About

I am experimenting with different ways to sustain a livelihood while contributing to projects participating in emerging solidarity economies. If any of my offerings are of interest, please reach out to discuss how we can work together.

I respectfully acknowledge the Birpai, on whose lands I was born, as well as the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Dja Dja Warrung peoples, on whose lands I live across. I pay respect to Elders, and honour their custodianship of the relational practices and knowledge of caring for Country.

Contact

email: teq.etsmith@protonmail.com
socials: https://mastodon.social/@teq@aus.social

FAQs

Attribution

Unless indicated otherwise, I (E.T.Smith) created any original material on this site and share it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence - CC BY-NC-SA.

I include hyperlinks to both direct-sources as well as general sources within the broader lineage of practices I draw upon. I also try to hyperlink to sources that amplify those ways of knowing that are often marginalised within the dominant discourse. Please follow these links to ensure appropriate attribution.

Which name do you prefer?

I typically publish as E.T. Smith, which stands in for my full name: Eden Tariq Smith. You’re welcome to refer to me by my first name, middle name, or any of my shortform names as relevant to our shared contexts.

I appreciate that contextual relevance is subjective and quite like having multiple short names with multiple pronunciations, so I encourage referring to me by whichever name/pronunciation you most associate with me in the relevant context.

My pronouns are consistently they/them/themself

Do you have a CV?

Yes, I’m in the process of updating this to include the work I’ve done outside of academia. In the meantime, please see my ORCID profile.

What is your hourly rate?

My hourly rate depends on the work being done and the resources available within the relevant project, which can be explored in an initial free video call. This rate will be agreed to in advance of the work requested. As a guide, please see the hourly rate for the closest relevant award for the context. My rates may also be adjusted within reciprocity arrangements within the context of solidarity economies.

If you are usually paid more than what we agree for equivalent work, please consider donating the difference to First Nations Hub, an organisation providing a culturally safe, co-working space to advance grassroots campaigns on Wurundjeri Country.

Why do you request donations to organisations you are not involved with?

I believe that distributed reciprocity is an important consideration within solidarity economies. Additionally, I am aware that the contributions I offer reflect the mixture of marginalised and privileged contexts that shape my partial perspectives. Within this mixture, I am appreciative that my experiences within communities of queer and disabled people helped me to embrace my various other outlier characteristics.

Along the way, I have also learned from many patient people who chose to teach me from perspectives that draw from marginalised experiences that differs to my own. As part of this, I am learning to interrogate my colonial complicity and take responsibility for how I act in solidarity with those fighting for Land Back.

So, in addition to directly reciprocal exchanges for my work, I am asking those who benefit from my contributions to ‘pay it forward’ by supporting organisations where it is more appropriate for me to direct financial support than contribute directly.

Why don’t you have a ‘regular job’?

Working as a consultant helps me structure my time and workloads in ways that allow me to manage my chronic health conditions and contribute to the research, resource curation, and documentation elements of community-led projects and cooperative enterprises.

If you are in a position to financially support my experiments in participating in the solidarity economy as queer disabled person, please support the following initiatives:

• First Peoples Disability Network Australia (FPDN) - an Indigenous-led organisation for First Nations people with disability, their families and communities.
• Black Rainbow Futures Fund - an Indigenous-led organisation investing in the futures of the Indigenous LGBTIQ+ community

What do you think about ‘AI’?

I’ve yet to articulate my policy on tools associated with ‘AI’ specifically, as these are tangled up with my broader concerns over the unequally distributed costs we externalise every time we default to the most convenient tools. In the meantime, the following describes my current approach to working with large language models (LLMs) / Generative-AI products.

My resource collections, writings, photographs, research outputs, and other content are all crafted without any ‘assistance’ from LLMs. Admittedly, most LLMs are likely to be more hassle than help in my sense-making type of work. However, I also avoid using LLM’s in areas of work they might actually be useful, such as software development, as the short-term benefits does not seem to be outweighed by the long-term costs. I also avoid generative-AI products and turn-off ‘AI assistance’ whenever the tools I currently use offer it.

In recognition that I am in an unusual position of being able to reject LLMs outright in my current work contexts, I will continue to collaborate with those who use LLMs in limited ways. In these collaborations I will listen to justifications for when and how a collaborator considers their uses of LLMs appropriate for their contexts (given the costs), and make case-by-case decisions.

However, I will not collaborate with people who adopt AI products without any consideration of more appropriate alternative tools.

For context, many of these costs stem from the size of LLMs that generative-AI need only really being being developed, trained and deployed by a small handful of big companies. The destructive impacts of tech billionaires controlling the development of LLMs are multiplying, but include efforts to enclose the digital commons and deliberate dissemination of misinformation, and an amplification of existing inequities through environmental destruction, societal division, and moral injuries. Meanwhile, uncritical promotion of LLMs as convenience tools has decreased the quality of research outputs, deskilled workers, discouraged creativity, and fuelled broader generational and class disconnect. I also believe it important to support communities who are fighting against top-down pressure from businesses and governments to accept the costs of massive data centres.

This collaboration position is informed by these costs; by my slow process of shifting onto non-extractive digital tools more generally; by my experiences helping to train a locally-hosted domain-specific LLM for analysing massive sets of public data (2022-2025); and by my ongoing collaborations with a programmer using LLMs with guardrails.

This still feels like a compromised position, and will likely evolve because, while I hope that environmentally-sustainable and ethically trained LLMs might be used appropriately within specific contexts, it is currently very difficult to justify even public-good uses of LLMs. At the same time, it is important not to let the hype around generative-AI obscure the larger challenges constraining the decisions we make about when and how to use convenience tools

“AI/LLMs aren’t the root cause here. Instead, we’re facing two long-standing, entangled systems - capitalism and colonialism - that reliably offer a carrot (convenience) and stick (exploitation) approach to many of us in the Global North, with the promise that ignorance is bliss.” Pat Allen, 2026

Who designed your website?

I am building this website using hugo and learning as I go, with help from collaborators. I use a dark theme to reduce migraine triggers for myself during development. Visual design is not one of my skills; if you want to teach me how to improve this site please reach out!