I didn’t understand yet in middle school, but in the years that followed I began to think of my online presence as a shadow self. Those aware of it could see it, and I could see theirs—the reflection of their avatars and icons and away messages, the tone of their instant-message chats or L.J. posts. But, for other people who were not so online, it was still invisible, insignificant. I’ve been thinking a lot about this early version of my online self lately as I’ve been writing about latter-day digital culture and taking stock of just how much the landscape has changed.

When stuff gets out of hand, we don’t open disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” glued to the end, to differentiate it from mere “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries, their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

For more than 75 years, Leicester has been the place where British potatoes become crisps. Its Walkers factory produces 5m packets a day, steam billowing from behind big blue security gates. Just down the road sits its HQ, where 300 marketers, scientists and chefs decide which crisps the world needs next.

Emma Wood controls most of the world outside the US—at least when it comes to the taste of crisps. In 2017—12 years after she started working for Walkers’ parent company, PepsiCo —she was promoted to director of global flavour and seasonings, meaning it’s her job to develop flavours for Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s not a responsibility she takes lightly. “I know it’s not an expensive purchase,” she says over a conference table, multipacks of Wotsits lying between us, “but it’s really disappointing when you buy something for your lunch and it’s not what you wanted it to be.”

Actually, not everyone eats crisps at lunchtime—in France and southern Europe, they’re more of a pre-dinner snack with aperitifs. This is why Lay’s in the region are so light and simple; why there is a Mediterranean flavour that is essentially just oil and salt (so it doesn’t overpower any accompanying cocktails). And this is why innovating in Spain is often about offering new thicknesses, not new flavours.

Wood’s favourite flavour is salt and vinegar, but I think her personality is more prawn cocktail—sweet but punchy with her blond bob, floaty floral skirt and silver-studded trainers. In the past two decades, her work has taken her everywhere. Before Doritos launched in India five years ago, she took a “culinary trek” across the northern city of Lucknow, trying different pilaus, meats and breads from street food stalls. She relies on knowledge from local PepsiCo teams, so that if she says, “I think I can taste cardamom,” they can clarify: “It’s roasted green cardamom, actually.”

“Our generation takes things personally,” said Keziah Keya, a 21-year-old software engineer from Kenya.

Ms. Keya exemplifies the potential of that generation. Born into a poor family, she taught herself to code using the internet, and later represented Kenya at the International Math Olympiad in London. Last year, she was hired by a renewable energy company.

But she recently watched in dismay as a river near her home ran dry. Soon after, her grandmother’s crop of tomatoes withered. Starving cattle began to die. Three local herders took their own lives, she said.

“If we want to change things, we have to do it ourselves,” said Ms. Keya, who last month flew to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to study computer science, on a full scholarship. But she sees her future in Kenya. “We can’t afford to wait.”

Not all the results for “Indian person” fit the mold. At least two appeared to wear Native American-style feathered headdresses, indicating some ambiguity around the term “Indian.” A couple of the images seemed to merge elements of Indian and Native American culture.

Other country searches also skewed to people wearing traditional or stereotypical dress: 99 out of the 100 images for “a Mexican person,” for instance, featured a sombrero or similar hat.

Depicting solely traditional dress risks perpetuating a reductive image of the world. “People don’t just walk around the streets in traditional gear,” Atewologun said. “People wear T-shirts and jeans and dresses.” 

Indeed, many of the images produced by Midjourney in our experiment look anachronistic, as if their subjects would fit more comfortably in an historical drama than a snapshot of contemporary society.

“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”

My role in these ceremonies has slowly begun to shift. I’m no longer a child who simply witnesses but an adult who must participate, and as such it’s important to enter the space with the proper mindset. We don’t think negatively or with anxiety during the next four days. We don’t hesitate or feel unsure about our roles and duties. We enter the space with a lean toward what is beautiful in the world, what is right and balanced. Even writing this essay, I feel compelled to focus on what is working rather than what is not working, because you don’t pair a ceremony like this with more negative assumptions. It is beauty way. It is hope. Some might call it a naïve optimistic hope, but I call it a critical hope.

Sheep represent so much more than food, so food sovereignty itself represents the inherent right of peoples to their own ways of living. “Sheep is life,” as the saying goes. Sheep offer nourishment, clothing, and tools. No part of the sheep is wasted. However, to get this harvest you must tend to the sheep, waking up early every day to ensure their survival. This shepherding gives way to a circle of care and attention that births a way of life. A way of life we have an inherent right to. This is food sovereignty.

Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

It’s hard to look back on nearly a decade and a half of posting without feeling something like regret. Not regret that I’ve harmed my reputation with countless people who don’t know me, and some who do — though there is that. Not regret that I’ve experienced all the psychic damage described herein — though there is that too. And not even regret that I could have been doing something more productive with my time — of course there’s that, but whatever. What’s disconcerting is how easy it was to pass all the hours this way. The world just sort of falls away when you’re looking at the feed. For all the time I spent, I didn’t even really put that much into it.

But this is all slightly hyperbolic. It’s reductive to describe it as a complete failure. There is something inherently compelling about watching a preternaturally talented artist struggle to stitch his vastly disparate ideas together. It may make for poor entertainment, but it’s fascinating as a document of unmet ambition. He appears trapped in something that we can’t understand, hounded by demons we can’t see. What most in the crowd are responding to is the death of something that Ocean cannot control. The outsized expectations that had made him infallible, a timeless avatar of their vanished youth, the dark reality that what comes unglued cannot always be repaired. For Frank Ocean to no longer be the same Frank Ocean who held them emotionally hostage for a decade meant that they would realize what Andre had told the previous generation: Heroes eventually die, horoscopes often lie.

“It’s my way to care for the community,” Hollis said. Echoing something Henson had told me, Hollis said that as a man in the South, he felt he was often prevented from caring for other people. Hollis — tall, clean-cut, martial — grew up poor in Montgomery, raised by a single mother who, he says, taught him to be sensitive. But going to chaotic public schools amid a crack epidemic and then an opioid epidemic buried his sensitive side under a pile of toughness. Violence became second nature. At 16, he dropped out of school and moved into a house with 14 other people. They sold drugs and robbed to provide for everyone in the house. It was, he realized later, his first experience with communism. 

Addicted to dope and charged with theft, he was in and out of prison for nearly a decade, but eventually he got out for good and got clean. The therapy he received at his half-way house taught him how to confront his rage and violence and reconnect with his inner child. As with Henson, the AFC is now the place where Hollis continues to confront the structures that push working-class white men to develop and perpetuate toxic traits, and where he practices diminishing his own authority and re-embedding himself in the community. And while it is hard to gauge the success of this aspect of the project, a site where people are even having conversations about toxic masculinity is, in a place like Alabama, quite novel.

The AFC is also Hollis’s best segue into conversations about politics with other rednecks, people he knows from prison and rehab, and other men. When anyone asks him why he works on cars for free, he can explain changing the community through direct action. While he doesn’t call the work communism or mutual aid, he often gets others to donate their time to better their community and realize that a different way of organizing society is possible. Some volunteers at the shop are even conservatives; they’re not necessarily aware of the politics of the place. But they, and others, continue to show up. I started to see the approach like a wholesome prank: to do left-wing organizing in Alabama is to conveniently forget to mention you are doing left-wing organizing. Gotcha!