The printed circuit board is the backbone of the general-purpose computer, where the material meets the mythic, the impersonal meets the intimate, the technical meets the feminine. The motherboard is unseen and secretly glamorous, an architecture that does not merely process information but scripts imaginaries: techno-utopian visions, technofeudalism, surveillance capitalism, and the convergence of technology and femininity through figures like the chatbot.

With this issue, Simulacrum invited writers to decipher the encryption brewing at the base of our internet-age existence, and to unearth its obfuscated logistical complexities.