all of a sudden it was just like the---what's the word I'm looking for---the accountability of having to show up with new moves and a new song. That's a lot of pressure over twenty years of having to have cutting edge music and cutting edge moves. Whether I have two people in class or 300 people in class, whether I have professional dancers in class or someone who doesn't know left from right, and they walk into mirrors all the time. I've had everything---I've had people burst into tears. I've had people throw up. We've seen it all. Teaching really helped me understand what choreography is.
+
+*To go back to that question of transmission---and tear apart my framing here if it's not right: How do you communicate those moves that you come to a class with into the bodies of the people who come to experience them and to hold them? Is it through modeling them in your body? Is it through telling them who they're becoming, what they're becoming?*
+
+No, it's modeling it in my body and working it through my body with them. There's a lot of statistics now that say dance is a cure for depression, because bodies are moving in unison together and doing the same thing. You're not just going to the gym and working out by yourself. You're in a collective room of bodies that are doing something together. You're increasing your beta endorphins. You're finding a physical and cognitive alignment in your body. You're turning your goddamn brain off. That's the trick---you have to turn your brain off.
+
+It doesn't work if your brain is on. You need to learn my language, however. So you have to keep one part of your lizard brain on, with one eye open, but you have to turn the rest of your brain off, or else you cannot absorb this information. It's the most meditative state you could possibly be in. Again, going back to Heffington teaching when that earthquake was happening---I was the only one in the class who noticed the earthquake, and he got mad at me because he said, "You're not here, Jazz." And he used to say that to me all the time. He'd go "Jazz, why didn't you take class?" I'm like, "Dude, I was just in class." He's like, "No, you were not in class. You were in the mirror. You were fixing your hair. You were not in class." I'm like, "Damn! You can see that?" He's like, "I see everything."
+
+When I teach, I'm trying to keep it open for people who don't know how to move. I also need to let them experiment. They're trying---first of all, they're in a studio. Let's just start---step one: you're in a dance studio staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. Good God! Maybe you hate your body. Maybe you love your body, but you're staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. It's totally intimidating, especially for dudes, too, because you're walking into this room full of beautiful women in leggings. There's a lot going on.
+
+So I work them out for forty-five minutes. We do cardio. We do sit-ups, we do push-ups, we do burpees, we do stretching. We blow our lips out, we scream, we do so much stuff in that forty-five minutes of fully strengthening and release. There's a lot of release. And then we work on a combo for one minute to a minute and a half of a song and I start with maybe two or three counts of eight, or the beginning of the track, and we just do it over and over and over again. We start building and building and building until, "Does everybody feel good? Can we move on?"
+
+Half the class says no. Half the class says yes. We do a little bit more, then a little bit more, then a little bit more, and then all of a sudden, you have this dance. By the time class is over that dance---you're holding onto it by the cliff's edge. You're like, "I don't have it at all. I can't wait to come next week when I can actually turn my brain off for real."
+
+When I take other people's classes I'm usually struggle city---they do five moves, and I'm like, "Yo yo, do it again." I am so bad at picking up choreography. It is so hard for me, which is weird. Being a teacher, you get into this authoritative state where you're the one telling people what to do. And then when you take other people's classes, you're like, "Oh my God! I have no idea what I'm doing." If my students saw me, they'd be like, "Who is that? She doesn't know how to dance." That's one of the reasons I love dance so much. It's impossible to master. It is always changing. Just as your body is always changing too. It is a cognitive and physical duet. 
+
+Everything is very dependent on what physical and mental state you get to after the warm-up. The warm-up is a really big part of my dance. Some people come for just the warm-up so they can get into that. Some people come for just the choreo. But if they haven't gotten through the warm-up, it's like they haven't been initiated properly and I don't really want them to just do the combo, because they can hurt themselves.
+
+*That's how they begin to turn their brains off?*
+
+The warm-up. And it's the same every time. It's super hard and you're sweating buckets, and we blow our lips out. We stretch our mouths out. We do so much in that warm-up that all of a sudden, once you're done with that, most people say my class is in two parts. They're like, "Your class almost feels like two classes, because your warm-up is almost like its own class." And then we move into the combo.
+
+And I tell people with the combos---this is the other thing about dance that's really interesting, especially when you're learning with a mirror. The mirror can be very problematic. You have to either look through the mirror or practice the "school of fish". I call it a school of fish...if the fish start moving, make sure you know the direction---you don't want to go against the stream, you're going to physically get hurt.
+
+This is another reason why having professionals and non-dancers in the same classroom is very problematic. There's etiquette and there are a lot of rules within a classroom. When you go across the floor from diagonal to diagonal, you would never reverse and go back. You're going to get hit in the face. You go to the other diagonal and you come around to the other side. Some people don't know that and I forget that people are not classically trained. I have had a lot of collisions. I forget that I have to keep telling people, and a lot of dancers get really frustrated when non-dancers are in the classroom because they don't have spatial awareness.
+
+Spatial awareness is a huge part of being a dancer---huge. If you hit another dancer in the face---oof! You have not studied. You have not studied space. You have to understand space.
+
+*What does studying space mean? Does that mean knowing those rules? Or does it mean something else?*
+
+It means knowing that if I'm gonna do this, I'm going to do that. I'm committing to that. What does that mean for you if you're standing next to me? If you'd like to run into me, I will run into you. I will hit you so hard---not on purpose. But this is my space. That's your space.
+
+You can do all you want in your space. If you want to do it in my space, I will hit you in the face. We're gonna clash. We're gonna hit. And that's cool, too---like, I'm down, I'm down for us to mix spaces. We can mix spaces, but be prepared in your body. Hold your center, push your belly button to your spine, and know that you're gonna get hit. I'm gonna get hit.
+
+It's different than martial arts, because we're trained to not hurt each other. It's a team sport that does not hurt. We're trained to lift and help each other. We have to be on that same plane. We're constantly looking out of the sides of our eyes because we have each other's backs. We're in this together. If you screw up, if you fall off the train, you could potentially knock out the whole system.
+
+It's kind of like being on a spaceship. Everybody is part of that spaceship, and we all have to contribute. If you don't know the rules of space, you're going to mess up the ride. If you trip me as a dancer, and I break my leg, you've ruined my career. You have to know the space, or you have to be prepared to take the consequences of not knowing the space.
+
+Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm making any sense.
+
+*It's so beautiful to hear you articulate this stuff.*
+
+I'm really glad to talk about this, because I have a new brain now. Second child in, you get a new brain every time you get a child. I don't even know what left and right is right now.
+
+*A lot of what you've talked about seems to be moments of turning away from traditions like ballet. What legacies, what currents do you find yourself drawing on in building your work?*
+
+I didn't major in dance at UCLA, I majored in history. I was sitting there watching bodies get blown up. I'm watching someone with no legs scoot on their ass. I'm watching violence in the body, because a lot of my students would be like, "Your movements are like a little ballerina that has no head or no arms." My moves can be very violent. I have a lot of aggression too. I need to let it out in dance.
+
+I think of the visuals that I saw as a historian. I also learned as a historian that there are no answers to things. Historians are very different than political scientists. They're not saying, "This happened because of this." They're saying, "I'm going to read everything, and I'm going to say, look at this and look at this---isn't that an interesting juxtaposition?" This concept was working its way into my choreographic brain---history and broken bodies---without me even knowing. 
+
+One of the professors at UCLA would say that dance originated from agriculture, which was really beautiful because you were thinking about people stomping and planting seeds. We don't really know---like what comes first, the chicken or the egg, dance or music? Where is dance from? What is dance? I like this kind of idea that it came from agriculture.
+
+But, again, I am a ballerina at heart, even though I've rejected ballet. My feet look like monsters---like, I've had people come up to me and ask if I'm okay, just by looking at my feet. And I'm like, "Yo dude, yes, I'm fine. I've lived with them my whole life. Appreciate it."
+
+I've also seen a lot of amazing dance. I've seen Batsheva, I've seen Marie Chouinard, I've seen Louise Lecavalier, I've seen La La La Human Steps. I've seen these companies---Netherlands Dance Theater, Crystal Pite---that have blown my mind with choreographically. You know, Pina Bausch---I have to look at it like, "Try not to take everything that they're doing! I want it all!" I allow myself to take a little bit. And when I'm really stuck, I watch videos of these dancers and these choreographers---Paul Lightfoot, is another---people who have blown me away.
+
+Let's say you're going to make pasta, right? You're putting it through this pasta machine, putting the wrong ingredient through the pasta maker. I'm going to put meat or put apples through the pasta maker, and then see how it comes out in my body. I'm looking at them on a flat screen, which is the worst way to learn choreography. Then I close my eyes. I put on a different track and I see what happens. Have I taken some of their movements? Of course. Has it come into my subconscious? Of course. Am I choreographing from my dreams? Yes. It's all mixed in there. Have I ripped from people I love? Absolutely. Oh, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker! Amazing choreographer. So it blends in. It's kinda hard to pinpoint my choreography to one thing.
+
+I don't know how to answer these questions.
+
+*You're doing it.*
+
+I'm realizing dance is so abstract, it is just---it's so bizarre. I always did tell people I dance so I don't have to speak. There's so much I can't articulate with words. I can write them down, but verbally saying them is super hard.  
+  
+With my body I can scream and whisper, sometimes at the same time. 
+
+*What do you think that other aspects of life can learn from dance? Are there lessons to draw from the way in which patterns carry through bodies?*
+
+I don't know. Keep going.
+
+*Are there lessons from dance for other kinds of worlds---people who are creating traffic patterns, people who are trying to figure out how to go to other planets, people who are trying to survive in the streets? What are the lessons from dance that carry to other parts of life?*
+
+Well, first of all, you have this body just once, and you gotta have fun with it. We all hate our bodies to a particular degree. You're in this sack---what is this thing? What does it do? It gains weight, it loses weight. It looks pretty, it looks ugly, you know---it's all these things. You have to have fun with your sack because you get that sack only once. Please have fun with your sack---step one. It gets so heady, especially the body dysmorphia among dancers. The amount of stuff we do to ourselves is horrible.
+
+In terms of what people could learn, I think it would be the spatial awareness. It has to also do with carrying yourself in a way that makes sense to you, carrying yourself in a way that you want to present. For example, if I'm gonna walk down the street, I'm holding my heart open. My back is down. I'm breathing out of my back. My rib cage is closed, my center is engaged, and I'm walking. Do you think I've ever been beat up in my life on the street? Have I ever been mugged? Hell no! People don't touch me because I'm holding my body in a way that says I understand this body. I own this body and I command this body. Would you want to hurt me? Try to---let's go.
+
+It's a matter of building a body that you're having fun with and that carries the person that you want to be. We have to walk into the world like that, or else we're screwed. Especially as women these days---there's a lot of imagery out there. There's a lot going on with social media---we could go down that rabbit hole, which would be a whole other conversation.
+
+But if you want to wear a mini skirt and you want to wear tassels on your tits, you better own your body. Same with men. If you want to wear a miniskirt and tassels on your tits, you need to own your body. Or non-binary folks or trans. Dance is about understanding your body and understanding where you have your limitations and also where you have your strengths. It is going to make us more powerful as humans walking down the street.
+
+Maybe what I was talking about with spatial awareness: You know your space. I know my space, you know your power, I know my power. If you know your power, I can know my power even better. We can power it up. But if you don't know your power and I have power, this is a problem. Let's move smoothly through this world together, eh? 
+
+I think it's about having a conversation. I talk about dance as having a conversation between your body and energy. Where does my body end? Does it end at my fingertips now? No, because the energy is shooting past and going out from there. If you see a dancer who stops their energy short, it's not good. It's not right.
+
+Taking the outline of the body and extending it, and then having a conversation---that is when you have a beautiful dance. When you bring other bodies into the mix, when you have multiple bodies, that's when things get super beautiful because you have lots of conversations. But it's also---this is something I learned with WIFE---it's also about the silence. We would stand on those boxes very, very still for a long time, for an almost awkward amount of time. There was music, but we were so silent with our bodies that you didn't know what was going to happen.
+
+All of a sudden, the first move was powerful because there had been so much space in silence. It allowed that movement to scream.

content/interviews/berjon-web_standards.md

@@ -0,0 +1,252 @@
+---
+narrator: Robin Berjon
+subject: Web standards
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-08-01
+approved: 2025-08-04
+summary: "The standards that govern the World Wide Web develop at the intersection of profit-seeking companies, nonprofit organizations, and small groups of people with rarefied expertise."
+location: "Brussels, Belgium"
+headshot: "robin_berjon.jpg"
+topics: [decentralization, open source, organizations, software, standards]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://berjon.com"
+  - text: "Social media"
+    url: "https://robin.berjon.com"
+---
+
+*How do you prefer to introduce yourself?*
+
+I'm Robin Berjon, and I generally describe myself as a technologist working on issues of governance. It's sort of fuzzy and blurry, but that's basically what I'm doing.
+
+*How did that journey begin for you, and when?*
+
+It began more or less in the mid-1990s when I was a first-year philosophy student. I got a computer to do philosophy essay writing and homework on. Instead of doing philosophy, I started doing a lot of web things. I'd seen computers before, but they never had people in them. That was immediately fascinating to me.
+
+I built a website that came second in a website competition. I got hooked on that and started making my own tiny web company. Not a family-money kind of thing, but just a tiny thing with my roommate. We basically had a computer between the two of us and started making websites for people. I would do nights, he would do days, because we only had the one computer.
+
+That collapsed within a few months because we had no idea what we were doing. But I got the bug for it and started another company in Belgium that worked significantly better. I started working more consistently in tech from then on. I started asking questions: "Hey, this HTML thing is nice, but I would like it to work differently. Who do you have to ask? How does this thing work? Where does it even come from?"
+
+There was this weird organization called the W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, where apparently people discussed these things and started agreeing on how they would work. It was complicated to observe from the outside. Back then, as someone who wasn't a paid member, you couldn't get in. You could only send feedback from the outside and maybe receive an answer within a week or two.
+
+I started getting interested in how you change the styling of things and eventually started scratching at that. In 2001, I was invited to participate in SVG---Scalable Vector Graphics, a file format. In 2002, I got a proper job where I was doing standards. Then I did a lot of standards for the following decades.
+
+*Can you say a bit about what drew you into the SVG process? What were you engaged in there?*
+
+What I liked with SVG is that it was a very powerful graphics environment. With JavaScript and all that, you could start to represent anything, from documents to games. You could use it as a rendering layer on the web.
+
+I started building SVG things as part of my job. We were still making websites for other people. I started adding SVG to projects when possible, which was way too cutting edge back then because you couldn't use it. Not enough people had the SVG capabilities on their computer. I had to constantly find customers who would be interested, so I ended up working, for instance, with the French---I don't know what it's called---the people who manage the road network at the level of France. They had these very complicated mapping requirements. They had this antique database with all kinds of weird conventions, and they wanted to bring that into a more modern world. They exported to XML and then wanted to turn that into something else. I started doing all these things around SVG.
+
+Eventually, since it was a relatively small community, the working group noticed and brought me in as an invited expert without having to pay for membership.
+
+*What is the business model for working on standards? Why is it valuable for a company---and in particular, the cases that you were starting out with---to pay someone to work on abstract rules for the whole ecosystem?*
+
+That's a perennial question, and I don't think anyone has a definitive answer, or at least not an answer that works in all contexts. For that specific company, it was a small startup in Paris. When you're small and you have a very specialized area of knowledge, you need to create markets for things. You need to create some stability to improve your credibility.
+
+What they had was a binary XML format primarily focused on optimization of transport at a very infrastructural level. The kind of customer that could adopt that thing would be a large telco or TV broadcaster---those kinds of big companies. But you're not going to get a large telco to adopt something deep in its infrastructural stack that's made by a company of twelve people in France with no proven business model.
+
+In order to solve that issue, the company was very interested in developing standards that included or referenced or made use somehow of their technology so that they would have something credible to offer these large companies. Of course, there's a flipside to that---they had to open up the technology and share it with others.
+
+It was a trade-off. If we keep everything completely proprietary, well, it's ours---and they had patents and everything that was still done a lot at the time---but then they could have no customers, so not wonderful. Or they could agree to open it up at least some and share it with others, and then get customers. That was essentially the play they made.
+
+They were also interested in figuring out avenues in which their technology could be used. Even though they were not directly working on SVG themselves, they were very interested in the potential bridging between their technology and SVG. So they allowed me to continue working on the SVG working group. When I was with that company, I made quite a few projects that used subsets of SVG in embedded devices with tiny screens and limited processing capabilities.
+
+*How did your involvement in W3C develop? This was a long-term process. How did it stick for you?*
+
+What really made it stick for me was that back then it was a fun community. I felt at the time that there were a lot of shared values. People were there from all over---a lot of people who didn't have any formal training in computer science or anything. It was very different from trying to talk to people who were old school professional programmers or people who went to engineering schools. Those tended to look down on web people at the time.
+
+In W3C, you made friends with someone, and they'd be, for instance, a history major---it was a very cobbled together, motley-crew community at the time. People were talking about building the web, and how amazing it was going to be, and all the cool things that we could do.
+
+There's also the thing that---there was this sort of whiplash thing where I was super young and I didn't come from anywhere particularly interesting. Just because I was specialized on this super specific thing, all of a sudden people were flying me to Australia and Japan to talk about my work. This tiny bit of expertise that I randomly developed immediately became weirdly relevant in ways that I absolutely hadn't anticipated. As a twenty-year-old, it's exciting---"Wait, I get to fly to Japan?"
+
+*Just to paint a picture of what is happening here: Are these conversations taking place largely in in-person meetings? Are they taking place largely on email lists or things like that? Where is this discussion occurring? Where are these dynamics unfolding?*
+
+It changed over time. If we're talking about the early 2000s, most of the conversations were on mailing lists and in chat on IRC. You would get to know what people looked like only when you finally met them, but otherwise you had no idea what they looked like. A lot of the time the groups would have a weekly or every other week, or maybe monthly---it depends---phone call. That's very different in terms of focus and difficulty compared to video calls, where you can see the person speaking. These were a grind. They were really difficult, especially if you're working internationally. Everyone has accents all over the place.
+
+The tooling was interesting in those days because W3C had better tooling than other contexts. For instance, they had their own phone bridge---a physical phone---and that was driven by a laptop that had Windows 3.1, I think, on it. The one guy at W3C who was a really good hacker had bridged it to IRC. So you could be in IRC. A lot of the time you didn't know who was speaking unless you recognized everyone's voice. It was tricky. You could ask the bot, "Who's speaking?" You could get the bot to mute or unmute people. There was a whole lot of tooling that worked that way.
+
+I think my first in-person meeting at W3C was the first meeting of that group when they decided they had sufficiently good Internet at the meeting place that they didn't need to bring a server with the email archives. Normally, for the meetings, someone would come with an actual computer that would be the email archives where the group discussions had taken place, because you need to refer to them. That's where the issues are and things like that. They would basically plug it into a local LAN, and everyone in the room could read the email archives on location.
+
+It's not like that anymore. Nowadays it's all GitHub issues and stuff like that.
+
+*How did the relationship progress between standards development and your day jobs?*
+
+I worked at that company for several years, and within that time I started chairing a working group, then a second working group, then being editor of several things. I was on the Advisory Committee of W3C. I basically said yes to every opportunity, which was not necessarily very intelligent in terms of time management, but it was so attractive, and so interesting, that I couldn't say no.
+
+Then, because I became a specialist, I was more hireable in that space. So there was this loop. The first job I got after that was with a company that wanted to build a video system where everything was standards-based. The entire environment was---the entire application was built around Mozilla Gecko. It was a fork of XULRunner, for those who remember. The entire user interface was HTML and CSS and SVG, and the data backend was RDF. The whole thing was super standards-centric. Again, building a completely different set of products with a completely different focus, but it still involved the same building blocks.
+
+After that company, I started my own consultancy, working for other companies as a standards specialist. I was usually referred to as tech strategist or something because the idea was really that you would come in and take in the business strategy that existed, and figure out how that mapped onto standards participation or more generally tech development. The web was still very confusing to many companies. Precisely for the kind of question that you asked initially---how does it make sense? What is the approach? How does it work?
+
+I did that for several years, and in part I worked for a lot of tiny startups that had often a very specific goal: "We're building this. We're trying to understand the role of standards." In those cases, twenty percent of one person is a huge investment for them. So they were figuring out, "Is it worth it if we do this? What's the most effective way of doing it?"
+
+At the other end of the spectrum, I also had massive multinational companies---Vodafone or Samsung, Canon---these really big companies. A lot of the time, they had very much the same questions.
+
+One of the things that I always remember, and that explains a lot about the power structures in standards---I remember being contracted by Samsung HQ, which is rare. They didn't bring in people from abroad to the Korean HQ very often. They brought me in, and there were all these people with very important-sounding titles, half of them from tech units and half of them from strategy.
+
+Essentially they opened by saying, "We have a problem we would like you to solve, which is that we don't think that Samsung can have any influence in web standards." This is from a company---you have to imagine, I was sitting in a part of the world that's called Samsung City, because it's a city where they have their own police force, their own supermarket. All the buildings are built by Samsung construction, they're insured by Samsung insurance. The whole thing---this is a massive William Gibson kind of futuristic massive corporation world, and then they go, "We don't think we can have influence on web standards. Can you help us, Mr. One-Person Company from nowhere?"
+
+It was true, because even though they had, I think at the time, something like an 8 percent market share with Samsung Internet Browser, they had no idea how to use that as political leverage or influence in the standards process---how to put people in the right positions, how to bring in a developer perspective. It was very much a hardware company, and hardware companies do not understand a sort of very agile, fluffy, and imprecise software world. It was baffling.
+
+The kind of process that you have at Canon, for instance---they would design chips two years in advance, and have a full specification with tests, and everything. The idea that you could just rock up there and code up a feature on the thing and just ship it---and then, oops, it's buggy, sorry we'll just fix it---was something that was outside of that sphere. Those interactions were super interesting in seeing how worlds collided there.
+
+*In these kinds of interactions, did you ever feel a sense of divided loyalty between the interests of the company that you might be working for or consulting with, and the organization---the standards themselves, the broader ecosystem?*
+
+That's interesting because I think I pretty much always managed to dodge the issue. It's an hourglass communication system. You're this tiny, very small thing, with an organization on one side and an organization on the other, and you're the entire point of contact between the two. You can sort of represent---without lying---the information from one side to the other and back.
+
+One thing that is pretty clear is you could be Samsung, and you still have no decision power over what W3C will agree to. You have influence if you play your cards right, but the whole thing---if you want to have influence, you can't be a total asshole. When something would come up that might trigger divided loyalties, I would say, "Yeah, that's very interesting. But I'm not sure I could get it adopted by the community, because that is the kind of thing that they disagree with"---without saying, "I disagree!" and without going into a group being a mercenary. You could make that representation, which wasn't lying in the sense that it was true. It's very hard---at least, it was particularly hard at a time when this process was not captured by a few big companies---to make a change without getting significant political support from multiple people, and that generally meant having to align with the values in one sense or another.
+
+*Did everyone else operate that way?*
+
+No, but it's certainly true that---and this is something I explained to my customers as a freelancer---you can't be a mercenary and be credible. What the group is interested in is not the fact that you're representing Company A, B, or C. The group is interested in your expertise as the person who's in the room. If for the first six months you work for Samsung and you're saying, "Yeah, we really need this feature," and then two weeks later, you move to Canon, and you're saying, "Oh, no screw that feature. It's a really bad idea"---your credibility is shot. So the group won't be interested in what you have to say anymore---or very occasionally, when they wonder what the companies think. But in terms of expertise, it wouldn't work. That is something I would always explain to clients initially. People understand it well. It's your expertise that is valued, and that is how you bring influence. But you can't just snap your fingers and make things happen.
+
+There is one company that did try. I didn't even start working for them, but they tried to basically get me to abandon my previous customers because they wanted an exclusive deal. They promised a lot of money and were saying, "We want you to work for us full time starting next week. We don't want to wait for the three or four months"---or however much was left on my previous contract. "We'll give you money to match or more than you would make from them to compensate, you just have to ditch them this weekend."
+
+I said no, in part because that's not how I work, and in part also because I don't want to work for people who operate that way. But also, you're talking about a tiny pool of potential customers. Even from a purely self-interested perspective, that's the kind of thing that would have shot my credibility right away.
+
+*You mentioned the sense that something has changed from this period. What years are we talking about when the standards processes you were involved in were more distributed---felt more like something that required widespread buy-in---and then walk us into the story of capture that you alluded to.*
+
+The years I'm talking about are---when did I stop consulting? I stopped consulting in 2015. It goes more or less up to then-ish. It's not like there was a sea-change moment where one day everything was fine, and the next day everything was captured. It happened gradually. I think a lot of us were frogs boiled in that water quite progressively before people started noticing. There's still people who are starting to notice today. So there's a spectrum. But in those initial years, from say 2000 to 2015, things were more balanced.
+
+Eventually, it comes down to what the enforcement mechanisms are. We're talking about what's called voluntary standards. In theory, it's standards that you would only adopt if you want to adopt them, and otherwise you can ignore them. Of course, that's never really---it's rarely really the case. But the enforcement mechanism for standards-making and standards adoption was the market. You could rely on market discipline. If most of the players have agreed on the standard and you haven't, you're just going to lose out on the market. For that to work, it's a very convenient enforcement mechanism, because you don't, as an institution, have to do any of the enforcement work. That's what always makes the market so attractive---it's just, yeah, like magic.
+
+But, of course, that assumes that there's competition. The moment competition disappears, the moment the market ceases to have any kind of disciplining power, then you lose that factor. Voluntary standards start to lose the ability to operate as shared standards.
+
+In terms of capture, it wasn't immediate, but the gradual focus on only doing the browser engine part---so really just the rectangle inside the browser chrome, and nothing else---was very much driven by that increasing power by certain players. They didn't want us to standardize search protocols, or e-commerce protocols, or advertising, or anything in the higher layer that they could see as capturable.
+
+There was a push to focus just on this, and it was always presented in terms of, "That's the specificity of the organization. That's what we're good at. That's where we can drive interoperability. Let's leave the rest to *innovation*"---which I think is always a red flag. It gradually got to this place where now it's pretty much only those standards. The only companies that have a say are the ones who have implementation power. That's mostly Google, Apple, and a tiny weeny bit of Mozilla.
+
+*Around 2015, you switched out of consulting. Was that because of the changes that were taking place? What brought about that shift for you? And where did it lead you?*
+
+No, it wasn't because of those changes. It was still early enough in the transformation that I either hadn't noticed, or it wasn't bothering me yet. But starting from 2012, mid-2012-ish, my primary customer became W3C itself. I was still formally a consultant, but during mid-2012 to 2015 I was paid in part by MIT, and in part by Keio University in Tokyo, to work as part of the W3C team editing the HTML5 standard. We had this situation in which W3C had gone down a bad direction with HTML, trying to make it all about XML. That was very unpopular with developers and browser vendors. So the browser vendors sort of forked and went to build their own HTML in the WHATWG. Then there was an attempt to bring everyone back around the same table, because that was silly. I was hired to be the W3C part of that sort of rejoining-the-people.
+
+Part of it was editing the actual spec, bringing it to completion. I think we were given a mandate to close it in two years, and it took twenty-six months, which was good, because no one believed the two years was possible. That was very aggressive. I think we had 400 issues when we started.
+
+Part of it was to be a diplomat and rejoin those two communities from the bottom up. We knew there were people who wouldn't ever get along, ever, but it felt that it was possible to drive alignment, and that actually did work. But to answer your initial question: in 2015, I was really done with that. It was a grueling process, and I was ready to work on something that was not standards at all. So I went to work for a startup, as CTO doing some product work.
+
+*As you reflect on processes that affect things we experience on the web all the time, do you see traces of those processes---and of your handiwork---in your experience of the web today? How does somebody who has been there in the room and on those lists throughout that period experience the web differently from somebody who wasn't?*
+
+There's several things. There are times I see features and I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah, I remember when we were talking about that." It's something silly, and it's not important---doesn't necessarily affect my experience of the web. But you see it in there. It often comes when, say, maybe there's a bug in a video UI thing inside the browser, and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's clearly because they didn't set the whatever-attribute correctly." I remember we talked about how that would might go wrong, the trade-offs, et cetera. So you have an extra level of understanding of what's going on. That jumps out at weird times.
+
+There is another thing where I think, more than a decade later, a sense of "Hey, we got that right." One of the hard projects that got off the ground as part of this HTML thing---the project I really relied on to bridge communities---is Web Platform Tests.
+
+Everyone hates writing tests. It's a drag. You have to go through the spec with a fine-tooth comb and find all the corner cases of any given statement, write code that matches every single thing, and then run it, and then look at what happens---the whole thing is terrible. But also when it's there, and it works, you have actual interoperability.
+
+Before the HTML thing I was doing, every specification had a separate test suite. They used different frameworks. A lot of them did it as a checkbox exercise---so the entire SVG test suite, I think, was 180 tests, or something like that, which is ridiculous. It's tiny. Groups would do it once to get approval to move forward with the standard, and then they would never touch it again, and no one would use it. So you got all these interoperability problems from lack of testing.
+
+We decided to get serious about it. I basically went and took everyone's test suite. I didn't ask permission. I took everyone's test suite, dumped them in this massive repo and started running really horrendous Perl code to replace the ad hoc frameworks everyone had, and put them all in the same kind of test framework---which some other guy had written, and it was very usable and very good. That's how we started having a unified test suite for the entire web platform.
+
+Today, I think it has two million tests or something like that. It's still really big. It's operated in production by every single large browser vendor. So any change you make to any browser will go through the test suite, and if it adds a failure, or whatever, it will notify them.
+
+I still get little sparks of excitement from that thing whenever I write a relatively complex web thing. I'm on Firefox. When I develop, I only look at Firefox, and then at the end, I usually look at other browsers. That's when you're thinking, "Oh, yeah, I've forgotten that Chrome doesn't support this or whatever." But sometimes you do it, and it just works the same everywhere.
+
+It's hard to convey just how incredibly hard it is to get a reproducible execution of something as complex as HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript, plus all those APIs---this is an insanely complex platform. The fact that you can write something complicated, and it works the same in completely independently implemented browsers, still sort of gives me a bit of goosebumps. Just by doing that, we saved---there are about twenty million web developers worldwide I think. We saved all of these people so many hours each, and they've been able to build better things for it. You still see the value in that.
+
+*Amazing. But after that process you moved on to a startup and then also, later, the New York Times. Tell us a little bit about those experiences.*
+
+The startup was very startup-y---five or six of us in a room that was probably ten feet by twelve or something like that. It was called science.ai, and the goal of the startup was to fix scholarly publishing---which, as you are well aware, we didn't succeed in doing. But the tech stack was very interesting. I still think that with more money and better strategic decisions, it could have succeeded, but it didn't.
+
+One thing that was interesting is I was running away from standards, and I managed to do only product work for about a year at that startup. Then it became very clear that we would need to do standards work for what we wanted to achieve. Because if you're building replacement document formats for scholarly publishing, and you're talking to a Wiley or Elsevier, et cetera---once again, you're not going to say, "Hey, please use this crazy little thing that these five people did." You have to document it and start standardizing it.
+
+I tried to avoid doing too much of it, so there was a strategy of doing enough to make them happy, but not a full standards project. But we used a lot of Schema.org to make sure that we were grounded in an ontology that was maintained elsewhere. Then we had this project that brought together what I called HTML vernaculars. The idea was that you could do specialized versions of HTML that would map to a specific domain. You would constrain the HTML in specific ways and also enhance it in specific ways. We constrained it to just be the kind of content that you would have in the scholarly article, which is already quite broad, and then enhance it with all these semantic annotations from Schema.org so that you could say that this figure is this type of figure, and it was authored by this person, who is different from the authors of the paper. We wrote a spec called Scholarly HTML around that. But I was still trying to stay away from standards.
+
+Then at the Times again I managed to go, I think, two or three years without doing standards work. But at some point we needed it for strategic reasons. Google was trying to change how advertising was working and doing this whole "Privacy Sandbox" stuff. The Times needed to be in that room and be in those conversations, and since I was the person doing privacy and strategy around data and tech, that fell to me.
+
+The Times was really trying to push for this world in which you had only one data controller. When someone interacts with you as a first-party website, only you as the website control the data, even if you work with other people---you're still the driver.
+
+That's why we worked on GPC, the Global Privacy Control. With the law that was emerging in California, I wrote the spec specifically for the technical signal in browsers to match the law. Because this needed to move forward and they needed someone who understood standards for that. So yeah, it tends to catch up to me. Right now, I'm in a phase where I'm really trying not to do standards. But I'm not sure how successful I'll be.
+
+*That was a case of standards as regulatory compliance. Is that something that had been a big part of your story before? Or was that something new at that point because new regulations were coming online?*
+
+It was pretty new at that point. It's not the first such thing, but it's definitely the first that I was involved, and it's still not a big thing. I think it should be a much bigger thing. I think there's huge promise in using standards processes to complement the work of regulators. But this was---and just to give you a sense for how hard it is to bring lawmakers and technologists in the same room to align on a standard---this is a one-bit standard. This is a standard for the transmission of a single bit over HTTP, which is a well-known protocol. Several years in, it is adopted but not yet ratified. So there's the whole human component of getting all these interests---the business interests and regulation---to align so that you get a standard. It is pretty challenging.
+
+*To pick up on the earlier story of capture, you mentioned that different people in the community discovered that there were frogs in boiling water at different times. Can you describe a moment or a process when you started to change your perspective on what was going on?*
+
+For me, it really was working at the New York Times that helped me realize we had a problem. Before that, if you'd asked me, I would have said, "Yeah, those Google people---I mean, clearly, they're not very good at privacy, that's not a thing they do well. But I've met a lot of them, and they mean well. They're really trying to do something, and it's complicated. I'll be the first to point out their failures and all that. But overall, it's looking pretty well."
+
+Then I got to see how those tech monopolies treat the media, including pretty powerful media companies. You'd think that the New York Times would have a say. But really what they get is fake deference. It's like the tech companies will send twenty people to the meeting to tell you you're important, but then they won't change anything. The constant arrogance of those tech monopolies---where they assume that if you work for a media organization, you don't understand technology. The people would explain very silly things. I saw that any change I was trying to make to push technologists or people in the standards world towards solutions that would work better for the media would stop moving. You could push a little bit, and then you'd feel a massive resistance.
+
+For instance, one of the things I was interested in at the Times was not doing AMP, because AMP takes your content away and publishes it on google.com instead. You no longer get data, and it's basically Google---
+
+*What does AMP stand for?*
+
+Accelerated Mobile Pages. So it's the whole idea that, because of performance and because the open web has to beat the mobile native apps, you have to give all your content to Google, who will publish it for you.
+
+*Facebook was doing that, too, right?*
+
+Yeah, so AMP was the most aggressive one by far. But yeah, Facebook had something called Facebook Instant Articles that was horrendously, badly designed. Clearly it was one person's job to figure out the format, and they had never built a format in their lives before. But Facebook didn't care. Facebook doesn't care about tech quality. They just care about shipping.
+
+Apple also has the thing that they use for Apple News, which is also not really great. None of them thought to reuse an existing thing---maybe RSS. Google was very aggressive in pushing it, though, because if you didn't do AMP, you couldn't be in the AMP carousel, which means you couldn't be at the top of the search results.
+
+They kept saying, "Oh, it doesn't help for your ranking, because it doesn't change the ranking. It just puts you more at the top." Yeah, okay, so it's not ranking except it's the only way to be in the top position. Gotcha. I could see how everything would get locked down if you tried to push back.
+
+That was one of the ways I almost went back into standards when I was at the Times. I started talking about, "Hey, how about we standardize ways of doing content aggregation such that publishers have a say about how it works, and we can make it work in a way that doesn't push everything to Google?" Everything ground to a halt. You could see that all the avenues of discussion would freeze up. I was thinking, "Okay, yeah, I know who's doing that."
+
+*After the Times, you shifted to a different kind of organization. You were starting to work with organizations that---for instance, Protocol Labs, or the IPFS Foundation---were not just businesses using standards. They're organizations that are trying to build protocols rather than the platform model that big tech companies were involved in. Could you talk a bit about that transition?*
+
+I went there because that's what I was looking for. After five years at the Times, I felt that it was not possible to move the web, either from inside standards organizations, or from significant businesses that were not themselves big tech.
+
+I didn't want to go to big tech with the hope of changing things from the inside, because I've seen too many people do that over the years, and nothing ever changes. Then you have all these people who are smart somewhere on the inside, but who keep justifying things that are less and less justifiable. They are basically frogs boiling themselves. So I didn't want to be one of those people.
+
+It wasn't easy to find a place where my skill sets would work---but at the same time not be a complete blockchain thing, and still be adjacent to this dWeb and web3 world. I really didn't want to do a five-person startup again. I didn't feel I had the energy after all that. So I landed at Protocol Labs.
+
+It was a very chaotic company, I have to say. But there was a very significant community of people who also wanted to do what I wanted to do. Even though I wouldn't say that anything that we built at that time has had massive commercial success yet, the sort of excitement and research and experimentation that happened there is starting to bring dividends today in terms of better protocols that are built on good ideas.
+
+That's a lot of what I've been focusing on at the IPFS Foundation. To give you a bit of context, IPFS was invented, I think, in 2013, 2014---ten-ish years ago. It was this way of doing content addressing. But over the years, many cooks were involved, and also it sort of worked on the principle that it needed a lot of optionality to work in different contexts. While that made it very flexible, it also made it almost very challenging to implement well, and it made it very hard to build anything on top of that you could expect interoperability from.
+
+What I've been working on---at the tail end of this crazy few years of experimentation---is, okay, how can we make these ideas more usable? A project called DASL ("dazzle") is in the process of taking this and eliminating all the options, eliminating everything that's not reliable and just picking one. Even if it's controversial, it doesn't matter. Sometimes there's no good choice. You just pick one making these tiny specs that can easily be reusable by other protocols. The AT Protocol that underlies Bluesky uses DASL under the hood for data, for CIDs---for content identifiers and for packaging.
+
+I think that there is something to the basic idea of data that can be self-certifying. You can have linked sets of content addressed data. I think it changes the kind of governance that you can build on top of the system compared to something that uses a more traditional domain name authority.
+
+*Can you explain what the goal of IPFS is? Protocol Labs is trying to build an economic layer on top of that, I know. It's an addressing scheme, but to what end?*
+
+There's so many different ways of describing it and all of them are partial truths.
+
+The first thing I always explain is that IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System, and it is neither interplanetary nor a file system. On the first part, the interplanetary part, there is a satellite in Low Earth Orbit that is conducting IPFS-related experiments. So that's as far as the interplanetarity goes. In terms of the file system, well, a file system---when you tell people you have a file system, they expect you to give them something like the Finder or whatever, a directory browser. You put a file there, and it's going to be there. If you come from another machine to the same file system because it's interplanetary, you're going to find that file, which you generally won't in IPFS.
+
+IPFS is essentially a suite of protocols to retrieve data in a content-addressed manner. So content-addressed means that the address of a piece of data is derived from its hash. So it's derived from its content. The retrieval method for that can be---it's very open-ended in IPFS. There is this thing called the IPFS Principles that actually celebrates the fact that it's open-ended. I mean, it's great that it's open-ended. But that doesn't always help people building apps.
+
+The core---the most typical way of retrieving IPFS content---is that there's this global distributed hash table, a DHT. Anyone who wants to expose data on the IPFS protocol through that network basically says, "Hey, I have this content, and here are the hashes for that content." When you connect to the distributed hash table, if you have the hash for something you want, you can use that distributed hash table in a peer-to-peer fashion, using libp2p or something to find who is actually providing that data. It could be multiple people on the network---and then you fetch it from them.
+
+*What will ordinary users be able to do with this that they can't do now?*
+
+I think it's not so much about what users can do directly, in terms of user interface. In my mind, forgetting the specificities of IPFS, but really thinking in terms of content addressing and self-certifying data, it really is about the kinds of governance systems that you can build on top of this.
+
+One way of thinking about that---I always tend to think of protocols in terms of Elinor Ostrom, ADICO, and institutional analysis, and all that. If you think of how data works in Web 2.0, for instance, where the authority for any information you have is grounded in the Domain Name System, you know it's a true thing, or it's authoritative in the sense that you got it from the horse's mouth.
+
+For instance, if we're on Twitter---the only way I can know that I'm reading a tweet from you on Twitter is by trusting that Twitter really received that from you, verified that it's from you, and then is giving me something untransformed. But technically, they could go in---you tweeted "I love cats," and they could go in and just replace "cats" with "dogs" and show that to me. You could tell me that it's not true, but authoritatively, Twitter is telling me that. That is architecturally part of the HTTP protocol. It's part of how we've built the web. Any institutional arrangement you build on top of that has to build in that trust of a specific party. It becomes this control point of power for all kinds of interactions you might want to build. That creates bottlenecks, and it increases the institutional complexity of what you're building.
+
+If you switch from that to a system that's content-addressed---where you know you're getting the right thing because you can always verify that you got the right thing---you know the data is correct intrinsically, without needing to ask anyone else. There's no other authority involved.
+
+On top of that, you can---because it's all hashed and deterministic and all self-certifying---you can also add a signature layer. If I know that you have a specific key, you can sign that content and say, "It's from me." I can then have a thing that's a hash that has the content and the signature embedded in it. I know all of these things come together. It's a real statement from you. It has its own authority. Then, because you have the content identifiers that are basically links between various things, you can have a graph.
+
+I have this thing that is content-addressed, so I know the content is correct. It's signed, and it's also referencing all these other things. I know that these references are correct, and therefore I can follow this thing and know what I'm getting without any third-party authority.
+
+Just to add a small point on top of that, in terms of the institutions that you can build: it creates a lot more flexibility. For instance, say again that we're in a social media environment, and you want to create a feed generator, and that feed generator has content from arbitrary people. Normally, I would have to trust you not to transform that content. But in this case you can't. If you transform it, the thing becomes invalid. This means that you can create your own thing, and I don't have to worry about what you're doing other than maybe I'm interested in the governance of how the content gets in. But all the other nitty-gritty of the data itself is taken care of.
+
+To my mind, what matters are the things you can build on that. It means that you switch to a system where you can have an institution over here dealing with identity, an institution over there dealing with data storage, one here that produces feeds, and another here that does search---and you don't need to integrate them. They can operate separately. A good separation of concerns makes them simpler, and they can remain trustworthy in terms of what you see. That's really the goal of these things. It's not, "Hey, you can now do crazy AI, with whatever-super-gradient-looking features." You can build a new world. That's really what I'm interested in.
+
+*How does the work of building protocols for building a new world compare to working in standards organizations with big companies? I mean, in both cases, you're trying to build a kind of rule book, but I imagine it's a very different kind of process.*
+
+It's different. But you always end up having a bunch of geeks in a discussion channel explaining technology to one another. Very quickly, you get interest from---not maybe the Googles or the Apples, but significantly larger companies start to get involved relatively quickly, because if you have something with promise, and you can demonstrate that promise, they come in.
+
+But one thing that's different is---and it might not be an actual difference, it's more like a time shift. The vibe is much closer to what it was like to do web standards in the early 2000s. We have meetings that have maybe ten people and it's super friendly. It's relatively informal. We know that we're a small group who understand these things, and that there's not many other people who understand them. It's not a point of pride, but it creates a bond. You keep having these conversations where you're thinking, "No, no, I promise you---self-certifying data is something that transforms the governance of digital---" and outside that group, those are conversations that are hard to have. Because you have to give twenty years of background and a bit of computer science about what hashes are---because you have something new that no one has explained to the world yet.
+
+It makes those meetings very nice, because you're thinking, "Oh, for the next hour, I can just kick back and just say things plainly the way they are in my brain without having to provide seven layers of explanation." It's also very interesting, because people build cool, small things that they demo to one another, which is something I haven't seen in a while. It used to be that on the web---"Hey, I made this crazy table. Look how cool it is. It's all pixelated!"
+
+For instance, there's this streaming service that is all around self-certifying data. All the video blocks are self-certified, and they create the giant Merkle tree. The whole thing is crazy from a technical level. But that guy could explain it, and he joined one of the meetings, and within two minutes, you could see he understood that everyone knew what he was talking about. His eyes lit up, and he was thinking, "Oh, baby!" He would start talking about how they have this guy who now broadcasts 24/7 streaming, and they don't know how big you can make a Merkle tree of video fragments---you really get that vibe.
+
+I really think it's a time thing. If we do it right and this is the next world, which I hope it is, at some point we're going to screw up and there'll be a new oligarchy. The question is how long can we---how slow can we make the capture process? I think by building better fundamentals in there, we can make it slower. We can enable much more democratic powers, and hopefully, instead of a twenty-year or fifteen-year path to oligarchy, we can get a two-hundred-year path to oligarchy---make it the problem for our great-great-grandchildren.
+
+*It's something to aspire to. Based on these lessons---in some respects you described what you're doing as returning to where you started and trying again---can you say a bit about the lessons you've learned? Not only for your own work, but what do you try to impart among the twenty-year-olds showing up in these spaces, and having the kind of excitement that you had when you first entered the web standards world?*
+
+I try not to pontificate at the twenty-year-olds too much, in part because they wouldn't listen anyway. But if there's something that I think has become really important in understanding how to build these systems, it is this idea that technology is politics by other means.
+
+A lot of what got us to fail in the previous iteration is we were a community that was very much a product of the 1990s. Neoliberalism---great, it works. We built these systems where---and you see that in all the "splinternet" discourse---fragmentation was always bad. You have only two levels, the global and the individual. Anything that intervenes in between is bad. It's going to slow you down, it's going to be a problem. So you build these systems such that you have that global standard for everything. You make it good because you're "ethical," and you have the "right values." Then individuals use it, and they have some choice. That's it. So we really built a system that reflects that. The current Internet governance institutions still reflect very much that mindset.
+
+If that had been on purpose---people consciously trying to build exactly that system---then, fine. I mean, I would politically disagree. But at least you could say that this was done on purpose. It wasn't. It was done by default, through lack of understanding of the mechanics involved in building this.
+
+Really, now, I'm very adamant about the idea that this is political project. What we're building is democracy. In the same way that what makes science work is democracy, the project here is a democratic project. It's a political project through and through.
+
+We have to stop seeing it as a defensive thing. There's a lot in the IPFS world that's very much about censorship resistance---the idea that you have an attacker from the outside, and you're protecting against that. But you're not proposing anything positive. I really trying to ground this in a capabilities approach, looking at what capabilities we're giving people. Again, self-certifying data gives you the capability of building something such that you can trust the data, no matter what institutional structure you put around it. The thing I would bang people on the head about is an old joke that I made many years ago: if you got into tech because you didn't like politics, now you have two problems.
+
+That is the core of it. I think people who are interested in the architecture of technology and of protocols today should take the time to familiarize themselves with subsidiarity, polycentricity---basically, how institutions work, how democracy works. It's not about voting or capture resistance. Then you could build much, much better protocols from that. That would be my lesson learned. I'm sorry it took me twenty fucking years to get to that point before I started, but you gotta start sometime.

content/interviews/mannan-diplomatic_protocols.md

@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ In protocol one has to work out all the details when you are organizing an event
 
 Once in an embassy National Day event---I will not say which embassy---this was when I was in Tashkent, the CD player suddenly stopped, guests waited for the national anthem to resume, the ambassador turned red in the face. You understand, all the dignitaries were present and the national anthem had halted because of a technical glitch. I'm sure next day the person in charge, whether it was staff or junior officer, was packing his baggage and was headed back to his capital. In Bangladesh too, once when the Prime Minister came to attend a formal program, there was a technical problem that prevented the national anthem from being played, and the next day the chief of protocol was fired. These things happen. With protocol, you have to be extraordinarily careful, you have to be calm and collected under pressure, and you have to be well-trained on how to swiftly handle a *faux pas* or unmeditated disruptions. One has to understand the enormity of any failings and one has to always be on alert. 
 
-*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail? *
+*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail?*
 
 I took interest, that's the main thing. From the very beginning I knew this is one of the most interesting jobs because you will be meeting the heads of state and government, and at least the foreign ministers. My opportunity came as a junior officer to be a guide to a visiting minister---showing him around, taking him to the market, taking him to another ministry, just accompanying him---I was very alert from the onset. And I received very glowing commendations after the visit. No matter how difficult the task was, I never said ‘no’ to anybody---I tried to manage. That is another hallmark of a diplomat, protocol instills this quality because we are entrusted to create positivity and an atmosphere of confidence. The objective has to be achieved, no matter how difficult. At the same time the process has to go smoothly, almost seem effortless. 
 

content/interviews/xavier_rodrigues-beekeeping.md

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+narrator: "Manoel Xavier Rodrigues, Glaicon Nei Ferreira de Sousa, and Dionizio Jansen"
+subject: Beekeeping
+facilitator: Júlia Martins Rodrigues
+date: 2025-01-18
+approved: 2025-04-28
+summary: "Meliponiculture—the practice of raising stingless bees—represents a vital intersection of environmental conservation, traditional knowledge, and sustainable agriculture in Brazil."
+location: "Minas Gerais, Brazil"
+topics: [ancestors, food, friendship, indigeneity, organizations, science]
+---
+
+*How do you introduce yourselves?*
+
+**Glaicon:** My name is Glaicon, I am a meliponiculturist and beekeeper. I have been working with bees for 30 years and professionally for 11 years.
+
+**Manoel:** My name is Manoel Xavier, I'm also a meliponiculturist and beekeeper, and I've been working with stingless bees for approximately 8 to 10 years.
+
+**Dionísio:** I'm Dionísio Janssen, also a meliponiculturist for 8 years. I feel responsible, along with my colleagues, for spreading this practice, given that 70% of the food that reaches our table requires our bees. For those of us living in this neotropical region, stingless bees are our main pollinators.
+
+*How is meliponiculture knowledge transmitted today, and how do you participate in this network?*
+
+**Glaicon:** When I started in meliponiculture, I saw the need to share my knowledge with others. I began studying more and building capacity. I saw the need to raise bees in a more organized way. Over time, I realized the necessity of creating a group so that more people like me could spread the idea and transform it into environmental protection. Today, our group---which has a presence throughout almost the entire country---has done good work with students who started with ten hives and now have 400 hives. Our environmental protection work has become family income, and all this was accomplished through creating a group for training new agents.
+
+*How does this group and network interact?*
+
+**Glaicon:** This network interacts through shared knowledge. We have small, medium, and large meliponiculturists who have doubts and teachings. Our information sharing enables us to build capacity for healthy meliponiculture and strong, focused environmental protection.
+
+**Manoel:** To add to that, we believe that to protect bees, we have rational management techniques that respect nature. We try to disseminate this knowledge so people can expand the number of hives and bees being raised rationally and sustainably, respecting nature.
+
+*What role does this network play in transmitting knowledge?*
+
+**Dionísio:** It's about bringing responsible, quality knowledge not only to group members, but to all people interested in species conservation, biodiversity, and especially our stingless bees.
+
+*Are these exchanges informal? What is the group's purpose and which platform do you use?*
+
+**Glaicon:** We use WhatsApp. We have a group among us that's available 24 hours a day to obtain information, management techniques, and learning---always interacting with each other and learning more each day.
+
+*So it's a space for sharing and exchanging experiences?*
+
+**Manoel:** Generally, people don't start with this as their primary source of family income. So obviously, all this is done during free time, when each person is available.
+
+*What are the criteria for participating in these groups? What rules and protocols are adopted?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Our group is very selective. We cannot address any topic that doesn't relate to meliponiculture. We keep our group well-focused on our perspective. All people there share the same idea and profile. There are people in the group who administer it, creating protocols so everyone can freely come and go with their questions and teachings.
+
+*How are conflicts addressed when disagreements arise?*
+
+**Manoel:** Conflicts always have a moderator who will calm the situation. The group administrators are responsible for this moderation and ensuring harmony in experience exchanges, question responses, or posts that some might find inappropriate for the occasion or the group's purpose.
+
+**Dionísio:** These decisions are deliberated among administrators, and before any action, we first discuss what measures to take. Whether it's excluding a member or simply making a private call to get them to retract, or if it's less serious, perhaps just a correction on the topic is enough to address the issue.
+
+*Glaicon, you're an administrator of one of these groups, correct?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes, Grupo União (Union Group).
+
+*How are these moderators chosen? Based on what criteria?*
+
+**Glaicon:** They're chosen based on their commitment to the subject. People who truly believe in environmental protection and pollinator conservation. These people are chosen carefully. They must fit the profile to provide answers to everyone present. The people in Grupo União are handpicked based on their commitment to healthy culture and environmental protection.
+
+*Do you have examples of teachings or exchanges that happened through these groups that modified your practice or bee protection?*
+
+**Manoel:** May I share an example? Our main concern is: how do we save bees from extinction? By multiplying hives. Often, people go and extract a hive from nature thinking they're helping, but they're actually causing harm. One method we found for hive multiplication is division. You take a box, like this yellow *uruçu*, and divide that hive into two. Previously, we would take the daughter or mother box and move it to a distant location for division, to prevent the forager bees from the separated box from returning to the original location, leaving the other uninhabited. A great teaching we learned in the group is that we can divide the hive by placing the mother box and daughter box side by side. The forager bees will find each other and divide between the two boxes. We quickly have two hives. This is knowledge we acquired in our group.
+
+*What do you understand as protocol?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I understand protocol as an action. My protocol today, which directed me to reach my current state, was my daily training, learning from friends, and resolving consistent doubts. Starting to work with facts and forgetting assumptions. After I began studying Paulo Nogueira Neto, whom we lost two years ago and who is considered by the UN as one of the world's greatest biologists---he studied and taught about stingless bees at USP in São Paulo for 65 years. I’ve built capacity and directed myself with the protocol of learning from USP, from Paulo Nogueira Neto. Today I can teach what is truly factual to all people. I have students who started with ten hives and now have 400. Meliponiculture has become family income for them.
+
+*Beyond this knowledge from the University of São Paulo, how did your journey with other communities happen? In other networks and groups?*
+
+**Glaicon:** What happened during my journey was the opportunity to know different types of places, like indigenous villages and large companies involved in extractivism. We managed to be present in various university courses, participating in university theses in anthropology and agroecology, which somehow built our capacity and taught us, enabling us to disseminate this wonderful idea of environmental protection and meliponiculture.
+
+*Could you tell us more about the indigenous communities?*
+
+**Glaicon:** The indigenous communities I work with today, in Espírito Santo and Bahia, have undergone significant cultural changes and no longer live as they did before. But they still carry in their veins, in their blood, love for nature. They taught me a lot about dividing hives and caring for bees, and by caring for the village and community, I learned much from them.
+
+*Did you visit these villages?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I visited them and we're still friends today.
+
+*Did they also teach you some of these techniques?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I learned much more than I taught them.
+
+*Today, how do you transmit this knowledge acquired from various sources?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I’ve built capacity so I wouldn't speak from my personal perspective. I teach everything scientifically. Taken from books by great biologists, from universities, from studies. I teach what has been thoroughly studied. I'm very careful to limit myself when teaching, to ensure I'm doing what has been extensively studied.
+
+*And you, Manoel, your path was different. How was this learning process?*
+
+**Manoel:** My learning process---I used to work more with stinging bees, which are exotic in Brazil. I had my first contact with a cousin's meliponary. I was enchanted by the bees and ended up joining Grupo União, where I gradually acquired knowledge about each species and how to manage each species, the type of box, which box is most suitable, the dimensions of each box, the type of division, the type of hive modification, how they're fed, what type of flowers they prefer. Gradually, we solidify our knowledge. With this knowledge, we can share this information and disseminate this knowledge to other people interested in bees and nature in general.
+
+**Dionísio:** We also have in Brazil a federal institution that's over 100 years old, INPA---the National Institute for Amazon Research---where there's work with these pollinators involving biologists from Asia, Europe, and South America. As a result, they taught us much about raising these pollinators. This greatly facilitated our work in the beginning. To this day, we share the idea of raising our bees with boxes developed by this federal agency, INPA.
+
+*After building this knowledge over the years, learning from scientific sources and indigenous sources, what protocol was created to transmit and disseminate this knowledge through networks?*
+
+**Manoel:** The protocols are actually rules we created to allow the group to be homogeneous and have a consistent form of knowledge transmission, always focused on the group's objective. We use the União meliponary groups to transmit what we know, as new people are always arriving. Sometimes, knowledge that's basic to us is fundamental for them to start from the beginning---learning in a guided process to practice sustainable stingless bee raising.
+
+*Why this concern with transmitting meliponiculture knowledge?*
+
+**Dionísio:** We feel obligated, so to speak, to be facilitators of this process. Why? To have the opportunity to share with people the importance of maintaining this biodiversity, keeping bee species alive that, as I said at the beginning, are responsible for bringing food to our tables. Most people don't know about this potential or importance that bees have for our lives.
+
+*How is leadership in this group? Is it individual or collective leadership? Why did it happen this way? How have these dynamics evolved?*
+
+**Glaicon:** In the beginning, it was practically the founder---me. Over time, I saw the need to let others also become administrators based on each person's capacity and effort. The group grew wings and evolved very satisfactorily. We became a group, and today, as Manoel emphasized, new people arrive daily, which for us is sometimes common---those arriving need that information.
+
+*The group plays a fundamental role in training new meliponiculturists.*
+
+**Manoel:** Yes, largely due to knowledge mastery. Sometimes a person has knowledge mastery but has difficulty transmitting it. But just by showing in the group, making a little video of how their hive is doing, what management they're doing, they're teaching a lot without even needing to speak sometimes. We perceive that their management and mastery is captured and perceived by group members, and they manage to transmit this knowledge.
+
+**Dionísio:** Another thing I find relevant is this information exchange, because each creator's objective, each bee multiplier, can be different. You might have bees for a collection, for distraction, therapeutic treatment, or to have healthy foods of the best quality through these bee products. This is very important to highlight because these are different objectives within the same group that need this knowledge exchange for growth in each area where a person chooses to engage.
+
+**Glaicon:** Something very interesting is that humanity---the first human communities, the first peoples---already directed themselves toward copying bees. If you go to Sumeria, back to Egypt, you'll discover that bees are present in all ancient peoples. This is scientifically proven. Communities were formed because they had a king, guards, foragers---all copying a bee hive. This is a structure humanity has been trying to copy from bees. It's very important today that we emphasize this magical bee creation, this bee's influence on human life---not just for the entire planet, but especially on human life and organization.
+
+**Manoel:** It's also important to highlight that this group enables us to better know the bees. Sometimes we're valuing only the bee, concerned with environmental and preservation issues, but we need to explore each bee type's potential. We learn about the diverse types of honey they provide, diverse types of propolis. Friend Dionísio, for example, just taught me that yellow *Mandaguari* propolis is wonderful propolis. Could you explore *Samburá* a bit for us, please?
+
+**Dionísio:** *Samburá,* which few people know about, is pollen produced by stingless bees. It's a food classified today as one of the world's best, so much so that it's the food source for future bees. This *Samburá* is nothing more than pollen enzymatically processed by bees and deposited in pots within colonies. Besides this, we also have honey and propolis extract---all wonderful foods that humans should consume periodically. None of this knowledge would be possible if we didn't have a tool like our group to transmit this knowledge to each other. It's no use researching this and keeping it within a university, in books, if it's not disseminated to the population, to creators who often have little information and limited access to books and universities. This is the great importance of having a tool like this group, plus we make excellent friends.
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes, the group is focused with direction as Dionísio just mentioned---honey, an energetic food that bees produce through sucrose, and stingless bees through fructose. Then we have pollen, which is the male gamete of all vegetation in our biomes. It's the most relevant protein source in nutrition, not only human but animal. We also have propolis, which is extracted with antifungal, antibacterial, antibiotic enzymes that when consumed by humans, help us elevate our physical condition and significantly increase our immunity. The group is ready and able to do work not only in environmental preservation, but as Manoel said, we learn a lot from our União group, studying meliponiculture and bees.
+
+**Manoel:** And their products too.
+
+*You mentioned there was evolution---it began with individual leadership, then moved to collective leadership. How did these community rules and protocols evolve? What were the inspirational models and lessons learned?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Actually, it's nothing more than our own learning from studying meliponiculture. What was created was cutting out everything that doesn't relate to meliponiculture. As things appeared, we created a protocol to maintain our focus on what represents the entire group's profile. That's how rules emerged, because we didn't know various types of problems that could arise. When they came, we created the protocol---the need to direct everyone toward healthy meliponiculture.
+
+**Manoel:** These protocols are important because there are many beginner, adventurous people who want to enter meliponiculture but sometimes don't understand there are rules. For example, box types. We talk a lot about rational use, rational creation. What is this? You have a box for each bee type, with adequate dimensions, and adequate dimensions for each hive size. Sometimes people don't know and put a tiny bee in a very large box. It goes well, but come winter, during the rainy period, it will weaken and that hive will die. We must guide people to follow these rules to ensure meliponiculture continues progressing as it is.
+
+**Glaicon:** What Manoel is saying is very interesting because each bee type has a specific management approach. Bees come in various sizes with different characteristics from the Apidae group. The Apidae group develops in two different segments: trigonines and meliponines. Trigonines divide by royal cells, and meliponines by cells. Understanding this bee subdivision and each specimen's pollination capacity, how they live, how they need to be treated so we can achieve comfortable meliponaries---these are fundamental ideas we share in our group for responsible, focused meliponiculture.
+
+*What other examples of rules govern the group, for instance, regarding commercial use and informal exchanges?*
+
+**Dionísio:** These rules are well-defined. In our main group, commercialization or advertising of products or anything commercial is not permitted. It's exclusively for information exchange and clarifying doubts. Commerce is prohibited in this group.
+
+*How do you attract new members and participants? How do you search for new meliponiculturists?*
+
+**Glaicon:** We believe our group would be and is much stronger when it has concentrated, focused people. Having large numbers of participants can sometimes take us off our trajectory. When we receive a request from an administrator to add a new member, we first call them privately and ask where they are in meliponiculture, what their perspective is. We study the person. If administrators think they're suitable for the group, we admit a new participant.
+
+*What are your expectations for improving and evolving this protocol, knowledge transmission, and group interactions? What lessons have you extracted from this process that you plan to improve over time?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Each person teaches us the way. Daily work, management, and knowledge create new situations where the group finds itself in a better place each day, with more knowledge.
+
+**Manoel:** Correct, because this is very dynamic---we can't leave fixed rules. These protocols can mature according to group dynamics, with new people entering and the needs of each moment. The world is in transition, so we can't stand still. We must edit rules daily for each situation.
+
+**Glaicon:** That's a beautiful statement, because if we observe, when we started the group, many management practices were very common that we don't use today because they've been modified. We have to change rules to accompany this.
+
+*How did these modifications happen through these exchanges?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly as I said---observing each other, establishing management rules, knowledge, observations. I recently went to Bahia and saw a tree there. I had the opportunity and was dazzled by such grandeur, such beautiful things. I observed the flower clusters of this tree, a schefflera, loaded with pollinators---wasps, butterflies, bees. I couldn't miss the opportunity to share this new discovery throughout Brazil---this find in Abrolhos, on the Bahian continent, 70 kilometers away. This is how we form and strengthen ourselves, and the protocol always receives new directions and forms, creating a strong group. Grupo União today is a strong group.
+
+**Manoel:** We need protocols not to be unpleasant or authoritarian, but because more people are participating---people need to know the rules to continue preserving group harmony.
+
+**Dionísio:** Exactly. To maintain focus on what really matters to the group.
+
+*Is environmental education focused exclusively on bees?*
+
+**Glaicon:** No. Bees are inserted in an environment where everything is connected. For example, reforestation. Bees are very responsible because by pollinating, they don't let any type of native forest in any biome go extinct. It's fundamental to know that bees aren't only directed toward producing honey, but maintaining native biomes strong, healthy, and natural. Consequently, our springs will be suitable, flowing water, because where there's native forest, there are springs. Bees are somehow connected to springs, mangroves, seas, lakes, lagoons, dams, rivers---our entire water chain. Most interestingly, the union of this reforestation with protection of our water sources results in purer, better air and a healthy planet. This is the meliponiculturist's greatest objective---maintaining all this influence that bees give us and that keeps us alive.
+
+**Dionísio:** It's interesting to note that because we know bees, we need to know much about what they feed on. Starting from this premise, the biggest discussion in groups I've observed lately, and it's always been this way, is the type of vegetation they visit, the type of flower they like, the type of tree, the type of resin they need. We end up discussing this a lot. Naturally, everyone will want to have near them the type of vegetation, flower, tree, plant. So we are vegetation multipliers.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. We are reforesters, just like bees. We must always think that before a bee, you must have a tree, a plant that produces food for these bees. Consequently, a producer of food for our table, for all world inhabitants. A concept our group in Juiz de Fora talks about, which I find beautiful and old: "Bee doesn't do harm, bee makes honey."
+
+*Could you give an example?*
+
+**Manoel:** Following this line of reasoning, I could mention that I have a farm in Leopoldina, in Piacatuba, and we're always concerned with plants that will improve bee nutrition. We're very concerned there with increasing basil, basil plantations, coffee vine, clove vine, and various other trees and plants that will support these bees' nutrition.
+
+**Glaicon:** What Manoel is saying is so interesting---some trees are very relevant compared to others regarding melliferous pastures. For example, *pitanga*. Our meliponine bees are ready to fly up to 120 meters high, so they don't forage far. There are smaller bees, but when it comes to low trees that have great relevance in food supply---pollen and nectar---bees don't waste time. Among these we have *pitanga* and *jabuticaba*. As Manoel just explained, this is how we try to facilitate, besides feeding and bringing healthy fruit to our tables, feeding our hives. We need great plant variety, so we can't have monoculture---we need diverse plant types to serve diverse bee types, according to region and time of year. Some flowers are very abundant but have very small flowering cycles.
+
+This is very interesting because we have a time when flowers bloom abundantly---spring, as everyone knows. So hives will experience great food discomfort in autumn and winter. Therefore, we stay alert and seek to improve our melliferous pastures so that during this off-season for bee feeding, we're involving trees in our biomes that will feed not only bees but mammals, reptiles, birds, etc., because it's a food chain.
+
+**Manoel:** Just one observation---notice that all the plants mentioned here, besides producing food, some spices, other fruits, are also medicinal herbs that serve to treat health. And here comes production. In the same plant, you have three or four food sources. You have pollen, nectar, resin, and leaves that often serve as spices and other things.
+
+**Dionísio:** I think it's also good to highlight that ornamental plants don't produce food for any type of pollinator. They're not angiosperms. So when we're inserting ornamental plants in our gardens, we're not collaborating with melliferous pastures. Many people don't know this information.
+
+*Besides exchanges made in the group through the internet, which connect people from across the country, what other channels are used to propagate this information?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I'm a small meliponiculturist. I've taken on the condition of meliponiculture, but I recognize I have a very small public reach. Sometimes, for example, I know I'm in relevant groups in Peru. They love my posts and ask me to post more. I see that we're somehow being facilitators in Peru, Argentina, here in South America. There are other countries where some of our colleagues are more present. But I see our work as a whole today, with my friends, as great progress, because some years ago, people killed bees. Today, there's understanding because our work is showing results. Dionísio, for example, Dr. Dionísio, has a completely different professional segment. Today, within his professional condition, he's clearly promoting and teaching meliponiculture and environmental preservation. This is very nice---bees are going into law, health, entertainment, various different fields, always bringing life, health, well-being.
+
+**Dionísio:** And complementing, another way we disseminate this is through congresses and meetings we organize. Now, for example, we're organizing the monthly meeting of meliponiculturists in Juiz de Fora. This word-of-mouth is still fundamental for knowledge dissemination. It attracts many new meliponiculturists, many new people, many curious people who today or tomorrow will be great meliponiculturists, great guardians of bee propagation and environmental conservation.
+
+**Manoel:** I'd add that as a form of knowledge dissemination, we're always invited to public events. We go to schools, squares, where there are larger crowds. We can explain and demonstrate what stingless bees are and the benefits they bring.
+
+**Glaicon:** I work in two municipal schools as a volunteer. I work with science teachers because state schools have an educational program where science teachers must execute field classes. This isn't possible today due to lack of training. So what has been my work in these schools with students from first to ninth grade? I work with their teachers teaching this biological and morphological part of bees. They complete the educational cycle that is the field science class that the State needs today, requests, but isn't being done. It's a very nice legal project. There's also demand for bee presentations at agricultural exhibitions, agribusiness events. You yourself participated and collaborated with our rich region here, Leopoldina, where Manoel went and did exhibition work with bees and honey. It was very interesting and very nice work.
+
+*What is your vision for the group's future?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I have an optimistic vision. I'm a person who always thinks we can be better, so I didn't create this group just for it to end one day. I created it so it could take flight and reach horizons, reach as many people as possible, and the result would be at minimum the satisfaction of living with health, with freedom for our children, grandchildren, all inhabitants, our descendants who come forward, to have a better world, a healthier world, something really nice. I don't want our group to end. To fix this information, I'd cite the case of our friend PPP, who must be 93 years old, working with stingless bees for 40, 50 years. If you asked him 50 years ago, today you'd have the answer that his own self-motivation and enchantment with bees kept him going. Even he is a reference for us. I think the group's future objective is that we don't pass through here leaving only peace. We must make our contribution to improving the world, the planet, and the population in general. The group becomes so strong that when my friends call me privately or say something in the group, I stay quiet because I want to listen---it seems like I'm going to learn something more. So our desire is always to continue, improve. This is very nice and true. The meliponiculturist has a mission in my view---the mission of not letting some pollinators, these wonderful insects, go extinct. Isn't that right, Manoel? This bee here is a capixaba bee from Espírito Santo that is extremely endangered, on the first extinction list.
+
+**Dionísio:** Does it only exist in Espírito Santo?
+
+**Glaicon:** Only in Espírito Santo. It's not known as *Capixaba* anywhere else---that's why it's called *Uruçu Capixaba*. What's interesting is highlighting what led this bee to extinction. The invasion of mangroves, mountains, monoculture, condominiums, deforestation, industry---industry caused this bee to become extinct. Today, we have this bee in the south of the country, in the mountains of Petrópolis and Teresópolis, because this bee only survives 700 meters above sea level. Certainly, Paulo Nogueira Neto wasn't wrong. If Espírito Santo today needs pure *Capixaba*, we can send them some. Because the meliponiculturist had the responsibility to treat this pollinator with love to prevent extinction. So we're going to see this *Capixaba Uruçu* hive now.
+
+**Dionísio:** The yellow *Uruçu* is a bee that is truly endangered and continues to be endangered. We no longer find it in nature.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. It builds its nests, every 3 kilometers on average. It flies 4. Today we have only 200 hives. I believe that registered in the last 3 years, I multiplied about 4 thousand specimens that were sent to other meliponaries that today have 300, 200 hives. So it's a bee that is far from extinction but still endangered because it's not present in Atlantic forests.
+
+**Dionísio:** And remembering that this bee is from our Atlantic forest.
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes. Can't forget to highlight. The yellow *Uruçu* bee divides into 11 types of yellow uruçu. The one from our Atlantic forest is the mondore, which is the bugia---that's the popular name. So we're going to open the box here for people to see.
+
+**Dionísio:** This bee looks like gold, doesn't it?
+
+**Glaicon:** It looks like gold. Look how beautiful. It has the color of the Atlantic forest howler monkey, so it has the popular name *Bugia* bee. Taking advantage of this connection, these here are the resins, right?
+
+**Dionísio:** These are geopropolis used to make propolis extract.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. Which protects the hive from fungi, bacteria.
+
+**Dionísio:** Yes. And we talked so much about *samburá* and honey---the honey of stingless bees is stored in these pots, called *samburá*. Here there are pots with samburá and pots with honey, and extraction is totally different from traditional apiculture.

content/interviews/zayner-biohacking.md

@@ -0,0 +1,264 @@
+---
+narrator:  Josette Adeline Zayner
+subject: Biohacking
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-07-30
+approved: 2025-07-30
+summary: "How hacking computers led to hacking biological systems, including her own body."
+location: "Austin, TX"
+headshot: "josette_zayner.jpg"
+topics: [art, gender, health, science, software]
+links:
+  - text: "Biohack the Planet newsletter"
+    url: "https://amateurgods.substack.com/"
+  - text: "The Embryo Corporation"
+    url: "https://building.life/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+Oh, I hate when people---my name is Josie Zayner. I have a PhD from the University of Chicago in biophysics, and I'm CEO of two biotech companies simultaneously. I know. Long story.
+
+*Let's get into that story. How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start?*
+
+I grew up on a tiny farm in Indiana. It wasn't really a farm---I think we just called it a farm because we were so poor and wanted to pretend life was better than it was. We had chickens that we collected eggs from, some goats, dogs. I grew up in rural America in pretty bad poverty.
+
+This was in the eighties, and we actually drank dehydrated milk. I don't know if most people here even know that's a thing. The people I know who know about dehydrated milk come from some third world country. We were really poor.
+
+My mom was divorced at a young age from my biological father, who was violent. Not a lot of good things happened there. My early life was probably pretty foundational for who I am today. I have three brothers, raised by a single mother who had to work all the time. We had no money, so you had to learn to be self-sufficient pretty quick and pretty early. If you needed something, you had to figure out how to get it yourself, because you couldn't ask my mom for money or help.
+
+When I was about eight, nine, or ten, I moved to the Chicago suburbs to live with my grandparents. My grandparents really raised me from then into my teens. I kind of take after my grandma---she taught me how to cook Italian food, and I like to cook Italian food.
+
+I wasn't good in school at all. I did terribly in high school---almost failed out. It wasn't that I was bad at school, I'm just not good at imposed structure. That's just the way I am to this day. I don't like imposed structure, and it's kind of made me who I am, stemming from needing to take care of myself and needing to decide what's best for me.
+
+I was arrested twice before the age of eighteen, which is pretty crazy considering where I am today. I don't know many people who are founders and have raised millions of dollars, or have PhDs, who have been arrested, much less twice. Very non-traditional upbringing compared to most people in my social class.
+
+*When did you finally start to engage? What was the bridge between getting arrested, not doing well in school, and then going to the University of Chicago?*
+
+It was computers. Do you remember "The Conscience of a Hacker," the hacker manifesto?
+
+*I teach it in one of my courses.*
+
+There's this line: "like heroin through an addict's veins." That's how computers were to me. My mom did this job for somebody, and they couldn't afford to pay her, so they gave her an old computer. I experienced being online from my friend who lived across the street, so I was like, "I gotta get my hands on a modem."
+
+I forget exactly how, but maybe I saved up money because I started working---once I was old enough to work, I was at the grocery store bagging groceries. I bought a modem, and it was just like, "Oh shit, this world is crazy. I love it." Got really into computers, into computer programming. Got a job at Motorola doing computer programming when I was eighteen. I was making more money than my mom, which was wild.
+
+I was really enthralled with that world. But then, in the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble burst, and Motorola laid off a bunch of people, including me. I was just like, "Is this really what I want to do with my life?" I was working for this giant, corporate company. I remember working on the Nextel cell phone network, and one weekend we were updating subscriber databases. I uploaded the wrong database or something, so maybe a hundred thousand people were without cell phone service for the weekend.
+
+When that happened, I remember the communication between everybody wasn't about how these people didn't have cell phone service---it was about how much money we lost. I was like, "Is that all I am here? Just a way to make other people more money?" I didn't want to be that. I wanted to work on something bigger.
+
+I decided to go into biology. The natural world has always fascinated me---it should fascinate everybody because it's so wild, but it really fascinated me. I did an undergrad degree in plant biology. I was always enthralled by the idea of plants starting out as a seed, sucking molecules from the soil, eating CO2 and sunlight, and growing. I was like, "How do you do that? That's crazy. I want to understand how you do that."
+
+I'm a reductionist. With computers, I wanted to control things on the lowest level---I wanted to program in assembly and move around all the memory, do different stuff so I had complete control. It's kind of the same way with living things.
+
+*Did that experience with computers leave you approaching biology differently than other people you studied with?*
+
+I think so. I saw it more as---especially in Western culture, we have this view of life as this sacred thing, and I'm not saying it's not at all true. But I approached it more from the idea that it was like a computer, like an operating system, something to be manipulated and programmed. From when I started biology to when I started my first company, I always approached it with that same hacker mindset. It was like, "How do I hack this stuff?" and not, "How do I write scientific papers about this stuff?"
+
+*How did you begin learning biology? What kinds of protocols became part of that practice?*
+
+In undergrad, I was poor enough that the government would pay people at the university to pay me---this work-study program. Basically, find a job and we'll give them money to pay you. So I would go work in labs---scientific labs. All plant biology labs in undergrad.
+
+That really got me excited about research, because undergrad is just learning, you're not necessarily doing. I wanted more of the doing. Once I started doing research, I was like, "Oh, this shit is fun." You can mess around with things and go crazy---if you have a crazy idea, you could just try it out.
+
+After my undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, so I applied for some master's degree programs. I had two: one where I went to undergrad, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which was like a six-hour train ride from Chicago where my family lived, and Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, because they had good rock climbing and I was really into rock climbing. I had a couple of friends who lived out there and ended up going to Appalachian State.
+
+*How did the organizational life in research labs compare to working for Motorola?*
+
+I definitely could have more autonomy. I wanted to find somebody who would just let me rip, and that's what I did. I found this person working on understanding the molecular mechanisms of cholera---the bacteria that causes the disease cholera.
+
+She also got pregnant and gave birth within the first six months I was there, so it was literally just me in the lab. I think there was nobody else. She would stop by once a week to have a meeting with me, but otherwise it was just me doing whatever I wanted. I'm somebody who can get super obsessive. I just dug in and went hard and made a lot of progress, had a lot of success---won all these grants and awards.
+
+At Appalachian State, it was a small school, so they didn't pay us big stipends---we had no money. I would work all night and then go to the bar right next to campus and drink dollar beers on dollar beer night. Another living situation with no money in some shitty-ass apartment, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
+
+*Were there particular moments where you found yourself able to achieve something or manipulate something in a way that you experienced with computers early on?*
+
+It was different in that science is this very physical thing. You're using your whole body. Computers is like---typing. It really turned into a form of self-expression to me. I could channel my anger or happiness and express that through my work. Sometimes in labs when experiments would fail, I would throw something across the room. Sometimes when things would succeed, I would scream. It became this art form for me that computers never could be necessarily. They couldn't reach this level because it was all in the digital world. Even when I did some electrical engineering work, building electronics, I felt like it was all in this digital world. Science became more of a real thing for me.
+
+*How did you move toward the PhD?*
+
+For my PhD, I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to break it down even further and be really reductionist. I wanted to get into biophysics---to be able to watch these atoms move and manipulate them.
+
+I applied for biophysics PhD programs all across the US and got accepted to University of Chicago, which was the only school I applied for in Chicago. I went because it was probably the best school I got accepted to, it was near my family. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Here's some kid who came from shit, and you get a PhD from University of Chicago. Immediately you start to enter---you're no longer lower-class anymore. Even just the stipend they pay you every year as a graduate student is a reasonable amount of money.
+
+All the people I was around had summer homes and lake houses that we'd go to. I was definitely one of the very few kids who came from poverty. It was one of the moments of my life I'm most proud of---being accepted there.
+
+When I went there, I knew what I wanted to do. I found the nerdiest, smartest professor who tried to work on things in the most reductionist way and worked with them to get a PhD. It was such an amazing lab. A lot of people from that lab have gone on to success. One of the people in my cohort, John Jumper, just won a Nobel Prize. It was a really impressive group of people.
+
+The knowledge I gained there set me up for the rest of my life. It was like a firehose of knowledge and information that I absorbed like a sponge. I spent extra time studying outside of the lab and classes. Nowadays, there's so much shit in my brain that I try to anti-learn. I don't need to learn anything more for the rest of my life.
+
+I had some amazing mentors there who really spent time with me, like Tobin Sosnick. Another professor doing biophysics research would invite me over to his office every other day. He would have fancy whiskey or alcohol that somebody gave him for giving a talk, and we'd sit there for two or three hours sipping whiskey, just talking about science. He would close the shades on his office door window. Amazing mentors there.
+
+But I also realized that academia wasn't the place for me. There were these guidelines of the way you're supposed to do things. It happened twice. 
+
+Once was when I published my first paper---I wrote the whole thing, made all the figures. I think maybe it was just me and my PI as the only two authors on a massive body of work. It was like a work of art. I put my soul into that paper. If somebody could read it and actually understand it on a truly deep level, it is like a work of art. Some of the experiments I did were so novel and wild---a breadth of experiments, from computational stuff to complex NMR measurements. I was super proud of it.
+
+We sent it off to the journal. Initially, they were really excited about it---do some revisions. We did the revisions and they came back, and they're like, "We're not interested in it anymore. Sorry." I was like, "What do you mean you're not interested anymore? What the fuck?" Even my PI wrote a strongly worded email to them.
+
+I was just like, this system---the scientific system---is not about the beauty. It's not about the cleverness, like that hacker world where it's all about the cleverness of stuff and the beauty of what you do.
+
+*How did you find balance between that rigor and regimentation of a lab environment and the art?*
+
+My PI just let me do whatever the fuck I wanted. "Do your shit, go off, go off, homie," and I did. I published four first-author papers, won the best thesis award at the university. I did really well, even by academic standards.
+
+But after that paper I got really jaded, and I decided to start fucking around. I built this musical instrument. I was really interested, because I was studying this protein and looking at the atoms move in this NMR machine. I was so obsessed with it---I had such a strong relationship with this protein molecule. I could tell you where all the amino acids were and where they pointed, what it looks like, how they vibrated. I knew way too much from spending so many hours and days with it. I didn't take days off ever, maybe one or two weeks off around Christmas, and I worked every weekend.
+
+I wanted other people to be able to experience this. I was like, "How can I do that?" Because it was this light-reactive protein that followed this photo cycle, I was like, "What if I could take that cycle, that exponential decay of function, and map that to a musical note?" Then people could kind of experience the life of this molecule and understand it, maybe even a little bit, because I'm taking it from the molecular world to the macro world.
+
+I built this musical instrument. I would be in the lab all day, come home at night, be working on this, and literally just fall asleep. I bought this wooden lap bench off Craigslist for a hundred bucks---person hand-built it and delivered it. I still have it actually, and it's a piece of shit, but it was a hundred bucks.
+
+I had never built a musical instrument. I had no idea about music or sound, never integrated sound with electronics. It was an impossible task to me---how do you even begin doing this? But slowly, over time, I built more and more, got better and better, figured it out more and more.
+
+We used to have this thing called Graduate Student Seminar---just graduate students could go. They had beer and pizza, every Friday. I went and played this musical instrument. Everybody had no idea how to respond and kind of laughed and stared at me.
+
+It was wild, and then it was even more wild because _Scientific American_ and _The Verge_ wanted to write news articles about this shit. I remember talking to my PI in the lab, and they were like, "Oh no, you can't put this in your thesis or anything," but I'm starting to catch recognition from these outside publications.
+
+To me, this has scientific relevance and interest in many different ways. But the fact that I can't include it with my thesis or can't contribute it to my scientific body of work seems silly and dumb. That was kind of the final thing with me. I was like, "I'm done with academia. I'm on this trajectory that I think is totally different, and I want to embrace that."
+
+*Where did you go next?*
+
+I went to this conference wearing a shirt---because in graduate school I was known to be a curmudgeon---that said, "I need my space," and it had a NASA logo on it. At this conference, somebody was like, "There's a guy from NASA here. You should talk to them." This person from NASA talked to me and they're like, "You should apply for this NPP fellowship. It's this prestigious fellowship---you basically write a proposal for research, NASA funds you, and you get to do whatever you want." It was in Silicon Valley.
+
+I wrote this proposal, and it was so weird. I'm coming from this world of watching atoms move in the basement of the library---the NMR room was in the absolute basement underneath the library---to writing a proposal about helping astronauts on Mars do this shit. It was so surreal, and then they accepted it.
+
+This was one of the first times where they're just like, "Here's a bunch of money to move out here, you get a nice salary, amazing health insurance." I lived in a hotel on base for the first two weeks I was there till I found a place to live. I wound up at NASA with a fellowship, which was pretty wild. I got to work on something cool and crazy, and I didn't have to deal with all the fucking academic bullshit.
+
+I worked on engineering bacteria to degrade plastic or degrade human waste so they could reuse it. It was pretty fun. I had two interns who worked with me, and we'd go to all these trash dumps to bio-prospect. I'd just be like, "I'm from NASA. Give me samples of your trash." People would be like, "Okay." It's so funny because you got this official NASA badge, and people just do whatever you say.
+
+*Did you find your way into startups through being in the Bay Area?*
+
+NASA was also really bureaucratic, and nobody worked---seriously, nobody worked. My boss came in one day a month. I was coming from academia where I was working my ass off, working on weekends and everything. So I come into NASA, I'm working on weekends, and they start telling me, "Don't come in on weekends---it's not a good look." I'm just like, "What? Why? What's going on here?" I was this naive person who doesn't understand social dynamics and bureaucracy.
+
+I remember one time the fire alarm went off in the building---it's this six-floor building that's really cool, pockmarked to look like the moon from all the micro-meteors. The base fire department comes, and the fire people were like, "Is everybody out of the building?" We're like, "I think so." There were five of us standing there, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is how many people come into work on any given day?" There's this six-floor building that employed enough people to fill it, and I was just like, "Oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get anything done here."
+
+I worked on engineering. I wanted to start working on stuff that was less molecular because I realized from the musical instrument that if you want to have an impact on the world---the real world, not just mental masturbation that you enjoy---you need to build things that impact the world. That's when I figured out, "Okay, if I want to do something that I want to do, I'm gonna have to build it myself," because all these systems that have been established, I just don't fit into.
+
+When my contract was coming up---the fellowships are for three years---I was just like, "I'm out, homies. We had a good one. I'm taking off."
+
+I was really interested in democratizing this technology. From the computer hacker days, what made computer hacking so great was access---access to the ability to program, access to knowledge and information. I believe that really drove the computer hacker movement. I was like, "I want to recreate that in biology."
+
+I made this CRISPR DIY---a CRISPR genetic engineering kit where anybody could gene-edit some bacteria in their home, and I did a crowdfunding campaign. If I raised $20,000, I thought, I'm just gonna do this full time. I ended up raising like $150,000 and got a ton of press. It started this trajectory of running companies and being in the public eye.
+
+*When you started building these tools that enable people to take things out of the lab and into their homes, how easy was that translation? How is providing access to biology different from doing it with computers?*
+
+It is a lot different. One thing I really learned about science is there's no user interface, no user experience design. It's just terrible. It's not intuitive in any way and requires all this complex equipment, expensive equipment. I was just like, "How do I package this in a $150 kit?" Which was the first problem---how do I make the protocols and experiments for somebody who doesn't have a whole lab full of equipment to use?
+
+There was a lot of translation, a lot of R&D that had to go into making this work for somebody in their kitchen who doesn't even have the ability to control temperature. That's a basic process of biology---you have an incubator, you can control temperature. People don't normally have that in their life. We have a thermostat that we could generally control room temperature, but that's it. You can't go up to 37°C or down to whatever.
+
+I had to adapt things and do things over and over again. I made more kits---letting people engineer human cells in their home, letting people genetically engineer plants in their home. The company still sells this stuff. It was always like, "How do I take this complex scientific experiment and break it down so that somebody without complicated equipment can do it?"
+
+Every time I did something like this, people would be like, "That's impossible. You're never going to be able to do that." And every time I was able to figure something out. I think it was just that hacker mindset---being clever and understanding things. Graduate school really helped because I came from this world where I tried to learn things from first principles. I didn't follow protocols---I wanted to understand the process so that I knew how to do things intuitively because I understood each step and why it was supposed to be done. I think that helped me greatly to take these protocols that people have been doing and still do and just be like, "Fuck that, you can do it this way also. That's way easier, requires way less equipment."
+
+*What did people start doing with these kits, and did it surprise you?*
+
+A lot of the kits are educational. You have to understand that even nowadays---I started the company around ten years ago---people still don't have an intuition for biology, which always blew my mind. We understand these devices, we use computers and cell phones so intuitively, and we have no intuition for ourselves and what we're made of.
+
+Almost all the kits we sell are geared towards, "Here's a basic experiment that's pre-built for you so you can understand the principles by doing this experiment to get this desired result." 99.9% of people do not move past that. But some people do. A couple of people that work with me today started off with those kits.
+
+It's more foundational. We're not at the place yet where people really understand or are willing to put in the effort to take it beyond just learning from a kit. It's like when you buy a little electronics board and you make the LED blink on it or something---it's basically like that for the world of biology or, in programming, writing a "Hello World" program.
+
+You have to understand the difference between playing a song and writing a song. It's really hard to get people to that writing-a-song stage. Very few people make it there in general in the world. With biology, most people are just going to be people who do the experiment, understand it, enjoy the process, brag to their friends, and then move on with their life.
+
+*How has art continued to be a part of your life as you've been a founder of companies?*
+
+When I was at NASA, one of the things I did was apply for this art fellowship at Stochastic Labs. It was this new organization that just opened up in Berkeley---a rich person gave them a bunch of money to buy this mansion and set up this hacker space. It was super cool, a bunch of brilliant people from the Bay Area.
+
+I applied by myself, but they paired me with Lynn Hershman Leeson. She is an icon---a feminist icon and art and technology icon. At the time I didn't know. She's made a bunch of movies with Tilda Swinton---Tilda Swinton starred in a bunch of her weird, crazy movies.
+
+We started doing art together. This brought me into the more professional world of art because the projects we worked on ended up in museums, which was really wild. We worked on some genetic engineering projects together. I think it was called the Infinity Engine---we worked on a bunch of different stuff to create this huge installation. I was combining some of my computer programming knowledge with biology knowledge.
+
+The first place it showed was ZKM, which is this new-media, techno-art museum in Germany. Then it went around Europe---I think it went to the Tate Modern and all these other places. It was really wild. That's when I first started to actually be considered an artist and consider myself an artist.
+
+But at the same time, outside of that, I started doing these weird experiments. I had gut health problems, and people were talking a lot about microbiome transplants. I learned a lot about the microbiome---the bacteria in and on your body. There's this really famous bio-artist at the time who I was friends with, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and she did this DNA sequencing from cigarette butts to facial reconstruction of people, which got a lot of press.
+
+I was like, "Let's do this experiment where we transfer our microbiomes---I transfer yours to me, and I transfer mine to yours." We're like, "Oh yeah, this is gonna be really cool." Eventually, she's like, "I don't know if I want to do this. It seems dangerous, and I don't want to fuck up my microbiome."
+
+We were having this conversation at this event, and some people I met who are filmmakers were just like, "Oh my God, that sounds fucking crazy! We'd love to film this thing." I was like, "Okay, I guess." Heather was out, so it was just me these people wanted to film.
+
+Somehow _The Verge_ got wind of this idea, and they're like, "We want to do a huge feature on this." This was the first time I had serious press coverage---before, I had some articles written about me, but very superficial. This was the first time I actually had serious principal photography and cameras in my face, a cinema camera, people following me around asking me questions, a journalist who's there.
+
+I'm doing this experiment and going through this process over the course of two weeks, and I have people following me around everywhere, asking me questions the whole time, recording every moment of my life. It was so intense---what the fuck is going on?
+
+It was intended to be a science experiment, and it was, but it turned into performance art where the world was interested in this crazy science experiment. It was super rigorous---I took all these samples of bacteria in and on my body, had the DNA sequenced, matched it to the bacteria, looked at how my microbiome changed.
+
+It was a huge success. The film documentary won a bunch of awards and went to South by Southwest and all these places. I'm at South by Southwest on stage answering people's questions because everybody's like, "Oh my God, that's crazy." This huge article comes out about me, and I started to become a public figure at that point. People started caring about what I did and what I said. It was weird. It was really weird.
+
+*How did your approach to science change when you turned it on yourself and your own body? What made you willing to do this?*
+
+It was really freaky because the journalists talked to a lot of scientists, and they were just like, "Oh, they shouldn't do that." At the time I was still male-presenting, so if I refer to myself as "he," just understand that, at the time, people referred to me as he.
+
+I felt like I understood it well enough and deep enough that I was taking a calculated risk---a risk that something could happen, but also I think something profound or really interesting could come of it. And it did. The results were amazing, just to see the shift in the microbiome. Nobody had done an experiment anything like that.
+
+When I started experimenting on myself, I thought there were probably few, if any, people in the world who understood this as good as me, and I understood it well enough that I thought I could make a calculated risk.
+
+It wasn't until later---when there started being copycats, who started copying some of these self-experiments that I was doing---that I was like, "Oh, holy shit, I never imagined that people who didn't have the knowledge would just start doing this shit also." They're crazy motherfuckers. But I think to do good science, to do a lot of this stuff, you need a certain amount of crazy to push boundaries, to do the impossible. You do need a certain amount of crazy, and you do need a certain amount of knowledge.
+
+I think I have a combination of crazy and knowledge that's really unique. Growing up, I never had anything to lose---I wasn't afraid of getting arrested or stealing shit. Where am I gonna go back to? I'm probably not gonna be worse off than I was at one point in time.
+
+It really built in me---this attitude of "I have nothing to lose." I think that's still ingrained in me to a certain extent, even though I've grown up and I do have stuff to lose. I still kind of more than not have that attitude of, "Shit, what's the worst that could happen? I've seen some shit. What's the worst that's gonna happen?"
+
+*I'm curious about whether you're influenced by the legacy of DIY medical interventions in the trans community, where people have had to take these matters into their own hands for a long time.*
+
+Oh, for sure, especially later on. At the time, my transness was really weird---I didn't quite understand. And I don't want to get into specifics because I think it makes me really vulnerable, and I don't like this information out because some journalists do use this shit against you.
+
+At the time I was still understanding who I was, and I think it definitely played into this idea of the body being malleable and not so set in stone like people thought it was.
+
+It wasn't long after that when I started doing more experimenting with medications---hormone replacement therapy in a trans context, DIY outside of medical intervention. To me it was a big deal---if I go to a doctor and say I want to experiment with this stuff, it's like you're either trans or you're not. And if you're trans, it's a big deal. Your partner obviously is going to know you're trans, everybody in your life is going to know you're trans, and it completely changes everything.
+
+I had just started to become a public figure. I did _Gut Hack_, which was huge, and then after that, all these documentaries started getting made about me from 2016 to 2019, culminating in a Netflix documentary coming out in 2019. I was constantly in the spotlight. I can't just one day all of a sudden show up and be like, "I'm a woman now. I'm trans." I mean I could, but to me that's a lot.
+
+There was a lot of experimentation going on behind the scenes---experimenting with different drugs and how they made me feel, how they made me feel about myself, what I thought about it. I think that was really helpful, and it was really amazing to have access to this stuff.
+
+There's a great resource---there's a DIY trans wiki that's associated with Reddit---that was so helpful to me to understand who I was and how I felt about all these things. It was super scary because you're going into the unknown, not just socially but also medically.
+
+*Do you think there are lessons that community has to offer the wider world in terms of thinking about medical interventions, about experimentation, about our relationship with our bodies?*
+
+I think our relationship with our bodies is huge. It really taught me a lot about body autonomy. When most people think of body autonomy, at least in more modern context, a lot of it's centered around abortion. But I think we don't realize how little body autonomy we have in general.
+
+Learning about this stuff, getting involved in the trans community, and just seeing that our bodies are so policed on every aspect---a woman can go and get an estrogen pill for birth control over the counter, there's no requirements. But for somebody who is born male, you have to sign all this paperwork.
+
+In California, when I eventually went and got prescriptions, there was all this paperwork---"I understand the consequences of this, I understand I could go sterile," and all this shit. You're just like, "Holy shit, they really want to control what we can put in our bodies."
+
+It really opened my eyes to that, and I think people don't even realize how much control they're under. It opened up my eyes to the idea that body autonomy is this huge thing---the right to take whatever medications we want, use whatever pharmaceuticals or drugs we want to get high or whatever it is, abortion, surgical medical procedures. It goes deep.
+
+A woman can go and get breast implants and nobody asks any questions. If you're transgender, you need three letters from psychiatrists. How does this make any sense? How is one different than the other when they're both gender-affirming surgery?
+
+It opened up my eyes to the struggles that a lot of people have. I've had it so good because, when I came out, my life was starting to become more upper middle class. I had access to insurance, I had money to pay and see therapists, really try to deal with this. In my life, I have been fortunate to---outside of online---not really experience much bigotry. The group of people I get to be around are very accepting people.
+
+I understand that a lot of people don't have that. A lot of people don't have access to insurance. A lot of people don't have access to people who---everybody around them will be bigoted towards them. It's complicated, and going to a doctor to get access to this stuff can be dangerous.
+
+Still to this day, even though I generally always pass as a woman, I'm still afraid to use women's bathrooms. Shit's crazy out there. Subverting that system again, I think this goes back to being a hacker---be clever enough to subvert the system. When I first started, I took medication off the internet and found websites where you can get a doctor to prescribe you blood tests. So I just go get my blood drawn to see what levels of my testosterone and estrogen levels and all sorts of stuff, so I had an idea of how the medications were affecting my body. It was really cool.
+
+*I wonder if you could say a bit more about your interaction with public health authorities. Where have you run into the limits of the dominant system?*
+
+Once I started to get more public attention and people paying attention to me, then the government started paying attention to me---and not even just the US government. It started at the time it was just me and two other people running this company, and I have the FBI chatting with me, meetings with the FBI, meetings with the FDA, meetings with the California Board of Medicine, California Medical Board. So many organizations just started to come after me.
+
+It was so freaky because here I am---the company is still growing, we don't have much money. If somebody wanted to do some sustained court battle with me, I would totally crumble. I'm flying by the seat of my pants, trying to figure things out as I go, and operating under the premise that I have nothing to hide---I'm not doing anything wrong.
+
+I made sure I would always research all the regulations and rules. Then the government started changing them, and California made a law, and the FDA came out with new guidances to start to try to counteract some of the stuff I was doing. It was so wild to have these government agents. The Bavarian government in Germany came after me, which caused this international incident that got the FBI and other people involved.
+
+It was way too much for somebody who---I don't want to say lowly, but what's all this drama going on? I'm just this farm girl who runs a small company in Oakland, California, out of a house! We didn't even have---because bio labs were so expensive, I just rented a house in this kind of reasonable but also not great neighborhood in West Oakland. It was right by the West Oakland BART stop where people got shot on the regular. I just run this fucking biotech genetic engineering company out of this house in West Oakland. What the fuck?
+
+*Where is the line for you between protection and guarantees that people should be owed, and that autonomy?*
+
+It is really complicated. I guess I'm kind of more libertarian at heart. There's these libertarians who are like, "Oh, you shouldn't need a driver's license to drive, or there shouldn't be stop signs," but when you think about it, stop signs and stoplights and guardrails do protect us, and they don't really infringe on our rights very much. You have to stop when you get to a stop---that's not really infringing on your right too much. These are good things. Having certain stoplights and stop signs aren't necessarily a bad thing when you're trying to prevent people from accidentally hurting themselves. What are those boundaries? I don't know. It's really tough.
+
+I'm sure there's some things we can all agree on---nobody should have access to Ebola. I think 99.9% of people are gonna be like, "All right, reasonable." I think when it gets to those gray areas is when it starts to get complicated.
+
+Honestly, what I've come to learn is that the system does play a role in---it scares, it prevents a lot of people from doing stupid shit, but it also allows room for pushback. If you're actually thoughtful about the pushback, I think you can actually hack the government, so to speak, in certain ways. Hack the regulations, find these loopholes and bypass them. That's what I've worked to do and still do today---find these loopholes and bypass them to your advantage, where they can't do anything to you because that doesn't break any of the things.
+
+And learning what's important to the system---what does the system value? How do I not fuck with the things that they value? I think I've become way smarter about it by understanding that the system does have a role to play. There should be some amount of pushback because I think just giving people freedom to do whatever they want isn't necessarily in everyone's best interest.
+
+So pushback so that the thoughtful people who are trying to push the boundaries end up making it through, and the people who are just doing dumb, crazy shit kind of get---don't make it as far. It's kind of like a self-selective sieve---if you made it this far where you're talking to the FBI, you probably hopefully have done it in such a way where they're not going to arrest you. If they are, you deserve it.
+
+*When you think of yourself encountering that computer and discovering your power as a hacker, what are you hoping to convey to people who are experiencing something similar with the tools you're providing now? What do you hope they learn?*
+
+I'm just trying to open people's eyes. I want them to see the beauty that I saw or see, because once you see that beauty---I call it "the illness"---it becomes this illness where you become obsessed. It's just like, "Oh my God, that thing is so beautiful. I just want to know more. I just want to feel it. I just want to touch it. I want to experience it in every way possible."
+
+That starts with showing people the beauty. That's why I started my new company. My first company was this bottom-up approach---people are never going to be able to see that beauty if they don't understand it. My new company is like, people are never going to be able to completely express that beauty if they don't see what's possible.
+
+In my new company, we're gene-editing animals, gene-editing embryos, which has been so wild and surreal. I want people to have the power to be able to be hackers, but I need to show them what's cool first. Just like when I was a hacker, there was a lot of code that inspired me---a lot of code that inspired a lot of the programming and clever hacking stuff that I did. People need that inspiration.
+
+It's also something I've learned being a trans person---I used to never understand what representation meant until I was the only woman, trans woman, queer person in a room. Then you're just like, "Holy shit---wow, it's very isolating." You start to realize people need representations of cool, interesting, beautiful things. I'm just trying to bring that to them, I guess.
+
+That's kind of one of my mottos---I even tattooed it on my arm myself: "create something beautiful." I want to inspire other people to create beautiful things, because what's the point if you're not seeing beauty?

layouts/partials/wompum-demo.html

@@ -1,7 +1,8 @@
 <div class="wompum-demo max-w-2xl mx-auto">
-  <h2 class="text-2xl font-bold mb-4">Wampum Grid Protocol</h2>
+  <h2 class="text-2xl font-bold mb-4">What are the color grids?</h2>
 
-  <p>The color scheme on this website is inspired by <em><a href="http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ws63912f5dd-e703-4759-8c31-33ac98b3c190">Constitutional Wampum</a></em> by Robert Houle. The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.</p>
+  <p>The color scheme on this website is inspired by <em><a href="http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ws63912f5dd-e703-4759-8c31-33ac98b3c190">Constitutional Wampum</a></em> by Robert Houle. This is a tribute to the convergence in that work between the long legacy of political protocol-building through wampum belts in Indigenous communities of North America and a pixelated aesthetic that evokes life in the digital world. In the concept of protocol, the ancient practices and recent technologies converge.</p>
+  <p>The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.</p>
   
   <div class="mb-8">
     <label class="block mb-2">Enter text to generate a grid:</label>