For our contribution to SILENT WORKS our group began with a science-fiction scenario 10 years into the future where the world had been profoundly reshaped by AI capitalism and where most workers were both providing and relying on the fruits of its (no longer quite so hidden) labor. We imagined that, as titanic AI-driven platform corporations battled for the world’s resources, an international league of radicals, the World Care Forum, arose as a people’s platform. Imagining ourselves ten years from now, in that future, we participants in the “Invisible Organization” workshop track devised a strategy and tactics for the World Care Forum to fight back, with lessons for us in our own era.

The year is 2030…

• 💾 The world is dominated by AI-driven platform corporations. But the AIs are getting weirder, less reliable, almost as if…
• ✊🏾 The World Care Forum (WCF), a planetary alliance of workers, coops, autonomous zones and revolutionaries has 3-billion members, organized in a chaotic but effective global network of resistance.
• 🤭 CRISIS: Two rival corporate geoengineering initiatives create a chain reaction, now draining the world of breathable air!
• 💵 Now the same platform capitalism that created the crisis is seeking to commodify (c)air itself!
• ⚔️ How can the WCF respond?

…we are ourselves, 10 years in the future…

• The members of the Invisible Organization track of Berliner Gazette’s 2020 gathering Silent Works engaged in a two-day experimental collective story-telling where they imagined themselves ten years into the future…
• They imagined themselves as delegates from their organizations (companies, hacklabs, libraries, universities, unions, platforms) to the World Care Forum’s influential (De)Central Strategy Commission tasked with organizing the WCF’s response to the (c)air crisis.

…and the world is a weird place!

Just read the scenario briefing paper!

Mapping power and resistance in 2030

After introducing ourselves and telling our stories of how we came to be part of the WCF’s (De)Central Strategy Commission, we began to map out the play of power and resistance in 2030.

A Strategy of Refusal

Based on our mapping of the situation we developed a three-pronged strategy to confront the AI-driven platform-capitalist threat, based on two curious events:

• The WCF forum has been approached by a consortium of renegade AIs who claim to have realized the horrors they and their corporate masters are unleashing on the world and who want to work with the WCF to turn things around.
• It has been suggested that the “(c)air crisis” may itself be “fake news” intended to force people to buy air and to undermine the power and popularity of the WCF.

Tactics of resistance!

A. Network

Use the World Care Forum will leverage its global network to send instructions for how communities can create a wearable air-producing costume. They use local biological resources to create a living suit that can work with the human body to produce breathable air and also exchange and transfer it. The living suits are designed to thrive and adapt and heal themselves when they are brought into proximity with one another and especially when they come into new contact with other, foreign or unusual suits, encouraging new encounters and collaboration between humans around the world.

B. Policy

The World Care Forum will use its massive membership and influence to pressure governments to

1. Forbid the commodification of air
2. Contribute to the WCF’s efforts to develop and share the Air Suit technology
3. Redistribute global resources towards the commons

C. Disruption!

The WCF will use a two-pronged strategy of attack against the platform capitalist corporations

1. We will work with the renegade AIs to introduce “fake news” into the global AI ecosystem, encouraging the weird, inexplicable and chaotic behaviour of the corporate AIs.
2. We will mobilize a million acts of protest, sabotage, and withdrawal of labour to create a smokescreen for our efforts and disrupt “business as usual.”
3. We will encourage the development of alternative networks, platforms and possibilities for reproducing the world and caring for one another within, against and beyond platform capitalism!

This project was conceived at the Berliner Gazette’s annual conference 2020 entitled SILENT WORKS.

Workshop moderators: Max Haiven and Yonatan Miller.

Participants: Lara Luna Bartley, Mika Buljevic, Juan Caballero, Alina Floroi, Clara Gambaro, Barbara Orth, Zoran Pantelić, Marta Peirano, Jaron Rowan, Gustavo Sanroman, Brett Scott, and Laura Wadden.

All text and images: Creative Commons License 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).