Starting Thoughts

future projects with M Kuznetsov

Emily Chao: You want to introduce yourself, where you’re located, and what brought you to the Collective Action School space?

M Kuznetsov: I’m M, I was previously based in Minneapolis, and now I’m in San Francisco. During Collective Action School, I was in Minneapolis. I saw the call for the first cohort but didn’t have the capacity. I remember reading the syllabus and it was just so related to what I was interested in at the time. I was running a weekly newsletter called the Finkedin, which I called “a tech-skeptical” stance on the future of tech and design. I was constantly sharing articles from Logic(s) and Real Life Mag and OneZero (rest in peace most of the magazines now). I was exploring what comes after human-centered design. Like, what’s next? Surely there is more to design, and that took me to learning about other fields of design and is what ultimately brought me to futuring. When I saw that there’s another cohort for Collective Action School, I had to apply.

Emily: So in joining our space, who did you bring in with you to Collective Action School? Who were you centering in your community?

M: I was thinking of my personal practice, to be honest. Being in the Midwest means kind of having to do things on your own, and I’m continuing to develop my theory of change. I lived in Minneapolis during the uprising and became the fundraising social media lead for Community Kitchen—I brought that with me to better understand how I could reconcile lived and learned experience. That’s something I was also exploring in my art collective practice: there is a lot to be gained by reading theory, but also recognizing that people have come to these concepts without that language, but that language can help you expand and combine and critique.

I was thinking of the mutual aid community in Minneapolis, in trying to come up with constructive ways to move past my frustration with what I felt was not working. And I was also continuing to develop my art collective. We had been working on this project called “A Night at the Orfelia,” trying to take academic concepts and bring them more into the everyday, building community around that...because our work encourages the audience to speculate, to critique, to reflect.

Emily: Before joining Collective Action School, what did you see as the themes of your art collective? And how did that change after your Collective Action School experience?

M: I don’t know if it significantly changed, but rather, matured. Before, we were centered on this idea of trans technofutures where we’re asking questions like, “how can we build technologies that foster the relationships we desire.” And after Collective Action School, a lot of our hypotheses were validated—hearing all these attendees say, “that was really exciting!” Up until CAS, I had moved away from tech in a lot of ways. Minneapolis is not a tech city, and so I started getting so involved with this specific type of mutual aid work because it was analog. Hearing from all the Collective Action School speakers from different parts of the tech industry and learning their stance on tech helped me revisit the difficult conversation of “how can I reconcile that I’m intrinsically fascinated by emerging technologies, and also I hate everybody working in emerging technologies?” There are people who have the same values that I do in technology! And so it served as a call-in—instead of turning away—to revisit the space now that I feel more secure in my own theory of change and better understand social movements. Because the broader conversations in tech can typically be so apolitical.

Emily: Can you tell me a little bit about your project then for Collective Action School and how it began?

M: I would summarize my entire project as a continuation of my body of work and as a beginning to see myself as someone who has a body of work, versus disparate projects. I built my “official project” as three projects.

The first project was information sharing with Community Kitchen, a volunteer-run organization in Minneapolis that does food rescue and turns it into hot meals for people living in homeless encampments, delivered twice a week. There, I started initially in a kitchen shift, but over time, I made their logo and began to further my theory of change by seeing how can I bring this system’s global design that I’m so interested in into mutual aid. And learned the challenges of doing that. One of the projects involved reading mutual aid stuff and being able to say, “here are ways that I can help guide some of our decisions.” For example, if we’re confronted with a person who is weirding out our regulars, they don’t have to be a part of our mutual aid group. You can say no! It’s very Minnesota to be overly polite, overly nice.

Mutual Aid by Dean Spade had been on my want-to-read list for a while, and after reading, I turned that into an infographic for Community Kitchen. That resonated with people and helped move our organization through a point of frustration and helped us develop new language that we could use in our social media strategy. We were dealing with people sign up for shifts and then bail: when we have no call, no shows, it’s a huge loss to the org. Our social media and the organization were well run, so volunteers thought there were backups for missed shifts, but there weren’t. It’s just the org. The “no masters, no flakes” language from Mutual Aid helped us first of all, to create infographics for people who might not understand that, and also to give language to our frustrations in a productive way, where we can emphasize the message of “don’t sign up because you think you need to sign up. There’s no one to take your spot.”

Since then, we’ve been able to use more language: not necessarily, “we’re all we have,” but “we make it happen.” We’re now very clear that we’re volunteer-run and that everyone needs to honor their commitments.

That also helped me navigate interpersonal conflicts at the mutual aid group. In summary, my first project was working with Community Kitchen and bringing back some of the readings in class to a broader audience into the org.

The second project was a personal exploration of labor futures, because that’s something I was exploring in a prior project. I interviewed trans people about their perceptions of trans labor in the future. Initially, this was going to be a digital project until I realized I’d rather die than make another website. The plan was to make mugs as future artifacts commemorating milestones. My final goal is to have a coffee conversation with all of these people, because there are things that resonated between them. I made a mug, which I will be sending to them...[M rustles off camera and presents a mug].

This one was my generic one, I had a spare. It says: “Trans people for a 3 day work week.” That’s what the “T4T” on that one is. I took personal moments from the conversation and tried to speculate them out into the future and create an artifact celebrating an important moment. This one is a Victorian coffee shop, and it says, “10 years of love, coffee and community,” for my friend, Enny.

Emily: It’s so beautiful.

M: My friend, Enny, had talked about how solidarity means love and community, and how her dream is to open up a coffee shop where people can come together. I want to create some supporting documents for it because it’ll help bring together that world. There is an understanding from a lot of the trans people I spoke with that things are going to be very difficult for a while, but that we’re going to persevere. I’m touching on that aspect to encourage people to continue doing the advocacy they’re doing.

This one is for Levi who works at an art store. He talked about how, yes, working in art retail doesn’t feel connected, but that there is solidarity with, for example, paper workers or people working in industry because you’re exposed to the same pigments and materials, and how perhaps there’s an opportunity for strike solidarity. I put this quote on there that says, “The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike.”

I also ended up making a mug for my friend Dylan, who’s the co-founder of my art collective, celebrating seven years of our project as a guerrilla futures thing. They were really delighted because it implies that the work we’re working on is going to be around for a while. I made myself a matching one.

This labor futures project is still in progress…I do have them all f ired and am trying to work on getting those supporting artifacts out so that I can tie it all up.

The third project was bringing back our learnings to my art collective, Encoder Rat Decoder Rat, and our ongoing project, “A Night at the Orfelia,” which is a nightclub—a dance floor from the future that encourages audiences to come in and speculate about what a trans technofuture would look like. A world where technology reflects our values, centers trans people, and most importantly, reflects Midwestern queer futures. A world reflecting this idea that the Midwest, like Detroit, is a cultural hotbed and that queer people are there. They will be in the future, and the future is what we make of it. If you like that future, let’s go build it. If you don’t like that future, let’s critique it. It builds on future frameworks and an idea of mutual aid and collective visioning. Collective Action School was a cool way to continue exploring those motifs and it was great to have Tao Leigh Goffe share her futuring work.

These were the three projects that I was working concurrently on while at Collective Action School. It was helpful to be in CAS to be able to bring those practices into the other projects I was working on at the time.

Emily: Are there any particular challenges or highlights from these three projects for you?

M: I think the “No Masters, No Flakes” chapter of Mutual Aid was like, “we are taking classroom experience, and we’re bringing it out into the real world.” The engagement on the Community Kitchen Instagram post helped us to realize we should make more infographics. It was one of those things where I had been searching for a way to voice my frustrations, and that language resonated with people at the org as well. That was an unexpected moment of “oh, wow! This is a framework we can use.” Because, it was frustrating to have people consistently bail on us but maybe they just don’t know that when signing up for mutual aid commitments. The other readings helped me better understand some of the guidelines and frameworks that are required for a sustainable mutual aid organization.

One challenge was trying to do this trans labor project when I wasn’t sure what it would ultimately look like. It’s a cool project, but compared to some of the other projects that people were doing, like, unionizing their workplace, it’s like, “what impact is this having?” Visioning is very important, but it was at times difficult to prioritize because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to integrate it into broader work I was doing or have it as a standalone project. I had previously made a labor mug for a friend, and he said it was a good conversation piece. Sometimes I can be very up to my ears in all this future stuff and ceramics, and it’s just like, “Oh my god. This mug is so ugly. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.” But if I give it to someone and they maybe talk about their visions for the future with their friends, it doesn’t matter if the mug has slightly imperfect lettering. I’m sure if my friend’s coworker doesn’t like the mug, they will donate it to the thrift store, and then someone will pick it up and be like, “Wow! Queer line dancing for environmental justice? Interesting!”

I also would have loved to have more time to ideate but recognize that if I want to revisit the project in the future, I can, but am also trying to be comfortable with the idea that sometimes you do things for the first time and they look just like you did just that.

Emily: Yeah and also it will percolate no matter what, right? Like, your friend mentioning it’s a conversation starter. That’s a conversation that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the mug, right?

M: Yeah, and I think it’ll be cool, especially because they’re functional objects, so you can use them.

The challenges of the Orfelia project are numerous and beyond the scope of this exercise, but we did have a preview event in November. We even reached out to Timnit Gebru because they wanted to do this futures night. Now that we have the preview, I might revisit some of the people we spoke with about their own projects and approach the converastion in a slightly different format. I want to ask, “So how did you find funding for this? Who did you talk to?”

Emily: Nice! Do you have any future dreams for the “Night at the Orfelia” or any of your other projects?

M: Yeah! Obviously, I need to finish the trans labor project, and we’ll see where that goes. I think that is something that will get broadly incorporated into “Night at the Orfelia” or into my personal practice in the future.

Community Kitchen is something I’ve offboarded from due to moving out of state and having the Orfelia project take up more bandwidth. In a counterintuitive way, I am glad that me leaving was a ripple. That was a goal of mine from the beginning, whether it came from designing a flexible brand system and creating templating. I don’t think they’ve had a hitch in social media posting, which is fantastic. I will always be proud of the work I’ve done at Community Kitchen through my posts. I was able to get us enough monthly donors to fully fund the kitchen within 6 months.

Emily: Woah!

M: I’m immensely proud of the impact I was able to make on the sustainability of the organization, the templating and the processes I was able to implement. In many ways, that work is invisible, but I also know it made a difference. I wasn’t able to do my final project to improve onboarding for drivers, but I hope that starting those conversations encourages people still there to improve on that process.

For “A Night at the Orfelia,” we are doing a summer event that is larger. We are currently in the process of finding a venue, and then it is full steam ahead to finding funding and finalizing projects. We’ve pivoted in funding strategy right now. We want artists to individually apply for grants where possible because it’s going to be easier to fund that way. We not only have our project, but we have the twelve artists’ subset of projects. It sounds like a huge, messy undertaking, but it’s basically little booths within a larger world.

Our preview event was important in establishing that we can do this. We only came out at a small loss, and now we have assets. We have pictures of what we’re talking about. To us, we’re like, “ the seating is from the future. How hard is it to imagine that there’s a nightclub from the future?” but then we go tour the venue and the person showing us around is like, “so you’re saying queer, but I thought it was a slur,” which makes clear the whole premise of the project—that the Midwest needs this.

Emily: Absolutely, yeah.

M: It is a big undertaking, but I have never felt so much like all my different skill sets are come together in a project before, whether that’s event planning, synthesis, or branding. When I was in college, I used to say that the job I’m training for doesn’t exist yet, and in some ways, I’m beginning to fulfill that. That job still doesn’t exist. No one is paying us for this. But at the same time, futuring has been a cool way to get really technical and synthesize ideas into something more approachable to the general public and encourage people to be citizen scientists.

Everyone should have a voice on how we build the future of technology…the Midwest part is very important to me. The Midwest is a cultural hotbed. Everyone thinks being gay is a coastal elite thing, and it’s not. There are so many queer people in the Midwest. From a more practical future perspective, like, less futures and more of a foresight thing, climate change continues to change what the US looks like and the Great Lakes region is poised to become a powerhouse in that conversation. Coming out to San Francisco and hearing how many people just don’t get the Midwest, I’m like, “you are missing out.” If we get some high speed rail going, there’s gonna be a huge revival for climate and ecological reasons. We have this brain drain because people can’t imagine a future here. When there’s only suburbs and suburbs, you’re not going to come back. You’re not going to start a life there. Chicago and the Midwest are some of the few regions in the U.S. that experience population growth. Let’s continue to change the cultural discussion.

Emily: To wrap up, anything missing from the conversation that you wanted to add?

M: To everyone’s detriment, I talked about literally everything I wanted to. I took to heart the topics and readings from the first cohort and explored that on my own prior to the class. The class resonated and upheld the work that I was starting to do after the uprising, and allowed me to revisit some of these topics after becoming more advanced in my tech career. Many of the issues are the same, but also different, and how I think of participating has grown different ways. It was wonderful to have a space for those discussions. Being like, “okay, I really want to talk to people from Collective Action School who are not trying to convince me to go for a ride in a Cruise.” We had a shared commonality and understanding of these terms, of these paradigms. We didn’t have to explain to someone that maybe technology could be bad.

I greatly enjoyed Collective Action School, and would not shut up about it for the entire year.