Episode 6 - Jamie Theophilos on Broken World Thinking

The Breakup Theory

On today’s show, I talk with one of my favorite people, Jamie Theophilos, a dear friend and comrade. Jamie teaches and studies the politics of digital technology and is a long time organizer, anarchist, as well as video editor/videographer, graphic designer, and motion graphics artist. Jamie also has an essay, “Ways of Seeing: Radical Queerness,” in the book I co-edited, Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies with PM Press.

Jamie and I planned today’s conversation around an essay that Jamie shared with me called, “Rethinking Repair,” by Steven J. Jackson, coming from the academic field of science and technology studies. Jamie knew that I had been working on a project around anarchism and breaking up, and this essay proposes a theory of relation (specifically to technology) through the idea of breakdown, which emphasizes care and repair. Our conversation tries uses this perspective to interrogate our relationship to the technology that plays a large role in our lives, and which can seem so totalizing and nefarious. How do we relate to the tools we have to create spaces for our flourishing and solidarity right now? We try to avoid any kind of purism or binary thinking, to address what we have in front of us, and what we can do with it.