Notes from “The Myth Beneath the Machine: : A Collective Descent into Ontological Debt”, a workshop by and with Crystal B. Isanda at Untameable Futures (u+, 21-22 October 2026).
“Most of us have had a moment when a system got us wrong. It decided who we were, what we could do, or whether we fitted, and we adjusted: we rewrote the answer, reworded the form, or presented the version of ourselves that the category could hold.” Crystal B. Isanda, a Nairobi-based researcher and civic technologist, opened the session by asking participants to remember and hold on to one such moment, not an unfair or biased decision, but one that was simply wrong about who they are, to be revisited at the end.
What a machine is
In this session, a machine referred to “any system that turns an idea about people into decisions about their lives.” A school that sorts pupils into streams, a platform that decides what you can see, a program that decides which communities are ready for funding: each one, Crystal suggested, runs on an assumption about who people are.
Participants were divided into small groups, each assigned one of four “machines”: Education, Artificial Intelligence, Development, and Futures. Each group received a document produced by its machine, set between 2036 and 2041, and read it as if it were an ordinary letter received in an ordinary inbox.
The belief no one printed
In their groups, participants went through a process where they made visible (including to themselves) the cost of complying with the demands of their “machine”.
Each group then named the unspoken belief behind its machine: “We accept this because we secretly believe…”. In Education, people accepted what was given them because there seemed to be no alternative, or because it came from a certified source. In the AI group, people accepted it because they felt powerless to do otherwise. In development, because they felt they should aspire to be like others. In futures, they accepted it because nothing better seemed to exist beyond what we could already see.
None of these beliefs appeared in the documents. They were not printed, signed or stamped. Yet every document depended on them completely. Crystal’s point was that this is how a belief becomes a machine: it becomes a rule, then a form, a score, a policy, and eventually a system that nobody remembers choosing.
Ontological debt
Crystal calls it ontological debt: the cost that builds up when a system is built on the wrong idea of who people are, and that is paid again and again by the people it misunderstands. The debt shows up in small, daily acts: filling in a form a second time, requesting another appointment, writing a letter to explain a gap in a CV, or spending years making oneself smaller to fit a category.
Where the debt shows up
Participants recognised the debt quickly. One described writing a new CV for each role, tailoring it in the knowledge that an AI system would screen it, and so playing with their identity to get past the first filter. Another described how education systems have historically been built around a single way of learning, leaving many learners unaccommodated. A third offered the view that humans evolved to cooperate in small groups, and that technology now exploits that tendency inside systems too large for anyone to comprehend.
Finishing the sentence
Crystal closed by asking participants to revisit their opening moment. The gap between who they are and how a system recorded them, she said, is not a burden anyone should carry alone. The documents from the futures they had read do not exist yet. Someone, somewhere, is finishing the sentence that will lead to them, in a policy draft, a product meeting or a funding decision.
Her invitation was simple. The next time something is handed to you as “just the way things are done,” pause and finish that sentence for yourself. Ask whether the belief beneath the document, the institution or the request is true, and who is paying for the gap between that belief and the people it describes.