Building Utopias in Anhalterra - Part III.
Five members of the Anhalterra Commune of different ages and backgrounds sit in a circle in the Commune's central library. The library contains shelves of books, CDs, records, and other media that preserved from the pre-internet era. The library also contains a glass case of deactivated devices from the pre-revolution period, including several smart phones, watches, laptop computers, and smart glasses with explanations about how these technologies were once ubiquitous in society. It is Jules' turn to moderate today's meeting of the Utopia Planning Council on technology and artificial intelligence. Jules places and switches on an old audio recording device they fixed in the center of the circle before kicking off the discussion.
Jules: Yeah, I'm just checking this device still works. Okay, cool. Maybe if it's all right with everyone we can go and just introduce ourselves again quickly. And then we can get back into the discussion. So my name is Jules. I am a member here at the Anhalterra Commune, and I'm just finishing my roles rotations at the Commune. I was born in Leipziger Commune. I am an aspiring cyberpunk and very AI optimistic. And I'm excited to be here under the Utopia Planning Council. Do you want to go next Wally?
Wally: Yeah, hi everyone. My name is Wally. I'm seven years old, and non-binary, and don't have a gender that I identify with. So I've grown up in the Commune and been collectively raised by different people of different ages that live here. The education that I've had has been learning to speak through just talking to people. And rather than going to school, I've just started on my role rotation at the Commune. And one of the things I've been doing is working in the garden.
Jules: Cool. Max?
Max: And I'm Max. I'm 25 years old. I was around 15 when the revolution happened, in my early teens. I didn't see much of it to be fair because my parents were already living in some kind of Commune with lots of people. So I saw it from afar. I've been living in the community house. There was a lot of old-school sci-fi books about flying cars and big buildings and automated systems and stuff which I got really passionate about. And what really strikes me is how wrong they got it all in some regards but right in some other aspects. For example, the fully automated AI thingy. So yeah, those are subjects that really interest me. I don't really know what I want to do with my life in general, but for now I'm just making cool lamps. So that's why I spend most of my time doing.
Jules: Nune, do you want to introduce yourself?
Nune: Hello, my name is Nune. My pronouns are she/her. I'm 77 years old and I've witnessed the revolutionary period, the times of mass surveillance and fascism. After the revolution, I've also witnessed the building of Anhalterra that came later on. And I see my role very much as continuing the memory and holding the knowledge of the whole history of this place and be very connected to this place and also honoring the memory of those who gave their lives in this struggle and who we lost. But also really reminding the new generation about the importance of building our community so that it serves all of us and gives everyone a good life and keeping everything that we struggle for alive. So that's my role in the community. I collect the knowledge. I try to collect stories and knowledge to build a kind of an archive but to pass on to the next generation.
Ness: Hi, my name is Ness. I'm 62 years old. I'm like old generation cyberpunk. *laughs* I've been working as a cyberpunk like already before the collapse of the old system and been working in an internationalist collective who's been trying to get people aware and make changes. And now after the destruction of a lot of our technological system I'm trying to kind of help to rebuild the utopias we've been envisioning back then. And yeah, right now in kind of my day-to-day job in the not like bigger picture things is restoring data at the mainframe here in the commune, trying to restore data from the backups of the internet. Back in the days and figuring out which things are actually still usable.
Jules: Yeah, actually I had a question about that. So are there any kind of information sources or types of information that you prioritize looking for?
Ness: Yes, I mean definitely all sorts of websites that have not been driven by a profit motive. Like one example is Wikipedia which had like very high standards of publishing and was never kind of commodified in a way, or capitalized on, and there you can basically use more or less all the information and there is a bunch of things like that or we can go to books that have been digitalized and things like that. But then when you go to more of the like, you know news outlets or social media or things like that you have to be very, very careful with which sources you select.
Jules: Yeah. I remember hearing from our elders that social media became so prolific and widespread that people had their entire lives on these platforms and they were not really interacting so much with each other in the real world which is really hard to imagine.
Ness: Yes, yes, it was terrible. It was like a commodification of social interaction, like capitalism spreading into every corner of your life and every interaction being capitalized on. I mean people were not meeting in real life anymore but were finding partners through apps and yeah, not just going out in the streets and speaking to their neighbors. Wally: What did young people do for fun and games?
Ness: I think many of them were just hanging on their phones. I remember there was this one time when I was like, I don't know, in my 20s, and I was just on my lunch break in a job I had next to studying and I went to this playground and was just eating there and I was wondering like, oh, what are all the children doing? They're all like hiding under this like little, I don't know, like something to climb on, right? And I was like, what are they playing down 2there? And I was looking and I just saw them all gathering around one phone and everyone like just, you know, trying to get a glimpse and like just doing that. A lot of what you saw was that. I mean it was obviously not all of the children and there were parents who didn't give their children phones from that early age, but I think this was a lot of them.
Max: This is crazy to me because people back in the day, all of them had access to this kind of technology, and they could use it whenever they wanted because now, for example, I'm 25, I was in contact with AI, like I used it maybe twice for really specific things that I had to ask permission for for my supervisors and like fill out the form and stuff like this because you know...
Jules: What was the supervisor for?
Max: In class for a project for lamp making, like I was designing a system and I asked my teacher if I could use the AI on the school computer to run a program that was gonna help me a lot for my thesis and I had to wait a week, fill out the form, stuff like that. It's crazy to me to think that back in the day you could have access to this kind of technology for leisure time at any given time because of how many resources and stuff it uses. I think it was a lot...
Nune: It was a very different time.
Max: It was like they would build microchips into t-shirts and things like that. The companies were just putting them everywhere and this was just because the global supply chains of extraction were really functioning back then. I mean just for the Global North for the empire and I mean this is what led to the whole destruction of the planet really, and people would just not think about the consequences and now people are aware of what it led to and this is why we're not carelessly handing out phones to everyone anymore. People would buy a new phone every year even though the old one was perfectly fine. They would build the phone so that it would break after one year and people would have to buy a new one.
Jules: Do you think that's one of the reasons why it's so hot and there's droughts and the winds, and flooding is happening so much? Is that because of what people have done in the past?
Max: It's definitely one of the reasons.
Wally: That's really sad that they didn't think of the new generation.
Jules: It's hard to believe that more people were not protesting this when it happened. That they could see that the techno-corps were just taking all of their data and were just using AI to increase their profits at the cost of the planet and people's lives.
Max: I think it was also due to where they got the information from about what the planet is like on these platforms. It was from the people who benefited! And before it was digital platforms it was mass media which was not very different. I don't know if you heard about televisions or so.
Jules: I heard about this!
Max: But, yeah, basically like it was like computer you can't interact with that just feeds you with information. You just listen to whatever comes and the ruling classes would always control the information flow or try to control all of it and this is how many people weren't really aware of the scale and were also scared of losing the little bit of power they did have. I think in the beginning there were also some revolutionary forces who used the technologies for connecting but I think it very quickly ended up being the more power or resources you had you could always have the better technology and so that kind of quickly turned.
Jules: How did people organize then?
Max: I think some used online technology early on, but there was also enormous pressure to organize in person, and then I think eventually when things got really bad, I think the uprising had its own communication infrastructure as bigger collectives formed. But people basically stopped using these online platforms and AI tools and social media for instance to organize. I think at some point they realized that it was really hard also to distinguish between what was right and wrong information and in a movement where you need trust that was not really helpful so they started using other modes of communication. I don't know if you maybe know more about this since you work more online.
Ness: Yeah, I know some of them were abandoned very quickly. There were some turning points, right? Like this big platform called Twitter which was then bought by one of the biggest oligarchs and he very openly turned fascist and this is where people began to open their eyes to what's been out there anyways, like this control by certain people of all the information sources and many people turned away and some alternatives appeared like this platform -what was it called - oh yeah, Blue Sky, which came out of that. But I don't really know how that exactly went because I didn't really use it myself before the internet shut down. There were other little alternatives popping up, and even though the masses didn't use them, they were really essential to organize then, I think. Also when the whole internet collapsed, there were people already working on low tech alternatives. I mean still technology, but a lower resource using technology that couldn't transmit so much data but still allowed people to be in contact with each other, indicating over radio in an encrypted way which was still usable with the phones everyone had and so on, without requiring the whole centralized infrastructure that was destroying the planet. So people still found a way to use technology and to organize but not underneath the control of these mega corporations, just by building on the open source community that had already existed which was essential because without the kind of communal spirit of the open source community things like the Android operating system back in the day wouldn't have been possible. They were all just built on top of it in a free spirit. I think people really started to realize how detrimental it was when the surveillance was so strong and then when there was uprisings and they saw how heavily militarized and protected the data centers were. Then it clicked for a lot of people. Before that there were warnings and everyone understood it was a problem, but they didn't really know what to do about it. But when it was clear how central it was to oppression, I think it clicked for a lot of people
Max: yeah, my parents tell me about that. Like there were political organizers back in the day before I was born. They used a lot of these technologies they thought it was possible to if you tweak this and that, and if you use this means of communication, instead of that one, 4then you're gonna somehow go under the radar. But then at some point when some of the comrades and friends were arrested and deported, they realized it was impossible to escape surveillance if you operate politically and you use this kind of technology, so when I was born they told me about completely abandoning any kind of technology from the big corporations because they couldn't trust them anymore and they went back to living in this remote community where I was born. I only communicated by like going to talk to the people physically which took lots of time but also was much safer. They didn't want to tell me a lot about this, so I don't know a lot about how they did it, but I just know that there was no phone, no television, nothing of this kind of stuff allowed in the place I grew up in which is also why I think I was so passionate about these sci-fi books because it was so far from everything I knew. But yeah this is really scary to think about the surveillance that was there before.
Jules: On that topic have you guys also heard about any resistance strategies or direct actions that people were taking against data centers back then?
Wally: One of the things that an elder told me was that at that time the effects of the new data centers weren't well publicized or reported on and that they were just being built so quickly but it was kind of going on under people's noses and it wasn't until later when it was having effects on local communities with the intensive water and energy use that then people started to realize but by that point it was already too late to go back.
Jules: I can't imagine living next to one of those.
Wally: Yeah, they completely drained the water reserves of the whole area and people were promised jobs and welfare but the complete opposite happened. You can imagine how many jobs there are in the data center. It was completely automated.
Jules: It's just like these computers, right?
Wally: Yeah, and cooling them drained the whole city's water supply at a time there was already so much water scarcity too. I'm quite young and it's really scary to think that this has all happened. I wonder what might happen in another 20 or 30 years, knowing what humans are capable of. That makes me feel quite scared.
Nune: Yeah, that's why as someone who witnessed the dangers of it, I know that some communities are now using it for the good and I'm really intrigued by that but on the other hand I'm always wondering how we can prevent going back to this, if it's even preventable or people will start using it again for such horrific things.
Jules: Yeah, I guess that also leads to one of the questions that the commune wanted us to address in this meeting which is the question of access and education around AI on the commune. Do we think that everybody should have equal access to AI and should they have any kind of training before they access AI technology?
Ness: I think I see it like any technology, like any tool, it requires training. Should everyone have access to chainsaw? It depends if they know how to use it right. It also requires the 5right use cases. A chainsaw can be used as a weapon of murder but you can also use it to cut trees to have wood. And the same applies to all technologies.
Max: Yeah, and we also should remember that it's a technology for a certain use and that it's not fit to solve everything because this euphoria about thinking it's able to replace any human in any kind of situation is what put us here in the first place. I mean looking back at that time, everyone had access and at the same time no one did. It's a tricky situation. Everyone could use it from their computer but then there was a powerful few who had access to all the data and its full potential. So, I can't really make an argument for or against everyone having access. But maybe if we have the proper teaching around AI and its past history and dangers then maybe this will help people understand how to interact with it in a better way. I think also like any technology of this size is a tradeoff, right? It has positive aspects and can help us calculate some stuff better, interact with animals better, and many other beneficial uses. But it also uses many resources and using it is not something to be decided individually. I think it's a discussion we need to have collectively of calculating precisely what it is going to bring to us vs. what it is going to take from the quality of our natural ecosystems. I put it in a vague sense right now but I really think we should have a very detailed and specific kind of accounting that allows us to see what AI going to bring us versus what it is going to cost us. And I know there's lots of experiments around that very boring table sheets that tells us this kind of stuff but I think it's a work that needs to be done so that we don't pollute or consume too much without realizing we are doing it. We must decide this carefully and democratically.
Jules: I think we have to close the meeting, but before we do, I did have one more question that admittedly was mostly a personal curiosity of mine. Last time we were talking about these large language models and it's just mind blowing to me to think that back in the days before the revolution, people would sit in front of their computers all day and just talk to this AI chat bot. So, I'm curious, if we had access to these chat bots again, what questions would you ask it?
Wally: I would ask it to help me learn because I haven't had access to the same education as my parents, and I think it could be really useful for grammar and the more technical details.
Jules: Yeah, there's so much old language that we don't really use so much anymore that it's really confusing. For me, I think I would ask what role it sees for itself in making our life on the commune better. I want to know what the AI would say about this. Well, thank you, everybody, for participating in this meeting. There are tea and snacks downstairs. We will meet again at the same time next week. Thanks everyone for being here.