Mission Statement

Can the internet hold our grief? Can the internet be a collaborator in creating sacred space and ritual? Can we be devastated together, online? Can we digitally honor the suffering that connects us all? Can technology reflect back our divinity?

Thanks to the work of Skawennati, Abeba Birhane, Neema Githere, Alice Yuan Zhang, and Yuk Hui (to name just a few whose work inspires this project), we know the colonial imagination has suppressed the radical possibilities of the internet and technology broadly. Crafted with ancient, reemerging values, we know the internet could be the web that reflects back our interconnectedness. 

In the West, we’ve struggled to see technology created from the womb of divine feminine force due to false dichotomies between progress and healing, the natural and the mechanical, the logical and the intuitive. Yet we know technology itself is not the problem but rather the imbalance of our vision.

We can code algorithms just as invested in the thriving of our ecosystems as Mother Earth.

Imagine some antidotes to the wounds of progress lying in the scraps of technology already created.

There’s no ‘right’ way to interact with this altar. There’s a ritual generator and questions for contemplation that you’re welcome to try, and we also invite you to bring your own ritual lineages, ancestral grief practices, and ideas to this space. We hope this digital altar can hold the complexity of the impact of technological grief.

FAQs

This is a space for technological grief — a place to name the wounds, the impacts of the industrial and digital age, of ‘progress.’ An invitation to map technological history onto your ancestry and make abstract systems concrete. It’s an interactive digital apothecary where past, present, and future collide, to understand a larger tapestry of ‘modernity.’ What did we think we were gaining? What have we actually lost? Now, what’s most important?

Digital Altar was created with a dear friend and software engineer, Gyan Prayaga <3 make sure to check out the rest of Gyan’s work!

  • We are not collecting your data. You are empowered to leave behind any data, any stories you’d like to share publicly through notes. If you feel moved to share a screenshot of your interaction with the altar, please send it to veroscartoonworld@gmail.com. Otherwise, pictures uploaded will disappear once you refresh the page; no one else, including the creators of the altar, will see your pictures. Wisdom you leave can only be received at random once, then it’s gone. Notes left at the altar are permanent, but they may pile up, be buried, or get rearranged.

  • To name a few: Skawennati, Neema Githere, Alice Yuan Zhang, Yuk Hui, Francis Weller, Aurora Levins Morales, Rachel Chak, Cy X, Lucile Olympe Haute, Materia Abierta, Louise Dunlap, Cara Page.

  • We hope to have more community offerings exploring digital grief and communal memory soon! Stay tuned.