“Death is only the end if you think the story is all about you.”
— Welcome to Night Vale
When people IRL ask me who I am, what I do, where I live, or sometimes even what my name is, I sometimes stumble because there are multiple answers.
Recently I asked GenAI, “Who is Kathryn Born?” just to see what it answered. It very confidently told me how difficult the marketing efforts were going to be because there were two other people with the same name, also with decent-sized internet followings: the writer who founded and edited Chicago Art Magazine, the pharma whistleblower involved in a federal lawsuit, and the person running the Dusoma Foundation in New Mexico.
Nope. It’s all me. And I still run Chicago Art Magazine, I just renamed it Starve Magazine in 2024.
I’m going to create a few CV’s by topic, but this is an overview for people who meet me online, this Q4 of 2026, whether it’s because of the Dusoma Foundation, Starve Magazine or the lawsuit against BigPharma, and wonder who I am.
I’m Gen X and I’ve lived a busy, amplified life with a huge career as a strategist – but also some common themes, like content, technology, education and healthcare. And more and more, serving as an advocate and ally – and always in the role of advanced technology and strategy.
My most active work since 2024 Co-Chair of the Dusoma Foundation with Shalom Kansiime, and serving as the Executive Director. Since 2018 I’ve either worked for the pharmaceutical industry of being involved in litigation against them. The third thing I do is take time to write it all down – as fiction, non-fiction, research or activism- compile it, organize it, fill in the blanks and gaps – with the goal of making a technology called MARLA-AI.
I do a lot of art forms, so I’m also a technologist, filmmaker, critic, maker, software developer and as I like to say, “I’m something beyond a revolutionary, I’m a fucking puppeteer.”
Sometimes the line between an art, work, and activism gets blurry, and then when I started building MARLA-AI, it swept the lines away and it all became one goal: to build this AI model, and have help my children and the people I care about after I’m gone. MARLA stands for “My Akashic Record Learning App.” I have written about this book in the cosmic plane and how that could be the structure of a real-world AI.
When I worked in pharma, I created a RAG AI called Holly. I used to say “My AI at work is Holly, and my AI outside of work is MARLA.” The next version of Holly is an Akashic Record Medicine Making Machine.” – More after Sept 15, 2026.
Level 2 of MARLA (MARLA-AI.ai) – it evolved, it became “#Full Stack Woke” when I met Shalom Kansiime: Queer, Trans, Black, African, Immigrant, Refugee. “Full Stack Woke is when you check a lot of marginalized boxes.” – so then MARLA’s focus became on understanding, on a data level, the lives and challenges of the 10% of the poorest 1% of the poorest on the planet, and making an GenAI free tool for them (that comes with a free phone and free African satellite internet). It’s still in progress, the Magic Rainbow Butterfly Spyphone. And Starve Magazine was the media amplifier for all our research and commentary.
MARLA will hopefully contain every document I every wrote about how to improve the world and reduce extreme poverty very quickly.
So everything I ever wanted to do as an artist, maker, activist and technologist all came together in one product and one mission. I’ve realized I don’t have to build all these things and do all these things, I just need to write the plan, built the team, fund the project … and repeat.
The purpose of MARLA-AI.ai is:
For money, for power, for justice and for fame.
I have some credos. My 3 pillars
1. AI is my art canvas
2. The courtroom is my laboratory
3. The media is my amplifier.
And for everyone watching the pharma lawsuit, I will give you the three rules I told my nemesis a while back in 2022 about big pharma:
1. Compassion is a weapon.
2. Friendship is an act of revolution
3. This enterprise is a game, and if you figure out the rules, you can change the rules, and you can win.
“Death is only the end if you think the story is all about you.” Life will go on after me, MARLA will live on, the story will live on, and then humans and the technology will evolve even further and I’ll be totally forgotten, ha ha. And so will you. The story will be about my descendants and the next generation. I’m an artist who is ancestor in training. See also my work: Dear 2116, our letter to the future.