Abolition as Sustainability

On Abolition & Sustainability

In professional settings it might seem odd to hone and utilize interpersonal skills to sustain our work. The wild part about this being true in open source tech, science, and even academic projects is we mostly launch projects with passion-driven relationships; not professional ones. We start because we care. However, by taking on the structure of professionalism, we channel our passion into the easily customizable and pervasive neo-liberal frameworks from the professional and traditional working world. Worlds, including the professional one, are built in how people sustain cultures. Professionalism is a relational protocol that sustains the exploitative dynamics which uphold a globalizing, extractive, and neoliberal economy kind of world. A project riddled with social dynamics of professionalism and neoliberalism render change-making initiatives ineffective and unsustainable because they end up reproducing a world they are trying to destroy. Abolition could be useful in designing against this form of sustainability by helping us sustain the care which inspired a project to start. In doing so, we become the work and the products we make become a form through which our worlds become evident.

Juxtaposing abolition inspired infrastructures with sustainability reveals what’s possible when we make to destroy rather than produce. (See: “No One Resigns Energized” in resources). Even within the realm of engineering open-source software and hardware, there are many possible worlds. From the completely underground techies deploying software with anonymous developers to the cybersecurity hobbyist eager to master bash. We should be perplexed about why we who share averse feelings towards proprietary information sciences obey protocols of professionalism and mirror it’s architecture to sustain our passion and care.

If we understand ourselves to have “power” or an ability to change, shift, or solve something, we tacitly concede we hold or carry a piece of that thing and we are important and/or proximal enough to impact it. It’s hard to accept that we enter many of these noble endeavors being versions of what we want to change. It feels counter-intuitive, but accepting we’re evidently not what we want to be is the obstacle blocking us from becoming who and what we need to be.

There’s a difference between solving a problem and stopping one. Solutionism is the Silicon Valley idealism that seeps into how we think about making technology. We use the same templates with problem statements to pitch our projects and ideas for funding in order to sustain them. But solutions are defined within and confined to the context of a problem. Building out projects and ideas sustained on solutionism is to build out projects sustained by the persistence of our problem statements.

For example, let’s suppose I live in a city where people steal a lot. Inspired to better protect its citizens, the city attempts to solve the issue with building more prisons and hiring more police. Naysayers challenge this decision with wanting to try other methods, and the city ignores them and even provides a skewed view of history to justify their decision as the only way and the natural way rather than a nurtured reality. Crime persists; people keep stealing and the city keeps building and filling more and more prisons. Prisons become the “only” answer to crime and organizations deploy problem-solving programming around helping people in prisons, transition out of prisons, etc. because people fear or passively reject what would happen upon opening ourselves to responses that could render prisons obsolete. At some point, the city is no longer interested in preventing people from stealing, but ensuring police have as much money to blow on technology so they can find the people who steal. Insurance companies make rules around only helping victims who went through the police. In lineages of solutionism, the original problem identified begins to shift and we forget that the problem was something we could have prevented all along by understanding the context it came out of and how to change that. People mostly steal because they are in need and grow desperate enough to take the risk. In this example. prisons solve for the persistence of theft. Care, love, and a radically different society–one transformed from it’s roots of slavery, genocide, and theft–prevents the crime and even a need for more prisons. The vision of abolition is not only a world without police, but a world where they need not exist. It’s like unraveling an old sweater to make a ball of yarn. It presupposes that cosmologies that consider punishment natural and necessary are false and worlds without police are not only possible because we can dream them, but because they exist.

Transformative Justice is a framework which focuses on shifting contexts by giving us a healing method with which to move forward from violence. It asserts that harm happens in breakdowns and malfunctions in relational structures. Unlike in restorative justice frameworks, transformative justice stipulates that harm is never siloed to the person who is doing it; harm is a product of built and sustained cultures and the values they instill in us. Immediately stopping harm is an important first step in transformative justice. But we must collectively undergo a transformative process to heal and shift the relational frameworks, architectures, and protocols that made such harm possible in the first place.

Missions like transformative justice stem from a clear vision of abolition and could be a wonderful basis upon which to build a relational structure for people making a thing. Abolition is the “presence of an absence of a thing” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore). My offering here is that your vision considers what presence will you sustain through your social dynamics and what harmful contexts will that sustenance destroy within your project and beyond? Rather than challenge you to present what “wicked problems” your offering solves for; I’m juxtaposing abolition and sustainability to invite you to think of what ceases to persist in the presence of your thing.

Linked Resources

This information is in no way exhaustive or comprehensive. Not just because it would be a lot of information, it would take us being in the middle of stuff to truly move through it together in ways that stick with us. This resource list offers additional resources so we can go deep in those moments.

• “No One Resigns Energized: Removal and Release as an [Abolitionist] Design Method” by miliaku

• The Four Parts of Accountability & How to Give a Genuine Apology by Mia Mingus

• Creative Interventions Toolkit

• Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman

• Educopia’s Transition Matrix

• “The Graceful Exit of Design Studio Hawraf” by Creative Gaga

• A Feelings Wheel

• “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity” by Tina M. Campt