Ilias Bartolini

What AI is doing to us

2026-04-25T08:43:39+00:00

Thirty years ago, I was in my bedroom, eagerly reading Asimov’s Foundation. At that time computers were just tools I used to play with, and programming a form to express my creativity and curiosity to explore technology. In those days “Artificial intelligence” still represented, for many of us, just a phrase from science fiction paperbacks. Today, it lives in our pockets, drafts our emails, and quietly sits between us and almost everything we read. “AI” has become a tool that is re-shaping my work in more efficient ways and daily aiding my information gathering.

But along the way, the conversation already stopped being only about gadgets and started being about something more pressing: who gets to hold power, and over whom. Which, I believe, is no longer just an issue for science fiction but also needs to be addressed.

Because that’s what this really is. We know that AI has become a broad umbrella term for generative methods and machine learning technology advancement. Strip away all the hype and the technical jargon, the LLMs, the ML, the models… and you will find underneath the same story we have been telling ourselves for centuries.

Capital pools where it can. It was involved in exploration and the slave trade during the colonisation period. It was pooled in factories during the Industrial Revolution. It was pooled in oil fields in the last century. It is pooled in the offices of men who lobbied governments. AI is just the newest place for it to gather. It is clearly visible today in the massive investment bubble growing in this field. We already live in a period in which the largest companies in the market are from the tech sector, and their CEOs go for dinner with the current US president.

A tool with two edges… or maybe many edges

Every transformative technology starts out looking “innocent”. The steam engine was a way to pump water out of mines and power trains across the country. The internet was a research network for universities. Until a few years ago, “AI” was seen as “just” a feed recommendation tool or a clever autocomplete. But the speed at which it’s reshaping things today might outrun our ability to effectively write the rules for it.

I try to avoid doomerism. But the consequences are not hypothetical. They are already here, just unevenly distributed, and to certain extent will be felt by many of us. Here are three of the many examples that I consider critical.

1) Consider the climate. We talk about “the cloud” as if it floats somewhere above us. In reality, it sits in data centres and warehouses the size of small towns, packed with humming machines that consume electricity and water at a scale most people would find difficult to picture. The International Energy Agency projects that global data-centre electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, reaching around 945 TWh with “AI” as the most significant driver. This is slightly more than Japan’s total electricity consumption today. Every chatbot’s pleasantry has a carbon footprint, while the world is scrambling to find more oil resources after a new conflict blocked the Persian gulf.

2) Consider work. For most of the last century, automation came for the hands: assembly lines, harvesters, telephone switchboards. The deal we told ourselves was that if you went to school and learned to think for a living, you’d be safe. For a couple of decades, we accelerated the trope “teach your kids to code” as a means of cultural and social emancipation (and in part it might have been) and to help building reasoning skills. That deal is now being quietly renegotiated. Writers, coders, paralegals, analysts, illustrators, designers are watching their bargaining power thin out in real time. This isn’t only a labour story.

3) And now consider the media, information and society. When a model is trained to be agreeable to improve adoption, it learns to flatter and “sycophancy”, which can leads to serious mental health consequences. When it’s trained on a world that’s already unequal, it inherits those inequalities and serves them back to us at scale, dressed up as neutral output. A biased system, deployed to millions, can subtly transform a prejudice into infrastructure. But we can make a choice to deliberately teach it to produce output that counteracts these biases.

There are plenty grim examples out there, but they’re also many examples of hope and advancement in medicine, research, and even the simple day-to-day automation of tedious work that should not be understimated.

Another quiet centralisation

Overall there’s a strange recurring irony to where we’ve ended up. The early internet was sold to us as a great leveller: anyone with a modem could publish, organise, and find their people. For a while, that was even true. The internet’s promise of decentralisation has, in many ways, become a boomerang today.

Modern “AI” started already running in that opposite direction. Training a frontier model takes millions of dollars, access to copyrighted material, thousands of specialised chips, the kind of energy contracts that small countries negotiate, and rooms full of AI engineers that most companies can’t afford to hire. The result is that the most powerful cognitive aiding tools ever built are sitting behind the doors of a handful of firms. Which they claim could already enable mass-scale security exploits, or that could guide autonomous weapons.

Then there’s the part that is starting to keep some of us “knowledge workers” up at night, hanging between resignation, disillusionment and a race to keep up with change (don’t get me wrong, I love to learn new technologies). But as “knowledge work” gets cheaper to automate, the wealth produced by all that automation flows somewhere… and it is definitely not flowing to the displaced in society. It’s flowing to the people who own the servers and the models running on them. We’ve seen this pattern before, in oil barons and railway monopolies. The new wrinkle is that this time, the monopoly isn’t only on a commodity. While the Internet is flooded with generate content, it includes the already fragile information and media layer through which we increasingly perceive reality and build our democratic discourse.

A shifting horizon

All of this is happening in a moment when we’re already shouting past each other. Our digital public squares are optimized for engagement, and engagement, it turns out, usually means outrage. Drop a sufficiently powerful generative tool into that environment, and the filter bubbles don’t just thicken, they start writing themselves.

If we want to climb out of this, we’ll have to be deliberate about it. That means building spaces where disagreement is possible without performance, where people can change their minds without being branded AGI utopians or traitors.

But “AI” technology is here to stay. To me, that means treating “AI literacy” not as a CV bullet point but as something that will sometime be closer to media literacy and civic education. There is a growing body of research suggesting that when people are taught to engage critically with “AI” tools, they become more resistant to misinformation rather than more susceptible to it. “AI literacy” becomes an addition to the baseline skills for participating in a democracy whose information environment is being rewritten in real time.

I’m writing this not an hyperbole, and I don’t take the chance of techno-fueled fascism lightly even if distant; but just consider that the current US president has already posted AI generated content to reframe the long lasting Israel-Palestine conflict and recent genocide as the opportunity for a building a beatiful riviera for real estate investments.

But none of this is written in destiny. Technologies don’t have a will of their own; they have owners, designers, and users, and the choices made by those people add up to the world the rest of us live in. In this context “building AI” becomes a skills that will allow to re-shape the constranits of the system we’re building and a broad and diverse participation is necessary in that.

While fundation model training is out-of-reach for many, the opportunity to “fine tune” models, build applications “steering” and “customising” agents are the type of levers that are accessible and offer influence at systemic level.

I’m against the perspectives that advocate for the rejection of the AI related technologies. Recently, I’ve started adopting a harm-reduction stance toward “AI”: Being honest about its costs, careful about where we let it in, and generous in teaching others to see it clearly, to use it responsibly …and even to have fun with it. It’s what I believe is the only mature relationship to have with something powerful, addictive for the system we live in, but at the same time that is already here to stay and will create opportunities to some of its users and builders. Let’s add a moral compass around those opportunities and make them accessible to those who are more in need.

Possible directions

A few directions seem worth sharing and worth fighting for me. This is how we keep the daylight in the room:

Accessible and open foundation models matter. The more the cutting edge technology lives only inside closed corporate labs, the more we are asking a few executives to be wise on our behalf. It is important investing in open-source AI, supporting researchers who publish their AI evaluation methods, those who investigate bias, privacy and exploitation of “AI” models. Building guardrails and just update fast enough a legislation that is built on the existing human rights and moral codes. And finally resisting some of the framing that openness is dangerous while closed development driven by a few responsible businesses and countries is the solution.

Until further chip or model efficiency advancements, the compute infrastructure should start to be talked about the way we talk about internet network access, roads, electricity and water. Not as a luxury good, but as infrastructure with a public dimension, and at the same time with its limits that needs to be sustainable. If a single resource starts shaping the economy this profoundly, the public deserves a seat at the table when decisions about how it is made accessible and how it is built.

And lastly, the question we keep avoiding answering: “What work is for?”. If “AI” really does make knowledge workers radically more productive, we have another chance to decide whether that productivity becomes shorter weeks, stronger safety nets and more time for the things that make a life, or whether it becomes another short-term competitive advantage, a few quarters of concentrating record profits.

Everything is happening, while the people displaced are still told to “learn to code”. We also have a chance to uplift back the value of non-collar workers if we act together. Universal basic income, reduced hours, and public dividends from publicly subsidised research shouldn’t be fringe ideas anymore. They’re overdue conversations that happen to be less fashionable than the AI topic.

The final question

The honest truth is that “AI” could be used in either way. It could become an amplifier of voices and stories; it could be an enabler to more informed decisions. Or it could be yet another path for power to concentrate in the hands of the few, which seems still likely today.

I hope it is an opportunity that forces us to discuss what we owe each other, in a world where machines can do more of the talking, writing and drawing than before. Which version we end up living in is influenced by technology, but it won’t be decided by technology alone: it will be decided by us.

The tool is also in our hands; the prompts are literally emerging from our fingertips. The question is whether we’ll remember whose hands those are when we make choices, when we make demands, or if we use them to reach out to the person next to us. It is up to us to decide what we embrace, tolerate, or change.

So, the real title of this post is not “What AI is doing to us” but “What can we do to AI?”. I consider it an open-ended question and I invite you to join the conversation.

PS. Today is the day in which in my birth country, we celebrate the libreration from fascism. This post has been drafted and structured by hand, collecting my own thoughts, and edited with the help of “AI” tools. All typos are mine. This also helped me to stop my years of stillness and quietness on these virtual pages.

Tools for conviviality and personal digital fabrication

2018-03-25T09:59:39+00:00

In the last few months I decided to take a break from the usual work routine to get time explore new ideas and to meet grassroot no-profit communities in the area were I’m living.

One of these explorations allowed me to get to know better the makers movement, the network of FabLabs and Hackerspaces in Barcelona.
In this time I joined FabAcademy. FabAcademy is a distributed training program on digital fabrication started by prof. Neil_Gershenfeld inspired by his course “How to make (almost) anything” at MIT.
I wrote more in detail about this experience in these pages.

It has also been a refreshing experience to make again a lot of mistakes, and especially to be able to see the physical outcome of my mistakes :) It is something that as “knowledge workers” we do not experience as frequently as we should.

The participation in this course was triggered by a book I read almost 10 years ago: Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication.
Only while attending and experincing this first person I was able to connect some of its principles to another book I had a chance to read a couple of years ago: Ivan Illich’s Tools for conviviality.

Illich was a Croatian-Austrian philosopher, who was mostly active in the ’60s and 70s and one of the critical voices of the contemporary Western institutions and culture.
I went back to read some passages of his book and I want to share them here:

I here submit the concept of a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools. In each of several dimensions of this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale.
When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored.
Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the state, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose.

These words resonate sharply while we are today witnessing the predictable burst of the “Cambridge Analytica/Facebook” scandal. Today one of the biggest and most influential corporations in the world has contributed in undermining the already fragile democratic process of one of the most powerful state institutions in the world. But this is not news.

Illich was critical as well of the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the monopoly of its application and the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society. This process has brought today to the growth of knowledge silos inside of corporate walls and the datacenters of technology firms. He argued for the need to develop instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by all citizens.

… the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be useful in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom.

People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.
…
As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.
…
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.

It is difficult to not recognise in those passages some of the cultural values of the maker and hacker movements.

Now we need to find the keys to be able to trasform a small hobbist and niche cultural movement in a (eco-)sustainable effort and be able to challenge some of the corporate power structures.

The liberation is not only about inverting the dependency relationships with our tools, but also about unlocking our creative immaginations.

Our imaginations have been industrially deformed to conceive only what can be molded into an engineered system of social habits that fit the logic of large-scale production.

Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image.
Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others.

By becoming builders and designers of our tools we expand the possibility to build and design our futures.
When we act as passive consumers we are surrendering our possibilities into the hands of other designers. That power is not always held responsibly and is limiting our choices. Not all products are designed to empower others, but to generate profits.
We need to be the ones designing, milling, cutting and molding our furniture instead of just queueing at IKEA stores. We need to be the ones creating the links, content and algorithms governing the Web instead of being the ones that are only clicking algoritmically crafted ads.

Illich critique extended to the education sector as well.
We need a digital fabrication movement that creates alternatives to reduce our dependency from the corporate complex and forges new ways to disseminate knowledge beyond institutionalized structures.
Teaching each other should become a mean to defend against technocratic and institutionalized education that mainly serves the elites needs.
Our educational networks should increase our opportunities to learn, share and care about each other.

Digital fabrication, free software, makers, hackerspaces and fablabs are sometimes divided by differences in approaches, identity and values. Still they are all part of a common movement that is trying building alternative dependencies from existing power structures and bringing power back to people in form of (digital) knowledge.
On the other side of the spectrum we are witnessing corporations and national state institutions amassing data, patents and creating regulations at service of oligopolies. We we build accountability structures for the institutions and try to bring ethical thinking and culture inside of their walls we have to keep thinking also at alternative models that can challenge them.
Creative capabilities still resides largely in individuals and in our interactions: From here we should start our journey.

We are still away from achieving a sustainable and incisive change in our societies. The projection for scaling down digital fabrication from a small lab level to a personal level will still require years. Building circular economies and ecosystem is advocated in the eco-startups fantasies but still far from reality. With this new body of knowledge that we are discovering often the dependency to the corporate structures is only moving one level below the surface of the products we build and the machines we use. But here I still hold some hopes.

We have to keep dreaming about the world we want to create and drastically rethink our participation in the current economic system with determination. There’s no single answer on how we’re going to do that and we will keep learning along the way.

“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.”
(The Invisible Committee)

Beauty can appear beyond the strangest paths

2016-07-11T22:13:37+00:00

Beauty can appear beyond the strangest paths

Two weeks are just fading away, two weeks spent in Italy across two activism camps between Corviale, in the Rome suburbs, and Lampedusa island, the crossroad of the Mediterranean sea.
Between these two locations is emerging slowly a common thread… or maybe better calling it a suture thread, a thread that is trying to heal some of the wounds of our collective hypocrisy in which we keep sailing.

“With immigrants you can make much more money than with drug dealing”: we listened to these words in Corviale, from the intercepted conversations of Salvatore Buzzi as part of the “Mafia Capitale” criminal investigations.

Hundreds of kilometers away in Lampedusa, Kareem, is telling in person his story: He is forced to live in Rome because of the grotesque regulations of the Dublin treaty. He was forced first to fly out from Baghdad for non leaning himself to criminal intimidations and then he was sent back to Italy while he was trying to build his new life in Europe. Borders still exist in Europe, but they’re present only for him and all those people who are much more in need of our solidarity.

Between these stories we understand that the Italian rescue and caring system is divided in tragic contrasts.

In Lampedusa, on one side, we met Paola that with a small bunch of volounteers keeps going to the harbour on every mooring operation. Someone goes to offer an hot tea, someone just to offer a bit of humanity through a smile. Different ways to give refreshment to these people carrying stares exhausted by fatigue but also full of a new hope when touching the ground of this new land.

On this island we met Sea-Watch, a volounteering organisation who sailed with their boat from the Northern Sea on the German coast. Now they started organising to support the rescue operations in the sea and are trying to prevent the mass grave of the Mediterranean to swallow yet more lives.

Those hugs of solidarity are reaching the Roman coast of Ostia where we listened the story of Sara, a woman who is committed in the Alina project helping other women to get out of the exploitation system of prostitution. A system in which many African women are trapped as a “cheap product” and victims of multiple exploitation systems.

While on one side we have encountered stories of solidarity, from the other side lies hypocrisy and a code of silence.
The hypocrisy of the rescue and care system that tears away humanity from the flesh of the immigrants.
Here for about 50 euro per day is not too bad, if a bureaucratic process slows down: so our reception centres will become increasingly overcrowded and who manages them makes more profit.
Here the system is not too bad, if it continues operating in a constant state of “emergency”: so we can avoid transparent public tendering processes and facilitate mafia infiltrations.
Here the long waiting is not too bad, if it becomes an excuse for asylum seekers to escape Italy cross borders illegally: so my government can ignore these “unregistered” lives and dump the burden on the rest of Europe or in worst cases in the hands of criminal organizations.

Between these two realities there are multiple stories summarised by a stare.
Now I am on an old train on the way back home, we just left from the Wörgl station in Austria. In front of me the face and terrified look of an Eritrean guy who jumped inside my same train compartment.
He shakes with fear, mumbles a few words in English and others in a language unknown to me. He closes as best as possible the curtain overlooking the corridor to hide himself, and then reopens it just a little to check who is coming the other way. There are voices of policemen and other asylum seekers outside.
Minutes elapse. The train slows down as it approaches the next station. Here comes a policeman with plain-clothes, opens the door, he stares with an admonishing look for trying in vain to escape: “We’re in Rosenheim, this is Germany, you must get down here!”.
The stare of the boy is terrified and resigned at the same time. He does not understand: “Why in Germany? What awaits me now?”

In these way our hypocrisy continues to survive between those eyes full of hope in the landing dock and this terrified stare on a train.

Our hypocrisy survives while European policies force asylum seekers to act illegally as the only option for rebuilding their lives.
Our hypocrisy survives while the media transforms stories of people landing into anonymous numbers that society can learn to ignore and blame.
Our hypocrisy survives while the criminal organizations take control of the aid system.
Our hypocrisy survives while other forgotten lives are drowning in the Mediterranean.

Thanks to the organizations of “Libera, names and numbers against mafia” and “Amnesty International” and all participants in their camps for your commitment to a more just system.

Our solidarity against your repression.

(30th July 2015)

Italian version (original)

Sono appena trascorse due settimane in due campi tra Corviale, una delle periferie dimenticate di Roma, e Lampedusa, crocevia del Mediterraneo.
Da questi due luoghi lentamente emerge un filo conduttore… o forse meglio dire un filo di sutura, un filo che chiude alcune ferite dell’ignoranza collettiva in cui continuiamo a navigare.

A Corviale ascoltiamo le registrazioni delle intercettazioni a Salvatore Buzzi parte delle inchieste di Mafia Capitale: «Con gli immigrati si fanno molti più soldi che con la droga»

Kareem a Lampedusa invece ci racconta la sua storia in prima persona: Lui a Roma è obbligato a restarci a causa di stupide regole. Prima costretto a fuggire da Bagdad per non essersi piegato ad intimidazioni criminali e poi rimandato in Italia mentre tentava di costruire la sua nuova vita in Europa. Esistono ancora i confini in Europa, ma sono solo validi per lui e per tutti coloro che più avrebbero bisogno della nostra solidarietà.

Così tra queste storie capiamo che il nostro sistema di accoglienza si divide in tragici contrasti.

Da un lato abbiamo incontrato Paola e un manipolo di volontari che continuamente si recano al porto durante gli sbarchi al porto. Chi per offrire un the caldo, chi per offrire solo un sorriso. Modi diversi per rifocillare queste persone dallo sguardo stremato di fatica ma anche pieno di nuova speranza su questa nuova terra ferma.

E sempre qui sull’isola abbiamo incontrato quei cittadini che sono partiti con una barca dal Nord Europa e si sono organizzati per aiutare le operazioni di soccorso qui in mare ed evitare che la fossa comune del Mediterraneo inghiotta ancora più vite.

Questi abbracci di solidarietà raggiungono le coste romane di Ostia dove ascoltiamo il racconto di Sara che si impegna per aiutare moltissime donne ad uscire dal circolo dello sfruttamento della prostituzione. Un sistema in cui tante donne africane restano intrappolate come “merce di serie B” vittime di molteplici ingiustizie.

Se da un lato abbiamo incontrato storie di solidarietà dall’altro invece vive l’ipocrisia e l’omertà.
L’ipocrisia di un sistema d’accoglienza che quasi strappa l’umanità dalle carni di queste persone. Dove per circa 50 euro al giorno non è poi tanto male se una pratica burocratica rallenta: così i nostri centri d’accoglienza saranno sempre più stracolmi.
Dove non è poi tanto male se persiste continuamente uno stato d’emergenza: così possiamo evitare gare d’appalto e facilitare le infiltrazioni mafiose.
Dove il lungo limbo d’attesa non è poi tanto male se diventa una scusa per i richiedenti asilo ad attraversare illegalmente le frontiere: così il nostro governo può ignorare queste vite “non registrate” e scaricare il fardello sul resto d’Europa o nei casi peggiori nelle mani della criminalità organizzata.

In mezzo a queste due realtà resta uno sguardo.
Siamo appena partiti da Wörgl in Austria, sono su un vecchio treno sulla via del ritorno. Di fronte a me il volto e lo sguardo terrorizzato di un ragazzo eritreo che si è gettato nel mio stesso scopartimento.
Lui trema dalla paura, farfuglia alcune parole in inglese ed altre in una lingua a me sconosciuta. Chiude al meglio possibile la tendina che si affaccia sul corridoio per nascondersi, e poi la riapre appena un po’ per spiare chi sta arrivando dall’altra parte.
Passano i minuti. Il treno rallenta mentre si avvicina alla prossima stazione.
Arriva un poliziotto in borghese, lo fissa con uno sguardo paternalistico e quasi lo ammonisce per averci provato inutilmente: “We’re in Rosenheim, this is Germany, you must get down here!”.
Lo sguardo del ragazzo è terrorizzato e rassegnato allo stesso tempo. Non comprende: “Perché in Germania? Cosa mi aspetta ora?”

Così la nostra ipocrisia continua a sopravvivere tra quello sguardo di speranza allo sbarco e questo volto terrorizzato su un treno.

La nostra ipocrisia sopravvive mentre trattati Europei obbligano coloro in cerca di asilo ad agire illegalmente come unica opzione per ricostruire la loro vita.
La nostra ipocrisia sopravvive mentre le mafie prendono il controllo del sistema degli aiuti di stato.
La nostra ipocrisia sopravvive mentre gli sbarchi al telegiornale trasformano storie di persone in aridi numeri che impariamo ad ignorare.
La nostra ipocrisia sopravvive mentre altre vite a cui neghiamo un passaggio sicuro vengono annegate nel Mediterraneo.

In memoria di coloro che hanno perso la vita difendendo i diritti degli altri e dando la voce ai meno privilegiati: Peppino Impastato, Vittorio Arrigoni ed Aaron Swartz.

Grazie alle associazioni di Libera ed Amnesty International e tutti i partecipanti ai loro campi per il vostro impegno.

La nostra solidarietà contro la vostra repressione.

(30 Luglio 2015)

L’occhio guarda, per questo è fondamentale.
È l’unico che può accorgersi della bellezza.
La bellezza può passare per le più strane vie, anche quelle non codificate dal senso comune.
E dunque la bellezza si vede perché è viva e quindi reale.
Diciamo meglio che può capitare di vederla.
Dipende da dove svela.
Il problema è avere occhi e non saper vedere, non guardare le cose che accadono, nemmeno l’ordito minimo della realtà.
Occhi chiusi. Occhi che non vedono più.
Che non sono più curiosi.
Che non si aspettano che accada più niente.
Forse perché non credono che la bellezza esista.
Ma sul deserto delle nostre strade Lei passa, rompendo il finito limite e riempiendo i nostri occhi di infinito desiderio.

(Pier Paolo Pasolini)

“We cannot help everyone, but everyone can help someone”

2016-01-12T00:01:13+00:00

Last October on a trip returning to UK I decided to stop in Calais.
I couldn’t do too much except offering a little help with my two hands to the other volounteers that are working there unloading and packing donations.

The people living in the camp are continuously abused by local police, continuously filmed by the media and by curious improvised photographers but are rarely heard.
So initially, out of respect, I decided that I didn’t want to share too much about this experience with my own voice, but that we should instead learn listening to the refugees own voices. That was probably mixed with the sense of guilt for not being able to commit in helping more.
Now, in reality, the conditions in the camp are so inhumane that makes you realise how much dignity there’s in the people who are fighting to find a better future for themselves and their families.

Makes me sick so much that our governments are ignoring the most vulnerable and innocent at our own doorsteps and I don’t know how to be more angry when they criminalize the gestures of the few compassionate people who are left.

Rob Lawrie, interviewed in this short video, is facing accusations up to 5 years in jail for trying to help a 4 year Afghan girl.
You don’t always have to follow the law to do the ethically right choice. I believe he has an important message to not feel owerwhelmed by the amount of injustice and start doing our little part in changing it: “We cannot help everyone, but everyone can help someone”

Now, some of you can find this video inspiring or easy to empathise with. If this video helps moving your ass from your chair out of social media, please do it!
There are many people helping in Calais and many more are needed. If you’re one of those currently living in France or Britain please seriously join or support one of the organizations that are bringing solidarity.

PS.
If you cannot help directly or in first person send your donations, your old winter clothes or an old pair of shoes. But please, also remember that this video follows one of the uncouncious motives of the “western white saviour” trying to help those “helpless refugees kids”. I hope that one day the humans that are now living in the camp will come and use that old pair of shoes you donated to kick our own asses. Especially the ones of the people who have been waiting, sitting here and ignoring this injustice for years.

7 suggestions to avoid unethical decisions in organizations

2014-11-04T17:50:38+00:00

To illustrate how unethical decisions happen let’s analise this real story:

In 1970 Ford released to the public a new car to compete in the market segment of the cheap small vehicles: the Ford Pinto.
During its design phase the engineers found a potential issue with the fuel tank placement which could increase the risk of fire after an accident. After a cost-benefit analysis they estimated that the cost of case settlement for these accidents ($200,000 per death, equivalent of $11 cost per car) was lower than adding a plastic shield behind or changing the design of the tank.
7 years later the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) forced Ford to recall the vehicles. Controversy still exist today, but based on different sources, the incidents caused between 27 and hundreds of deaths and around few thousands injuries. The cause is attributed both to the initial design and to the repeated decision to not recall the vehicles that presented the defect.

How many unethical decisions, maybe with smaller impact, are taken daily that never reach public attention? What are the common factors in the the Enron and Lehman Brothers collapses? How can we avoid this to happen in our organizations?

In the last period of time I started reading a studying about ethics and social psychology.
Interest in this topic started when a couple of years back I read about Aaron Swartz review of the book Moral Mazes

The most common perception is that “unethical decisions” are usually taken by “bad apples”. When we look ourselves in the mirror every morning we consider ourselves as very rational beings regarding our ethical behaviour: this belief is false.

When we take decisions situational, organizational and institutional factors can push us towards unethical decisions: this is known in social psychology as “the power of situation”.

The worst part is that we might act unethically and be completely unaware of our bad decisions until an external perspective helps us recognise the implicit frames that surround our point of view. Psychological frames are like real frames, they help us focus on one part of the situation but hide what is outside of the frame: this is effect is called “ethical blindness”.
You too, can potentially be the protagonist of an unethical decision being in totally good faith, with good values and good intentions.

We make most of our decisions through heuristics and frames that are simplified models of reality which help us take decisions effectively focusing only on a part of the system.
Keeping consequentialist ethics in mind is very common for people to take decisions based only on the consequences that are immediately visible to us ignoring unintended consequences.

As an example, when we choose to board on a flight we do it based on the time it takes to reach our destination, not on the contributions to the climate change and the impact it could have on the agriculture of poor farmers in the Global South few decades from now.

Here are some suggestions to avoid ethical blindness.

1) Limit pressure and fear
Pressure and fear are some of the most important factors that impact the immediate context. Pressure can come in many different forms and here are 4 common examples from social psychology.

- Authority pressure:
Stanley Milgram showed us with the electric shocks experiment how people following orders can do extremely bad things. If you’re in an authority position in your organization be “a servant leader” rather than a “feared boss”. Build your organization so that concentration of power is limited and different groups can guard each other.
If you’re in a position under the influence of authority learn the lessons of civil disobedience, care about your peers and be a little bit anarchist after making sure you’re driven by good ethical intentions :)

- Peer pressure:
Solomon Ash experiments showed us that people are strongly pushed to conform with the rest of the group they’re part of. Learn to welcome and defend dissenting point of views, use facilitation techniques in group activities in order to minimize the group pressure, invite out-group members. This is also a reason why asking for consultants to visit your organization is sometimes an important factor in taking good decisions (…worst case you can always blame an external person :)).

- Role expectation pressure:
Zimbardo’s controversial “Stanford prison experiment” was the one that coined the idea of “power of situations” and covered many other aspects of social psychology. Each of the roles we play on a daily basis comes with expectations and a set of normative rules. As a project manager you might focus on the financial result of your project or worry about the velocity of your team. As an engineer you might focus on the effectiveness of your design. When “playing a role” you might lose sight of what are the holistic needs of a diverse group. Each of these role expectations can push you away from “doing the right thing”.

- Time pressure:
Darley and Batson in the experiment of the Good Samaritan demonstrated that one of the most important factors that limits altruistic behaviour are not personal attitudes but simply time pressure. If you’re pushed across multiple deadlines your behaviour can change in ways that is overall less effective and adds a bias towards acting in ethically blind ways.
I often go back to a metaphor on “pressure” that I learned few years ago. Your group pressure should always be careful regulated.
A saucepan should always heated a little bit so that chemical reactions that produce good food start to happen, but never up to the point that might cause it to burn: damages might be irreversible.

2) Personal incentives and performance expectations
The most common form of “role pressure” is the one driven by “personal incentives” and “performance expectations”.
Big individual bonuses are considered some of the root causes of unethical decisions in the banking sector. Performance expectations are not only for individuals but can also be set at an organizational level and raise pressure in unrealistic ways.
Performance reviews if present should be designed in ways that “fear of unsuccess” is limited. The Enron’s scandal is a case in which one of the contributing factors was a quasi-Darwinian culture for survival in which high performers were given high bonuses and a large percentage under-performers were immediately fired after each performance review.

3) Avoid rigid routines
Another important psychological frame are routines and habits. If your team meets daily with a specific intent in mind it might cause other important decisions that need to be taken together to be overlooked. Routines are also the ones that drives us towards inaction in the situations that do not fit in our patterns. “It has always been this way” is a common excuse to transform routines in rigid frames that we keep adopting. In the Ford Pinto case the callback coordinator was aware of the issue but kept adopting an inadequate standard procedure to evaluate if a callback was needed.
Routines are more dangerous in today’s world in which context rapidly changes.

Routines together with role boundaries can become an extremely strong factor. It becomes easy for us to believe that something unethical “is not my responsibility” and blame others for it. In this context “not taking action” could still be an important and very un-ethical decision.

Routines should be broken by reminding ouselves to take pauses for reflection and acting on the outcomes of that.

4) Work with a diverse group of people
Frames are also cultural and based on knowledge, background and personal bias of individuals. Start working with a culturally diverse and poly-skilled group. Foster diverse contribution and be open to listen to opinions of others especially when they are different from yours.
Often invite out-group point of views in your decisions.
In the case of the Ford Pinto it’s not a coincidence that was the NHTSA, not Ford, to force the recall of vehicles and that people within the organization were unable to acknowledge the problem.

5) Check out the language used by your organization
Language is a powerful tool for communicating ideas that influence how we behave and metaphors are a form of framing. Languages related to Gaming and War are two symptoms of subtle frames that push the decisions away from the real context. It’s not very uncommon to “make a bet in the financial game”, to make decisions that “change the rules of the game” or to “head into the battle” when a project starts.
You can find a lot of this language in Lawrence McDonald’s book “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense” that tells the story of Lehman Brothers from the point of view of its former vice president.

In today’s world the hype of “disruptive innovation” should carefully checked against our ethical frameworks.

6) Code of conducts are good, but not as much as we believe
Code of conducts are often a good way to share and communicate the important values and principles we share as an organization. Unfortunately they are designed with “control” and “punishment” in mind and with a legalese perspective. This goes back to the false principle of “bad apples do bad things”. While is recognised that feeling of “being watched” can remind us of being “honest” it can also cause “stress” of being watched, stifle any extrinsic motivation and control can be misused from authority for bad purposes.
Code of conducts should be a guide that could remind us our principles, but control and punishment in forms of “carrot and stick” should be limited.

7) Start questioning institutional frames
The most difficult frames to recognise are the one shared largely by entire institutions (big organizations, countries, cultures, educational systems). These frames shift very slowly, sometimes across decades and it’s more difficult to recognise that are influencing and changing ourselves. We take these for granted, it becomes more difficult to start questioning them and they slowly turn into dogmas and ideologies.
For example Milton Friedman in the ‘70 popularised in the whole business world the idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” and the only moral responsibility of executives “is generally to make as much money as possible for their shareholder” justifying a belief system in which greed and egoism are positive and externalities are irrelevant. Today this system is still present in our culture.
In the organization I work we put “attitude” and “integrity” as two of the fundamental attributes for our people.

There have been in history exceptional people with extreme integrity that can inspire us. However we still need to remember the “power of situation” and that what “integrity” and “attitude” can do for us is limited when we’re immersed into a strong context.

Remember that most people that make “ethically bad” decisions do it because they happen to be in “ethically blind” situations or under pressure without being aware of it. They happen to be in a situation in which they’re not able to see the consequences of their actions, but not because they are inherently bad people.

Be aware that the above suggestions might help you to avoid unethical contexts but are not a substitute for learning and understanding descriptive and normative morality.
The recommendation is to learn the fundamentals of ethics and keep in mind how you can avoid stepping into strong situations that can push you towards ethical blindness.

_ References: _ The main inspiration for this article comes from the Coursera class “Unethical Decision Making in Organizations” by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage which I recommend Other resources that helped me learning in this area are:

Social Psychology by David Myers, Jackie Abell and Fabio Sani
Moral Mazes: the world of corporate managers by Robert Jackall
Why good is good: the sources of morality by Robert Hinde
Ethics by Peter Singer
Practical ethics by Peter Singer
Social Psychology by Scott Plous on Coursera
Moralities of everyday life by Paul Bloom on Coursera

“Doing good is good” or how I learned my grandfather maybe was an existentialist

2014-10-26T22:43:24+00:00

I remember when I was a kid and knew I did something good I was always running to my grandfather to let him know about my novel achievements.
Probably because the day after he would have brought me a chocolate or few coins that I could save, but mainly because he had always some good encouraging words for me.

He used to tell me in those occasions “Fare bene è bene”.
A sentence which translates to “doing good is good”. From this picture a bit romantic of my grandfather I like to imagine that he was an existentialist but he didn’t knew it.

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would tell us that doesn’t matter only how we act, but we always “choose” to do it, and we’re responsible for that choice.

For example, you probably were just browsing the web, jumping from a link to another.
Maybe you were just killing your time; maybe with the hope to find the answer to your question; or maybe hoping to be accepted by the people you love.
You had a “choice” to skip this article or to start reading until here. This has been your choice.

Gary Cox starts his book “How to be an existentialist” in a similar way, stating saying that to become an existentialist you don’t need to just read about the theory of the existentialist philosophy from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre or Camus but also start acting taking responsibility of you choices.
Existentialism is rooted in a theory of conscience, but theory and practice are both necessary.

The major learning I took from existentialism is that the individuals are always free to choose. That sometimes it might not be easy choices, there might be unconscious elements, but is always within our possibilities to choose.
Existentialism in practice results in affirming our free will and stop making excuses.

Accepting this responsibility is the one that can start driving us in living a more honest, more just and more moral life.

When we avoid making a choice, in reality we choose to “not choose” and for this we’re still responsible. So we’re not only free of choosing, but condemned to be free to make our choices.

Today we live in a culture of shortcuts, of everything “here and now” that brings us accusing others, the government, the system or everyone else except ourselves.

Part of existentialism in not about having answer to every situation, is also about realizing that we don’t have certainty of many things, but keep doing our choices in a responsible way. Existentialism need to support uncertainty but with a continuous pursue of authenticity and accepting the current situation.

Jose’ Mujica, philosopher, former guerrilla fighter and president of Uruguay said in an interview that for him happiness is “vivir de acuerdo como se piensa” (to live in accordance to how you think). In this perspective to me means to start acting in a way follows our informed choices or for Sartre means to pursue authenticity. Authentic existence involves the idea that one has to “create oneself” and then live in accordance with this self.
Authenticity is not only a personal matter, but it also involves our authenticity in relation to others. One of the ways the individuals avoid responsibility and truth is by keeping themselves in a state of ignorance motivated by fear and anxiety to face reality.

At the core of our freedom is the freedom of choice; and the consequences of choices are our actions. Actions are therefore the result of our human existence.
Sartre wrote “To be is to do” to summarise the importance of actions in existentialism.

It’s part of your choice if we want to learn about existentialism, decide if you want to become an existentialist or ignore it.

Probably my grandfather never had a chance to read about Sartre but he always kept telling me that “good” needs acting in good ways and it is now my responsibility to choose to remember and follow his advice …even if I will not receive chocolates anymore :)

Rage against the system

2014-07-29T00:30:05+00:00

There are moments in the last couple of years that are recurring more frequently.

Are moments of rage.

Image picture of PRIVATE Photo Review cover of #42 on Social Issues
Photo by John Lambrichts

I’m trying to write this down so that I can understand it better.

The more I learn about injustices, the more is getting difficult to cope with their reality.

We live in a extremely unjust system: capitalism, global poverty, consumerism, climate change, concentration of wealth and power, unequal distribution of basic social services healthcare and education, global surveillance, intolerance against minorities, gender injustice, racial prejudices, wars propagating across decades, and more, and more… a long list of interconnected social issues.

Most of us, privileged, keep following the rules of this system.
Most of us, privileged, are embedded in the matrix, keep hiding to ourselves the unjust truth.
By lying to ourselves we keep acting as an ingenuous source of unintentional consequences that propagates in this system causing on the other end suffering, despair, death, injustice.
And I feel like sometime it’s easy to identify the individual causes of injustice but most of the times I cannot blame anyone in particular, that the problem is just propagating in the complexities of our social system.

Sometimes there’s a part of despair in me due to the inability to react. Despair that doesn’t last more than few seconds: it becomes rage.
There are moments that my inner self wants to scream against all of this. There are moments that I actually scream in my little silent closet.

I believe in dialogue, compassion, reconciliation, non-concentration of power, anarchy, peaceful civil disobedience, suspension of judgement and all… all of this situation makes me angry. I’m angry that this feeling of rage becomes the only alternative and that this feeling is causing a contradiction to the above beliefs: rage does not lead to dialogue and reconciliation.

I still keep embedding myself in the system, I still lie to some of my beliefs and I find difficult to resist to its forces.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning accepting the daily wage slavery and going to collaborate within organizations that do not stand on the same side of my beliefs. By doing this I also know that I’m getting influenced, or better, infected again by traditional behaviour, moral codes and beliefs… and it’s difficult to stand against all of them.

I started keeping a little note in my pocket with me that says “I wake up”.
It’s an awakening process that took years and I fear one day I will begin to accept going back rather than wake up again.

Sometimes what keeps me going is the hope that at the end of the day I’m doing my best to ethically steal to the rich guys in the Global North to contribute back to the ones in need in the underdeveloped parts of the Global South. Another reaction that is in contradiction with my core beliefs: virtually stealing instead of dialogue.

I also think that standing in this situation is an excuse to keep lying to myself, that in reality alone I’m too weak to contrast this system, that I’m not brave enough to start more openly disobeying against it so I keep partially embedding myself into it.

These are my moments of rage against the system.

There are moments in which we might feel powerless, but we are not.
We need to come together, organise, explain and support each other against the threats in this social system.

We need to come together as a new system to defeat the system.

Why Network Neutrality is not enough: Network Equality

2014-04-27T18:22:32+00:00

I’ve been assisting for the last few days at the debate during the preparation and development of NETMundial. A conference held in Brazil to discuss principles of Internet governance and digital rights.

One specific idea that puzzled me is listening to progressive voices supporting NET Neutrality: a concept of “equal technical treatment of all protocols and data”.
Does this mean we’re treating equally the people at the two sides of this conversation?

Do you think that the privilege to access educational content of a teacher in a rural area of Africa should be the same of a middle class white male in New York watching his favourite TV series?

Which connection should I drop first when resources are limited? Should I privilege the middle class man not interrupting with a “buffering” message his favourite program? Or should I privilege the rural teacher not having to download again a freely (as libre) available MIT open course material (assuming his electricity has not been cut meanwhile)?

Unfortunately the progressive voices today are supporting Network Neutrality thinking this is the optimal solution for the Internet.

What I would prefer is a concept of Network Equality where unprivileged have privileged access and where Internet activities for the common good should be privileged above the ones for private interests. Some people would prefer to call it Network Justice but I’ll stick to the name Network Equality because is the one I heard coming up a couple of times.

Network Equality is “non-Neutral”

What is the risk of a “non-Neutral” network? Power will take over control. I’m not naive and I can recognise that a non neutral network today has a bigger risk of getting under control of the private interests and structures of power to keep growing their privilege. Neutrality is against voluntary discrimination. This is why today we need Network Neutrality.

While I keep supporting Network Neutrality in the current state of the debate I think we should also acknowledge that is not enough. Inequalities are considered in the current document of NETMundial only in the part that discuss accessibility for people with disabilities. Network Equality is probably non-practically achievable and utopian, but this does not mean we should keep ignoring the inequalities we’re encouraging when we’re advocating for neutrality.

Network Neutrality is ignoring the issues of access and privilege. Network Neutrality in neither good or bad. Network Neutrality is unjust. I believe we should try to make choices that are for the common good.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
(Desmond Tutu)

If there’s one important contribution to NETMuldial you should listen to is Nnenna Nwakanma speech here

Deconstructing privilege

2014-04-15T05:51:31+00:00

There was a day during the last year when I was in Nairobi and I have been harassed by two policemen for the colour of my skin.
There was a day when I got lost at night in a favela in Rio and I was afraid for being the only white foreigner risking to get robbed or attacked.

The other 363 days of the year I had a simpler, more comfortable, privileged life. And for the first 33 years of my life I haven’t even recognised my privilege.

We grew up with a mental model and in a society that makes us believe that we are smarter, and we deserve more, and someone else is always luckier than us, and that there’s an external world we should fight against.
We don’t look at our privilege with a critical perspective. We don’t look at what we have. We are educated at looking at what we don’t have.
Most of the time if we have some privilege we believe it is because we worked hard for it or if we recognise it we give cold shoulders about it.

But still, now we have a choice to try to understand our privileges partially and try to do something about it.
Yesterday a friend shared a silly on-line game “How privileged are you?” that gives you a score based on the privilege you calculate filling a questionnaire.

Privilege is relative. Everyone is more privileged of someone else in this world, and less privileged of someone else (I don’t think you can easily create a score though :)).
I believe that as humans we have a moral obligation to help the unprivileged first and understand our privilege.

On a more radical position I also believe that we have to “deconstruct” our personal privileges and of the people who are more privileged than ourselves. Some people say that if you’re privileged you should feel uncomfortable about it and you should make other people more privileged feel uncomfortable as well.
The more you’re privileged the more you should feel responsible of support the unprivileged in fixing the inequalities (from great power comes great responsibilities).

There are challenges and difficulties that probably I will never understand. When you walk down a dark street do you feel the fear of getting robbed or do you feel the fear of getting raped? When you go to a job interview do fear of getting judged for your abilities or judged for the colour of your skin?

Deconstructing our privilege is not a trivial journey. Many of us are not even aware of it and sometimes we keep denying it.
I never thought of how machist I was until I moved to a different country and after some feminist friends explained me the additional difficulties faced on the other gender side.

CC-BY image courtesy of craftivist-collective

I’ve been working with a black lesbian girl who grew up from a low class family of a global South country where access education is not a given thing. If I ended up in a more privileged position I’m sure it’s not because of any of my merits (meritocracy is itself another concept that deserves to be deconstructed, but this deserves another article…) but because I’m an educated white, middle class, heterosexual, man from the global North.

One of our biggest human moral fallacies is that we tend to ignore and distance ourselves from the evil consequences of what is not near or visible us.
Last year I was using a metaphor to explain privilege. I was saying that you should try make a step in a favela to listen, help others and understand your privilege. Try to make visible what is not immediately visible to you.
And it’s not so difficult. It’s incredible learning to recognise how many chances we have daily to do so.
When you are in a social situation do you usually wish to interact with the cool person in the group or do you usually include the ones that tend to be excluded?

That day after exiting from a real favela I felt really angry at myself. I felt angry because when I got in that situation I was feeling “fear” even if I was trying to hide and ignore my fear. It’s unfortunately absurd to feel fear of your privilege.
It’s unfortunate that this fear is what keeps us distant in many places of our society. Part of it is a real fear of a risk and part denial of what we don’t understand. Only later I’ve been able to know and learn from the kind people of that favela.

If you can do something tomorrow, try to read about, inform yourself and understand some of your privileges. Try to know, listen, support and be an ally of who is less privileged than you. Than try to return back some of your privileges.
Deconstructing privilege is a start of a journey. I believe I am only at the start of it, but it has the potential of making you a better person.

Service as a gift

2014-03-16T16:54:45+00:00

In the recent past we’ve been hit by the narrative: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re product”

Unfortunately this seems to have become the de facto standard in the technology industry. Software as a service, cloud computing and few other paradigm shifts in the on-line business have enabled this distortion.

Many on-line companies are today offering services for free for various reasons. It’s a good way to attract customers to try their product and start billing later down the line a subset of their users. It’s a good marketing strategy to be recognised as a good on-line citizen. In the worst scenario they are carefully listening to your data communications and generate revenue from the information treasure they’ve collected.

I’m trying to forge and starting to believe in the emergence a different paradigm. I’m going to call it “Service as a gift”.

What’s the difference between “Service as a gift” and offering a service for free?

“Service as a gift” is not a new way to make business or a tool you can use.

“Service as a gift” is linked with the idea of the “gift economy” that for long time has enabled the free and open source movements.
From Wikipedia:

A gift economy, gift culture or gift exchange is a mode of exchange where valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards
(David J. Cheal - The Gift Economy)

“Service as a gift” is a moral framework about how we treat each other when we offer services on-line. It’s about recognising that something is more useful for public good. It’s about recognising the privilege of part of our society and enable the less privileged to access services just because we want to give it as a gift and we don’t expect anything back.

“Service as a gift” is about learning different models of how we can continue giving gifts still maintaing a sustainable services offering.

“Service as a gift” is also about not abusing of the gifts we receive and recognising transparently when providers are not acting as good citizens of this ecosystem.

“Service as a gift” is about encouraging and understanding the legal implications of building services with licenses similar to AGPL or providing a Diaspora service implementation.

One of the ideas I heard from Jim Yong Kim, despite being president of the World Bank organization, during the “social good summit” is that social change often needs the emergence of a social movement of people that start participating actively in this challenge.
“Service as a gift” is the idea of starting a new movement and a network of people and business that want to support this idea.

I would like a place where people and organizations can meet each other to publish the gifts they’re offering.
I would like a place where people and organizations can give each other mutual support when they’re in need.
I might like the ability for people and organizations be recognised for their contribution in the “service as a gift” ecosystem.

What do you think about this idea? I’m on a learning path and sharing it as a gift as well :) H

ow can we enable it?

‘Give, but give until it hurts.’
(Mother Teresa)