Empty Set is founded on the idea that technology writing is at an impasse. Despite growing interest in “tech criticism,” the genre has found itself flattened and constrained in recent years. As publications dedicated to grappling with the many contradictory shades of our techno-culture have shuttered—Real Life, WIRED Ideas—the industry has shifted towards hype-cycle based business reporting, at best, and thinly veiled advertorials at worst. Though there remain a few bastions of critical thought, these have mostly survived as watchdogs, too tired from keeping up with a neverending cycle of abuses to speculate more broadly on what our evolving relationship to technology is doing to us.

We believe that technology writing can be so much more. After all, despite what we so often assume, technology isn’t synonymous with the latest gadget, or digital this-and-that. It is ancient—as old as our bodies and words. If language was one of our first technologies, then shouldn’t technology writing give rise to poetry? If our bodies were the basis upon which all technical prostheses emerged, then shouldn’t technology writing know how to move? The tech writing remaining today is too sober, too timid in style and subject matter to capture what it feels like to inhabit our world: the millenarian fervor of the techno-evangelists, the riptides of rage and desire we traverse daily on our devices, the anxieties and distant hopes that shimmer on the horizon. We need writing that not only thinks about technology, but with it.

The stakes are clear. Having failed to address this latent world— where technology becomes religion, flesh and code intermingle, and ghosts haunt the machine—we’ve let the worst among us steer the conversation. Peter Thiel sells out lectures on the Anti-Christ while pseudo-intellectual bloggers peddle dollar-store fascism by misreading Hegel. In our failure to experiment boldly, to speculate and myth-make and take all the strange corners of our techno-culture seriously, leftist technology criticism has handed over the reins of sensemaking to feudalist wannabes and reactionary trolls. Donna Haraway once wrote that “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with… what thoughts think thoughts.” Empty Set is dedicated to finding the concepts and thoughts that we’ll need in order to tell a new story about our technologized lives.

Writing in the dust of this critical landscape, it’s only fitting that our first issue takes on decay. Though the promise of technology is one of eternity (neverending life, endless access to information) it’s rot that undergirds our world today: brainrot, entropy, planned obsolescence, 404 errors, poor images, lossy compression, nutrient-rich humus, carbon-rich biomatter turned oil and coal. Rot is a process that encapsulates the short-sighted excesses of our techno-culture, as well as a potential force we might channel into new hopes. After all, without decomposition there could be no regrowth, nothing underfoot for life to arise in. By sitting with this decay, we hope something new might take root.