A few years ago, I saw a call for a special issue of Ada New Media about feminist hacking. I am a crafter: I crochet; I sew; I mend and meddle.

Already fascinated by the types of work of my friends and colleagues in computational craft and wanting to experiment with making an alternate reality game (ARG), I put up a half-baked call for collaborators on Facebook and wrangled a team.

We pitched a project, The Spider’s Web, which was selected for the issue. The ARG opens with a seemingly normal academic article on the Ada website, but careful reading reveals otherwise. Most obviously, a footnote explains the article is part of an experimental game, but more subtly it includes a number of references to an imagined future. That future is both apocalyptic and utopic. Ecological disaster has become commonplace, but it has been met with robust networks devoted to care and protection.

The thinning veil

I submitted the game (the work of an excellent team! although I write here about my own experience producing) while I was a few weeks postpartum. While I joke, sometimes, about the veil being thin, there are moments when, truly, I think it must be: birth, death, standing once alongside a highway outside of Marfa thinking if someone murdered me right here, nobody would ever know. These are places, moments where you could disappear or transform. The Spider’s Web came to fruition during one of those moments.

I drew inspiration for the game from Cynthia Kadohata’s writing in In the Heart of the Valley of Love. In that book, Kadohata seems to ask what if, as we face the encroaching reality of environmental and economic catastrophe, we just keep plugging along? I had another question, too: What if, in the face of epic, catastrophic change, we decided to lean into caretaking, protection, and intimacy? What of us is worth salvaging? And, are we brave enough to save it?

The game is apocalyptic and deeply hopeful. I imagine better futures made of our own stumbling, slouching efforts to create the type of individual and social transformations that might let us survive.

Knit together

In the wake of news that Ravelry, a website known primarily amongst knitters, had taken a decisive stand on banning white supremacist commentary, I found myself thinking again about The Spider’s Web.

It isn’t a perfect project, although I think parts of it are beautiful. The game includes several original quilt blocks made by Anastasia Salter; Megan Reilly did an amazing job on the video that concludes the game; and Megan Boeshart Burelle did a tremendous amount of work putting together a professional website for a personal archiving service that does not exist in this moment and might never.

When I first brainstormed the game with members of the writing team, we circled around a few themes, including environmental disaster and caretaking, but also the entangled history of code and craft. In particular, I wanted to do something with my fascination with steganography as practiced by women, especially needlecrafters.

The punchcard was invented for weaving. Every pattern I’ve ever crocheted has been written in code. Folk accounts suggest quilts provided maps to the Underground Railroad. The historical record shows definitively the use of coded scarves to carry out anti-German espionage during WWII.

Hidden in the light

Women make deadly spies and assassins because they hide so easily in the light. After publication, The Spider’s Web has done a bit of that, too. The first footnote explains that the article is not an article, but the rabbit hole to a game. Despite that, people regularly ask why I have something written by someone else linked in my CV.

If you ignore the citations from the future, the article looks real enough. Nevermind that it’s written by a person who does not exist, affiliated with a fake university. To some extent, it is real — most of the citations are real, and the piece follows the form, length, and conventions of an academic article. More importantly, it makes a real argument: The future may seem grim, but that grimness doesn’t have to be the whole of what happens.

A knitting website has shown what a bold moral stance might look like. Based on the research that went into The Spider’s Web, this is no surprise. Knitters, quilters, sewers, crocheters, and other crafters make and remake on scales small and large. The clearly articulated policy at Ravelry shows the power of crafting and of recrafting community.

Now, more than a year after the launch of a game I completed in a postpartum haze, the veil seems much less thin, but the world is even more need of reimagination. We all must imagine how to reweave the threads of reality into something that could sustain and protect us all.