Combinations Issue One Launch: Myth and Mechanism

RadicalxChange invites you to an evening of discourse, drinks, and music exploring Myth and Mechanism—the guiding theme of both this gathering and the inaugural issue of its new publication Combinations.

What is the relationship between the grand narratives that have guided humanity and the concrete institutions and technologies that perpetuate them? Who decides where politics ends and governance begins? How do the systems we build to order our world end up limiting or expanding our capacity to imagine new ones?

Issue contributors Jaya Klara Brekke, Christina Lu, and Gary Zhexi Zhang will discuss these questions in a conversation chaired by editor Guy Mackinnon-Little.

Following the conversation will be a drinks reception featuring music from Mouna Press.

Doors at seven. Panel at eight. Free with RSVP.

About the Speakers:

Christina Lu is an AI researcher, technologist, and artist working via technical proposals, philosophical implications, and narrative infrastructures. She is currently completing a PhD with Oxford University’s Human-Centred AI group. Previously, she was a software engineer and sociotechnical researcher at Google DeepMind.

Jaya Klara Brekke is chief strategy officer at Nym, a noise-generating network that secures people’s digital footprint in the age of AI-powered profiling and targeting. She holds a PhD in digital geography from Durham University and writes and speaks extensively on power and the political economies of digital and decentralized systems.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer exploring connections between cosmology, technology, and economy. He edited Catastrophe Time! (2023), produced the opera Dead Cat Bounce (2022), and has lectured at Goldsmiths and Parsons School of Design.

About Combinations:

Combinations is a publication of the RadicalxChange Foundation, exploring new ideas about economics, democracy, and the relationship between technology and power. Combinations examines institutional reconfigurations that point to attractive possible futures for technologically mature societies—eschewing compounding power concentrations and opening up routes for more participatory paradigms. 

Its first issue, Myth & Mechanism, features contributions from Rana Dasgupta, E. Glen Weyl, Divya Siddarth, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Matt Prewitt, Jack Henderson, Christina Lu, J.H.H. Weiler, and Jaya Klara Brekke.