You should consider settler colonialism a set of technologies, not only a totalizing identity – refusal is not enough – we have an obligation to radical pragmatism – to challenge the working of the state internally

The scyborg’s medium is assemblage. When we take assemblages seriously as both analytical of power and as the medium for it, then the question becomes, how do you hack assemblages? The scyborg is a sculptor of assemblage—s-he splices one machine to another, de/links apparatuses from/to one another, places machines to work in making new machines, disassembles and reassembles the machine. The scyborg can connect Black radical thought to the paper-producing academic–industrial complex and set the print command to “manifesto.” The scyborg is like R2D2 in the Death Star, opening escape tunnels, lowering and raising doors to new passageways, making the death machine run backward, and ultimately releasing the plans for its destruction. The scyborg is an artist in the un/patterning of relations of power.[19] The scyborg loves dirty work.[20] Scyborgs do not care whether the assemblage they are retooling is first, second, or third world. Categorical thinking is not the point. Nothing is too dirty for scyborg dreaming: MBA programs, transnational capital, Department of Defense grants. Scyborgs are ideology-agnostic, which creates possibilities in every direction of the witch’s flight—not just possibilities that we like. This is why some of you are not always decolonial in behavior. Thankfully, your newly assembled machine will break down. Some other scyborgs will reassemble the busted gears to drive decolonial dreams. To dream it is to ride the ruin. Scyborgs are creating the free university. Scyborg desires are connecting the neoliberal motor that drove President Obama’s campaign for tuition-free community college to antipoverty organizing and to critical education. One of the interesting ways this is being done is by connecting free universities to the rhetoric of democracy and citizenship. Democracy is not decolonization. Democratization will expand, at best, the normative class of citizens through reinvestments in settler colonialism and new articulations of antiblackness. However, “democracy” as a discourse was also ready material for assemblage, a gear to attach to build the free university. The dream of universal education is born from the reality of exclusive schooling. This dream may shift as educational expansion creates new imbalances, such as inflated credentials, the devaluing of unschooled knowledge, new gaps between educational training and employment, or gaps between the trained workforce and the available supply of jobs. However, in building the free university assemblage and watching it fall apart, perhaps something unpredictable will come of its ruin. As to what, and whether the free university will be decolonizing, will be answered in scyborg assemblage. To be very clear, I am not advocating for rescuing the university from its own neoliberal desires but rather for assembling decolonizing machines, to plug the university into decolonizing assemblages. Close to my heart, Roses in Concrete Community School opened its doors in 2015 in Ohlone, what some call Oakland, California. This school is part of a larger self-determination project for a mostly Black and Brown community, in which we hope for a pre-K–16 educational institution, community-based economies, and land.[21] Also in 2015, also in what is now called Oakland, longtime Indigenous educators and activists Corrina Gould (Chochenyo/Karkin Ohlone) and Johnella LaRose (Shoshone Bannock) created the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust built upon “the belief that land is the foundation” that can bring all peoples together in “the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands . . . to Indigenous stewardship.” Sogorea Te’ Land Trust also reworks Western concepts of “land tax,” nonprofit status, and inheritance. Decolonizing land relations is the heart that reworks this machinery. Sogorea Te’ not only calls on but indeed provides an avenue for people living in Ohlone lands “to heal from the legacies of colonialism and genocide, to remember different ways of living, and to do the work that our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.”[22] Nearby Roses in Concrete is an abandoned U.S. Navy base the size of a small town. California community colleges are talking expansion, while the tuition-free college movement had nearly found a federal reality under President Obama. A scyborg might connect these pieces—might imagine how the machines of freedom schools and free community colleges could purchase land, land that could become part of an Indigenous land trust. Roses in Concrete has a sister school in Aoteroa that originated from a Māori bilingual program Te Whānau o Tupuranga (Centre for Māori Education) and Fanau Pasifika (Centre for Pasifika Education), which became a school in 2006 and then became Kia Aroha College in 2011. Similar to Roses, Kia Aroha College is built on a holistic “scholar warrior” culture that developed the school over twenty-five years into a “culturally-located, bilingual learning model based in a secure cultural identity, stable positive relationships, and aroha (authentic caring and love).”[23] This craft of creating Indigenous space in an urban colonial context requires a constant rearrangement of settler law, Indigenous rights, state educational ministry systems, built schooling environments, and community systems of Indigenous education. Furthermore, these associations between school makers in Māori/Pasifika and in U.S. ghetto colonial contexts produce new shared scyborg flight plans. These technologies are driven and repurposed by scyborg desires. Where I am now, on Kumeyaay land at UC San Diego, we are at the confluence of the engineering apparatus, the naval and sea industries, the U.S.– Mexican border, the white utopian project of Black exclusion, the settler project of Native disappearance, the transnational project of international (read model Asian) recruitment. Scyborgs might reorganize these technologies into third university organisms with decolonizing programs: a project of water, a project of transnational/Indigenous solidarity, a project of Black assertion, a project of islands. As I write, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (my other I) are supporting a collective of collectives, the Land Relationships Super Collective, that connects different land-based movements across North America with one another to share strategies, resources, learnings, and so on. As Eve and I are both university professors, the university plays into this as an institution that must be refused, and yet also as an organism, an assemblage of machines, that we can make work, make space in, make liquid enough to allow us to contribute to land rematriation projects directly. The third world university will be built by scyborg labor. This is not a revolutionary call for scyborgs of the world to unite. This is a call to gear-in and do the dirty work of desiring machines. Through desires’ dirty work, we might recommission these first world scraps into a third world machine.