The other day I read an interview with David Suzuki where he said that the fight against the climate crisis is lost and it's "too late" to address it. He believes we've failed to shift the narrative and remain trapped in existing legal, economic, and political systems, and suggests we should instead "hunker down" and focus on local communities as the units of survival to prepare for future emergencies.

I guess I knew it to some extent – in the sense that I wouldn't have fully believed it if someone from the future had told me that we'd entirely rearrange our societies and achieve rapid transitions towards sustainability within years. But it's still a punch in the gut. I hope, though, that community-oriented prepping and resilience-building is something we do as part of the effort to eventually, even if too late, shift the narrative and dismantle the existing regime, not instead of.

Anyway, this made me think what it would mean to channel the power of the kind of design and tech practice I'm engaged in into building community resilience. Here are a few things I've come across in recent weeks:

Repair Café

It's not a new thing I've discovered, but an ex-industrial designer, Tony Elkington, recently did a nice write-up about his experience volunteering at a Repair Café event. I haven't been able to join recent events at my local Repair Café, but volunteering there is always fulfilling and insightful, and that's the closest thing I've done along the lines of community resilience building.

Critical Signals

This three-month-long event in Aotearoa/New Zealand looks super relevant:

Critical Signals invites you into a three-month public space for learning, imagining, and practising how sovereignty, resilience and collective care will shape our futures in times of rapid change.

The programme includes a 'Mapping local assets for disaster' workshop, a 'Server gardening' seminar, 'Permacomputing 101', and many more.

FOSS and Code4 Communities

I recently met Eirol Fox at a symposium organised by UAL CCI, and what a pleasure it was. On top of being a super facilitator of zine-making workshops (!), Eirol works as a designer in FOSS (free and open-source software) and creates software that contributes to human rights. I joined Code4Japan's Slack through their introduction and am now exploring how I might be able to contribute to them.

Slow AI / Small AI

Slow AI is a research project by the folks at AI x Design.

Slow AI seeks to subvert corporate-first thinking by collectively exploring how the values of mindfulness, care, and community can be applied to AI development and deployment. Just as slow fashion and slow food prioritize quality, locality, and sustainability over mass-produced, generic, over-engineered products, Slow AI brings these same values into the evolving technological landscape.

Out of the three alternative AI imaginaries explored in this research, the Small AI concept particularly feels relevant here, with a DIY locally-run AI model project for a censored community.

I guess there's also a bunch of relevant design work in the More Than Human exhibition at the Design Museum. The day I was planning to go there was that heatwave day in London, so I stayed home instead and read a book. I'll go there soon.

--

Japan held an upper house election, and the biggest news was that Sanseito, a far-right party with the "Japanese First" agenda, gained seats from just one seat up to fourteen. It's worrying that so many people are in a situation where they find the rhetoric that Sanseito use, many borrowed from Trump, Reform UK, AfD etc, to be the best sounding one itself. A hope is that I now see some folks trying to challenge Japan's long-standing culture where you avoid talking about politics, by holding casual political dialogues in different spaces. One of them is my partner who recently started a podcast in Japanese that aims to just do that.

Last week when I was playing around with Gemini Live as part of work at DeepMind, it somehow picked up my family's conversation in Japanese in the background and it started speaking in it. Gemini's Japanese is not as natural sounding as its English - in fact, it's eerily similar to how people learning to speak Japanese sound. With exclusionary policies by the likes of Sanseito being talked about in Japanese news during the election period, Gemini suddenly felt like a foreigner. An obedient immigrant assistant. This thought disgusted me. It's nothing but a Japanese racism that labels someone foreign when they don't speak perfect Japanese. It's so deeply rooted in me - to an extent that it undermines my own identity as an immigrant living in the UK. The process of unlearning continues, I suppose.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading.