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Y Is for You Are the Tech(know)logy: Your Body Is the System They Tried to Erase

Writer: Kiing Curry
Kiing Curry
3 hours ago
7 min read

AfABC · Y/25

The Ultimate Algorithm Is You

The Afro Ting (Hair Care) portal appears against a black field. A textured green and purple Afro rests inside a coral-red form above colorful lips and a turquoise grid reading “Afro Hair Tings.” Beside it, text locates Afro hair as a living archive holding memory, lineage and embodied identity, with care rooted in relationship, rhythm and ancestral presence.
Y begins inside Afro Tings, where hair care is not aesthetic alone. It is relationship, rhythm, ancestral presence and remembrance—the embodied foundation from which the Afro ABCs return.

Afro Ting (Hair Care)


Hair, Ancestral Memory & Embodied Care


Afro Ting centers hair as living archive—holding memory, lineage, and embodied identity.


This terrain approaches hair care as ritual practice rooted in relationship, rhythm, and ancestral presence.


Care here is not aesthetic alone; it is remembrance.





Y Is for You Are the Tech(know)logy ◉)) I Hear Tings — Two Aural Worlds



A sculpted, multicolored ear form in electric blue, orange, magenta and green floats against a black, speckled field. A warped neon-green grid expands behind it like an antenna while thin sensory tendrils extend outward.
The I Hear Tings stamp opens the Aural World for Y Is for You Are the Tech(know)logy, where magic is not spectacle but embodied intelligence: melanin, energy, intuition and the crown operating as living circuitry.




The sound thread for Y Is for You Are the Tech(know)logy, where magic is not spectacle but embodied intelligence: melanin, energy, intuition and the crown operating as living circuitry.









https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_e14f488a7531433497da2ba751cf3367/1080p/mp4/file.mp4
Seba Kaapstad’s “Magic” opens Y’s first aural world: the system did not invent the current. It learned how to extract, program and profit from what was already moving through the Black body.

Before the machine, the platform or the algorithm, there was the Black body generating the current. The system did not invent the magic. It learned how to extract, program and profit from what was already moving through us.



A Spotify share card on a muted blue background. A pale-blue rounded rectangle contains a small portrait of Solange, the song title “My Skin My Logo,” Solange’s name, the large black text “My skin my logo” and the Spotify logo.
Solange’s “My Skin My Logo” enters Y as a warning: Black skin can be praised as magic while still being made into a logo, placed back in the museum and kept available as commodity.

“My Skin My Logo” enters as a warning. The song literally is showing how the magic stays and remains commodity. And if you’re not careful, you’ll listen to the song and think it’s praising the black body when it’s actually placing the black body back in that same damn museum state where it remains commodity.


Skin becomes logo. Blackness becomes an aesthetic system. The body becomes the exhibit, the advertisement and the product while being told that this visibility is celebration. The praise sounds good enough to conceal the glass case. Cooler than a fan the feeling it invokes. Y asks us to pay attention to that conversion: the Black body may be recognized as magic and still never be released from the market. They can name the power, reproduce its image, build an entire cultural machine around it—and still refuse the Black body ownership of the current.



The Ultimate Algorithm Is You


Y is for You Are the Tech(know)logy. Afrofuturist collage on a black, star-speckled background. A Black astronaut moves through five stages, gradually shedding their spacesuit and transforming into a brightly colored organic-technological body with an electrically charged Afro crown. Planets, helmets and fragments float around the sequence. Text reads “Y — You Are the Tech(know)logy,” “Afroscape Field Notes” and “Your body is the system they tried to erase.”
The body does not become technology when it reaches the machine. The suit comes off and reveals what was already there: Black body, melanin, memory, crown and current as the original system. Y is for You Are the Tech(know)logy.

Your Body Is the System They Tried to Erase


Textured Riso-style graphic on a black, star-speckled background. An enormous pale-blue letter Y edged in hot pink stands beside a large violet 25. Above them, a coral profile figure with an Afro bends toward the Y while a line from the body connects to a violet gear. Blue, purple and red-orange waveform bands cross the top and bottom. A vertical label reads “AfABC · Y/25.”
Before the computer, platform or Silicon Valley product, there is the Black body. You are the programming. The ultimate algorithm is you. The electricity feeding the system is you.

AfABC · Y/25


Y is for You Are the Tech(know)logy.

You are the programming.


The ultimate algorithm is you.

The electricity feeding the system is you.


Technology has been made to look like something outside the body. A computer. A platform. A product built in Silicon Valley and sold back to us as proof that the future has arrived.


But technology did not begin with the machine.


The machine is one attempt to reproduce what bodies already know how to do.


Receive information.

Recognize patterns.

Store memory.

Respond to pressure.

Communicate across an entire system.

Adapt to changing environments.

Protect what must remain alive.


Your body was doing all of that before anybody taught a computer to pretend it could think.

Tech(no)

Deep-blue Riso collage showing three nude Black bodies of different sizes standing in a row. The tallest blue figure lifts their face upward, while the pink and green figures’ Afros extend into thick electrical cords plugged into wall outlets and a bank of computer servers. Cyan, magenta, green and orange inks overlap across the bodies and machinery.
The machine learns to pretend it can think by plugging directly into the Black body (it why the plug and outlet are misaligned purposefully). Crown becomes cable. Body becomes infrastructure. The system calls itself intelligent while running on a current that was never its own.

Silicon Valley has narrowed technology until we can barely recognize it without a screen.

That is tech(no).


Technology without knowing.


Technology refusing to know where its materials came from, whose labor assembled it, whose language trained it, whose behavior feeds it or which bodies became disposable so the machine could keep expanding.


Technology that wants the information without entering relationship with the body carrying it.


The Black body has always been inside that system.


Cyan-and-violet Riso collage showing two overlapping Black figures with large Afros on the left, one larger in the foreground and one smaller behind. Threadlike currents extend from their crowns across the blue field toward round gauges, reels and plug-shaped mechanical objects clustered on the right.
Before we were users, we were made into commodities. Measured. Priced. Wired into the apparatus. Technology did not end the auction block; it learned how to make the extraction look like participation.

Before we were users, we were made into commodities.


Measured.

Priced.

Tracked.

Transported.

Forced to produce.


Made into the labor, data and physical infrastructure of somebody else’s progress.

The plantation did not need a computer to be a technological system. It had ledgers, production targets, surveillance, extraction and programming designed to convert Black life into somebody else’s wealth.


Silicon Valley inherited the logic.


https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_27c474dffe3e4f069f4ffdc6fa666ebd/1080p/mp4/file.mp4
Silicon Valley did not invent the system. It inherited the colonial logic that turns Black bodies into infrastructure, extracts the current and calls the machinery innovation.

Extract the culture.

Extract the language.

Extract the image.

Extract the labor.

Extract the attention.


Keep the platform.

Keep the profit.


Then convince the source that access to the machine is the same as power.


Melanin Is Tech(know)logy

Hot-pink Riso collage with branching chemical structures spreading across the left side. A dark, grainy silhouette of a Black body curves in from the lower right, overprinted with red, violet and black molecular lines that dissolve into the surrounding field.
Melanin is literal tech(know)logy: living information carried in and across the Black body. Coloniality keeps trying to study it, map it, own it and sell its power back to us.

Melanin is literal tech(know)logy.


It receives.

Protects.

Responds.


Transforms the body’s relationship with light.


It is not simply the color coloniality used to organize human value. It is material intelligence that existed before whiteness built a hierarchy around it.


That is why melanin is tattooed between my breasts.


Portrait-oriented blue, magenta and green Riso close-up of a deeply melanated chest framed by a metallic V-shaped garment. A hand-drawn molecular tattoo runs vertically between the breasts while enlarged chemical structures are layered across the skin.
Melanin is tattooed between my breasts because the knowing is held directly inside the body coloniality keeps attempting to describe as an object. The mark does not make my body technological. It names what was already there.



The knowing is held directly inside the body that coloniality keeps attempting to describe as an object.


The mark is not there to make the body technological.

It is there because the body already is.










The Crown Holds the Current

Pink-and-black Riso collage of a Black person in profile with a large Afro and one hand resting behind their head. A tall black oval overlaps their face and upper body. Inside it, a cyan hand reaches toward the Afro but stops at its red-and-blue dissolving edge.
The crown holds the current, which is why access can never be casual. Every hand reaching toward Afro hair enters an energetic relationship. Anyone and everyone should not be allowed access to your hair.

Afro hair is also literal tech(know)logy.


It helps keep the Black body embodied.

Tethered.

Grounded.


It responds to water, heat, pressure, atmosphere, friction, neglect and rest. It records what has happened to the terrain while changing how the body moves through the environment surrounding it.


Energy coalesces at the scalp.


This is why anyone and everyone should not be allowed access to your hair.


Your hair is not a public interface.


Someone liking it does not give them permission to touch it.


Someone being licensed does not automatically give them the knowledge required to tend it.


Someone being related to you does not give them permanent access to your crown.


Electric-blue Riso collage framed by overlapping green, orange and pink arches. Inside, a close crop of a Black body’s shoulder and crown shows thick, cable-like rows moving across the head toward a rectangular connector and vertical computer-server panels. Violet, magenta and green inks overlap throughout.
Relationship is not a lifetime password. Someone being related to you does not give them permanent access to your crown, your current or the system living inside your body.

Root access must be granted.

And it must remain revocable.


The first ting they took from us was our hair.


Cutting it.

Covering it.

Renaming it.

Regulating it.

Using it to classify us.


Training us to pull, tug and yank it toward gravity so that the body underneath it might become more manageable.


More employable.

More gendered.

More cis.

More palatable.


We have been struggling to find solid ground ever since.


https://video.wixstatic.com/video/23e724_a9cbac9def6c4a2b92202218464a70af/1080p/mp4/file.mp4
The first ting they took was our hair. Every hand that pulls the crown toward gravity, palatability and somebody else’s order repeats the disconnection—and we have been struggling to find solid ground ever since.

But an Afro does not have to be pulled into gravity for the body beneath it to be grounded.


The crown rises.

The body remains tethered.

The system knows where it is.


The Rooted You

Red, pink and violet Riso collage showing two Black figures with large Afros. One stands upright on the left while the other reclines across the lower right. Purple and green currents extend from their crowns into a branching network of floating electrical plugs above them.
The rooted you is not waiting for the system to switch on. Crown to crown, current to current, the power is already circulating. Their success depends on you forgetting where the electricity begins.

Their success is banking on the possibility that you will continue running from a rooted you.


A you who leads with a crown anointed and adorned by ancestors and spirit.


A you who understands that the body is not malfunctioning simply because it refuses somebody else’s programming.


A you who knows that care cannot require surrendering root access.


A you who can recognize the difference between technology built through relationship and tech(no) built through extraction.


Mycelial Sankofa brings us back to that distinction.


Not backward toward purity.

Backward toward the relationships that were severed.


Toward the knowledge that survived inside the body even when the language surrounding it was taken.


Toward the current that kept moving even after the system renamed its source.


Y is for You Are the Tech(know)logy.

Your body is the system they tried to erase.


The ultimate algorithm is you.


Y Is for You Are the Tech(know)logy: Your Body Is the System They Tried to Erase


Post Identity AfABC · Y/25


Field

Entry

Letter

Y

Letter Phrase

Y is for You Are the Tech(know)logy

Essay Title

Your Body Is the System They Tried to Erase

Series

The Afro ABCs

Primary Portal

The Afroscape • Afro Tings

Book Connection

The Afroscape: Hair as Tech(know)logy — A Field Guide

Central Thesis

The Black body is the programming, algorithm and electricity feeding systems that have repeatedly extracted from it. Afro hair is living tech(know)logy that helps keep the Black body embodied, tethered and grounded.

Body Coordinate

Reclaiming the body and crown from colonial programming while controlling who receives root access

Primary Methodology

Mycelial Sankofa

Core Refrain

You are the tech(know)logy. The ultimate algorithm is you.


Afroscape Connection


Y continues the backward journey through the Afro ABCs by expanding what Z established: the Black body is the blueprint, and Afro hair is living tech(know)logy. Y separates embodied tech(know)logy from colonial tech(no)—the systems that extract Black labor, culture, information and energy while teaching us to locate innovation somewhere outside ourselves. It establishes the crown as protective infrastructure, hair access as root access and the rooted Black body as the source their machinery continues to depend upon.


Source Constellation


Source

Use inside Y

Human Scalp Hair as a Thermoregulatory Adaptation⁠

Supports tightly curled hair reducing solar heat gain at the scalp

Role of Semiconductivity and Ion Transport in Eumelanin⁠

Supports eumelanin’s hydration-responsive electrical behavior

Melanin, the What, the Why and the How⁠

Supports describing eumelanin as a heterogeneous functional material rather than one fixed chemical structure

Enslaved.org⁠

Makes the vast documentary and data infrastructure surrounding slavery visible


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