This essay, The Conservation of People, is part of my ongoing work on necropolitics, or the politics of who gets to live and who is allowed to die. It argues that any real revolution has to start with building, not breaking. That means care, food, health, and communication—the things that let people actually survive when systems fail.
It’s about taking the tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—automation, AI, distributed manufacturing—and using them to create abundance instead of extraction. It’s also about the people we leave out of our revolutionary imagination, especially the disabled and dependent, who are too often treated as collateral.
The point is simple: if our movements can’t feed people, keep them safe, or help them survive, they aren’t revolutionary. The work of care is the work of freedom.
This essay, The Conservation of People, is part of my ongoing work on necropolitics, or the politics of who gets to live and who is allowed to die. It argues that any real revolution has to start with building, not breaking. That means care, food, health, and communication—the things that let people actually survive when systems fail.
It’s about taking the tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—automation, AI, distributed manufacturing—and using them to create abundance instead of extraction. It’s also about the people we leave out of our revolutionary imagination, especially the disabled and dependent, who are too often treated as collateral.
The point is simple: if our movements can’t feed people, keep them safe, or help them survive, they aren’t revolutionary. The work of care is the work of freedom.