I have been thinking about disposal as a structure.

Disposal begins when a system decides who is worth investing in and who can be managed, punished, ignored, extracted from, or abandoned. It often begins early. A child is named as difficult before anyone becomes curious about what they are carrying. A young person is treated as a problem before anyone asks what the institution has failed to provide. A family is marked as chaotic before anyone sees the conditions surrounding them. A worker is treated as replaceable before anyone understands what they have endured. A community is described as lacking capacity while its knowledge is mined, underfunded, and misrecognized.

Disposal is a structure because it repeats. It moves from school to work, from work to housing, from housing to health care, from health care to social services, from social services to courts, from courts back into family and community life. Each institution claims to be responding to an individual problem, while the pattern keeps producing the same outcomes across many lives.

One of the ways disposal sustains itself is through the misrecognition of competence. People and communities are often treated as unprepared, unserious, risky, emotional, informal, or insufficiently developed because their competence arrives outside the preferred institutional form. Their strategy may come through relationship. Their due diligence may come through lived pattern recognition. Their governance may come through trust built over years. Their financial intelligence may come through scarcity, adaptation, mutual aid, and the capacity to stretch resources beyond what institutional actors have learned to recognize. Their rigor may come through proximity to consequence. Their discernment may come from having lived close to failure, abandonment, and extraction.

Institutions often recognize competence when it arrives as polished documents, formal plans, familiar credentials, professionalized language, multi-year projections, clean org charts, and risk frameworks that make sense to people protected by distance. That is how disposal hides. It makes structural abandonment look like personal failure. It makes institutional coldness look like professionalism. It makes punishment look like accountability. It makes exclusion look like standards. It makes exhaustion look like lack of readiness. It makes survival look like dysfunction. It makes competence look invisible until someone with institutional authority certifies it.

And then the people who have been discarded are asked to become grateful for partial inclusion. They are asked to prove they are worthy of care. They are asked to translate their pain into language that feels manageable to the people who benefit from distance. They are asked to show up healed to the places that harmed them. They are asked to trust systems that have already taught them what those systems are willing to do.

I have also been thinking about this in relation to AI and the future of work. There is a lot of public conversation right now about what will happen as AI restructures labor, replaces tasks, eliminates pathways, and produces a growing surplus workforce. The fear underneath that conversation is real, but the condition itself is older than AI. Many people have already lived inside a world where work did not guarantee belonging, usefulness did not guarantee protection, competence did not guarantee recognition, and productivity did not guarantee dignity.

Terrenales — peoples formed by the hemispheric ruptures produced by Black enslavement, Indigenous genocide, displacement, dispossession, and the forced continuities of life in the Americas — have lived inside this contradiction for generations. Across the hemisphere, Terrenales have known what it means to be needed and discarded, incorporated and misrecognized, extracted from and made illegible. The labor of mixed, displaced, racialized, migrant, informal, domestic, seasonal, reproductive, and community-based peoples has helped produce the world while full belonging remained conditional. Capitalism has always depended on people it did not fully recognize.

This is why I do not think the AI crisis is only about jobs. It is also about the breaking of an old promise: that labor would secure legitimacy, income, dignity, and place. Terrenales know that promise has always been unstable. They have known that a person can work, serve, care, build, translate, organize, carry, clean, raise children, hold memory, tend land, move resources, and still be treated as disposable.

So when AI threatens to generalize labor insecurity, I hear a deeper question. What happens when more people discover that the economy can benefit from them without belonging to them? What happens when competence becomes increasingly detached from recognition? What happens when the formal economy trains itself to see fewer and fewer people as necessary, while people still need food, housing, care, relationship, meaning, and a future?

For me, this is where the wisdom developed from disposal becomes a theory of the future.

There is a wisdom developed from disposal. It is the wisdom of people who have had to understand systems from the underside. People who know where the doors really are. People who can tell the difference between an invitation and a containment strategy. People who know when care is being practiced and when care is being performed. People who can feel when language is being used to delay responsibility. People who understand how institutions protect themselves from the knowledge of those they have harmed.

This wisdom is often misnamed. It gets called distrust, resistance, anger, noncompliance, difficulty, lack of readiness, lack of professionalism, or inability to collaborate. Much of what gets called difficulty is discernment. Much of what gets called distrust is an accurate reading of conditions. Much of what gets called refusal is the body remembering danger. Much of what gets called failure is evidence that a person was placed inside structures that had already failed them. And much of what gets called lack of capacity is competence appearing in a form the institution has trained itself to dismiss.

To me, this is one of the great losses of our time: the wisdom developed from disposal is treated as a problem to correct when it deserves recognition as a knowledge system. The people who have been pushed out often know the most about the real design of our systems. They know where the promises break, where the policies thin out, where language becomes performance, where help becomes control, where inclusion becomes extraction, and where belonging is offered only after obedience. They know how competence is misrecognized when it comes from people who have had to survive without institutional protection.

A society that throws people away also throws away the knowledge needed to become coherent.

This is why I keep returning to Poetic Futurism as a practice of coherence. Coherence asks us to listen where the system has produced abandonment. It asks us to take seriously the knowledge carried by people whose lives have been misread. It asks us to understand survival as intelligence. It asks us to recognize competence when it arrives outside the forms institutions prefer.

The future will be shaped by the wisdom developed from disposal: by people who know how systems fail because they have lived at the point of impact; by those who can recognize the difference between repair and performance; by those who have had to build dignity without permission; by those whose competence came through relationship, consequence, memory, adaptation, and survival.

These are the people whose wisdom may help us remember that a future organized around human worth has to begin where worth was most consistently denied.