General | Platypus

What the Map Conceals: Sovereignty and the Sea in the Strait of Gibraltar

 Adam Matthew Mikhail  April 22, 2026

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An aerial view of the Strait of Gibraltar shows something that resembles order. Container ships move in two disciplined lanes, their wakes parallel lines across the surface. Between them, a single patrol vessel sits like a traffic cop at an intersection. Smaller ships move differently: ferries on fixed schedules, fishing boats angling across the grain, following lines invisible from above. The Strait, fourteen kilometers at its narrowest, appears split down the middle, dividing Morocco from Spain, Africa from Europe. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described the sea as the exemplary smooth space—fluid, directionless, resistant to the grid—but also as the first place to be striated, ruled into navigable geometry by technologies of longitude and open-water navigation. From above, the striae of the strait are clear. The question is what that striation conceals. (read more...)

Criminality, Risk, and Labor: Altruistic Surrogacy in Contemporary India

 Ritu Ghosh  April 20, 2026

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Surrogacy is a form of assisted reproduction in which the gestational labor of birthing a child is carried out by someone other than the intending parent/s. Surrogacy in India has gained a great deal of popularity over the last three decades, emerging as a major transnational commercial hub. Generating close to $2.3 billion in annual revenue (Rudrappa 2015), the industry was largely unregulated, until recently. In December 2021, the Indian state passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, criminalizing commercial surrogacy and permitting only altruistic surrogacy for select clients. The Act bans the “commercialization of surrogacy services,” outlawing any possible compensation for surrogate workers, whether it is “payment, reward, benefit, fees, remuneration, or monetary incentive in cash or kind” (Government of India 2021, 2). In effect, surrogacy is legally permitted only if it is “altruistic,” with heavy punitive measures in place for commercial surrogacy. By “altruistic” surrogacy, the state means an unpaid surrogacy arrangement that is borne out of the good will and selflessness of the surrogate worker, upon whose body the biomedically intensive, complicated, and risky process of surrogacy is carried out. It is important to note that surrogacy arrangements in India are largely shaped by stark power imbalances. Surrogate workers tend to come from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, and are often low-income, oppressed-caste women from rural areas. Intending parent/s, by contrast, are typically more privileged – urban, middle-to-upper-class, and from dominant-caste groups. These structural disparities have significant implications for surrogate workers in the current moment, with the regulatory turn to “altruism.” (read more...)

Data Borders: Three Years Later

 Melissa Villa Nicholas  April 14, 2026

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What should we do today? How would you write Data Borders differently today? But what can I do? People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (Villa-Nicholas 2023), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection. (read more...)

On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu

 Misria Shaik Ali  March 31, 2026

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At India’s southern tip, eight reactor buildings line the shore of the coastal communities of Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu—one of the four districts my family and I call home. These reactor buildings are of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), envisioned to be India’s largest nuclear park. People living in the nearby Idinthakkarai and Kootapalli villages mock the association of a risky technoscientific complex to anything close to a ‘park,’ or poonga—a forest or garden of flowers, in Tamil. The sea that rolls against the compound of KKNPP is where women protestors claimed that they derived their energy to lead the protest against the plant in March 2011. Following suit, fishermen rowed and drove their boats into the sea to protest the commissioning of the plant. (read more...)

The Human Cost of Precision

 Samiksha Bhan  March 24, 2026

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In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage. When in 2017, Nadella delivered a talk about the use of assistive artificial intelligence for people suffering from disabilities like CP, he was contacted by one his colleagues in Spain. Julián Isla, a software engineer at Microsoft, emailed Nadella out of a sense of resonance, because his own son suffered from a rare genetic epilepsy making him a parent of a child living with disability as well. Like Nadella, Isla was also motivated to think of the role of artificial intelligence in the assistance of other parents who, as he described, were on the “odyssey of diagnosis”. (read more...)

Love at First Sprout: Wild Peanuts and Mars’ Plan for Climate Security

 Eva Steinberg  March 18, 2026

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An animated peanut with a bowler hat and a white beard sits on one side of a campfire, opposite three smaller peanuts grinning back at him adoringly. Amid the chirping crickets and the crackling of the fire, the older peanut calls out: “Gather round my little legumes, it’s story time!” A small redheaded pod responds, “Grandpa, tell us the M and M’s story again.” Grandpa responds in a chiding tone: “We’ll get there! But, let’s start at the beginning…” (read more...)

A Promise of Safety for Everyone, Anywhere, Any Time: The Panic Button, The City, and the Box

 William F Stafford Jr  February 24, 2026

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By the time panic buttons were installed in buses, taxis, and autorickshaws starting in 2012, their deployment in Delhi’s public transit vehicles had already been under discussion for some time. Policymakers and engineers had considered them as one among many measures available to address anxieties that movement through the public spaces of the city by these means was inherently and increasingly fraught with danger. In the case of autorickshaws, panic buttons where integrated directly into their fare meters as part of a new meter format introduced in 2012 – the Integrated Electronic Fare Meter (IEFM) – which sought to address broader suspicions about the commercial honesty and social morality of autorickshaw operators. The IEFM incorporated GPS receivers and SIM cards which allowed for the identification and transmission of locational data, with each IEFM linked to a centrally administered software platform to track and monitor each vehicle. (read more...)