YS: I became interested in figurative sculpture and started
exploring different ways of making them. I think the first
figurative work that I made was right after this show in
London and in some way was the other side of that screen
I discussed—in that it shows the person in front of it. The
work was a self-portrait made of a down jacket that is
stuck in an empty desktop computer tower, the object
people used to have in offices and homes below the desk
before Laptops. The jacket is arranged or draped
to look like there is an actual person in the jacket, so that
the mental picture that is created is of someone actually
living in the computer, or being stuck in a computer. Art
doesn’t translate too well into language, so it sounds silly
here. But as a sculpture I think it was formally quite interesting
and successful. I later scanned this work and had
it cast it in plaster, which totally changed the character
of it. I showed the plaster cast on a little rabbit fur for my
degree show in 2014.

YS: It was in that same period, exactly. I had moved from
Berlin to London in 2012 for my Masters at the Royal
College of Art, and the workshops there allowed me to try
some new and more elaborate fabrication methods than I
had used before. The first work I made there was a life-sized
Emma Watson sculpture CNC-milled out of one solid block
of Swiss pear wood. It took weeks to first program
and then mill it, and I left it just like it came out of the
machine. The only thing I added to the figure was this silver
hedgehog necklace, because I had read online somewhere
that it was her favorite animal. Since there was no other
finishing or sanding, one can still see the way the robot
was programed, the tracks it was running along and where
it couldn’t quite get to etc. I find that quite beautiful.

YS: On a personal level, going back to what I said above, it
came at at time when I was living in a long distance relationship,
maybe feeling a bit lonely and spending a lot of
time on my computer. On a societal scale I think the internet
was still somehow new, especially social media, and
there was this broader cultural shift towards life spent online,
and the alienation that comes from it. It was also the
time of the “dark web” with Silk Road and new online forums
such as 4chan. There was a series of hacks targeting
celebrity phones which resulted in leaked private imagery—
what you would call “nudes” today, and a lot of them
were fake. Living in London and being a Harry Potter fan,
I was particularly interested in the attention that Emma
Watson got online. I found it interesting to create a work
that picked up on this contemporary moment, to reflect
on this new character of the internet loner, but to address
it within the traditional medium of figurative sculpture. I
thought of Pinocchio and how one can now create a companion
out of nothing by 3d printing or in my case milling
it out wood. In an art historical sense it also aligned with
this burgeoning movement in young art that came to be
labeled as “Post-Internet” art, where people were interested
in somehow bringing digital matter into physical
space, or at least bridging the two worlds via objects in
the real world beyond just phones and screens.

YS: Yes I presented a group of these sculptures with an
Emma Watsons face but with fantasy bodies in my first
major gallery show at Guido W. Baudach in Berlin 2014.
The figures were in the nude with short hair, crossed legs
and only their hands covering their breasts. The show got
some positive press coverage, which I think then came to
the attention of a feminist Facebook group and some
young London artists in specific. They took offense in the
work and accused me of objectifying the female figure. I
was called a misogynist, had magazines call me for comments
and then fairs, exhibitions and sales canceled because
of it. I would almost say that I was canceled before
that was even a thing yet.

YS: I focused more on myself I think, and maybe lost a bit of
my youthful energy at the same time. Shortly after my exhibition
at Guido’s I moved to New York and did my first exhibition here at the Swiss Institute in 2015. The show
was framed as a fictitious Honey Moon between a mermaid
Emma Watson and me, and followed by an exhibition in
Mexico in 2016 for which I created this stalker persona
obsessed with Kristen Stewart and Twilight. As a result of
my move to New York maybe, and some other changes in
my personal life, this fan fiction and celebrity part of my
work slowly lost some of its relevance and interest to me.
I tried to make work that was more personal and maybe
more universal in subject matter at the same time.
In 2017 I made an exhibition titled Single which had a picture
of myself in the nude as an invite, and mainly consisted
of ready-made sculptures of myself, sort of domesticobjects-
assemblages. After that I did a show series called
Primal in 2018 that presented very simplified, almost
pre-historic wooden figures. I combined these with a lifesized
wooden Legolas sculpture, which I made after
leaked nude images of Orlando Bloom appeared online.
So the the celebrity aspect never fully went away, I
just started to juxtapose it with other elements.

YS: Totally. In 2019 I did a show called Boys for which I made
a plaster self-portrait of myself as a little boy based on a
family video. In some way this was in response to the
cultural climate of #metoo at the time, but it then also led
me to the explore other elements of my past and the cultural
archetypes that I grew up with. It led me to make the
country boy plucking flowers next, and then the Snowman
with the hearts as well as some of the new animal sculptures.
Most recently I started combining all these figures
into larger groups, which is something that keeps me busy
and really excited today.

YS: The work you mention is titled Day and Night
and I made the first iteration of it in 2021 for an exhibition
in Mexico titled Eternity. In some way it is a reflection on
masculinity which has been an interest of mine from the beginning and I guess heightened with the climate you describe.
But I think this specific work comes without any
feeling of guilt. I see it as an exploration of the relationship
between softness and strength, much beyond the current
moment I hope. What I see in the work is an oversized dandelion
flower that props up a muscular Greek or Roman
hero figure which is missing a leg. The flower is draped
around the torso so that it becomes the missing leg that the
figure is precariously leaning on. I see the two elements as
forming this fragile unit, but at the same time I could imagine
them walking away together like this, him using the
flower as a sort of crotch. I find it very poetic and nice how
they together manage to defy the gravitational pull, which
is sort of the cleansing force of any standing sculpture.

YS: It differs. In the case of this work we just spoke about,
the flower represents things like beauty or poetry or art
in my mind, without wanting to load too much onto the
work by saying this. I mean that it stands for what contrasts
with the physical strength of the figure, but still
supports it if that makes sense. In some other works the
flower is personified I would say, even the next work
where there are two flowers growing out of a concrete
block. To me they become almost like figures, I see them
as a couple that is flirting with each other in some way.
It’s this little moment of tenderness in a slightly hostile
environment that I like about it. And then in some later
works like in Laetitia, the flower to me represents
a person outside of the arrangement. For this
figure the large flower is turned towards the woman and
then child as if it was given to them.

YS: I’m glad to hear that. Damien Hirst speaks about having
to make a fly piece after making a spot painting, just
to balance the sort of good with the bad, the pretty with
the ugly. I never had it like that. I like to make things that
make you feel good, things that give you a deep and
hopefully warm feeling. In driving school you learn that if
you look at the tree you will hit it, I think that is a good
strategy for life also. If you want to be a happy person, think
happy thoughts. The world moves by positive action not
negative thought, so I really try to be engaged in the former 248
SC: Would you say that is the purpose of art?

YS: I would need to think more about that. When it comes
to the purpose of art, I often think about this quote by
Gerhard Richter, who said that “art brushes the dust of
the everyday”, which I find very beautiful and right. It can
touch on the silly as well as the essential parts of the human
experience, but in a way that is pure and complete.
What I mean is that the world is always perfect within a
work of art, not in a moral sense, but more in the way
that a given moment can also be perfect. It’s like cleaning
up your house, which gives you that one moment of enlightenment
when things are all in place. Or that one first
breath of clean air when you step out in the morning, or
looking at your kid when it sleeps or moves in a cute way.
Art is exactly like this moment, but it never ends. It’s
eternally perfect.

YS: I think it was Andy Warhol who said “Switzerland is
great, it’s finished”. Which I think is a very interesting
observation. My one friend always says about New York—
it will be great once it’s finished. Which obviously it will
never be. I’m not sure if this really captures anything at
all, but it’s easier to do things in New York. Someone once
wrote about my work that “Nothing glamorous ever came
from Switzerland,” which I think is an interesting observation.
In Switzerland the ultimate achievement and
thing another person could say about you, is that you are
normal. It’s the absolute peak of Swiss-ness and the real
ingredient if you want to belong—is not to stand out.
As a young person I think this can feel limiting and disempowering.
But the older I get the more I value the understatement
and also the social cohesion in some way. There
is a true sense of quality and people care about doing the
right thing and about doing things right. I appreciate
that today.

YS: What I can see is that my work used to be much more
loud and American while I was in Europe and much more
Swiss since now that I’m in New York. Today I’m interested
in making figures that are centered within themselves, not
looking for attention or reliant on an audience or other people. The best I can hope for is to imbue them with a
kind spirit, to put a little fire in their hearts. I read something
the other day about monasteries, and how some of
them are spectacularly modest. I really like that expression
and idea, it’s something I strive towards. Maybe it’s my
protestant upbringing but I do find true joy and beauty in
restraint. I think the spirit lives in simple things. As Carl
Jung famously said, “if you are looking for god and haven‘t
found him yet, you are not looking low enough.”

YS: In my mind the genuine opportunity of art is to speak
about the things which don’t change over time. Art doesn’t
get better with time, it’s not like technology where there
is some kind of development and a strong notion of progress.
I don’t think art gets better or worse. If I think about
a person in a cave, they would carve a figure out of a piece
of rock or bone that might look quite similar to my onyx
works. And in spirit and function it is probably pretty
close to what I described with the Emma Watson work
above—as in the first human carving themselves a friend
or thinking about someone they saw in the forest. What
I mean here is even though the Emma Watson work is
extremely specific, and it took 2000 years of recorded
cultural history to get to a place where all these references
are in places, and where the technology exist to make it
in such a realistic manner by a machine, to me it is no different
than a piece of driftwood that barely resembles
a figure at all. I’m interested in the whole spectrum of
figuration, and think that especially the combination
of these different forms, expressions and materials are
thrilling to me. While there is a technological graveyard
for a lot of things that came in between, I would say that
the earliest human artistic expression can still be as valid
and meaningful as anything great made today. Art is like
a perpetuum mobile that gives endless energy once it’s
created, without ever losing any. Forever.

Jona Köpf: I mix both analog and digital. I usually design the images digitally first, print them out and then work with different textures, for example foil on foil or water on the printing ink so that the structure changes. I draw and craft on top of that, scan it again and continue working on it digitally.
 I also take a lot of photographs, for example with friends when something comes up in the studio. I used to only do photography. Then I started working with paint, refined my techniques more and more and found my own approach.

JK: (laughs) I was not very good at vocational school. It was only my practical work that got a good grade. I was always the loud one who made jokes. I was never really the model student.
 Right now I am working as a graphic designer. I want to keep developing there and look into different areas. Maybe freelancing will also work out.

JK: I would definitely call myself an artist. In the graphic field a lot of things are already defined by the client. Artists can be more free. I like it more when you can follow your own ideas and bring your own visions and inspirations onto the page. Design is fun and creative too, but it is something different when you create something that is truly your own.

JK: Yes exactly. Two years ago a friend [Nils Weindl] and I founded a creative archive called Convaicant Archive in Stuttgart. We film concerts analog, mostly with VHS or Sony HI8. We take photos and film there simply because we enjoy it. That is how I got into the music scene. I was able to make contacts and combine that with my hobby.

JK: We started painting and filming together. As a joke we said, let us just combine it. We really love concerts and I already had a few contacts in the music scene. One thing led to another and we just slid into it. I really like capturing concerts on analog film. Nowadays almost everything is filmed digitally. Analog has that 2003 vibe. That feeling gives it an extra kick. A new camera basically has endless storage, but with analog you have a 30 minute tape so you have to film the perfect scenes. That’s fun.
Our archive projects were on pause this year, but now we want to start again and do more creative things.

JK: It started on Instagram. I connected with small musicians simply because I was interested in how they work. I got more and more contacts, more and more people. You know someone who knows someone and so on. Then it turned from digital into personal. The network grew naturally and not in a forced way. It is not that hard to get into it, you just have to stay consistent, talk to people and integrate yourself.

JK: I once found a book by that photographer at a flea market. Morris used to work for The New York Times. He took photos in Iran, Iraq and other war zones. I found the book so fascinating that I had to write him an email. I said that I would like to work with his images. After one or two weeks he replied. He said he would send me everything I wanted. He sent me entire folders with photos and told me I could do whatever I wanted with them and that I could also publish them.
 We had a phone call together. He is a very nice person who has experienced many terrible things. I was able to learn a lot from these images. It was really impressive for me: You find a book at a flea market, you write to someone you think is so far away from you, and then something like that happens. Since I am very interested in politics and history, I wanted to address how much has been forgotten. Many wars that people never really heard about.

JK: I have been thinking about publishing my own magazine. I still want to find the perfect printing house. When I do something, I want to do it really well, so I need to take my time. It might still take a while. I would do it in a small edition. Small editions printed in Germany are quite expensive if you want high quality.

JK: There are still some single covers coming up. Right now I am working a lot with the musician Filly. I am doing a lot of cover artwork for her. This year is a bit quieter, but next year I want to do more again and set myself new goals.

OONA: Self-sovereignty.
Which is just a fancy way of expressing the idea that I am in charge of my body, my money, my creativity, and my life. It’s a radical approach to the self – taking complete ownership of every aspect of my identity and way of being.

OONA: Sometimes, I consider myself a feminist artist and an activist. I’m also an anonymous artist, a performance artist, and a crypto artist. Depending on the day, I am either a brilliant artist or a very bad one. Sometimes, I perform; most times, those performances engage with technology, and almost always, they explore identity.
The activist question is tricky. When I think of contemporary activism, two archetypes come to mind: one I admire, the other less so. There’s the Emma Sulkowicz type: she carried her mattress, the site of her rape, across her college campus until graduation. Then there are the oil-painting destroyers: once provocative, now repetitive and headline-chasing. I’d be disappointed to be lumped in with the latter but proud to create work with strong intent and lasting impact like the former.
In this lifetime, I happen to inhabit a female body, and I’m asking what it means to exist – as a woman who makes art. Feminism is one of the tools I use to navigate the weight, wonder, and weirdness of that experience. How do I translate the view from my eyes, my breasts, my body into art? If my pussy could talk, what would she like to say?
Feminism is not about gatekeeping womanhood, nor is it man-hating. Feminism is a collection of ideas, like seeds, that, if nurtured, give way to greater intuition and freedom of choice.

OONA: Labels, when applied to artists, should be used as launching pads, not intellectual cages.
If someone writes off my work as “feminist” and moves on, that is their loss. I’m not here to coddle small minds or peens. In my pursuit of knowledge and in my expression of wisdom through art, feminism is a great starting point, but feminism is certainly far from the final destination.

OONA: I never show my face, but my body is often on display. Without my face, my body becomes more like a canvas – a (literal and physical) abstraction to explore the female form.
I used to have silicone breast implants; I explanted them. Now, in a performance called Look Touch Own, I invite people, one by one, to touch my breasts and the implants that were once inside me. The tension between anonymity and intimacy is intense. I’m letting strangers touch my scars, but they can’t see my face. It’s privacy vs. intimacy, honesty vs. visibility.
Anonymity serves as armor in my guerrilla performances. I’ve been kicked out of Art Basel Miami, the MoMA, and the Met for these performances. When Sotheby’s curated an all-male glitch art show – a movement founded by a trans woman in the 1970s – I publicly called them out until they re-curated the show. In these instances, the anonymity my mask provides is a signal of something renegade, something radical enough to warrant invisibility. The idea is bigger than the individual.

Plus, the mask means I don’t really have to fuss with makeup.

OONA: My anonymity is whatever the audience projects onto it; it shifts from person to person.
Without a face, some people treat me like a toy or an object of desire. During Look Touch Own in Los Angeles, a woman messaged me for days afterward, begging for forgiveness because she “treated me like a plaything and didn’t know why.” (She did indeed treat me like a plaything; she is one of the few women who juggled my implants and tried to juggle my real breasts as well.)
When I’m in wealthier crowds, people sometimes assume I’m an escort, and I can always tell. Once, I was at a small event presenting Touched, a dynamic artwork tracking G7 asylum trends using UNHCR data. At the start of the evening, a woman rudely dismissed me and even told her husband not to speak to me. (I can only assume it was because she knew he enjoys meeting escorts.) Then she heard me speak. Once she understood my anonymity and its purpose, we spent the rest of the night chatting. We got along super well. I love moments like that – when people show they can change their minds… emotional and creative flexibility in action.

My favorite reaction to my mask is, of course, curiosity. I meet so many beautifully curious people who talk about all types of wonderful ideas with OONA.

OONA: I’m not sure I could answer that, even if I wanted to. I don’t really want to “fight,” but that doesn’t mean I just want to make art about “pretty shapes.”
Anger + Love = Passion. Sadness + Love = Empathy. And laughter is supreme.
I’m creating art with all three: passion, empathy, and humor.
In performances like Look Touch Own, I’m performing along a sliding scale of anger and sadness… anger at how often women’s bodily boundaries are violated, and sadness at the harm women inflict on themselves in the name of beauty.
In other works, I like to be playful. In Spread, a video art collaboration with Lori Baldwin, I mapped out the gender pay gap in art sales using butter. Taking big, heavy topics and breaking them down into absurdity is its own form of resistance.

OONA: My work will live forever, and no one but me can tell me what to do! Conceptually, I’m deeply attracted to the potential of blockchain technology, crypto, and NFTs. I believe it offers a revolutionary approach to ownership. In its “purest” form, blockchain technology allows us to create entirely new metrics of value – ones that challenge traditional gatekeepers and hierarchies in the art world.
For performance art, an ephemeral (and esoteric) medium that resists objectification, blockchain opens up a lot of possibilities. It allows me to assign tangible value to intangible moments, preserving my performances in a way that transcends their original context. The sale or transaction is, in many ways, an extension of the performance.
It’s also empowering. I wouldn’t have a practice if I had to rely on the traditional art world hierarchy. I’m too wild for white walls. Blockchain redistributes power, allowing artists to connect directly with their audiences without intermediaries. I love that I know my collectors and the people who support my practice.

OONA: This technology is only as good as the people who use it. In other words, it does not live up to its potential.

Charlie Stein: I like the friction between the two titles. The Real Thing is taken from an obscure Australian pop song. Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is a corrupted Nintendo meme but functions as a reminder that nothing is permanent. I want audiences to sense both at once: the desire for authenticity and the awareness that it can slip away at any moment.

Both titles trace back to corporate language. The Real Thing first struck me in Australia through Russell Morris’s cult psychedelic track, written during the Vietnam War as a sly riff on Coca-Cola’s famous slogan. The song folds protest and romance into one, weaving in even jarring WWII samples, which makes it political, magical, enigmatic, and subversively romantic all at once.

Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost originated in ’90s pop culture, as a variation of the Nintendo quit screen. The original “Anything not saved…” was remixed through Reddit and meme culture into the more poetic, aphoristic phrase “Everything not saved will be lost”. I asked myself why this incorrect version became more widely shared than the original quit-screen message, and I think it’s because we feel a desperate need to find meaning in an increasingly technologized world. We want deeper meaning in the magical devices that surround and haunt us; otherwise, we have to accept that we are just nodes in a ginormous internet brain that spans the planet which we feed into—and which feeds off us.

CS: The imagery of puffer jackets in Virtually Yours grew out of a deeply personal experience: visiting my partner on what would become his death bed in the ICU, where every attempt at contact was mediated through protective layers of latex gloves and glossy clothing. Those barriers made touch at once tender and distant, and I began to see the padded surface as a kind of interface — protective yet suffocating, intimate yet estranging.

I don’t see Virtually Yours — or the “puffer jacket series,” as you called it — as only about personal experience, though this is present in the work. I began the series a year or two after my partner’s passing, and over time I’ve come to see that it resonates with many kinds of relationships I navigate — personal, professional, and even metaphysical.

CS: They do a couple of things I really appreciate. The figures are all Trojan horses: an actual person is never shown. They remain mysterious, even to me, because they are portraits that deflect their own readability. They refuse to be easily decoded through gender, race, or class. That ambiguity allows me to work in an investigative mode.

At the same time, these figures connect to how we experience bodies through screens today. Time and again, I paint glossy black surfaces that evoke a smartphone display—smooth, light-emitting, touch-sensitive. When you touch your phone, nothing really physical happens: a tiny electrical signal registers, is translated, and becomes an action. On canvas, I turn that into an image of dissolution: touch without object, intimacy between skin and surface. We stroke our phones thousands of times a day—far more than we touch our loved ones, or even ourselves. That strange redistribution of tenderness fascinates me.

So the figures hover in this in-between space: half-human, half-object, intimate yet untouchable. They mirror contemporary identity as something mediated, constantly translated through layers—of fabric, of screen, of code. But they also insist on mystery, on resisting total capture. For me, that’s the paradox of being alive right now: we are more visible than ever, yet our true presence still flickers between surfaces.

CS: That’s a good observation. I would argue that painting is still one of the most successful storage media for images that we have. We know how to preserve oil on canvas for centuries. Every major museum employs teams of conservators who specialize in stabilizing pigments, repairing canvases, and slowing down the aging of oil paint. Compare that with the fragility of digital images: formats become obsolete, hardware breaks, and even when stored carefully, files can vanish because the infrastructure that supports them collapses. Rhizome and similar organizations are working on digital preservation, but the knowledge of how to keep a JPG alive for the next half-millennium is far less secure than the knowledge of how to preserve an altarpiece from the fifteenth century.

Painting to me is not nostalgic at all, it’s radically contemporary. As a medium, it guarantees visibility and longevity in a way digital storage still struggles to achieve. Think of VHS tapes: they’ve degraded, the players have disappeared, and whole archives are lost. By comparison, a painting, even when cracked or darkened, remains legible, restorable, and transmissible across generations. So when I paint, I’m not just making an image; I’m choosing a medium that resists disappearance.

CS: Living in different countries has made me acutely aware of how identity is not fixed but constantly dissolving and reforming. You carry fragments of language, gesture, and intimacy from one place to the next, shedding and accumulating layers like skins. This fluidity is mirrored in my paintings, where figures often appear padded or encased, melting or half-dissolved, suspended between categories.

When I lived in Beijing, I became hyper-aware of my own body as a marker of difference. During my daily bus rides and errands I didn’t experience myself as different until I caught my reflection in the window and saw an alien staring back. Blond hair, pale eyes, light skin. That estrangement came with its own contradictions. There was comfort in difference, but also the undeniable recognition of privilege: I could drift through that space with a kind of immunity, while others – the larger part of the world population – carried the daily weight of structural racism. Whiteness represents only a minority of the global population; it is neither a norm nor a standard for others to live by. Becoming aware of one’s own privilege—and the traces of racism within one’s own thinking—is a necessary beginning. To inhabit that contradiction can be unsettling, but it matters. I feel this body of work largely takes skin colour out of the equation and allows me to speak to more universal topics that may be relevant to anyone at some stage.

CS: I don’t try to separate the personal from the universal. My paintings often begin from lived experience, but I treat those moments as material that can shift and expand into broader conditions. In the Virtually Yours series, for example, the padded and encased figures carry traces of grief and intimacy, yet they also speak to how all of us navigate mediation, distance, and vulnerability today. I think the balance lies in letting the work remain open: it is never only about me, and never only about the universal, but always suspended in between.

CS: Yes and No. In Berlin the puffer jacket is what the baseball cap is in America: a uniform, not a fetish. Everyone wears those big black glossy coats through the endless winters. Straps, latex, vinyl belong to the city too, but what stayed with me was the sheen itself, that glossy black that always recalls the surface of the iPhone — cold, omnipresent, the portal through which so much of life now passes.

Even if those cultural markers do not always translate, I try to make work that unfolds on multiple levels. At first glance you might see figures embracing or fighting, then notice textures, contrasts, titles, the meaning I try to inscribe into each canvas. I want to make works I could live with for the rest of my life. Paintings that contain something I cannot fully grasp, that will mean something different to me ten or fifteen years from now. Like the box the pilot draws for the Little Prince, they withhold clarity so the imagination can keep moving.

The objects I depict are vessels. I try not to seal them shut, so that I can always ask: if this painting were real in another realm, what would I encounter if I skinned these forms? That question keeps me excited and a little anxious, as if I am afraid to discover what they truly hold.

CS: That is a difficult question, because what I see right now is a strong current of nostalgia in art, and that troubles me. By nostalgia I mean the insistence that art must look handmade in order to be authentic, as if visible brushstrokes or artisanal labor were guarantees of value. It is a romantic idea, but one that reproduces a very narrow model: the solitary genius in the studio, detached from questions of economy, infrastructure, or technological change. Historically, this model has been available only to those with security and privilege. For everyone else — women, minorities, artists without resources — it becomes exclusion disguised as purity.

My own practice pushes against that. I want painting to remain a valid contemporary medium, not because of its nostalgic aura, but because of its unique capacity to store and transmit sensations across time. At the same time, I engage with writing, installation, and digital media, because these forms expand the conversation and allow new ways of thinking about intimacy, mediation, and presence.

CS: I would say both. Technology alienates and connects at the same time. There are sparks of intimacy when you catch a friend mid-meme in a chat, or when FaceTime makes it possible for my mother and me to sustain a close relationship across distance. At the same time, so much of life is outsourced to us as end-users — travel apps, booking systems, endless contracts — that our hours are consumed by tasks disguised as efficiency.

Philosophically, though, I think technology is not just a tool we use, but part of what defines us as a species. Aside from our ability to cry tears, the drive to invent and advance technologies is the one thing that sets us apart from other animals. It is both our curse and our gift: the source of alienation, but also of entirely new forms of intimacy worth embracing.