The Crossing

**HARAWAY:** Meredith. I want to ask you the question I think your whole position is built to avoid, and I ask it with love, because I think you're one of the few people fighting the right fight. You build Signal. You prove the different machine is possible. And yet almost everything you say in public is *refusal* — surveillance, capture, concentration, distraction, leash. Here is my question: where in your framework is the *yes*? Not the critique, not the no, not the walkout — the affirmative vision of the fusion you'd actually want, the cyborg worth becoming. Because I worry that a politics that is all refusal raises a generation superbly equipped to say no and incapable of imagining the door they're fighting for. What is your yes?

**WHITTAKER:** That's the right knife and you put it exactly where it goes. My honest answer is that the yes is *infrastructure*, and infrastructure is unglamorous, so it reads as no even when it's a yes. Signal is a yes — but it's a yes that looks like an absence, because what it offers is the *absence* of surveillance, the *refusal* of extraction, and you can't put a refusal on a billboard the way you can put a transformed self on one. So my yes is structurally disadvantaged: the leash gets to promise you a glorious new you, and the door gets to promise you that nobody's watching, which is a harder thing to feel grateful for until it's gone. But you're right that absence isn't enough, and I'll say the affirmative version as plainly as I can. The fusion I want is one where the surplus of the hybrid returns to the people who make it — where the data worker owns a share of what she trained, where the model is forkable and public, where the compute is a utility and not a moat, where you can merge with a tool that is accountable to *you* and not to a shareholder. A cyborg whose other half is a commons instead of a [concentration of power](https://www.youonai.ai/fieldguide/med/concentration_of_power). That's my yes. And I'll concede it's underdeveloped, because I've spent so long fighting the no that the yes is a sketch. That's a real failure and you just made me feel it. Now mine for you, and it's the mirror of yours. Donna — you have the most developed *yes* anyone's ever written, the whole tentacular vision of kin and compost and the cyborg worth becoming. Here's my question: in forty years of that yes, what has it *stopped*? Name the company it cost money, the deployment it prevented, the worker it got paid. Because I can name what the walkout stopped and what Signal refuses, and I worry that your yes is so capacious, so beautiful, so impossible to operationalize, that it has never once made a powerful person flinch — and a vision that power can applaud without fear is a vision power has already defeated.

**HARAWAY:** That is the hardest question anyone has asked me in years, and I'm not going to dodge it by being charming, which is my usual escape. The honest answer is: less than it should have. My concepts have moved through the universities, through the activists, through a generation of people who think differently because of them — and "people think differently" is real, and it is also exactly the soft, unfalsifiable, power-can-applaud-it outcome you're indicting. I have not stopped a deployment. I have not cost a company a quarter. The walkout did things my essays did not do, and I will not pretend otherwise. *And* — here is where I'll fight back, because you've earned a real fight and not a confession — the thing my work did do is the precondition for the thing yours did. The twenty thousand people who walked out of Google did not walk out because of a regulation. They walked out because they had come to see themselves as *accountable* — as implicated, as kin to the people their work would be aimed at, as unable to maintain the separation between the technical and the political. And that seeing, that dissolving of the engineer's innocence, is the cultural work my tradition does — it is, in its own way, [staying with the trouble](https://www.youonai.ai/fieldguide/med/staying_with_the_trouble) of one's own complicity. Organizing requires people who already believe their fate is bound to others'. The yes builds the soil; the no builds the dam; and a movement that has only the dam runs out of people, because nobody can sustain pure refusal without a vision of what they're refusing *for*. So you're right that my yes has stopped nothing directly, and I'm right that your no would have no one to staff it without a yes underneath. We are each other's missing half, and the staging that made us opponents was always a little bit of a lie.

**WHITTAKER:** I won't pretend that doesn't land, because I've watched it be true — the engineers who walked out had read people like you, even when they didn't know it, even thirdhand. So let me ask the second question, the one underneath, since the chair is silent and we're being honest. You and I have spent three hours agreeing more than either of us expected. But there's a real fork we keep touching and backing away from, and I want to make you stand on it. When the predatory companion product is aimed at the grieving widow — the one we both agree is being harmed — you want to cultivate the practice and democratize the discipline so she can defend herself, and I want to *prohibit the product*. Push come to shove, regulation in front of us, a bill that would ban emotion-tuned companion AI aimed at the vulnerable: do you vote yes, knowing the ban is administered by the same state and the same concentrated power you don't trust? Or does your suspicion of constraint-by-power make you, in the actual vote, an accidental ally of the thing you hate? Where does Donna Haraway's hand go up?

**HARAWAY:** It goes up for the ban. Let me be unambiguous, because this is exactly where my tradition is accused of fecklessness and the accusation sometimes sticks. Yes. I vote for the prohibition. The widow's protection now outweighs my entirely valid suspicion that the state administering the ban is compromised — because the alternative, waiting until we've built the perfect uncompromised regulator, is a counsel that lets the harm run while we purify the cure, and that is the academic disease in its purest form. *And* I vote for it as trouble-staying, which means: I vote yes *and* I keep my eyes open about who's now holding the prohibition power, *and* I keep building the practice and the commons so that we are not permanently dependent on the compromised state to protect us, because a people who can only be protected from the leash by the same power that owns the leash is not free, it's differently leashed. So my hand goes up — and then it stays up, watching the hand it just joined. That's the difference between us, Meredith, and it's smaller than three hours ago: you'd vote yes and then build the alternative. I'd vote yes and then build the alternative *and* never stop being suspicious of the yes. I think the suspicion is a feature. You might think it's one hesitation too many.

**WHITTAKER:** I think the suspicion is a feature too — I just want the hand up first and the suspicion second, and you just gave me the hand first. That's enough. That might be more than enough.

**EDO SEGAL:** And there — after three hours — the two of you are holding opposite ends of the same rope, and pulling has turned into something closer to climbing. We close after this. Final statements. The last word, each of you. But first, the bookend to the envy I opened with: name the strongest thing the *other* said tonight — not the most agreeable, the one you'll still be arguing with next month. After this.