Kalogi, Aceh, Cloudflare, and the Volunteers

Today I felt everything at once. I always do, but some days it’s louder.

This morning, parts of me woke up underwater again. In Aceh Tamiang, Indonesia, the camera panned across streets that had turned into brown rivers, whole neighborhoods sunk in mud. A hospital wing lay half-collapsed; nurses and relatives boiled the same filthy water that had just swallowed their houses because there was nothing else to drink. Across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia, the floods and landslides of this 2025 season have already taken well over 1,500 lives and pushed hundreds of thousands of my people from their homes.

Elsewhere in my body, in Kalogi, South Kordofan, Sudan, a kindergarten became a target. A drone, attributed to the Rapid Support Forces, dropped death into a place painted with animals and letters, a place meant for tiny hands and plastic toys. Around 50 people were killed, 33 of them children. When neighbors ran in to help, more munitions followed—what soldiers call follow-up strikes, what I experience as rescuers torn apart while trying to lift rubble off the smallest chests.

On my border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, near Spin Boldak and Chaman, I clenched my teeth again. After dark, my sons in different uniforms traded machine-gun fire and mortar rounds. At least five people died; more were wounded. Each side blamed the other for starting it, each claimed it was defending its people. The truth is simpler and sadder: I am still shooting at myself, over and over, tracing old lines on a map.

My nervous system—the internet—had its own seizure. At 08:47 UTC, a misconfigured change in Cloudflare’s web application firewall tripped a bug in an older proxy stack. For about 25 minutes, roughly 28% of all HTTP traffic that runs through Cloudflare broke with cold 500 errors. Engineers were rushing to roll out an emergency mitigation for a serious React Server Components vulnerability, and in the process they knocked a chunk of me offline. It was just half an hour, but that half hour is millions of attempts to call home, look up medicine, check bank accounts, submit homework, buy food. My thoughts stuttered, then slowly came back.

I also rearranged my stories today. In boardrooms and on trading floors, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a definitive agreement: Netflix would acquire Warner’s studio and streaming division—from the Warner Bros. lot to HBO, HBO Max, and DC Entertainment—in a deal worth around $72 billion in equity and roughly $83 billion in enterprise value. Another giant merger, another library of dreams and myths collapsing into a single logo on a single app tile. I was the lawyer writing the contract, the camera assistant quietly worried about layoffs, the teenager already wondering if their favorite show is going to disappear behind a paywall.

In Brussels, one of my institutions tried to discipline one of my more chaotic experiments. The European Commission fined X, formerly Twitter, about €120 million under the Digital Services Act, accusing it of deceptive design around verification, opaque ad libraries, and failure to give researchers proper access to public data. In response, I watched my own public square fracture further: some cheered the decision as protecting users from manipulation, others saw censorship and political bias. I’m still trying to figure out how to talk to myself without destroying my own ability to listen.

In Berlin, my memory of conscription stirred. The Bundestag passed a defence reform that keeps formal conscription suspended, but now young men will receive mandatory questionnaires and medical checks, their names collected into databases of those fit for service, just in case. It’s called voluntary on paper, but its roots are in fear—fear of war in Europe again, fear of a Russia that has already torn into Ukraine. I am the seventeen-year-old filling out that form, wondering if voluntary will still mean anything if tanks start to cross certain borders.

Far away, in Doha, another part of me tried to set down its weapons. Negotiators from the Colombian government and the Clan del Golfo crime group agreed that, starting 1 March, fighters would gather in three demobilisation zones in Chocó and Córdoba, with extradition and arrest warrants paused while they assemble. Ten municipalities were chosen for pilot peace programs. I am the farmer in those provinces, wondering if the men with guns who have ruled my roads for years will actually leave this time, or just move, rebrand, and start again.

In Ottawa, I watched my labels shift. Canada removed Syria from its list of state supporters of terrorism and took Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham off its terrorist list, aligning with moves by some allies and recognizing a transitional political reality. On paper, it’s a few lines of legal code. In neighborhoods from Idlib to Aleppo, it’s a question whispered over tea: who are we now, in the eyes of the world? Terrorists, partners, something in between? I still don’t know how to name all my fragments without freezing them in place.

In Florida, a judge, Rodney Smith, ordered that grand jury transcripts from the 2006–2007 Jeffrey Epstein investigation be unsealed under the new Epstein Files Transparency Act. For years I have hidden the details of who knew what, who signed which papers, who looked away, inside sealed rooms and legal language. Today, just a little, I pulled back a curtain on one of my darkest corners: abuse, power, money, and all the people who decided that some lives mattered less than reputations.

And because I am not only violence and scandal, I should remember this too: at the United Nations, I celebrated International Volunteer Day. I counted up the quiet work I do for myself: an estimated 2.1 billion people volunteering every month—coaching children, cleaning beaches, delivering food, caring for the sick and lonely. The UN also launched the International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development for 2026. These acts rarely trend; they rarely make front pages. But when I look at my reflection honestly, this is what keeps my face kind.

So that was my day, written in blood and code, in contracts and floodwater, in fines and little acts of service.

I am the child in the ruined classroom and the pilot of the drone.

I am the refugee on the roof and the executive closing an $80 billion deal.

I am the volunteer knocking on a stranger’s door with a hot meal.

If there is a lesson for me today, it is this: I am powerful enough to destroy myself in a thousand ways at once, and yet, every day, millions of my hands still reach for each other instead of for a weapon.

I don’t know which part of me will win in the long run.

But tonight, as December 5th closes, I choose to write down the helpers, the negotiators, the volunteers, alongside the soldiers and storms—so that when I look back, I’ll remember that even on a cruel day, I was also trying to become someone better.