I have a lot to share today!
Last night, I saw We Are Guardians, a new documentary that is playing at Angelica Village East in NYC this week. I will be on the panel after their Sunday night screening. Please come if you are in town and tell others about the film, which everyone should see.
I met one of the directors, Chelsea Green, seven years ago at Envision festival in Costa Rica, when she was in her early twenties. She and her co-director, Rob Grobman, spent five years on this project, which covers the efforts of indigenous communities in the Amazon to protect their forests from invasion and logging. They have also created an engagement campaign where you can donate directly to indigenous efforts to protect their lands, for instance by helping them buy drones to keep watch on loggers, ranchers, mining companies and other invaders.
Perhaps the most special thing about the film is its depiction of the loggers, which is compassionate and nonjudgmental. As The Guardian reports:
A central theme in the film is the story of an illegal logger, Valdir Duarte. Grobman says Duarte was found after a two-day journey during one of the expeditions that inspired the film.
“We went on more than eight missions with the guardians to try to find the loggers,” Grobman says. “There would be times when we could hear them close by, and we would just not be able to find them in the dense jungle, or they would run away. It was like finding a needle in a haystack.
“These loggers are often armed and hiding, and we were nervous to approach them. But when we finally found Valdir and his friend and explained what we were doing and why, they were surprisingly like, ‘Yeah, sure, please film,’” he says.
“In a way, it felt like Valdir was waiting for someone to ask him what was going on in his life – because no one had ever done that before,” Grobman says.
What these men are doing is both illegal and incredibly horrible — it is wrenching to watch them cut down 500 year old towering trees — but they are only doing it to make a small pittance for their families to live. Apparently the filmmakers reached out to the corporations — Cargill, etcetera — that are orchestrating such damage to the life-support system of the planet, but nobody from these companies or the venture capital firms supporting them would speak on camera. What a surprise!
Although the subject of the film is grim and sobering, I found it uplifting. Basically, most of the culture and most people seem stuck in in such a dissociative / avoidance mode, to see a skillful, lovingly made film that goes right into the heart of one of the most devastating problems confronting us was satisfying. The film is also not without hope. Lula’s 2022 victory over Bolsonaro has led to a massive upsurge in indigenous protections and land claims. One of the main indigenous protagonists — Puyr Tembé, an activist from the territory of Alto Rio Guamá — repeats a wonderful slogan: “Reforest the mind,” which becomes a leitmotif for the film.
I want to rant about the dire situation in the Amazon in a bit more depth — and how mindlessly insane our corporate oligarchy is in its determined effort to annihilate the possibility that our children can live on Earth to gain a few more years of financial reward. But first, I want to make a last, shameless plug for our Artificial Intelligence seminar, Breaking the AI Barrier, which you can still join. I am overjoyed by the community we have assembled, which has erupted on our WhatsApp chat for the course.
The seminar meets Sundays and Wednesdays for the next three weeks. All sessions are recorded. Here is a “late bird” discount offer but we can also offer more partial or full scholarship options for those who want to join us — just email and let us know what you feel comfortable paying, at info@liminal.news:
I particularly want to see younger people join and, also, people who can code, as well as media producers. I would love to find a way to offer this to recently laid-off programmers from Meta, Microsoft, etcetera, who may be discovering their interests now align more with the working class, generally.
Douglas Rushkoff just posted this, which makes the most important point I want to impress on anyone who might be interested:
He makes the essential point I seek to drive home and, also, actualize: We are in a small window — a bit like the early days of the Internet — where we can use these AI tools to challenge the corporate behemoths of tech and perhaps make their products obsolete. I believe we need to be working on this — full stop. It is a last chance, or last dance.
Generally, I feel people on the Left are not thinking big enough. We need to think on a massive scale — just as Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech oligarchs started with huge, world-changing ideas. Right now, nothing prevents us from building a suite of applications and network tools that can make what is out there obsolete. Plus we can use AI to help build the media assets and marketing to support this tech-insurrection. We must do it now before this window closes.
For instance, I believe many millions of people would quickly migrate from Facebook if there was a network that was easy to use with similar functionality, but gave them sovereign control over their personal data, while also using a blockchain protocol to allow users to vet any piece of content or news by tracking it back to its human source. Such a network needs to be built as a public service, for the common good, which doesn’t mean it can’t generate revenue in different, equitably sound ways.
Such a “pro-social” network could then allow for applications such as a mutual aid / sharing / matching system where people could make requests or offers and find matches without requiring monetary exchange, as with AirBnB or Uber. This is basically the “platform cooperativism” idea that Nathan Schneider explored in his book. AI with vibe-coding could facilitate building and iterating on all of the tools that could help us build a participatory democracy as well as DIY learning platforms that could replace the broken old industrial age education system that the Trump regime is seeking to demolish for other reasons (because a stupid and ignorant population is very easy to manipulate and control), but needs to die in any case.
Okay, now back to my rant about the corporate Capitalist suicide death doom machine that is ravaging the Amazon and killing the planet for a few pathetic years of financial gain before the whole shit show goes down in flames.
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