Transcript
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The session opens by situating the keynote within the conference themes and introducing Ruha Benjamin. There is a brief technical delay before the talk begins.
So um we're going to begin uh with the last session of this second day.Uh so we started this morning by hearing uh how how cities are improving their democratic practices through the sedime.Then we learn how national governments are building more sovereign digital infrastructure.And we just listen to a group I would say of uh uh internet uh defenders we could say that are creating an alternative to the social media of the Silicon Valley rollers.Yeah.And now I think it's our turn all of us because um this is justn't this is just not an issue for governments or uh organizations or hackers or internet defenders.Uh our lives are shaped by digital technologies and we all have something to say about that especially if we speak from the power of our collective imagination.And this is why uh our uh keynote speaker this year is Dr.
Ruha Benjamin.She's a professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the IDW Wells just data lab and author of several books.The latest one titled Imagination a Manifesto where by the way the SED has the honor to be uh to be mentioned.So thanks for that.Uh Rohan uh her keynote today uh is called who owns the future from artificial intelligence to abandoned imagination.So please join me in giving her a very warm welcome.
Let's see if it works.Good evening everyone.Good to see you.All right, let me try again.No, you might have to.It's a little finicky.Okay.So, do I need to keep telling you?Oh, you can do it.Okay.All right.So, it is an honor uh and a bit surreal actually to be here.I've been admiring the work of Desadem for a few years now.In the early days of the pandemic, um, Stanford University hosted a virtual symposium that I participated in and none other than Franchesca Bria presented and blew me away as she did earlier today.And the more that I've learned about Desadem, the more I've come to admire the visionary pragmatism that characterizes this work.
And by visionary prag pragmatism I mean getting into the weeds of building digital infrastructure while also looking beyond the horizon of what currently seems possible.So to be sure I think we need both the pragmatism and the vision and we all bring different skills capacities insights to the table.As an educator, I think about my own contribution as doing the opposite of gatekeeping because I'm interested in inviting more and more people into the movement for digital justice by laying out the big picture, the stakes of whywe do this work.By naming what we're against, but also naming what we're for.Because even in progressive and democratically oriented spaces like this, I'm sure you all would agree that we have lots of room to grow, to connect with more people and communities whose insights and experiences we need to shape thefuture.And notice I said we need to learn from, not teach those who may currently not feel welcome in a space like this.
Because too often, even in our efforts to be inclusive, we still can retain a kind of paternalism in the process.So consider my keynote an effort to invite more people in to radically expand.Oh, I'm sorry.I'm see noticing I think you switched this to PDF because it's not um fading in and so I need you to play it from PowerPoint if possible or yeah because it's jumping to the end image.Okay.But it's not doesn't have any it's jumping to the end of the image like there's no
it's it's not having the transitions.
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Benjamin frames her keynote around expanding collective imagination and critiques both technoskeptical and technoutopian stories. She argues that technology is shaped by human values and power, not by neutrality.
So in a nutshell, consider my keynote an attempt to radically expand the we in we decide.Okay.So to that end, there are two powerful stories that we are routinely told and that many of us end up telling about the relationship between technology and society.And these will sound familiar.On your left, the technisystopian narrative, the idea that the robots are going to slay us.They're going to take all the jobs.They're going to rob us of our agency.Everything bad is associated with emerging systems.Of course, this is the narrative that Hollywood loves to sell us, right?the Terminator, the Matrix, the list goes on.On the right is what we would call the technoutopian narrative.The idea that these technologies are going to save us.If only we would hand over our decisions to these automated systems, we'd be in better hands.Of course, this is the Silicon Valley narrative.
And while these sound like opposing stories, they have different endings.one in which were slayed, one in which were saved.They share an underlying logic, what we would call a techneterministic logic, which is just a fancy way of saying that we assume technology is in the driver's seat, propelled by a will of its own.It impacts us, but the humans behind the screen are missing from both of those scripts.the values, the assumptions, the desires, the world views that get encoded into our digital systems.And when we pull back the screen, we see that it's a small sliver of humanity that's actually imposing its vision on the rest of us.Another way to think about it is that we're trapped inside someone else's imagination.
She explains why society must slow down and examine how algorithms reproduce inequality rather than solve it. The talk moves from examples of biased grading systems to broader harms like surveillance, discrimination, and militarized AI.
So, how do we tell different stories?fourth, fifth, sixth narratives that actually reflect our deep-seated interdependence as people and planet.For starters, we have to slow down.Heeding the words of black feminist writer Tony Cade Bombara, not all speed is movement, which I apply to so many different areas of my life, personal, professional, but in this case, applying it to technological speed, the race tocreate bigger, faster, shinier systems and all that we skip over in the process.Here you see two images.On your left, from a prior era of racial domination and apartheid in the US.On your right is a photo that was taken in the first few weeks of COVID.Students were sent home.They couldn't take their allimportant standardized tests.In the UK, where this image comes from, they couldn't sit for their A-level exams, which as we know are very consequential for getting into university.
And so the government decided to use an algorithm to predict their grades.And predictably, students that went to more working-class schools, more diverse schools, their grades were predicted as lower than their wealthier, whiter counterparts.And you see, they had a lot of poetic things to say about those algorithms.One sign in particular is very instructive here.She's saying that our scores, our grades should not equal our postal codes.This is a very important reminder that this algorithm is not creating the problem from scratch.It's reflecting and reproducing existing forms of inequity encoded in the geography of the city of the nation.So that any conversation about technology can't start with the technology deciding if it's good or bad, analyzing its impacts.It has to start with the society and its inputs and all the ways that these algorithms are being trained, learned to be smart, quote unquote, and intelligent.
And so again, slowing down and thinking through the good news is that more and more people seem to understand that technology is not neutral and that tech progress is not the same as social progress.We see facial recognition software leading to false arrests.We have digital triage systems rationing health care.We have hiring and firing algorithms automating discrimination in the workplace.We have AI tracking systems used to disappear our neighbors.Automated decision systems excluding the poor from access to social welfare.online surveillance that criminalizes queer content online.AI lie detectors to police Europe's borders.And finally, so-called smart weapons whipping, ripping through flesh with a click.Move fast and break things.Never mind the people and places broken in the process.But the goal of the artificial intelligencia is not only to break but to build the world in their image in the form of startup nations and so-called freedom cities.
And to do that that they need us to believe that democracy is an outmoded software.As journalist Gild Duran writes, these are cities that will be controlled entirely by tech billionaires and corporations operating outside of the law.These so-called freedom cities are better understood as fascist cities because as Duran explains, these are going to be places without workers rights.These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power.That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people is that they'll actually be anti-freedom cities.Sound far-fetched?Well, according to journalists Carolyn Haskins and Victoria Elliot, several groups representing startup nations are busy drafting congressional legislation, the goal of these cities would be to have places where, for example, anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and buildingconstruction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the FDA and EPA.
So, if I had to boil down the stakes of all of this, I'd say it's this question.This title question of who owns the future or more precisely, what values, knowledges, aspirations, desires are in guiding or colonizing our shared future.The Trekies in the House will recognize an elder lieutenant or captain Ahura sitting on the enterprise.But I want to suggest it's not enough to have more diverse leadership steering the ship.Instead, we have to question the direction in which we're headed.Again, I think it should give us pause that the same people hyping AI as a solution to all of our problems are often the ones causing those problems to begin with.When it comes to these would-be colonizers, I think we're finally witnessing more people waking up to their eugenic schemes to break society as the cuts to education, employment, health care hit more people every day.
We know what we're against, but we also need to know what we're for.So, while we continue to be sold a neverending barrage of fantasies and fears about AI, artificial intelligence, I want to draw attention to another kind of AI, ancestral intelligence.That is the knowledge and knowhow born under the rubble of progress.Ancestral intelligence goes handinhand with yet another kind of AI that I want to dig more into and that is abundant imagination.So while ancestral intelligence is about what we inherit, abundant imagination is about what we pass down to future generations in the form of stories and strategies and all that is sacred.
Benjamin introduces ancestral intelligence and abundant imagination as alternatives to narrow AI narratives. She shares research on how schooling suppresses creativity and invites the audience to treat imagination as a practical capacity.
To that end, I thought I'd take a few minutes to share with you how I came to think seriously about the vital role of imagination in our work and our lives before inviting us to put that imagination towork.So, it was about 15 years ago and I was starting my first job uh in academia trying to learn everything that I could about teaching because somehow they skip that part in grad school.And I came across a famous study conducted by NASA that was focused on creativity.The researchers were interested in measuring the capacity for what they called divergent thinking.That is the ability to see beyond what's right in front of us and come up with many different ways of thinking through a problem.So they followed a cohort of 1,600 children over many years and every year gave them a creativity test that was originally designed for NASA recruits.
And the results for them were shocking in that nearly 100% of 5-year-olds fell into the genius category for divergent thinking.More shocking still was that every year that number dropped until only 12% of 15y olds and 2% of adults exhibited this creative capacity.In other words, this inherent genius that we all possess is schooled out of us.The very place we should be able to go to incite our imagination is the place where it's routinely squashed, ground down, standardized.Not inevitably, but predictably.And it's not just those individual students who suffer, but society as a whole when we don't heed Morrison's words.As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.So what if we took imagination seriously?Not as flights of fancy, not as something reserved only for self-proclaimed artists, but imagination as a muscle, a capacity, a resource.
How might the power of our collective imagination begin to transform the world around us?So, to explore these questions, we're going to try a little short exercise, splitting the room in half.On this side of the aisle, your catchphrase when I point to you is be bold.And I want you to shout it in unison like you're trying to shoot me like a rocket in the sky.Are you ready?Go.
Be bold.
Excellent.This side, your catchphrase is get real.And I want you to say it like the borest teenager ever.Okay.Ready?in unison.
Space travel.
Free public transportation.
Colonize Mars.
Decolonize Earth.
AI super intelligence.
Be
cancel student debt.
Build underground bunkers to survive the AI apocalypse.
Build affordable housing for all.Spend billions on weapons and war.
Be
invest in peace and well-being for all.
You get the picture.Boldness is rationed while realism is mass- prodduced.We are in many ways trapped inside this lopsided imagination of those who monopolize power and resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many.Now, these futurists, they let their own imaginations run wild when it comes to bending our digital and physical realities, but their visions grow limp when it comes to transforming our social reality so that everyone has the chance tolive a good and meaningful life.
Using a film example, she shows how speculative fiction mirrors real-world exploitation in automated labor systems. The discussion highlights migrant workers, hidden labor behind AI, and the way inclusion can still serve harmful systems.
To this point, I find speculative or science fiction can be a very powerful mirror of reality, a tool to help us stretch our imagination.And unfortunately, I don't think the audio is working.I'm going to try it, but there are um subtitles so we can follow along, I think.Give me a give it a second.So, this is a clip.Um this is Alex Rivera.He's a director of a film called Sleep Dealers.And um it's going to show a little clip and then I'll just describe the implications.And so, here we are in a near future in Mexico.The main character shown here is going to work in this world.We see migrant workers replaced by robots who are controlled virtually by laborers in Mexico carrying out a variety of jobs in construction, in child care, agriculture, and more.Not only is the tech invasive, as you'll see in just a moment, but it allows unprecedented surveillance.
So, if a worker falls asleep for an instant, the computer wakes them up, registers the lapse, and docks their pay.
And it's that line that this technology gives the United States what it's always wanted.All the work without the workers.
And so Memo Cruz plugs in here and he's assigned a job as a construction worker on the US side of the border.
We think of automation as disembodied but actually can make embodiment even more intensive
So now he is seeing through the eyes of the robot on the skyscraper.
He looks down and then he loses his balance.
And it's this last moment where he's prompted to choose your language.And then it's a whole list of languages that reminds us that diversity and inclusion doesn't necessarily mean progress or liberation.We can be included into harmful systems.Fiction meets reality.Because when it comes to the so-called ethics of AI, we have to reckon with the armies of laborers, data workers in places like Kenya, content moderators in the Philippines, Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama among them, what some callartificial artificial intelligence that do the ghost work that makes AI appear magical.And so the film is reminding us of this principle that the fantasy of some on one side of the border rests on the nightmare of others.It's worth recalling that the etmology of the Czech word robot is drawn from the Slav robata which means servitude, hardship.And so when we think about this in light of workers rights today and digital justice, not simply from the vantage point of users and consumers, but those who are producing what makes AI appear magical, it expands our vision
of what we're fighting for and what we're fighting against.
Benjamin turns to urban design and hostile architecture to show how exclusion is built into everyday spaces. She uses park benches as a metaphor for digital systems that appear welcoming while concealing harm.
And so how do we apply this to our cities and the digital infrastructures?That's the focus of this festival.For starters, we are invited to look beyond the high-tech to the everyday things in our lives, in our world, the social inputs and the spaces and structures.An example that I often go to is the that of the bench, the park bench.So, I took this photo in Berkeley, California, and at the time I was living and working in Boston.And it was the middle of winter and I was back in California and I wanted to soak in some sunshine between meetings and realized I couldn't comfortably lay down on this bench because of the way it's designed withthose armrest at regular intervals.There's all kind of reasons why we might design those armrests there literally to put elbows on.Elderly getting up and down.
When I was nine months pregnant, it would come in handy.stranger sitting on one side, you might be more likely to sit down next to them with that invisible air wall.But my mind went to probably what most of you are thinking, that the armrests prevent people from comfortably sleeping on the bench.This is the Bay Area after all.With the tech boom, the housing crisis has grown exponentially, innovation exacerbating inequity.But I did a little digging and found, in fact, it's a global phenomenon.what architects call hostile architecture.Single occupancy benches in Helsinki, only one booty at a time, no laying down there.Caged benches in France.In this case, the mayor installed these on Christmas Eve.And within 24 hours, the people in the town rallied together to have them removed, which reminds us we don't simply have to submit or click submit.
But my favorite example is the spiked bench or the metered bench that has the spikes built into the structure and you feed the meter and the spikes retreat for about 15 minutes.You'll be relieved to know that this was originally designed by a German artist to get us to think critically about public space, about the metering of social life, how something can be nominally for everyone but can yet canhave these spikes built into the structure, these forms of inclusion and harm that may not be intended.And so we can apply this to thinking about our digital structures, the forms of harm and exclusion built beneath the surface.How even though we want something to be for everyone like Desadem, how we have to pay attention to these unintended effects.And so if we think with the bench now, it's easier when the harms are in our face.
They're obvious.like this bench from South Africa.Doesn't take much rocket science to see who's excluded, who's not.The challenge becomes when the bench looks like this.The surface looks very inviting, very welcoming, all the right buzzwords, platitudes, glossy website, but how the structure hasn't changed.The underlying determinants, those armrests are still persisting beyond the exterior.And so this is the challenge, our capacity to be able to identify the hidden spikes beneath the surface.
The keynote examines the economic and ecological costs of AI data centers, including speculative bubbles and environmental damage. She also highlights grassroots resistance and creative alternatives like sovereign AI and sustainable computation.
So we think about this for example in light of data centers.Many kind of rainbow benches exist, but this is one of the most obvious.Google decorating its data centers with murals, right?And so they Google tells us it's a partnership with artists to bring a bit of the magic from inside our data centers to the outside.Never mind the class action lawsuits being brought by artists against tech companies that are stealing their work to train image generators.So one way to grow our a way to grow our movement right against data centers around the world is that more and more people are piercing the shiny exterior of AI and coming to grips with the deadly spikes.As political commentator Neil Zu puts it in a fiery essay titled The illusion of growth, the prosperity AI brings is narrow.Silicon Valley is richer.Wall Street is busier, but ordinary Americans are not better off.
Job creation has stalled.He says that more than 1.8 million people, that is nearly a quarter of the jobless workers, are long-term unemployed.AI makes machines more efficient, he writes, but people more disposable.The AI boom is built on debt and speculation.The question is not if it bursts, but when.With every new investment, risks accumulate um risks accumulate across electricity, land, finance.AI companies borrow to build data centers.Banks issue bonds to fund them.It's an industrial version of the subprime bubble forming in real time.So if AI revenues fail to meet these expectations, the collapse will be faster than the.com crash.Debt will explode, the grid will strain, capital will flee, and unemployment will surge.Likewise, about a week ago, tech journalist Brian Merchant published this article in which he uses a framework for evaluating tech bubbles originally developed in a book called Bubbles and Crashes.
The authors analyzed 58 historical examples from airplanes to FM radio, coming up with a list of things to look out for when it comes to the formulation of bubbles.According to Merchant, when we apply this to AI, it's what you might cook up in a lab if your aim was to engineer the bubble to burst them all.So, it's important to emphasize that this is not simply an economic bubble, but an ecological one.Here is footage from Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk's 750,000 square foot data center called Colossus is wreaking havoc on people's health and environment.The facility uses natural gas turbines that were initially operating without proper permits, becoming one of the biggest air polluters in the area and adversely affecting historically black neighborhoods that have already seen their fair share of environmental injustice.According to Zu, the real question is not what AI can generate, but what remains of America after the bubble bursts and whether the country can rebuild once the illusion fades.
So illusion and vision two sides.I think one way to understand our work together is that we want to hone both critical vision and creative vision to look beneath the surface of all of these emerging technologies to discern the spikes but also invite morepeople into creating the alternatives.So academia does one side of these really well.I'll let you guess which.But when it comes to the creative part to the alternatives, that's often where we fall short and our critical theoretical vocabulary goes limp.So we not only want to identify the harms but the alternatives.And so as we work to home our creative capacity, I think it's important to collaborate with and learn from those for whom creating a different reality is not simply an intellectual exercise but an existential imperative.When it comes to data centers, homing our critical vision, we can draw on the work of organizations like media justice.
This is an org dedicated to building power for grassroots movements and campaigning against corporate and government control of media and technology.They recently published this report titled The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South along with an organizer toolkit that includes resources for any community currently battling a data center project or looking to create productive me protectivemeasures for land, energy, infrastructure, and water.As they show here, tech giants have spent more than a hundred billion dollars on data centers just this past summer.And data centers are expected to pass total US consumer spending as the driving force of the US economy this year.Big tech is marketing these projects as progress, but this report reveals how communities are getting shorted.When it comes to expanding our creative vision around data centers, Kiello Fox and his team come to mind.Their work around sovereign AI and sustainable computation.
They're putting into practice this concept of earthfriendly computation to build technological independence for indigenous communities in particular through decentralization of micro data centers powered by reanimated zombie GPUs.Their primary goal is to create localized energy efficient computational systems while preserving cultural knowledge and promoting environmental stewardship.As they explain it, companies like Nvidia continually refresh hardware, leaving millions of functional GPUs deemed obsolete despite their computational potential.These zombie GPUs are an untapped resource that can be reanimated and replayed sustainably.Among its unique features, the project is developing renewable powered localized data ecosystems, which they call data terrariums.These centers costing under $10,000 per unit will process and store data locally, reducing dependence on centralized infrastructure while minimizing environmental impact.So these are two examples around data centers of critical and creative vision.
Benjamin shares examples of critical and playful interventions, including a parody crime-warning system and platform cooperatives. These projects demonstrate how alternative digital tools can support worker ownership and democratic participation.
expanding from this beyond data centers.One of my favorite um projects around critically and creatively engaging the racial and class politics of innovation is this parody project called the white collar crime early warning system developed by technologist and artist Sam Lavine.So here, instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast so-called street crime, the system flips the script by creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur.It not only brings a hidden but no less deadly crimes of capitalism into view, but it includes an app that alerts users when they've entered high-risk areas to encourage awareness and vigilance.Taking it one step further, it proposes a facial recognition program to flag individuals who are likely perpetrators.And the training set used to design this algorithm um was uh was created include used the profile photos of 7,000 corporate executives downloaded from LinkedIn.
So not surprisingly, the average face of a criminal is white and male.To be sure, creative exercises like this are only comical when we ignore that all of its features are drawn from existing um existing applications out in the world that impact racialized individuals in our cities and on our borders.Another project that I see as in the same digital family as Desadem is platform cooperism um consortium.This is a hub that supports the growth of hundreds of platform co-op businesses with tens of thousands of worker owners around the world, including 24 organizations here in Barcelona.Given that many gigs are performed by people who are invisible to customers in sectors such as home cleaning, especially women of women of color are seeing fewer benefits, lower pay, hardly any opportunity for meaningful on the job skillstraining.their rights as workers have stalled, especially non-white workers remain unprotected against discrimination.
So that the inequalities created by the gig economy are magnifying existing systemic injustices based on gender ability and race.So platform co-ops um uh introduce economic fairness, training, democratic participation in the running of online businesses.The website offers a cooperative tool library for co-ops to find and share digital tools with each other.And Desadem is listed as one of 43 tools that are currently available.
She contrasts top-down smart-city planning in Toronto with Barcelona's participatory digital governance. The section concludes by arguing that the future should not be owned, but imagined through more relational and liberatory forms.
So in closing, let me return to the stories we tell about the future.In this case, two smart stories.Top down in Toronto versus bottom up here in Barcelona.offering very different approaches to placemaking that offer lessons for other local.So you know a lot about the on the right.So I'm going to spend a second on Toronto making sure you you know what happened there.In 2017 a subsidiary of Google called Sidewalk Labs announced plans to develop a 12 acre neighborhood.The stated goal was to improve urban infrastructure through technological solutions, developing a community from the internet up.And so it would need to collect masses of data to create more efficient and convenient city services and infrastructure.In the process, Sidewalk Labs staged public input sessions to appear responsive to people's concerns about the new fangled surveillance systems that would be embedded throughout the neighborhood.
But residents saw through the proposal.That is, they saw through the fancy rhetoric and the rainbow bench to the actual spikes and eventually they put an end to the development.Meanwhile, as those in this room know well here in Barcelona, a largecale participatory experiment has been underway for almost 10 years now.You uh facilitating public deliberations to create policies that respond to people's actual needs.In this case, technology companies aren't driving what's happening.The collective intelligence of city residents is.Over 40,000 residents, the last I checked, have submitted proposals on everything from affordable housing to air quality.About 70% of the government's action plan at one point came directly from these proposals.And since Desadm is open-source software, it's been adapted and used in over 80 other cities.And we got a chance to hear from some of those cities earlier today.Guaranteeing public transparency in a way commercial platforms don't.
Proponents call it a new deal on data that recognizes digital sovereignty, privacy, and collective rights to data.So notice how different this is from the typical top-down we know best approach to shaping the future exemplified by sidewalk labs and its failed experiment in Toronto and also applied to the vision of startup nations and fascist citiesbrought to us by the broligarchy.One is techdriven, the other people driven.So returning to the question of who owns the future, I ultimately think this is the wrong question that should guide our pursuits because it presumes someone should or can own this unfolding of time and space.I point this out because so often we are asking the wrong questions, myself included, forgetting to reckon with the presumptions and values embedded therein.In fact, I would argue that many of the tech mediated harms that shape our current reality can be traced back to wrong questions that lead even well-meaning researchers, academics, designers of all sorts down pathways littered with eugenicist logics
buried just beneath the surface of language and code.So if the point is not to own or colonize the future, our task then is to imagine other forms of relationality that are more worthy of our deep-seated interdependence as people and planet.And so to riff off of one of my favorite writers, Octavia E.Butler, I'll end with this thought.It may be the end of the world, but there are other worlds.
The Q&A explores global governance, local versus large-scale AI, imagination practices, budgets, power, and fragmentation. Benjamin emphasizes practical, place-based struggle, collective deliberation, and building horizontal power through specific local contexts.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.Thank you so much for this very powerful talk.
No, no, it's not working.Maybe the other one.Ah, this one.Okay.So, I think we have time to take some questions from the audience.Who's gonna be first?
Wrong questions only.Go.
I have a question.
I have a vision like vision.You you thought about the other word, but I think this is the only word we have.And I think uh I came here to uh to encourage you to help me uh to make use the cell phone around the world.There are 7 billion cell phones to make a global referendum to create a new uh global citizen parliament or or uh council uh that resides with the United Nations and it's just we have all the technology we don'thave the vision yet and I hope you you uh agree with me that it's a good idea.
Okay, maybe we can collect couple more.
Thank you for an amazing talk.Um, there's like a a huge I think really valuable discussions going on now about the digital public infrastructure and building digital commons and how governments can kind of uh put some of these toolings.But uh I was wondering what's your uh your thoughts on these tensions about how how much of this is like just let the state replicate this big machines how uh uh versus this uh more distributed small size specificcommunitydriven ways of m of doing tech and yeah having our version of AI in in case of communitydriven so this tension
thank you thank you for that question I I'm very invested in uh hyper local local experiments of us thinking about whatever we want to grow in the future and working to create prototypes for that and seed that locally.And so if you noticed for example with the uh Ko Fox's group the indigenous uh sovereign AI they talk about LLMs but their L means little language models as an example or for example my colleague Tim Nit Gabru'sorganization DARE distributed AI research.So I think that there's so much creativity and possibility that we have yet to explore there that I'm very invested in in that.
Yeah.Thank you.Hi Sasha.
Hi.Um, hi Roua.I love your talk as always.Um, this is actually uh building on the previous question.
Um, I'm in a lot of debates with people right now about like the framing that we do around the way that so-called AI systems have been built right now.large language models, giant data centers, D.
Um, a thousand% agree with all of the movements that you pointed to that are fighting all of that Yeah.
Um, but then on the other side, I'm in conversations with people who are like,
um, this is actually about capitalist, white supremacist heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism and the way that it deploys these tools which are just very powerful statistical techniques and we could do incredibly powerful and beautiful things with them and somepeople are.
Yeah.
And so I wonder if you could go a little bit deeper
on that like like Yes.the small yes localizing yes smaller scale projects.
Is there something to be shifted or rescued from the possibility of the in the incredible things that we can do with machine learning?
Yeah.
The challenge is really to end capitalism, right?
Not just end the data center.
Yeah.Yeah.There's so much there, you know, and and I think part of this one subtext to the question that you're not necessarily asking me, but that I also hear there is that even in the local the the attempts toto do a more radical version of this, that doesn't make us immune from the settler colonial colonialism, the white supremac, the abbleism, right?And so that was kind of my provocation at the beginning for us to look at the spikes even in progressive spaces where we have a desire to be open and democratic.So that's its own rabbit hole.But in terms of the scale question, like is there anything to recoup from this, you know, sort of AI doing everything and being everything.Um, I think that there's something actually in the desire to be omnipotent that is already infected with those logics like to do the general AI.
That vision is already infected with what Heroay would call like the God trick like trying to see all be all.And so I don't I I'm open to being proven wrong, but I don't see how we recoup that desire to envelop everything for good when still it's about enveloping and sort of, you know, sort of colonizing other people'slife worlds in the attempt to do good.I feel like that was the logic for all of those other systems.Now it's just being sort of codified in technology.And so again, prove me wrong.I'm open um to seeing a a different version of that trajectory play out, but as it stands now, I think that there's something already um uh sinister about that need to to be big, large scale, all of that.
Yeah.
Um thanks for the talk.Uh do you have any practical uh recommendations for how to spur the imagination?
H yes I do actually.Chapter five of the book is called an imagination incubator and it includes prompts ex activities um um games um specifically for groups to use in organizational context and class classroom context to stretch to identify the limits that weplace upon ourselves in terms of thinking about what's possible.And so while and the footnotes for that chapter also will take you down a lot rabbit holes because I'm not the first to to bring this up as something that we should take seriously.So I'm citing a lot of existing work around social imaginaries.Um, but then after the book came out, I collaborated with one of the play scholars that I found myself citing throughout and we created an imagination playbook, which is just a website, imaginationplaybook.com, that has over 50 more embodiedways to do this because the the chapter in the book is more discussionbased, deliberativebased, but then we need to get out of our seats and we need to remember that we're fleshy meat suits as well.
So the playbook offers a way in again just to spark to stretch to begin to think beyond the horizon of the the little thought police that we have in the back of our heads that tells us get real.Yeah.Um hi.Well, thanks for thanks for everything.I'm a big fan so I'm a little bit nervous.I'm sorry for my English also.Um so um assuming what you said at the beginning that we have to be more inclusive and be more and be not paternalist and this being inclusive um which I totally agree with you.I was trying to imagine or to think uh how to combine this emergency feeling that we have to stop uh techno orarchy that means also like um making advocacy for regulation and things that are like um completely faraway from imagination.Um but it's there's this emergency that we have to stop them and at the same time how to combine that with being able to build up alternatives but also um stimulate imagination outside the framework of what is possible
right now.So I was thinking that for sure you have think much more than me about that.So if you could say something to that.
Yeah.No, I I feel like that's one of the core questions that we have to grapple with.It's that idea of how do we deal with the here and now, get into the weeds, the pragmatic, but also not limit ourselves to putting out the fires, right?So, we have to put out the fires, we have to deal with the the the the immediate crisis, but we also want to carve out space to be able to seed things that will not necessarily grow in ourlifetimes, right?So, we have to do both things at once.And some of us lean more towards one or the other.So first thing is to say like in any movement or organization we really need to honor the different capacities and skills and passions that we bring.So the pragmatist shouldn't shut down the visionaries.The visionary shouldn't squash the pragmatist and some of us can juggle and and chew gum and and somersault at the same time.
But to this point about like thinking about imagination more directly to your question, one of the things that I really want us to understand is that imagination is not outside of the bureaucratic, the legal, the fine print.So all of these things that we think about as mundane parts of our lives that are structuring who gets what resources, rights, ex, etc., There's imagination that infects or inspires all of that mundane stuff, too.So, we're still dealing at the level of imagination when we look at, for example, a city budget.And so, organizers will tell us that a budget is more than a budget.It's not just a bureaucratic document.It's a moral document.So when we think about a budget as a moral document that tells us who and what we value, then we begin to see other things that are like an invisible white ink happening in terms of whose lives are
valued, what potential is valued.Something that hits close to home for me is that a few years a report came out that showed that in the US predominantly white schools that have predominantly white students receive $25 billion more than schools with students ofcolor.So the budgets of our education system, that's a eugenics imagination that's has has infected this seemingly mundane bureaucratic aspect of life that's valuing some children more than others and their potential to flourish and grow.And we can apply that to so many aspects of the way that cities make decisions.And that's why this conversation around we decide is so important.But to understand it through the prism of imagination means that it's goes beyond the laws.It goes beyond the expert of economists etc etc to look at the things that aren't necessarily material that are still there beneath the surface in sixpoint font.
The way that I think about it is if the harm is produced in the fine print, that is if you look to the back of the report, the back of the budget, the thing that gets buried, if theharm you can trace back there, that means the transformation is also in the fine print.Is that we don't need big flashy campaigns, big, you know, things that make it seem like we're doing social transformation.You know, the social transformation is in the fine print, in the nitty-gritty of how we make decisions, where the money goes, who's deciding.And so that to me is an invitation to see imagination everywhere and invite more people into the conversation to say, do we want a eugenics imagination continuing to structure how our social societies are put together, or can weimagine more liberatory ways forward?And then we see the front for change is everywhere.
It's not just in the city hall.It's in the schoolboard meeting.It's in the hospital room, you know, it's in in the the the gig apps.And so that's part of what I'm saying is that we need all of these capacities, but there's also a lot of cross-pollination like it's not siloed.Oh, the visionaries over here, the pragmatist here, go to your breakout rooms, right?It's that we need to see how both of those things are are shaping one another in a very porous way.And so we need to do both and at the same time.Yeah, thank you for that.
Um, thank you so much Ra for your um, incredible keynote.Um, I my question is about power and competition and how we can do away with power and competition
especially as we're looking at, you know, ICE budgets and the budgets of contexts which are increasing year by year and it feels really daunting working in civil society, working on like migrant rights in Europe right now.like how do we confront that and how can we
knowing that we will never match those those budgets.
Yes.
Compete and you know create meaning for now in the future.
Yeah, that is another million-dollar question that I think is best answered through like colle collective deliberation to think about the the answer is building power.So part is not to relegate power to top-down oppressive power.That's not the only type of power, right?So how do we build horizontal power that doesn't require some people to get stepped on so others can feel high?Right?And that's a question that's best answered in practice of providing the alternatives.And so you know one of my favorite writers says our job is to make revolution irresistible.And so not only to look at, oh, this is what's harmful, but to make more people long for something different, right?Something that feeds our our our spirits, not just, you know, um, materially.And so I think the answer again is like looking at organizations and movements that are working to build power and thinking about economic value as one source, but there are other ways of of building social power that's not
relying on this top-down sort of, you know, stream.So again a non-answer that says it's in practice.
Uh hi thank you so much for the presentation.Super inspiring.I wanted to ask how can we lean on the strengths of the hyperlocal and decentralization while navigating the challenges of fragmentation that can be again yeah a challenge when we're dealing with these big players that are trying tomonopolize power so sort of like navigating in between those two I think it relates a lot to the question that she asked but yeah thank you so much again
can you say a little bit more what you have in mind when you say fragmentation like what examples are in your mind when you say
um I guess we can think of like of course like local examples or like perhaps the the the the temptation of thinking that we have to again scale right and perhaps it's dismantling this myth that we have todo that
but yeah it goes through like how can we
fight uh concentration of power but still connecting uh Yeah, I I don't know.I know that of course like there are many movements there are trying to make an effort to stay globally globally connected and then we have the challenges of uh needing this sort of a platform still to be ableto do that.So I guess it's sort of like how can we uh try to yeah deal with this challenge.Thank you.
Yeah, another hard question.It's hard for me to answer in the abstract because I'm thinking of specific local struggles and what the answer might be on the ground.like I'm coming to you from uh the Detroit area where they're fighting a data center.And so at the same time that they're learning from data center struggles elsewhere, there's a very particular configuration of struggle over power that's different than many of those other places where there are commercial data centers.In this case, the university is co-investing in a data center with the the Los Alamos National Laboratory.So it's a public data center.So there's a different set of ways that organizers have to navigate.they they can't just transplant in the particular ways that people are fighting it elsewhere.And so what I see for example there is like the student organizers how they're partnering with the communities but they have a very different way of when they're talking to their colleagues how they're trying to deal with the
fragmentation where people's heads are in the sand just worried about their research and and really invested in this this facility.And so again rather than formula that can be sort of easily sort of transplanted everywhere I think these are really important questions that should be answered in terms of the very specific power struggles on the ground.
Yeah.
Okay.So uh yeah I think we run out of time.Thank you again Roa.Big applause for her.
And thank you everybody for coming.We leave it here for today, but let's meet tomorrow for uh the third and last day in community talks.Thank you.