Pitches Wanted (Technology) | $1,200 to $2,000 per article

We are currently soliciting pitches for Issue 19 of Logic(s): supa dupa skies (move slow and heal things) Compensation: We begin at $1200 for shorter essays of 1200-1600 words, and $2000 for longer features of 2000-4000 words and up. Other mediums will be compensated at the same rate depending on length. Logic(s) is still a magazine about technology and society that publishes three times per year, in print and digital formats. We’re under new leadership, J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Xiaowei Wang, and are re-launching as the first black + asian queer tech magazine. This inaugural issue welcomes all types of mediums thinking through tech and matching our theme, supa dupa skies (move slow and heal things), including reported articles, features, graphic stories, poetry, speculative sci-fi and fashion. Can we detonate and rebuild a genre that began from product reviews? Let’s reach for the skies as we collage and remix like we’ve always had to.

We are open to any creative responses bringing together the theme and critically examining tech. When Missy Elliot debuted her 1997 music video (The Rain) supa dupa fly, from which this issue’s title takes its inspiration, the fish eye lens on out of this world outfits, built on and moved past the Sun Ra lookbook of 1960’s Afrofuturism. It also was a declaration of black women avant garde in the game, making space for explicitly queer rap (even as Missy has chosen to remain quiet on her own sexuality). We hope to channel supa dupa fly rhythms in calling forward technologists who are baby mommas, villagers from the countryside, locked up, hustling, or just travelers wandering, looking for a place to catch their breath. This is not about diversity, it’s about reclamation. It’s about blackness taking up more space, it’s about thinking across or trans the arbitrary disciplinary boundaries of academia. While technologies of the status quo reinforce hierarchies, in these pages we’re making space to break them down.

WE ARE PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN SUBMISSIONS THINKING THROUGH THE FOLLOWING CONCERNS:

As SA Smythe emphasizes, black study is what lets us know that we gotta ask a completely different set of questions if we want this tech journalism thing to be of any use. Yet black study has yet to critically engage tech to the degree it has engaged literature, visual arts and theory*. While all the other academic fields are playing catch up to (or made irrelevant by) the black radical tradition’s insights, there’s something like a tacit refusal to think through computation and technologies marketed as AI or machine learning. Why is that and what can we do about it? How does blackness think across or trans these conceptual constraints? Can we find rhythm in the process or in the spirit of Braithwaite, seek to break the pentameter?

Central to Silicon Valley’s development of carceral technologies has been the operationalizing of Brahmanism while claiming casteism doesn’t even exist, especially in the US**. How does corporate tech leadership disciplines Dalit and Black worker dissent within companies, while digitizing oppressive social hierarchies outside of the industry? How can we move beyond simplistic DEI frameworks to understand the convergence of caste, race and carceral technologies?

How do legacies of state assimilation projects dovetail with modernization projects in the Global South? How are concepts of nationality wielded in the Global South to create border and surveillance technologies, or are being disrupted by community created technologies for sovereignty? Genocidal enclosures specially designed for non-US population ie. Uyghurs held in Xinjiang operate as testing grounds for digital repression later implemented in the US.

We are deeply interested in pieces reflecting on a critical caste, abolitionist approach that moves beyond demands for corporate inclusion or police prosecution of hate crimes. We’re also looking to receive submissions thoughtfully engaging with the distinctions and connections between caste, race and nationality in the development of new technologies or grassroots campaigns refusing them. Writers who are currently incarcerated are given special priority in the pitch process. We are happy to provide as much assistance as we can to ensure submissions from incarcerated writers are published. Pitch window closes end of day January 27, 2023. To send us a pitch, please fill out this form with your pitch and contact information: https://airtable.com/shrSI83Wn5GiJjWvL

*Bedour Alagraa’s scholarship, The Interminable Catastrophe, and recent publication in the Journal of West Indian Literature, Lessons From Braithwaite: Breaking the Pentameter, Deepening Black Study has deeply informed the questions presented here and their framing. Alagraa’s generosity in being in conversation with us as we envision this first edition of Logic(s) is deeply appreciated. **Special thank you to Murali Shanmugavelan for their scholarship on critical caste and technology, in particular the recent syllabus published by Data & Society. Their analysis on brahminical hegemony in critical tech discourse and social justice more broadly, deeply informed our framing here. Again, thank you for the intellectual generosity which made this nuanced prompt and framework possible.
Website: https://logicmag.io/