😺linktr dot ee slash Sophie from Mars😺 just some lady really💅 trying to get better at tagging my posts. "Sophie from Mars" for my main work ✨ "Sophie's space program" for my astrophotography 🪐🔭
We've just spent 3 days on the ZAD filming a documentary and I'm really excited. If you don't know, the ZAD is a French term that means Zone a Defence and means somewhere squatted or occupied to resist the state. In particular we were on the Notre Dame des Landes ZAD, a massive area of biodiverse wetland that was squatted by farmers, ecologists, anarchists and communists for over a decade to stop the French state building a new airport near Nantes. Eventually the state gave up and the squatters won, and now they live there outside of modern capitalism taking care each other in a manner that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call real, actual communism that's happening inside the imperial core right now
We stayed at pa Rolandiere, one of many little communes within the ZAD, and home to Jay and Isa, authors of We Are Nature Defending Itself. Like many of the places we saw, there is a central common living area and lots of little cabins and caravans around for sleeping in, but la Rolandiere also has a couple of pretty unique things. They have a lighthouse, and a visitors welcome centre. Jay told me this is because they see conviviality as a certain kind of revolutionary practice. The state paints the people on the ZAD as terrifying violent criminals, so having a welcome centre for visitors to come and learn about the ZAD is a kind of direct resistance to that.
I learned a hell of a lot being there. I talked to farmers, artists, squatters, a medic, a botanist and of course, lots of communists. I also walked miles through forests and fields and got to forage some interesting mushrooms which was very special for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentary develop into a real thing, but sitting on the train back from Nantes to Paris right now I'm reflecting on it all and I really feel like I'm coming down off an incredible high. This morning I was weeding a row of carrots!
I keep thinking about our interview with the botanist Jasmine, who told us that on the ZAD it's really hard to be lonely, because even if you aren't around human beings, you feel the presence of all the plants and animals in a way that you don't do anywhere else, and I really think it's true. I'm going yo be thinking about the ZAD for a long, long time. I may not have been a part of their struggle but I hope that my documentary can be. We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself 🌺🍄🦎
We're in the middle of our return stay to finish the documentary finally 💕 every day here is so peaceful and fulfilling. I've been waking up with the first light every morning, this morning I climbed the lighthouse to watch the sunrise 🌄
Yesterday we were preparing raspberry beds for replanting on one of the collective garden farms that provides vegetables for the communes, and one of the farmers gave a little yelp and when we came over to see he was holding this salamander. This salamander is a symbol of the ZAD because it is a rare species native to the area that was crucial in the ecological struggle against the airport development
A storm this winter uprooted a lot of large trees in the forest. Some of them will be left alone, some of them will be turned into lumber by the ZAD's sawmill which generates wood for the collective from their forest
Two nights ago I cooked dinner for everyone at la Rolandiere, which was fantastic because I love to cook, especially for big groups, but this wasn't any kind of special occasion - group meals of 10 or even 20 people are the norm here and happen twice a day with different people taking turns to cook, to clean etc
Given my recent interest in astrophotography I couldn't resist taking some pictures of the sky, which is absolutely breathtaking out here, even so close as it is to Nantes.
There's a lot more to talk about of course, and I will in the documentary, and I'm sure I will in other places as well, because I intend to come back here to stay many times after the doc is finished ✨
Another Study in Utopia: N K Jemisin's "The Ones Who Stay and Fight"
Substack version
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin presents a utopia that is made real by hideous violence. This draws out questions about whether a utopia is still a utopia with one horrible exception, how we interact with the idea of "the better place", and how societal progress and benefits are justified by cruelty and domination. There is a lot more besides that you can explore in the short story, but these are some of the key ideas. For those who walk away from links to very short stories they could just read themselves, the story is about a perfect utopian society magically made possible by the infinite torture of a defenceless child.
Yesterday I discovered the 2018 response The Ones Who Stay and Fight by N K Jemisin from her collection How Long Til Black Future Month?. It's also quite short and there's a very good audio version at the link I've given there which is just 30 minutes.
Taking place in superficially utopian "Um-Helat", this story presents a current of violent repression as the key to a progressive postcapitalist utopian society. The narrator, although describing them as "social workers" is implicitly part of a caste of citizen-police in Um-Helat who murder people for seemingly the only crime that is committed: learning about the world that Um-Helat came from. Our world. These "social workers" kill people who they have discovered taking part in underground comms to peer into the world of violent and unjust hierarchies that we live in, because to share the knowledge of this disgusting world is to taint or "infect" others with its "disease". They use a pike through the heart and spine "so it is quick and painless" and silent so that "nobody else will come to investigate". In the plot of this particular vignette, the "social workers" kill a father but realise that his young daughter has already been "exposed to the disease", and so they keep her in detention for a week after which she must choose between becoming one of the "social workers" for the rest of her life or implicitly, death.
I take is as best to read The Ones Who Stay and Fight as a sort of satire or critique, much as Omelas is. We don't assume that Ursula K Le Guin thinks Omelas would be a good place to live, and understand that she is posing a question, and we should understand Jemisin as posing a question as well. The way that this might slip past the reader is that although Le Guin's narrator is directly posing the conundrum to the reader, describing the suffering of the Omelas child as a bad thing that shouldn't happen, Jemisin's narrator really believes that this is the right thing to do, and is trying to recruit you, the reader, into the struggle as well.
The narrator derides Omelas explicitly in The Ones Who Stay and Fight as "a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child" - the implication is that how Um-Helat treats children is better, and the evidence given to us is questionable. Every child in Omelas except the one being tortured is brought to see the miserable child and made aware of the way the city works, folding them into the monstrous mechanism of the city. In Um-Helat, some children remain ignorant of the world of horrors from which their world developed, possibly for their whole lives, while for others the moment of their innocence being shattered also becomes a moment where they are made to choose (by the "social workers") between lifelong commitment to joining the epistemic police force or getting the pike, a coercive false choice by design. If Omelas is a tick, Um-Helat is a hornet's nest.
It seems everyone agrees the point of The Ones Who Stay and Fight is to present a third option besides Le Guin's complicity or abandonment: struggle. As I take it, the genius of the piece is that much like the options in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, this third possibility does not deliver justice or liberation for the child whose suffering we are asked to contemplate. Living under a sort of benevolent capitalism that seems to have reformed incrementally from our present reality into the society of Um-Helat, the struggle of the "social workers" is not a revolutionary struggle. It is not a struggle rooted in care, or in solidarity, in class tension or in a belief in transformation. It is a purifying, authoritarian, repressive struggle to police the population into happy ignorant utopian subjects as long as they never expose themselves or others to the horrors of our real world.
In essence what Um-Helat describes is a utopian bubble policed by moral absolutists. If a conservative had made the same description of the political landscape of 2018 everyone would have rolled their eyes and carried on much the same, but I think we are in a moment now 8 years later when we can see there were some serious problems with how we conceived of making society better in the 2010s. Chief among those problems was our readiness to figuratively skewer people who we considered morally impure.
Here in the imperial core, we were born into a society that justifies the horrendous suffering of some, sometimes of children in fact, by the progress and glory and equality of our shining city. At a time when lots of people seem very taken with the concept of "woke 1" and "woke 2", using the fall from cultural prominence of progressive leftist politics to plot how the next movement can be stronger and better, I think it is entirely appropriate for us to recognise that what people are calling "woke 1" took many bubbles of progressive leftist culture from Omelas to Um-Helat.
I have been slowly building a theory of change in my work that centres utopianism, that is to say the perfect that exists in the heart of every person alive, in dialectical political change. In my working model of utopia and revolution, it is necessary for highly dogmatic bubbles of radical political belief to exist. These are cores of political change out from which spin versions of society that are more real and less utopian in shades as they conflict with the broader world and are tested in real time against the particulars of people's real world experiences.
It is sometimes necessary when discussing utopia to remind ourselves that although the word has come to mean "a good place", for which "eutopia" might be more fitting, it was originally "no place", and the nonexistence of utopia remains perhaps the most central contradiction when discussing the ideal world. However, on very small scales limited visions of perfection can be practiced. You and I share a delicious meal that we both put in equal work and money to make happen and happily chat while doing the washing up - a utopian dinner. No little bubble will ever be a workable model of the rest of the world, but if we want these cores of utopian change to affect society writ large, a constantly retraumatised class of social police working to protect the innocence of utopian children is not the kind of struggle we need.
Today (Wednesday 5th Aug 2026) the UK has brought into force a trans segregationist policy stating that single sex spaces must be defined by sex assigned at birth, effectively a trans bathroom ban the same as many of the most right wing states of the US. On top of this, the guidance now in force mandates that trans people be outed non-consensually at their workplace and asked to use the incorrect bathroom by their employers, which will drive higher unemployment in an already disproportionately unemployed and unemployable population.
Today is a deeply horrible and dark day in British democracy as a policy pushed by a select few fascists engaging in a campaign of bullying, sexual harassment, lawfare and institutional capture have pushed through a policy that the vast majority disagree with oriented around harming a tiny minority of the population.
The only solution that will create change is that trans people need to organise. When this guidance was first proposed I wrote the following essay, outlining the specifics of how someone can set up a trans assembly from which harm reduction structures can be formed and clear directions from the trans community can be given to our cis allies, strengthening our political position and creating a pathway back towards being recognised as human beings while protecting the most vulnerable amongst us in the meantime.
I am aware of half a dozen locations where people have started organising towards a trans assembly since I made this, although none of them are in the UK. We desperately need this kind of organising here. We need trans assemblies and we need community formed and focused harm reduction structures.
I have made myself available to people who have started holding regular assemblies in other places to review their constitutions and organising structures and consult with them to get them off the ground, and I may at some point write a followup comparing the results. I am more than happy to help anyone who is putting together a project like this.
Please share this and organise like our lives depend on it.
Stream starting now - The Press Killed Jason Arday, The Pres Fired a CIA Agent For Being Trans, The Dems Can't Stop The Socialist Left - Liberal Slop Stream
New video! Shikata Ga Nai: The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
This one is really special to me ✨ I love space and I love communism and I love utopianism, and the Mars trilogy has been a huge inspiration to me ever since I first read it. It's a sociological epic telling the story of human habitation of Mars through a series of successive revolutions over 200 years as humanity strives towards a future where nobody is hungry or homeless
The books have never been adapted to screen, which presented a big challenge to me as a video essayist, so I included a lot of my own astrophotography to show everyone why I love space 🌌 🔭
I also spent hundreds of hours in Kerbal Space Program recreating iconic sci fi set pieces from the series ✨👽
It's a really pretty video about a story that matters a lot to me, and I think there's so much in the trilogy to enjoy that I didn't get around to that you really don't need have read the books before watching 🥰 but I hope you'll want to read them after.
This essay is about utopianism, which I think is utterly vital. We need to formulate and share our postcapitalist desire. We must dream.
"The deepest desires of our hearts and minds and those of others are a necessary form of knowledge and of truth" - Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method
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I'm editing a video at the moment so I'm looking at my face a lot and I wanna share some positive transition thoughts. I have fewer transition thoughts and further between at 6 years in, I'm generally just pretty comfortable living my life as a woman, so it feels worth sharing since it's coming up for me now
I love in particular that I like how I look in frames like these. I like the sort of expression of slight uncertainty and curious exploration that my face frequently rests into when discussing things I care about. I would hope that people remember me that way I suppose. Ponderous
I have a new dress that's beautiful and sparkly and I look really hot in it and it SHREDS the inside of my arms because it's all sequins like it PUNISHES my skin I wore it for 3 hours yesterday and my skin is still sore
what's this? a brand new show from former video essayist sarah zedig?? and you can watch the first THREE episodes RIGHT NOW by giving her money on patreon or comradery??? what kind of sick joke is this!!
a new show is coming soon... watch the pilot early and help shape its direction! by Sarah Zedig on Patreon. Join Sarah Zedig's community for
Started editing the green screen stuff for my Ezra Klein video. I've basically just put all my footage into this mask for now but even this is just endlessly funny to me
The above are a rough first pass of the pictures that I took, and this is a rough first pass of the video. It was all very chopped up because I was taking breaks to let my neighbours use the eyepiece but that's more important than content lol
Tbh there's very little difference to me between when an online leftist says something needs to be done about "abusers" and when one of my neighbours says the biggest problem with the neighbourhood where the landlord is attempting mass evictions is "all the druggies and the crackheads"
If you regret a permanent body alteration you got and your immediate thought is "raise the legal age for everybody who can do this" instead of "Maybe I, specifically, was a dipshit" you need to get Gotten by a mountain lion
Sophie's Thoughts (big and small) @sophie-frm-mars - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
