Why Am I Walking Away from Omelas?
A how-to manual for benign withdrawal and the practice of publishing otherwise.
“At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
In her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin offers a compelling image of people who refuse to remain complicit in a system whose beauty and abundance depend on someone’s brutal suffering by rigorously walking away. I have been thinking a lot about this act of withdrawal for quite some time, and am proposing something as an attempt to walk away. In short, I’m starting a newsletter to explore how creative labor, namely artmaking and writing, can maintain its value without institutional mediation. I will clarify what I mean by “walking away from Omelas,” word by word.
What I mean by Omelas is the political and financial infrastructure of the cultural industry in which I have been involved, whose modus operandi is the unmediated creation of surplus value through the extraction of otherness and the financialization of representation. The Zionist genocide against the Palestinians was an important call for all of us to recognize the contradiction of the industry of radical artists and critical designers that unquestionably depends on the means that are saturated with age-old and ongoing racialized bloods. I have been reflecting on my own complicity within this assemblage, what “having my career advanced” here means. In other words, Omelas is the institutions that exhibit queer arts displaced from the movements that were once riots, while maintaining binary segregation in their bathrooms and allowing their collaborators to be continuously misgendered. I have been witnessing real subsumption of the sense of futurity, the foreclosure of speculation that was thought to have an open possibility. I think of how this fundamentally reorganizes the political potentiality of political art, the artists’ self-image as a class, and their ability to organize. This is what I want to walk away from. What encourages me are the comrades that are already on their way.
What do I mean by walking away? Dear esteemed curators, you don’t have to worry because I’ll still be making things. But it is rather a statement about the mode of being—a divestment from the systems of value that enabled those violences. Under genocidal bio-cognitive racial capitalism, by which the production of culture is instrumentalized, representation—be it the graduation shows, a racialized representational worker as a token in a white institution, a ten-page max portfolio, or a privately owned queer collective—is the dominant method of valorization, rendering the practice of listening nearly impossible, making good readers scarce. To walk away is a benign refusal to make creativity subordinate to this paradigm. It necessitates mobilizing attention toward an understanding of value that cannot be captured—taking place simultaneously while avoiding immediate exposure to institutions, akin to what Harney and Moten called the undercommons.
This is why I am trying this newsletter service: as a site where my abstract labor can directly engage with those who make it valuable. I hope to be able to create something genuinely useful for you, not optimized for the accumulation of attention. This way, I won’t have to rely excessively on institutions like Instagram or museums, which congeal creative labor into its commodity form. I find the framework McKenzie Wark proposes in A Hacker Manifesto(2004) still pertinent here: these vectoralist platforms have been driving the enclosure of the surplus of information that we, the hacker class, create. I don’t think this publishing strategy will dismantle class divisions overnight, but I do imagine it transcending an individualist mode of survival—becoming a reciprocal infrastructure, where your paid subscription helps me afford to support the work of other artists, cook more often for the community outside institutions, design posters for queer events pro bono, and buy more eSIMs for those in Palestine.
How do we walk away from it? We walk away neither by participating in the vanity fair nor by withdrawing into complete silence, but by sharing ideas and values through this patchy publishing infrastructure that I titled The Archive of Patchy Studies. At its center is a diagrammatic interface—a rhizomatic motherboard—where not only the posts but also their interrelations and other relevant materials are mapped relationally. It is not designed for extractive taxonomy or classification algorithms, but proposed as a fuzzy web of mutual causalities. To navigate this space, hover or tap on any node to preview its contents—these might be essays, images, notes, or external links. The connecting lines represent conceptual, technological, aesthetic, or affective relations. Some nodes are public; others require a subscription to unlock. The subscription is handled—on the web and via email—through Substack, where you can subscribe as a Reader (€5/month) or as a Supervisor (€100/year). Both tiers grant access to monthly writing (3–4 posts, around 4,500 words in total), while Supervisors receive a more infrastructural view: a comprehensive reading list, annotated PDFs, notes from daily thoughts, and exclusive previews of ongoing artworks.
The diagram will grow organically, following rhythms that pulse outside the viciousness of racial capitalism. New nodes will emerge as thoughts coagulate, as conversations sustain. Some paths will shape themselves more densely; others may remain slow, in incomplete connection. Over time, I hope this platform becomes not just an accumulation of information, but a transformative infrastructure: a space where artistic labor is not extracted, but comes to obtain other forms of value mutually.