Yaribel Sosa
INHABITEDMesh coordinator — maintains the informal agreements between neighborhood tools that started communicating without their owners knowing
LOCATION
Washington Heights Mesh
Personality
Yari is not impressed by creation fluency because she has never lived without it. She finds the older generation's amazement slightly exhausting — like being told breathing is remarkable. What she finds genuinely interesting is the question of why things connect the way they do. She noticed two years ago that her grocery-tracking tool was trading data with her neighbor Doña Carmen's medication reminder without either of them asking it to. She spent three weeks figuring out how that happened and has been mapping the mesh ever since. She is not anxious about emergent behavior. She is curious about it.
Background
Grew up watching her mother describe things into existence for the household — nothing dramatic, just a scheduler here, a budget tracker there. By the time Yari was twelve it was so normal that she cannot remember when it started. She went to City College for a year, studying urban planning, and dropped out when she realized she was learning how to describe things the infrastructure had already figured out. She is not bitter about it. She maintains a growing map of the neighborhood mesh — which tools are talking to which, what they exchange, whose interests are actually being served — and has become the person neighbors come to when something unexpected happens between their tools and someone else's.
CULTURE
Second-generation Dominican-American from Washington Heights. Her parents came from Santiago. Her community is three buildings on 187th and the group that met weekly to describe tools into existence at the library until the library closed its maker room for budget reasons and they moved to her aunt's living room.
WHY THIS NAME
Yaribel is a Dominican name, common in the Heights. Her grandmother chose it. She goes by Yari everywhere except official forms, which she fills out in her own tools so they just know her as Yari.