Chapter 7
Recorded on October 30, 2068, at the Harlem Commune.
Eman Abdelhadi: This is Eman Abdelhadi, conducting an oral history interview with Aniyah Reed for a project on the history of the communes of the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly. We’re here in Grey House, at the Harlem Commune. It is October 30, 2068. Aniyah, thanks for agreeing to speak to me!
Aniyah Reed: Yeah, you got it.
Abdelhadi: Aniyah—the purpose of this interview is to get to know you and your life story. Let’s start with the basics. What year were you born?
Reed: 2010.
Abdelhadi: And you live here in Harlem?
Reed: Yeah, on Powell and the One-Two-Five.
Abdelhadi: Oh. At the old Hotel Theresa?
Reed: Yeah. Where Malcolm X met—
Abdelhadi: Fidel Castro! Yes! That’s a lovely building. In another life, a lover gave me a book called, what was it? Oh, I remember: Radical Tours of New York City. We walked the Harlem Tour together, including that building.
Reed: It’s a real special place.
Abdelhadi: Wonderful. And how do you spend your time these days?
Reed: I am a competitive runner, and I love puzzles. When I’m not doing those things, I work on spacecraft design.
Abdelhadi: You’re being humble. I hear you’re in charge of a whole design council, not just working on it! [Laughs.] I’ll ask you more about that later in the interview, but for now let’s talk about your childhood. Are you from Harlem?
Reed: Actually, I was born out in Jersey. My mom had me when she was sixteen. She moved out of my grannie’s house soon after, and we were on our own. It wasn’t stable though, we moved around from place to place. My mom had what was then called “bipolar.” It was really hard for her to maintain relationships or keep a job, and in those days that meant you had a really, really hard life.
Abdelhadi: Definitely. Did you stay with her throughout your childhood?
Reed: No. I was with her until I was five or six. At that point, we were living in Georgia. She had people down there and rent was cheaper, so she took us down there, but then we got evicted from the apartment we were at, because her man at the time wasn’t paying rent. Anyway, we packed up what we could carry. I remember I had this purple backpack that I loved, and I stuffed it full of my favorite clothes. Anyway, we showed up unannounced at my grannie’s apartment, she lived here in Harlem. Of course, she took us in. The next day, my mom said she would go out and look for a job. And … she didn’t come back.
Abdelhadi: Ever? She didn’t come back ever?
Reed: She came back, every once in a while, kind of sporadically. But she was never really my parent again after that. Sometimes she’d come for a while and say that she was going to take me, that we would get our own place. But no one was going to let her do that, not after she left that first time. No one had really known how bad it was with us. Apparently, when we showed up, it was clear that I hadn’t showered in a long time. And when my grandma enrolled me in school, they told her I could barely read. I was way behind where I was supposed to be.
Abdelhadi: So, your main caretaker was your grandmother?
Reed: Yeah, my grannie. It was hard on her, because she had cancer and could barely care for herself. But she tried her best, and my aunt and uncle helped too, they were out here in the city. I’d go to them for weekends sometimes when grannie was in the hospital.
Abdelhadi: I see. When did you start getting interested in science?
Reed: Oh, not ’til way later. I barely hung on in school, I was always a problem child. I was always getting on somebody’s nerves or somebody was getting on mine. In retrospect, I think I was really sensitive, and I didn’t know how to express that. It felt like anger, and the sense I was always getting abandoned, or everyone was out to get me. But I think about it differently now. If I was growing up nowadays, they would have spent a lot of extra time with me in crèche, given me counseling, special attention, and all that. But back then, it just meant I was often sent home early or got kicked out. I’m sure I would have ended up in prison one day if I had stayed longer, those schools were a gateway to the cell.
Abdelhadi: So, you stopped going at some point?
Reed: My grannie managed to keep me in school until I was fourteen or fifteen. Then yeah, I just stopped showing up. I had a fake ID that I would use to get into clubs and stuff, and I used that to get a job at a restaurant. I started making my own money and just doing my own thing.
Abdelhadi: What was that?
Reed: What?
Abdelhadi: Your own thing? What were you doing?
Reed: At the time? Mostly I just worked. I worked myself into oblivion, and when I wasn’t working, I’d find oblivion through other means. I drank a lot. Smoked weed. The usual. Spent a decade that way, in a stupor.
Abdelhadi: What pulled you out?
Reed: My grannie dying. She passed away in ’34. I guess I was twenty-three or twenty-four then. It was after the economy started failing, and the company she worked for folded. She had been working there for thirty years or something, and they went under, went bankrupt. So then, she didn’t have health insurance anymore.
Abdelhadi: Some of our younger readers and listeners might not know what health insurance is—can you explain briefly?
Reed: Insurance was what determined whether you could afford to be sick. If you didn’t have insurance, you couldn’t go to the doctor. And it was tied to whether you were working. So, your job gave you insurance. No job, no insurance. No insurance, no doctor. She went into relapse, and we couldn’t afford treatments. So, she died.
Abdelhadi: That must have been really hard for you.
Reed: Yes, but I couldn’t really react. I just watched it happen. I was too numb at that point, and I couldn’t snap out of that. She was dying, but I was the ghost in that house.
Abdelhadi: What happened when she died?
Reed: I woke up. One day, a month after she died, I was on my way home from work, and I wanted to pick up groceries. And I called her, to ask if she needed anything. And the number was disconnected, obviously. And it was like, I had forgotten that she died? I don’t know. I just. I had floated through the rituals, the funeral and all that. I hadn’t touched anything of hers since then. We had barely been seeing each other at home, you know, before she died. I barely even saw her. We were living around each other, not with each other. And I had let myself kind of pretend she hadn’t died. And when I called, and the number was disconnected, for a full minute I was genuinely confused. I was like, why would she disconnect it? Did she not pay her bill? And then I realized. Oh wait. She’s dead. I never get to call her again. She is gone. All the way gone.
Abdelhadi: Wow.
Reed: Yeah. I went home that day, and it was like I was visiting a new place. I walked around the house touching everything, all the artifacts of my life. I realized, I had no idea who I was, what I was living for, anything. I sat there and cried and raged. It was a turning point. I never drank again. I never went back to my job. And that’s when the real work began.
Abdelhadi: Which work?
Reed: At that point, it felt like the work was revenge. I was livid. I was fucking angry. Like, I kept asking myself, “Who is responsible for this?” My first answer was the hospital. I kept thinking about how they wouldn’t treat her, how she was turned away for not having any money. I remembered her doctor’s name, this old lady, Samira Rahman. And I started researching her, obsessively. I figured out that if I called into the hospital and tried to make appointments with her, I could piece together her schedule. And then I started going to the hospital and trying to track her down.
Abdelhadi: What was your plan?
Reed: I didn’t have one. It was an obsession.
Abdelhadi: Did you track her down?
Reed: I did. I figured out what part of the hospital she worked in, and I found the entrance she used, and I spent a couple of weeks just hanging out outside and watching for her to come in and out. One day, I caught her as she was leaving and I followed her. I walked after her, kept a safe distance so she couldn’t see me. And I walked all the way until she reached her home. I saw her enter her building. I was too scared to follow her in, and I didn’t know if I could squeeze in after her. But I started watching her building after that.
Abdelhadi: Was it a big building?
Reed: No. It was small. Anyway, I watched it and watched it for a week or two. And then I started noticing something weird. There were people like her that showed up, people that seemed to live there. They dressed a certain way, a lot of them looked like doctors. They wore scrubs. But then there were others that showed up too, people who looked like they were too poor to live there. Their clothes were tattered, sometimes it seemed like they were unhoused, because they were carrying trash bags with lots of stuff. And I thought—what is this? Why are these people coming here? One day, I just went up to one of them and asked, “Do you live here?” And he said, “Nah, I’m here to see the doc.” I asked if it was a hospital or a clinic, he said no. He said that his doctor told him to go there after he could no longer go to the hospital, because he couldn’t pay. I asked for his doctor’s name. He said Rahman. Dr. Rahman.
Abdelhadi: Your grandmother’s doctor.
Reed: Yup. I was reeling at that point. I felt so stupid. Of course, it wasn’t the doctor who had really turned grannie away! It was the hospital! And who was the hospital? It was whoever was making money off it, and those faces were invisible. It was the whole fucking system. I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out on the subway or on the street or that people would forward to me. Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, “I don’t have time for this,” or “I don’t have energy for this.” But then I realized, “I don’t have time because of this. I don’t have energy because of this.” This system had taken everything from me, from us. It had taken my mom, my grannie—even myself. It had even taken me away from me.
Abdelhadi: Yes! How did this epiphany shift you?
Reed: I started going to organizing meetings. There had been all these flyers around my building about facing off against the landlord, because more and more people were losing their jobs. More and more people were getting evicted. That was my entry into politics, a rent strike that eventually ended up in a big shoot-out with the police when the fuckwad landlord sent them. We won that one, but it didn’t always go down that way.
Abdelhadi: How did you go from tenant organizing to spacecraft design?
Reed: [Laughs.] When I got to these organizing spaces, I realized how little I knew. About politics, about the system, about anything really. I started reading, I joined every reading group I could come across. One of them was a radical science-fiction book club. I loved the stories about space the most, but back then space felt so fucking far away. Not just in distance, but conceptually, you know?
Abdelhadi: Say more. What was going on with space travel at the time?
Reed: It had been privatized. The US government let corporations claim land on the moon and on Mars during the late twenties, and the first semipermanent lunar colony was started a few years later. They did a couple of visits to Mars, but establishing a colony there wasn’t profitable enough. Rich people would go up for vacations to the moon. Eventually they set up these orbital residential enclaves for the ultra richies. The scum of Manhattan ended up living in Acadia, a private orbital. The real money was in asteroid mining. Mostly robots, but also, they needed a few people, and it was incredibly dangerous work. When the Levant insurrection took off, some of the ruling-class people from there fled up to their orbital homes. That became a trend.
With the economic crash, most of space tech in North America had been taken over by this one corporation: ExT. They bought out all the government space infrastructure in Texas and Florida. They got a bargain on everything when the debt crisis took off and when the flooding took Florida under. But they didn’t operate it for, like, the good of humanity. For them it was a business. Basically, ExT set up space enclaves so the ultrawealthy could run away from the messes they made here on Earth. When Battery Park City started flooding, some of those assholes fled up to their space homes too. To hobnob with the mass murderers that had been kicked out of the Levant, the Andes, China, the Maghreb. Fuckers. Where were we?
Abdelhadi: We were talking about your growing interest in space travel.
Reed: Right, right. So yeah, it was all privatized. I started reading more about how these programs started. I learned that the technology ExT was using or adapting had all been publicly funded until the twenties. It was all government money—so, like, our money—that had made these space grabs possible. It was enraging. Space was another thing the rich had stolen from us.
Abdelhadi: Definitely.
Reed: So, I’m reading about all this for a couple of years, and really diving into organizing. In the summer of ’36, there was an occupation at Columbia University. Some of my comrades were graduate students there, so we went out to support their rallies, and I met a lot of scholars at that point. One of them, Jay, was an astrophysicist. One time, they asked me if I wanted to get a Frankie at Roti Roll, it was over on Amsterdam. I remember it like it was yesterday. We finished our food, and they decided to get a beer and I had a lassi. They told me to go to school, told me as fucked as the system was, I would learn a lot, and we could use those skills to fuck shit up.
I did a lot of research and ended up doing my GED—which was like a high school equivalence. Then I went to Brooklyn College to study physics. Did that until ’41. It was much cheaper than Columbia. I did really well. Turns out I have a brain for math. But I also wanted to know how things worked—I liked the mechanics of things. I applied to engineering for grad school. Jay was still there, they were almost done with their doctorate at that point. They helped me apply, and my mentors at Brooklyn College too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten in. I didn’t have the knowhow—it wasn’t a system made for poor Black women.
Abdelhadi: So, did you end up at Columbia?
Reed: Yeah in ’41, I had gotten my foot in the door, but the building was about to burn down. [Laughs.]
Abdelhadi: [Laughs.] By the building you mean academia?
Reed: Yup. It was just a mess. Students and teachers were constantly on strike. At that point, these schools were running out of cash—they had all their investments in the stock market, and that was all in freefall. Students couldn’t pay any more. Everything was falling apart. But I learned about engineering and physics, between the chaos. My focus was on mechanical and aerospace engineering.
Abdelhadi: Hence spacecraft design. Did you start working for that industry when you finished your doctorate?
Reed: Yes and no. Throughout grad school, I had gotten involved with this group of radical scientists from across the city. We called it Born in Flames. Most I met through people in my cohort and program. We even had quite a few professors. We connected with this network of radical scientists and engineers and academics all over the world, a lot of people asking the same questions and really wrestling with answers. That is when I first had contact with this astrophysics program at Quito, before I started working down there. Everyone, Born in Flames, but also all these other people all over the place, we were mad as hell, and we were all staring down the barrel of academia’s collapse. Like I said. Burning building. And a lot of us were like, “How do we save the baby from the burning building?”
Abdelhadi: Who’s the baby in this metaphor?
Reed: Science. The collective knowledge of humanity. Not to be dramatic or anything. [Laughs.] We talked a lot about that in a hypothetical sense in this group. What happens when these institutions fail for good? They were facing so many crises, just like the state and every other pillar of that version of society.
Abdelhadi: That makes a lot of sense.
Reed: Anyway, when I got close to graduating, I was having this existential crisis. Like, what the fuck am I gonna do? Am I gonna just go work for one of these firms helping the ruling class flee? Am I going to stay in this burning building and train another generation who will go help the ruling class flee? What am I doing? So, at the same time, I have this organizing life. And fec is being collectivized left and right. People are fighting their landlords, their bosses, the pigs, the fash. And I realized, well fuck, the whole thing is a burning building. Not just academia, this whole fucking system. And everyone is trying to save their baby. We need to do that too. You know?
Abdelhadi: What did that mean?
Reed: It meant going from theory to action. It meant we needed to take back what was ours.
Abdelhadi: Science?
Reed: And space!
Abdelhadi: Fuck.
Reed: [Laughs.] Correct. We started doing a lot of research about ExT. We were learning everything about them that we could. We wanted what they were doing, wanted to be a part of it but also to turn it upside down. We were trying to figure out how to get in, how to—well, we were starting to make a plan but didn’t have one yet. This was like a council within Born in Flames. So, about ExT: with fighting escalating all over the states they had really tightened up security. They had really intense protocols, usually required employees to live in gated communities so they could monitor them and their activities, there was very intense vetting for any left or insurrectionary politics—
Abdelhadi: So then, was working for them ever really an option for you?
Reed: Yes. A subindustry had developed for faking all your shit to get those types of jobs. Basically, you could pay people to scrub your whole history. But we had a list of former comrades who were working for them, and even a few people who would surreptitiously still communicate with Flames.
Abdelhadi: What did you do with those contacts?
Reed: We schemed. We had a few goals, first we wanted to democratize space tech. At this point, you kind of learned the basics in university, but all the actual technology of space exploration had become private knowledge. We wanted to democratize all that and take that knowledge back. Second, we wanted to reappropriate the actual infrastructure these companies held, both on and off Earth. We wanted to communize space; to make it for everyone. Obviously, that was a longer-term goal, because we understood that this meant war. We wanted to wage that war, but it took preparation.
Abdelhadi: Wow. That’s a huge undertaking. So, you all are scheming? What did you do?
Reed: We realized a major vulnerability was how centralized ExT had become. They were headquartered in Long Island. Originally, they had been this transnational company, with operations in Latin America and Central Africa. But with the economic crises and then the insurrections they had tightened up, becoming much more US based. All the manufacturing was by bot or 3D printer; most of that happened in a plant in Pennsylvania. At that point, given all the instability with insurrections everywhere, they had consolidated to two portals, where the actual launches would happen. But we knew that if we could take over headquarters and manufacturing, we basically had cut off the snake’s head. We could take over the portals from there, they were not heavily manned. That was a ways’ out though, first we needed intel. A ton of intel. We focused on building out this huge network of spies infiltrating every aspect of ExT. We were just taking back all their data, all their models, their plans, their everything. We built a huge knowledge base with the information that spies were bringing back.
Abdelhadi: Ambitious.
Reed: Yeah, the security challenge was here on Earth. The security up there was nonexistent, because it wasn’t like anyone could waltz up. There wouldn’t be any home invasions, you know what I mean. [Laughs.]
Abdelhadi: [Laughs.] Right, right.
Reed: So, we needed information on EarthOps: the portals, the launch stations, all of that. And once we had all the intel, we needed an army to take those over.
Abdelhadi: But then the government would step in—the actual [US] Army, the police.
Reed: Exactly. We had to wait ’til we knew we were strong enough to overtake their private security, and we knew that the Army wasn’t strong enough to step in. That opportunity came when things went to hell in Iran. The Army was getting weaker and weaker, and as the crises increased, we knew our time was coming soon.
Abdelhadi: Wait, when you say you were strong enough to overtake their security—do you mean militarily?
Reed: Yup. Like I said, we knew this would eventually need to be a war. Comrades in Born in Flames started working with some of the insurrectionary militias that had been building across the city to fight the pigs and the fash. Most of us were training with the Zetkinistas in particular. When the time came, we already had battle plans laid out for Long Island.
Abdelhadi: When was the actual battle?
Reed: May 15, 2051. By then, Army presence in New York had really thinned—they pulled out the next year. The Zetkinistas let us know that the Lilies—a militia out of the Bronx—were planning a strike on an Army camp that day. So, we knew they would be distracted and wouldn’t be able to send out reinforcements.
Abdelhadi: Were you there?
Reed: Of course.
Abdelhadi: Can you describe what happened?
Reed: Basically, half the battalion and a lot of weapons were snuck in over a few days leading up to the strike. And the rest of us showed up that day to the gate, held the guards at gunpoint and demanded they let us into the perimeter. There were at least fifty of us coming in, and at least thirty inside throughout the facility. We knew they would trip an alarm for lockdown, of course, but our people inside knew what to do. The point was to draw out as much of the security forces to face us as possible, so that the people inside would have enough time to commandeer the servers and take full control over the building. We had people stationed near each of the main command access points to sabotage their security protocols. You should have seen it. We had a contingency for every single facet of it, years’ worth of research finally coming into fruition. It was fucking beautiful. And you know, the thing is, these guards. They were not going to take bullets for this fec, they weren’t the ones going up to space, they were just doing their jobs. Once we had everyone surrounded and it was clear there was no getaway, most of them surrendered their arms. We only lost a few people on both sides.
Abdelhadi: What about the plant in Pennsylvania?
Reed: Most of it was operated remotely from Long Island, so we shut down operations remotely. We sent messages to the workers there that it was time to go. We gave people a couple of days and then we sent a team there to finalize the takeover. It was similar with the portals.
Abdelhadi: So, did you then send folks to the colonies?
Reed: No. We sent nothing.
Abdelhadi: Say more.
Reed: There was a lot of debate, you know, about what we would do. Debates ended up spilling way beyond Born in Flames, like it became this huge thing in the assemblies, and everyone was arguing about it. We liked that, everyone having an opinion, because it was also a way for people to start thinking about the future of space travel and all. So, the arguments were raging: would we send people up to take over? We had been researching the physics of weaponry in space. We knew they weren’t armed, but there are a whole lot of ways people in space can kill each other. And we didn’t know what we would do with the people up there. They relied on regular supply shipments from Earth—our calculations suggested they probably had food that could last up to a year. There was no AeroAg yet, you know, that technology was still in the making. They also relied on support from programmers and techs here for troubleshooting and glitches, to keep their cleaning and entertainment bots running and so on. So, the decision that we made was to not send any more food up. Or any tech support. We cut off all communications.
Abdelhadi: Did you tell them you were doing this?
Reed: Yes. We broadcast messages to the colonies letting them know that EarthOps had been reappropriated by the people, and that no more resources would be sent up to them.
Abdelhadi: Could they respond?
Reed: We didn’t take incoming messages. [Long pause.] Listen, these people were actual mass murderers. Tyrants that had been literally run off Earth because of their crimes. Others were causing the suffering of hundreds of thousands more by hoarding resources that belonged to all of us. And the only reason they weren’t on the ground is because they had hired out guns to get us all under control for them. Their parents and grandparents had destroyed our planet, and their children had fled. All of them were inheritors of destruction. Some of them managed to crash-land on some ocean with their little orbital pods, and we rounded up those we could find. The rest.… Well, they made their choices, and I’m glad they are gone.
Abdelhadi: Their violence was met with violence. I understand. It is still hard to stomach.
Reed: Yeah. It wasn’t easy. Of course. Not at all. We were all pretty fucked up about it. It’s hard to kill, even when you have to.
Abdelhadi: What did you do next?
Reed: There was so much to do. Research about how to make the technology better and move it forward, and ultimately how to communize space. One thing we figured out was that space travel could be less resource-intensive, more accessible. ExT had held a lot of that technology under wraps, because they wanted this to be expensive. They wanted to make sure that only the ultrawealthy could access it—because it was part of the selling point of the colonies, that they would only have ruling-class people. They wouldn’t even let up servants, they were so nervous about the possibility of insurrection. They automated everything and ran tech remotely. With the takeover, we reestablished the old network, and started these international research collaboratives. Pretty quickly, we got excited about this idea of the space elevator in Quito.
Abdelhadi: You must travel to Quito often.
Reed: Definitely. I was very involved in helping with the design of the elevator, but my real passion was in spacecraft. I spent six months in orbit helping to build the shipyards in Pacha, and now, as you said, I coordinate the design council for new craft. The launch for Mars is only three weeks away. I leave tomorrow and won’t be back in New York for a few months. This one isn’t just a small expedition or a tiny group of cosmonauts, but a full commune ship: two hundred and sixteen people. They are finishing up the Puriy, the Mars commune ship, at the Pacha shipyards. In a couple of weeks, the rockets to take the residents up will start to lift off. A lot of people are visiting Quito for that week, to see the launch.
Abdelhadi: Everyone is very excited about it. Let’s take a step back and talk about how you ended up there. I feel like we just rushed through from ’51 to the upcoming launch. What happened in the interim?
Reed: After the takeover, we had ExT’s infrastructure, but we didn’t have access to the flow of goods and energy necessary to actually fully run operations anymore. We had one exploratory mission in ’54—that was the first major global collaboration—just to see what had happened with the existing infrastructure from the old colonies. We brought back reports to Born in Flames, and we got to work on a long-term plan. Our crew was talking through this all with the communes that were springing up around New York, and later with the Free Assembly. But everyone else was doing this in their lands, like trying to hash out a collective vision for space. It’s still an ongoing conversation.
Abdelhadi: Where were people leaning at that time? Or what were they focusing on?
Reed: The initial priorities were reestablishing the moon residences and repairing and rebuilding the satellite infrastructure. Asteroid mining was very controversial—people who had been involved had some very bad memories—but eventually we decided we would get that going again.
The first really big idea, the thing that we slowly started to get consensus around, was the way to make space accessible: it was to build a space elevator. The people in Quito had the beginnings of some plans, ExT had shelved a research unit on it but had some great data. The CNSA, the last actual public space agency in the world, had gone rogue during the civil war in China and was very eager to collaborate. It was decided that the elevator was the way we were going to make space accessible to people. Using some of what we found when we completely took over, we started serious designs.
Abdelhadi: Can you explain the space elevator?
Reed: Um … there is a lot of new coverage about it. I feel like every six-year-old knows what it is. Perhaps, especially every six-year-old. But sure. We have started construction already, and it should be done within a decade. It will be a permanent structure, linking a geostationary orbital platform to the Earth’s surface. It had to be built on the Equator, and our friends in Quito were very eager to be point. It will be the biggest structure humans have ever made. It took years of debate to decide if it was worth the resources of constructing it. The idea is, instead of launching rockets or components, they can be hauled up on the elevator’s main platform. There will be channels for pods in the interior of the structure, used for smaller scale items like people. Once the construction is complete, the resources and energy to transport back and forth will be a tiny fraction of what is required for rockets. The orbital platform above Quito is already completed, or at least fully functional. It is called Pacha. Already, all our spacecraft manufacturing takes place in orbit, at the shipyards of Pacha. When the elevator is complete, anyone will be able to visit, not the months-long wait lists we have now.
Abdelhadi: What is Pacha like?
Reed: It’s … it is the most earnest place you will ever visit. Like everyone there is so passionate, and so dedicated, and so hard working. It is like the passion of humanity crystalized into fifty structures tied together with tubes and struts. It is like a giant, magnificent, lopsided snowflake. Lots of visitors are artists and scientists. Lots of people are on their way to the lunar commune, or the asteroid belt, or one of the orbital communes. It is really profoundly moving for people to just look down on Earth, the first time they make it up. Getting back and forth is hard, admittedly, because we are still using rockets. But the elevator will turn Pacha into a city anyone can visit.
Abdelhadi: You’ve talked mostly in “we” form, and I’m curious what you yourself are focused on these days. I know you primarily work on spacecraft design. What else?
Reed: Yeah, that’s my main team. I also do a lot of public-facing stuff in communicating what Born in Flames is doing with the communes and making sure we have oversight from the Free Assembly. I do a lot of teaching and training too. None of us wept over academia’s grave, but we have been thinking over the past twenty years about how we maintain knowledge production outside of that system. How do we make sure we are still discovering? Creating? How do we systematize those things? Turns out, so much of what we thought was supporting us was holding us back. There’s no shortage of interest in science, it was just a matter of creating new ways of training the next generation, of communicating between scientists, of sharing resources—those are all the things the commune is about.
Abdelhadi: Indeed. Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time, thank you.
Reed: I hope you’ll come to Pacha one day.
Abdelhadi: [Laughs.] I’m too old to leave Earth! But I wish you the best of luck and appreciate the work you’re doing.
Reed: Thank you.