Chapter Six: Opening a Channel

I sink into my futon—my workspace, my couch, my bed. The yellowish-white walls creep in towards me. In this moment, I become aware of my imprisonment—the entirety of my existence is spent here. 

I am raising a child in solitary confinement.

Beside me, Cillian lies sprawled, his small chest rising and falling in the heavy heat. The air is too thick for play. He should be running with other kids, not wilting in a box. My chest tightens. What kind of life am I giving him?

A burst of energy hits me. I grab a pen, and a crumpled piece of paper from Cillian’s backpack, then find myself frantically scribbling: “Profits from a business could fund the revolution.” These words didn’t come from me; they came through me... I have never thought about starting a business—is the universe having me channel the solution? Then the pen in my hand writes… “A marketplace.”

An image appears in my mind’s eye: I see a woman in Indonesia, her hands working a loom passed down through generations. The tapestry she weaves is thick with her family’s stories, dyed in the colors of their hope. She places it on our marketplace, and somewhere in Toronto, someone buys it—not just paying for fabric, but for her to expand her palette from hope to reality.

“Mommy, what are you writing?” Cillian asks, eyes wide.

“Just a second, kiddo,” I pat him on the back, and the memory of the schoolyard flashes behind my eyes. The mother’s face, tight with contempt. The way she yanked her daughter away from Cillian’s offer of imaginary flowers.

For a moment my internal narrative floods in. My problems are karma. A cosmic punishment for not fitting in, not doing things the right way. The universe tallies my flaws, and sends back the bill as isolation.

But then, a switch flips in my head, so loud it feels like a physical click.

I see her face again in my mind, and I look past the anger. Beneath it, I see something else. I see the widening of her pupils. The rigid set of her jaw. It wasn’t contempt. It was fear.

They pipe fear into us through the loudspeakers. We are being programmed by the news alerts, and warnings. And then they have the nerve to tell us compliance will be our savior.

My pen moves on the page, writing : “The system is designed to make us small, to make us afraid of each other, because if we’re all locked in our own little boxes, we’ll never have the strength to look up and see the people running the machine.”

It’s not karma, it’s the system. A system working exactly as designed—and if a system was designed by people, it can be dismantled by them.

Then the pen in my hand starts its automatic writing again: “There needs to be a new way to communicate ideas, and form connections. Current social media use algorithms as a wall to hide you from each other.” Is this why it feels like we’re all screaming into a void?

Then another image forms in my mind’s eye: I see me? 

I am writing out my ideas for a post-capitalist system in a social media post. I feel confident about my ideas, but after being met with a silence that swallows me with the screen, I delete my post, and my confidence with it.

I gasp. Are they shadow banning me? Was my post hidden?

Then the vision in my mind’s eye shifts—I see the platform as two halves of a whole: one side a living marketplace, the other a new social media sanctuary for voices, one that connects us. A new Library of Alexandria they can’t burn down.

“What’re we doing today, Mommy?” Cillian’s voice pulls me from the spiral. He needs water, a cool breeze, a life bigger than these four walls. He needs a world where he can thrive, not just survive.

I look from his expectant face to the frantic lines on my page. My resolve hardens—I’ll do the experiment. I’ll use the money to hire someone to build the platform. 

This is how the revolution begins.

I ruffle his hair and quote Pinky and the Brain, the words a secret promise. “Same thing we do every day, Pinky—try to take over the world.”

He giggles, and the sound—pure light—fills the stifling room.