Celebrating Malka Older's arrival at Global Voices
Originally published on Global Voices
Malka Older replaces Ivan Sigal as Global Voices Executive Director. Illustration courtesy Ivan Sigal.
As I wind down my tenure as executive director of Global Voices, I am celebrating the many friends I’ve made, the community we’ve built and the many projects and successes we’ve achieved together. I am also celebrating the arrival of Malka Older as my replacement!
Malka is a science fiction writer and a sociologist who studies and teaches about future risk, with extensive experience in humanitarian response work around the world. I first encountered her writing in 2018, with her Centenal Cycle, which explores a world with a radically different system of governance. In this world citizenship is untethered from geography, in a configuration dubbed micro-democracy. The system is maintained by an agency that combines features of an international organization and a monopolistic technology company resembling Google. Complexity ensues.
As I read Malka’s work, it seemed as if the conversations I was having daily with Global Voices colleagues could be transposed into her stories. It was uncanny. Global Voices contributors debated, traveled, wrote, worked and socialized in an expansive, polyglot universe imbued with a politics that makes space for the many potential identities every person possesses, not just those bestowed upon us by social forces, geographies or countries of origin. Malka had envisioned a world in which those aspirations, combined with exceptional fighting skills (it is after all, science fiction), might flourish.
Since that time, I’ve continued to think about the commonalities between Malka’s polymathic and unconventional approach to questions of information orders, governance, and how communities and organizations emerge from crises, and Global Voices’ vision.
Malka’s selection as the next executive director of Global Voices therefore gives me confidence that this organization and community will be tended by someone who has not only the skills and experience to carry out the technical parts of the job, but has evolved a common set of values. I am excited to see what directions she, together with our colleagues across the organization, will move our projects and programs in the coming years.
As I said in February when I announced my plans to step down as Executive Director, there will be a need for what Global Voices does for a long time. Spaces for creative exchange and expression are, around the world, under increasing pressure from both political and technological systems. Global Voices has long sought to place human interests at the center of our thinking. In a world optimized for passive consumption, we celebrate the capacity of all people to contribute to a knowledge commons. We treat the people we write about as if we might know them, and attempt to build connections and understanding with humility and curiosity, resisting the emphasis on conflict, drama and sensation that rewards media with attention. We celebrate human translation and language learning as a means of discovering other cultures and places, despite the ubiquity and ease of use of machine translation tools and artificial intelligence.
I have high hopes that the entire Global Voices community, together with Malka, will find creative ways to continue to build this mission for years to come. I look forward to coming along for the ride.