Illustrations from Joseph Freidrich zu Racknitz, On the Chessplayer of Mr. von Kempelen and its Replica, 1789. Courtesy Humboldt University of Berlin, University Library

It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

And today, it was the spectacle being presented at the National Hotel in New York City, drawing crowds of hundreds after touring all over Europe.

The Mechanical Turk, which debuted in 1770, was the first automaton chess-playing machine that played a competitive game of chess — all on its own. It was developed by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian inventor, to impress an empress, and soon became an international sensation.1

Consisting of a life-sized model of a head and torso, the machine also wore a turban, had a black beard, and grey eyes. His left hand gripped a smoking pipe, and his right hand lay on a large wooden box. Atop the box was a maroon and ivory chess set. His arms moved, and he could make facial expressions. During games, he shouted, “Échec!” (French for “check!”).2

The crowd went wild.

On December 4, 1840, the Turk was advertised as “[having] been seen by more eyes than any terrestrial object ever exhibited.” The machine toured and exhibited for eighty-four years worldwide and even beat historical figures like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.3

People couldn’t believe their eyes. How could such a machine exist? How could a wooden sculpture succeed at a labyrinthine endeavor like chess? To some, it was intricate machinery and innovation that made such a feat possible. To others, black magic.

Eventually, it was revealed that the Turk was no automaton after all, simply an illusion.

The games were all played by a hidden (and probably sweaty) chess master in the box who moved the chess pieces through magnets. The operator also used hidden levers to move the Turk’s arms and control his expressions.

To this day, the identity of the chess master, objectively a master of chess, has not been revealed.

Last week, some friends and I stumbled upon the New Museum in Lower Manhattan.

The museum’s current exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” explores how technology has inspired dynamic definitions of what it means to be human. Per the New Museum’s own description, “In an age when technological advancements and their unintended consequences seem to be accelerating at uncontrollable rates, New Humans proposes art as a collective form of creative prognostication—a vital self-portrait of the humans we may become.”4

I know what you’re thinking.

Prognostication means “the act of predicting or forecasting future events based on present signs, empirical data, or clinical judgment.” 5

Moving on.

A video installation there, “Mechanical Kurds,” by German filmmaker and theorist Hira Steyerl, blew my mind.

Steyerl is a contemporary artist exploring how political conflicts and social developments interact with technology. Her exhibit spotlights the Domiz refugee camp in northern Iraq, where young Kurds comprise the unseen workforce that makes digital innovation, namely AI, possible. For the installation, Steyerl interviewed twelve refugees, many journalists, and before the devastation of the war, who were commissioned by international firms to process military camera footage for AI models. In exchange for a small payment, they spent their days on the computers they once wrote compelling stories on, geotagging drone footage as “person,” “car,” and “house,” to aid machine learning.6

Nobody told them what it was for.

Hito Steyerl, Mechanical Kurds, 2025 (still). Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps, New York. Commissioned by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the New Museum, New York

There’s no denying that humanity is currently experiencing an electrical surge in innovation. From self-driving cars, digital assistants like Siri and Alexa who can turn on our bedroom lights and order our lunch, and scandalous computer-generated fruits with a penchant for infidelity, we are more reliant on and entertained by technology than we have ever been before. And how can you blame us? Thanks to all these technological advancements, everything is easier: seamless, touchless, and convenient. And now we have so much more time to do what matters!

Scroll on our phone and buy stuff.

It is a common misconception, however, that the increased capability of tech products is simply due to software or programming.

For example, when Amazon introduced its “Just Walk Out” technology, a cashier-less innovation that permitted customers to walk into Amazon stores, sign into their account, then walk out without physically paying, it was praised as the future of touchless shopping. The company advertised the technology as a groundbreaking achievement, manufactured and powered by computer vision.

However, Amazon was later exposed for failing to disclose how its “Just Walk Out” technology was possible: 1,000 workers in India who monitored shoppers through cameras and hurriedly logged what customers grabbed and walked out with. 7

Invisible human labor, usually by brown and Black bodies, makes astonishing technological advancements—particularly AI and automated systems—possible. However, tech companies are hyper-fixated on concealing this labor to maintain the illusion that the technology is purely autonomous.

These companies insist on keeping labor invisible because, when the public realizes that a “smart system” is powered by thousands of humans cramped in an overheated room being paid unlivable wages to categorize images, code data, or geotag content, the technological witchcraft is exposed as good old-fashioned exploitation.

Companies also conceal their harmful labor practices because, when they release new technology in glossy advertisements and billboards to their consumer base, they understand that what makes machines truly innovative is taking on human burdens on their own. However, when a machine relies on human labor to routinely course correct, it is less innovation and more secret outsourcing trickery. Nobody can know this.

Some may argue that this system is not all bad: it creates jobs for people facing poverty or displacement! Even if true, ask: at what cost? These tech companies are doing what they do best: maybe not replacing human labor, but restructuring it to be invisible, unprotected, cheaper, and rid of any accountability for how these workers are treated or compensated.

After being exchanged between different owners for almost 80 years, the Turk was eventually housed at the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia.

On July 5, 1854, a fire broke out there. As the flames engulfed the 85-year-old machine, the current owner, Silas Mitchell, rushed to the scene.

He was too late.

The machine, a representation of the pinnacle of technological innovation for over eighty years, was reduced to ashes.

Silas later wrote that, while walking away, the automaton’s voice box cried, “Check! Check!” …until it no longer could.

Photo Source: Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009

1,252.

That’s how many Facebook friends I have.

That’s how many people that I interacted with during my 28 years on earth, who I noticed -- or noticed me -- enough to press a button that subscribed them to me, and me to them. Forever.

A hodgepodge of people from different seasons of my life: a woman from the Nation of Islam I befriended at an interfaith dinner (happily divorced now, btw), high school teachers (also happily divorced now), and teammates from my college improv group (relationship status: unknown).

Don’t get me wrong: at some point in my life, my relationships with these people were important enough for us to stay connected. But maybe that was when social media was still new, and the prospect of having exclusive access to what my cool new “friends” were up to was salacious. Today, it’s more like, “I will never talk to you again, but I felt a small pang of sadness when I scrolled past your 3-paragraph tribute to your dead grandma.” Rest in peace, grandma. Crying face “react.”

Scroll past ad for Shen Yun playing near me.

Social media revolutionized the way we view friendships, and the way friendships exist (If we can even call them friendships). Social media has devalued friendships. Because now, everyone is a “friend,” and now, for someone to deserve access to the things we would share with our real friends, they must be promoted to a “close friend.”

Before social media, we took a class with someone in college and barely remembered them five years later. They were forever frozen in time as their eighteen-year-old self, who loaned us a pencil once that we liked so much we “accidentally” stole. We shared a laugh or two.

And that was it. Maybe one day we would find that pencil in a drawer years later and think, “I wonder what happened to that guy…” That beauty in the unknown has faded to another thing. Now, a Google search would reveal that he works at JPMorgan as an analyst. If we were connected on social media, I could tell you what he eats for breakfast or who he voted for. Some may say that it’s better to know the real him now than remember him fondly as someone he no longer is (Democrat).

But maybe, best of all, is to forget him entirely.

I hate knowing useless information about people I don’t see at least monthly, because that pocket in my brain should be filled with something more useful. Like overnight oats recipes. So, I mute them. But then, WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEEPING THEM THERE? They watch all my stories but won’t extend the courtesy of wishing me a happy birthday.

So what do we have here, Trevor?

What must be done with these pseudo-friends? I ask with the self-awareness of knowing I am one to many. We met twice in college, and now you have a lifetime subscription to my thirst traps and me, your bad poetry. I have many of these such “friends,” and some of them are doing novel and exciting things…but what is the point of me knowing that?

Removing them would take forever, and even if there was a magic button to do a hundred people at once, I’m too much of a people pleaser for that. Because what if they noticed and took it personally? Ironically, when I have been the target of someone’s “Instagram cleanse,” I started subconsciously hating them because, well…they hate me now!!!!!!

I try not to take it personally. Maybe they unfollowed me because we’re not close anymore, or they suddenly remembered we never were. Regardless of our affiliation, my life wasn’t interesting enough for them to stay subscribed. Which is fine.

My new philosophy is to normalize leaving an interaction and not connecting on social media, even if you had a good time. The next time you have a thirty-second conversation with someone that neither of you got anything out of, bid farewell, suppress the impulse to ask, “What’s your Insta?!” …and walk away. It will feel uneasy to retreat, effectively admitting that you don’t care if you ever see them again, but it’s better than suggesting that both of you stay connected and then watch each other’s stories until you die.

Sometimes, it’s more serendipitous to leave it up to the universe to see if your paths cross, or don’t.

The thrill is in the unknown.

If you step into my childhood bedroom and turn right, you’ll see a door.

Once you open the door, step into the closet.

Once you step into the closet, you’ll feel scared.

My bad. I forgot to tell you to turn on the light.

Now refocus.

Behind the door, there’s a broken bookshelf. And on the last shelf, there’s a bunch of journals. In those journals is…well, me.

I’ve been writing since I was 13. Writing has always been a reprieve for me. As a third grader, I wrote a horror story (inspired by Goosebumps) ((I was not a freak violent child)) (((btw have you guys seen The Drama….))) and distributed it to my class. It was returned with a few tears, Cheeto dust fingerprints, and raving reviews (my class had twelve kids in it, by the way). Given the MINDBLOWING feedback, I wrote two more parts. I don’t remember much about the “series” except that each book was bound with staples and yellow construction paper. Also, I drew a bloody hand on the covers.

Writing is one of the few things I can admit that I’m good at, because for so long, it was the only thing. In middle school, I routinely got Cs and B minuses in all my classes. Math never made any sense to me, my memory was too weak to learn another language, and science…one time I dissected a frog and cried on the way home. (In school, obviously ((I was not a freak violent child)).)

I wrote about everything. My feelings, quotes I read in school, random billboards I saw around town…you name it. Sometimes I wrote fiction about a teenage diva who went to the mall with her friends and ran into her crush at Starbucks, other times about my ten-year plan to abolish Kumon.

With the sparkly grandeur of the internet, the possibilities were limitless. I pitched articles to an online magazine celebrating South Asian womenhood. I interviewed comedians and podcast hosts. At sixteen, I started a blog called “Being Duriba.” Only three of my friends read it, but that was enough for me. I updated it every few weeks for over four years. Then one night, I impulsively deleted the whole thing.

At first, it felt liberating not to have immortalized posts about why the term “chai tea” is redundant.

12 years later, it feels like a betrayal.

I think about the girl who stayed up furiously typing on her sister’s lime green Dell laptop (that she was only permitted to use in the dining room) because she promised her friends a review of “The Fault in Our Stars.” I’m sure the posts were mediocre, but I wish I could read them again.

Over time, I stopped publishing my writing completely and journaled only when the impulse struck (usually when I felt like crying). It started feeling like a chore, and then I played it up in my head as a scary monster. There was nothing to write about it, and even if there was, did I want to be the one to write it?

It took me three years to finish my last journal. Even though I carried it everywhere, I never opened it. Emotional support journal? Or maybe it became a cute coffeeshop table prop for my Instagram story.

It didn’t help that whenever I had a thought to share, I texted it to my friends. Instead of writing and reflecting, my impulse became to reach for my phone and numb my brain with JusReign videos (rip), and eventually, TikTok.

At the start of the year at midnight, I promised myself I would start writing again and do hard things. Every month, I’ve made excuses, and in fact, I planned one this month, too.

But yesterday, I was waiting for the subway when my childhood best friend texted me saying it’s time she took writing seriously again, and that I should too. So this is me, rising to the occasion and doing a hard thing. I hope you stay along for the ride. At the very least, I hope you won’t send my articles in your group chats and call me cringey.

It’s shocking how, twelve years ago, I didn’t think twice about being perceived. I liked writing, and I shared it for fun (regardless of the consequences of my digital footprint). Six years later, I overcomplicated it. Today, I’m trying again (more responsibly!).

It won’t be easy or novel, but it will be something.

Hopefully, that will be enough.