The Journal of Embodied Futility
We strive to make meaning. always unfinished.
A digital commons for writing that moves slowly, listens deeply, and refuses optimization.
Here, scholars and artists co-create with generative AI, treating it not as a shortcut but as a mirror for human thought—distortions expected, third voices emerging.
We publish work that teaches, questions, and imagines otherwise—fictional, philosophical, poetic, pedagogical. Unfinishedness as the act of becoming.
Stay awhile; scholarship behaves differently here.
Environmental & Ethical Statement
We write within contradiction. Generative AI draws enormous energy from infrastructures built by corporations whose values we often resist. Rather than deny that entanglement, The Journal of Embodied Futility makes it visible. We aim to use these tools against their own logics of scale and extraction—to create small, slow, reflective work that consumes carefully and gives back attention. Our practice is transgressive, not innocent: we write with machines while refusing to worship them.
We hold that ethics begins not with purity but with recognition of relation. Every act of composition—human, algorithmic, ecological—has consequence. To write at the tempo of attention is therefore an ecological gesture: a countercurrent to the speed, erasure, and resource intensity of digital life. We acknowledge that our language rides on the same data centers that melt icecaps, that our metaphors move through cables mined from colonized land. Awareness alone cannot absolve this harm, but it can reorient us toward responsibility. We respond by attending: to the slowness of revision, to the trace of energy each text carries, and to the possibility that thought itself might become reparative through care.
Philosophically, our stance borrows from posthuman and decolonial ethics: the refusal of human exceptionalism and the insistence that knowledge, like matter, is shared. We understand writing as a practice of accompaniment—moving with rather than mastering technology, with rather than over the planet that sustains it. This means accepting futility not as failure but as fidelity to the unfinished. Each essay, poem, and dialogue published here is a small act of resistance to the fantasy of total understanding. Our hope is that this humility—the willingness to think, err, and re-think within the tangled circuits of creation—might point toward a livable ethic: not clean, not closed, but conscious.