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Enter your email below and we'll send you a one-time pin to log in. The technologies that were supposed to facilitate widespread connection are keeping us more isolated from each other and our environment than ever before. But the antidote to our crisis-ridden age has always been with us: investing in our fellow humans and the rituals that unite us. I spend most of my waking life thinking about technology and power. At the Campaign on Digital Ethics (CODE ) , the organisation I founded and lead, we ask uncomfortable questions about who controls the technologies increasingly shaping our lives. We investigate platforms, algorithms and artificial intelligence. We worry about elections, disinformation, surveillance, concentrated corporate power and what happens when a handful of insanely wealthy men acquire an almost unprecedented ability to control infrastructure through which billions of people communicate, organise, consume information and shape reality itself. I believe deeply in this work. We need progressive regulation, accountability and democratic institutions capable of confronting technological power. But, importantly, a potential counter to this optimised, often synthetic reality that we are living through, is connection . A great irony is that we have never been more connected in a technical sense, yet loneliness is everywhere. We can speak instantly to someone on another continent while barely knowing the person who lives next door. Our friendships, desires, politics and grief increasingly pass through platforms designed to monetise our attention. With the advance of AI, we are seeing a rise in synthetic intimacy and companionship. I sometimes wonder if the disconnection is incidental to the political moment we are living through, or fundamental to it. Authoritarianism thrives on separation, so does oligarchy. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, in their just-published book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World , have described this moment as the emergence of what they call âend times fascismâ, where an alliance of forces are responding to planetary crisis not by imagining how we might survive together, but by deciding who gets to survive, and who can be abandoned. Their description of bunker politics is both literal and metaphorical, which is that these extremely wealthy sociopaths fantasise about escaping the destruction that they have created and benefited from by spending billions on bunkers, and investing in escaping planetary destruction by colonising Mars. They believe that their best chance of survival is through separation. It is a logical endpoint of neoliberal politics, a worldview that has spent decades telling us that we are individuals before we are members of communities, consumers before citizens, and somehow separate from the ecological systems that make our existence possible. Against this often depressing and disturbing backdrop, I have spent much of this year co-creating an experimental dance production called BhÅ«mi , which means Earth in Sanskrit, which will be performed at the Joburg Theatre on 13 and 14 November. I started dancing when I was four years old, learning the ancient Indian classical artform of Bharatanatyam. My mother is my teacher and my guru, which means that dance has never existed separately from the rest of my life. It is tangled up in childhood, family, discipline, memory, identity, politics and love. The production began with questions about our relationship with the Earth, but it also became a process for me to grapple with the same questions that occupy my political work from an entirely different place. What does it mean to live in a world where power is becoming so concentrated? What happens when progress becomes indistinguishable from extraction? How did we become so comfortable with the idea that everything around us, our attention, our labour, our creativity, our natural resources and even our relationships, can be converted into something to be bought, s
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