Speculative Solidarities: Sanctuary Cell Division – A Call to Action
Camille Acey,
Rev. Elæ Moss Benedetto,
Rev. Eon,
Jorge Luis
This panel discussion brings together organizers, technologists, faith practitioners, and care workers to examine how sanctuary systems are being stress-tested in real time. As surveillance expands and mutual aid networks face increasing legal risk, the people doing the most critical protective work are operating through fragile, improvised systems. Meanwhile, those who need refuge – undocumented neighbors, trans youth, abortion seekers, journalists, organizers – continue to show up at the doors of churches, hackerspaces, clinics, and encrypted channels asking the same question: will you hide me, will you teach me, will you stand? The discussion begins from the premise that faith infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and care infrastructure must learn to operate together. The conversation focuses on concrete tensions: operational security in community settings, coordinating without increasing surveillance exposure, managing resource flows without creating legal liability, and sustaining the physical and nervous systems of the people doing the work. The format emphasizes exchange, disagreement, and synthesis across domains.
Saturday 1100 Crystal Ballroom
Camille Acey is a former tech worker, a mom, a community organizer, and a conscious closures consultant. She is founder of The Wind-Down (wind-down.org ), an independent studio that designs and delivers tools, practices, and services to aid mission-driven projects and organizations in the process of closing down. Over the past 25 years, she has worked with/for community cooperatives, tech companies, open-source projects, nonprofits, and activist groups. She was a cofounder of the Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology (CoLET), a radical feminist tech collective, and has also served on governance and advisory boards for local, national, and international organizations. She brings all this experience to her work of shepherding joyful endings.
Rev. El æ Moss Benedetto is a trans interspiritual minister, artist-researcher, social scientist, and sustainable systems-focused urban designer working at the intersection of radical faith infrastructure, systems design, and social transformation. They are the founder of The Operating System and Liminal Lab - a decades-running open-access publication and peer education platform - and creative director of Autonomous Mechanics Design Studio. Elæ brings nearly three decades of direct action organizing, mutual aid system building, and community-embedded care praxis to this work. They serve as campus minister and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute and as spiritual care and fellowship director at Faith in Harm Reduction. Exhibited and published widely across theory, intermedia, and para-academic forms, Elæ’s preferred medium is questions, and their ministry is building infrastructures for futures that don’t yet exist.
Rev. Eon spent much of their life immersed in code and circuits before turning their attention to the wild intelligence of plants. Now a clinical herbalist and remedy maker, they work with the Mugworts Free Herbal Clinic, a grassroots care project dedicated to health sovereignty and community resilience. Eon brings a hacker ethic to the world of herbal medicine, celebrating the beauty, comple xity, and radical diversity of nature.
Jorge Luis is an Afro-Caribbean activist, organizer, technologist, and privacy advocate. They’ ve worn many hats: carpenter, metalworker, artist manager, game developer, and are now the director of security operations at Constitutional Communications, with a focus on malware analysis, blue teaming, and organizational defenses. Their life experience gives them an understanding of how vulnerable people are because of the way digital systems control every part of our world. In response, Jorge works to both educate people on how to protect each other online and build community centered defenses. In their free time, they obsess about home-labs as community infrastructure.
