Connection is an Act of Resistance
By Kavisha Pillay
I spend most of my waking life thinking about technology and power. At the Campaign on Digital Ethics (CODE), the organisation I founded and lead, we ask uncomfortable questions about who controls the technologies increasingly shaping our lives. We investigate platforms, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence. We worry about elections, disinformation, surveillance, concentrated corporate power and what happens when a handful of insanely wealthy men acquire an almost unprecedented ability to control infrastructure through which billions of people communicate, organise, consume information, and shape reality itself.
I believe deeply in this work. We need progressive regulation, accountability, and democratic institutions capable of confronting technological power.
But, importantly, a potential counter to this optimised, often synthetic reality that we are living through, is connection. Our great irony is that we have never been more connected in a technical sense, yet loneliness is everywhere. We can speak instantly to someone on another continent while barely knowing the person who lives next door. Our friendships, desires, politics and grief increasingly pass through platforms designed to monetise our attention. With the advance of Artificial Intelligence, we are seeing a rise in synthetic intimacy and companionship.
I sometimes wonder if the disconnection is incidental to the political moment we are living through, or fundamental to it. Authoritarianism thrives on separation, so does oligarchy.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in their just published book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World have described this moment as the emergence of what they call “end times fascism”, where an alliance of forces are responding to planetary crisis not by imagining how we might survive together, but by deciding who gets to survive, and who can be abandoned. Their description of bunker politics is both literal and metaphorical, which is that these extremely wealthy sociopaths fantasise about escaping the destruction that they have created and benefitted from by spending billions on bunkers, and investing in escaping planetary destruction by colonising Mars. They believe that their best chance of survival is through separation.
It is a logical endpoint of neo-liberal politics, a worldview that has spent decades telling us that we are individuals before we are members of communities, consumers before citizens, and somehow separate from the ecological systems that make our existence possible.
Against this often depressing and disturbing backdrop, I have spent much of this year co-creating an experimental dance production called Bhūmi, which means Earth in Sanskrit, that will be performed at the Joburg Theatre on the 13th and 14th of November.
I started dancing when I was four years old, learning the ancient Indian classical artform of Bharatanatyam. My mother is my teacher and my guru, which means that dance has never existed separately from the rest of my life. It is tangled up in childhood, family, discipline, memory, identity, politics, and love.
The production began with questions about our relationship with the Earth, but it also became a process for me to grapple with the same questions that occupy my political work from an entirely different place. What does it mean to live in a world where power is becoming so concentrated? What happens when progress becomes indistinguishable from extraction? How did we become so comfortable with the idea that everything around us, our attention, our labour, our creativity, our natural resources and even our relationships, can be converted into something to be bought, sold or optimised?
Writing allows me to analyse those questions, activism allows me to organise around them, but dance has provided me with the space to feel them. There are things that cannot simply be articulated in policy submissions, articles, or speeches. Grief is different when it is danced, so is rage, and love.
Bharatanatyam, as an artform, is also dependent on transmission from generation to generation. My mother learnt from her guru, and has spent decades passing that knowledge down to me and her students. A movement is demonstrated, corrected, and repeated. A rhythm is learnt until the body remembers it with conscious instruction. Knowledge travels from one person to another, and across generations, through attention, patience and care.
This process of learning feels extremely precious given the time that we are living in.
In this age, where we are so obsessed with frictionlessness: faster answers, instant generation, automation, and efficiency – dance moves in the opposite direction. It asks for time, for repetition, for you to inhabit your body fully, and to pay attention to the people you are performing with.
Bhūmi has made me think more seriously about the role that art might play in the years ahead. The Indlulamithi 2035 scenarios, developed through the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), imagine possible futures for South Africa. In one of those futures, investment in arts and culture becomes part of rebuilding social cohesion. People return to theatres and shared cultural spaces, even in a society saturated by artificial intelligence and “online everything”. Art becomes a place where people encounter difficult ideas, experience something collectively and begin rebuilding relationships with one another.
I find that possibility profoundly hopeful because the arts offer something our increasingly individualised and technologically mediated lives desperately need: shared experience.
For too long, we have underestimated the socio-political importance and value of the arts. While the crises we face are structural and require structural responses – the climate catastrophe will certainly not be solved by everyone attending a dance performance – we do need to invest in and create spaces for connection and meaning.
The future will require us to protect the spaces in which we remember how to be human together. We will need art, music, dance, public spaces, parkruns, communities, rituals, and relationships that cannot be monetised by platforms or simulated by a machine. We will need reasons to care about people we have never met and protect a planet that will long outlive us all.
The tech bros will continue building their bunkers and dreaming of Mars. The rest of us can choose each other, and choose to remain connected to this extraordinary, imperfect world. In this political moment increasingly organised around separation, our connection to one another and the natural world may just be our strongest act of resistance.
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Bhūmi will be performed on 13 and 14 November 2026,at the Joburg Theatre. Tickets are on sale here.
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