All the good guys are gone All our heroes dead and buried We live on as ghosts amongst monsters who eat our children and devour our dreams yet we still live in our memories, on endless repeat rehashing the best there never was With dreams that are at best diversions, at worst caricatures of futures envisioned but never lived. Utopias drowned in screens, clicks and endless ‘likes’ no love, no hope, no endless summers “no future for YOU, no future for ME” and thats the best there ever was The human experience distilled as disillusion repackaged as retribution, redistributed as reverie Echos, noise, static.

What do you say when you look out upon a broken world, filled with a broken people and their broken promises, devoid of hope, optimism and any dream of a better tomorrow; lying inert upon their cartesian sarcophagus, inside a cave of shadows filled with images of despair? …

When I was growing up, America was still a compelling idea. A place where anything was possible, with unimaginable entertainments and amenities, where history and identity did not matter for success — or so I naively believed at the time. Living in 2001, it was a different epoch — our…

Everything is going to get better! We only need to work together and believe! After all, aren’t the injustices of the past only momentary diversions from the long and graceful arc that was so eloquently foretold? I have made my career peddling hope like this to young people, rural farmers…

As I watched chaos unfold at the Kabul airport last week, I couldn’t help but imagine that some of those people caught up in the panic — those running alongside the airplanes, scaling barbed-wire concrete walls onto the tarmac, hanging on to the landing gear; were development workers of one…

(This piece is co-written with my student Samar Sabie. It also appears in the December 2020 issue of Computers and Society, vol. 49, no. 3.) Sometimes to build something new you have to destroy what exists. We learned what should have been this obvious fact of existence through our collaboration…

As Marx famously said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” When we as HCI researchers seek to change the world, design is one of the key material practices that we are trying to impact. We impact material design practice…

This is a story I wrote for a very early ICTD publication called iConnect launched by a World Bank funding program called InfoDev that was influential at the time. InfoDev was also a key supporter of the Knownet-GRIN project at SRISTI where I worked. …

“It was empty”. I will never forget the mayor’s words as he talked about how NYC Health and Hospitals Coler facility was being converted to COVID-19 use. Coler is located next door to our apartment here in Roosevelt Island, and where some of my best friends live. Even after twenty…