Why taking over natural capital and AI is essential for our collective future
Depth and strategy--not just problematisation--are needed
AI, or machine-learning as we practitioners prefer to call it, is taking over knowledge-workers by storm. Translation, administration, code, writing — it all feels different, and even wrong. Part of that discomfort is legitimate: if you’re leveraging these tools to mislead people, overloading tight attention spans with content no one cares about, or enabling systems of oppression, that’s a real problem. AI’s footprint is not negligible, but a careful analysis shows that video generation and the exponential abundance of useless content — rather than necessary, useful work — is mostly to blame. My (AI inclusive) work making affordable impact reporting for thousands of impact-driven organisations costs less energy than a single flight with zero real impact. I’d rather take the heat and use it for what matters, while keeping my commitment to not flying and providing nutritious, just food for my community.
This is not a defence of tech-bros and the monopoly of digital infrastructure we all suffer under — and Palestinians and people forced to migrate suffer most acutely — not to mention communities living next to water-hungry data centres. My point is that AI, like low-carbon energy, can be emancipatory under alternative conditions of production and governance. There is no venture-capital ethical AI and there never will be, because it will always choose profit and growth above everything else, even at the cost of our fragile democratic fabric.
The solution to this dystopian world of surveillance, automated killing, and creative displacement is collective. It requires massive agency and participation in building alternative modes of production — machines that genuinely support decision-making and productive processes. The delimitation work on big tech is largely done. What we need now is to simultaneous dismantle monopoly structures that capture all capital, while we build organisations that offer these tools under net-positive-impact schemas: focused on essential industries, helping workers reduce time and gain productivity; distributive in design, creating a mosaic of alternatives that balance cost, access and reach; and limited — there is no space for machines in arts, music, social interaction, or the work we want to do ourselves.
Alternatives exist, but like email and video alternatives before them, they must survive against companies offering zero-price products that make your data and privacy the commodity — and that receive vast amounts of venture capital, private and public, allowing them to run at a loss for years. That is impossible for member-based and stewardship-owned alternatives. We will either need massive public financing, or accept — as with unions — that only people’s effort saves the day. Engage with ethical, member-based solutions, or accept defeat in your wonderful ivory tower.
Information technology requires not only democratic scrutiny, it needs literacy — just like finance. This is not achieved by being consumers or users, but by critically assessing how these tools work, their limitations, risks and potential. Many people think AI is ChatGPT only, while continuing to use Gmail, YouTube and search engines that are not only AI-based, but clearly benefit from human rights violations worldwide and fuel military applications whose dangers are suffered by millions today — mostly in the global south, but soon everywhere. We need sufficiency and wellbeing principles embedded in technology’s design, governance and use — not as optional nice-to-haves. Digital permaculture offers a genuinely good approach to designing just and lasting digital tools. I encourage you to read that literature alongside material about digital utopias; they offer paths for alternative systems, not just problematisation without collective agency.
Grace Brekeley put it wonderfully: it’s your boss, not AI, who will fire you. Firing people is as much a political choice as it is an economic one. AI can only go as far as managers are willing to take it. This is the goal of big corporations — purposeless, monotonous, impersonal, soulless — but not of cooperatives and impact-driven businesses. The latter can leverage AI to focus on what makes them human and unique, leaving the boring stuff to machines--a genuine gift for the working class still engaged in dehumanising labour.
I hate paperwork, admin and routine reporting. I love design, problem-solving and building persuasive stories from data. AI has no place in those human spaces. If you feel threatened in your workspace: organise, speak up, reorganise work with your peers. Not using OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft is necessary, but nowhere near sufficient. Having said that — let’s move away from big tech, big social media, big cloud; support the rising alternatives, even knowing they’re not yet at the right price point. Be patient investors with your 20 euros a month, and create schemes so privacy is not a privilege of the affluent.
Let’s not forget: the struggles linked to AI are class struggles, not technological ones. Organise, learn, build, iterate — until the margins become the common place.
Now the other hot potato. The natural capital industry. Investors and businesses are slowly recognising that their own survival depends on healthy ecosystems, and new financial instruments to protect productive capacities are rising exponentially — even if most of you aren’t aware. Land purchases, biodiversity funds, water credits: these are not just processes of enclosure, they are the system attempting to save itself before it’s too late. That’s genuinely good news for survival, but justice is by no means guaranteed. It is entirely possible to maintain unjust systems with violence while restoring land and ecosystem services. Ecofascism can restore nature without redistributive social systems. We need to get into this field before it’s too late.
As with AI, the general public’sallergy to finance makes us nearly illiterate in what’s actually happening. We may hold the principles of alternative finance, but we are too far from making a dent — from dismantling these systems and creating the social awareness and political projects to regenerate both landscapes and social relationships, not only the former.
Understanding the economics of insurance, the valuation of natural processes, and how capital moves, is used, taxed and reproduced — this is essential. A just transition does not only require a mass movement, parliamentary representation and organised workers; it will require massive capital. Restoring ecosystems while securing livelihoods demands knowledge transfers and payments to the custodians of the land. There is an opportunity to avoid externalising costs and free-riding by extractive forces, but the governance and financial instruments must be ready to integrate local communities, productive capacity, and resources into one of the deepest transformations of our generation.
Land and water systems are the areas where whether we collapse as a civilisation will be decided, and what degree of suffering we’ll endure. The physical world will play an increasingly determinant role in what is possible. Soil health, water security, resilient energy, community strength — these will depend on how we manage local landscapes. The time has come to move from climate alarmism to crisis management. Some claim the climate movement is dead; I think it is maturing and being pruned. Purist ivory towers are dying. People are quietly leaving their bullshit jobs to restore land and focus on existential needs, in solidarity with others. Software developers who could earn 200k in big tech are leaving for alternative projects at high personal cost. The same with architects, teachers and medical professionals who resist — despite mainstream media giving them almost no voice.
If you feel overwhelmed, I feel you. I was desperate, close to doing stupid things. I chose action, radical pragmatism, deep solidarity and the long game. We will fail and fall many times. But in this civilisational crisis of the western model of production and reproduction, we need to repurpose, refurbish, create and repair — as much as we resist, denounce and demand. Your full potential is reached when you dare to engage with the messy world of deep transformations, not when talking about it only superficially or academically.
See you at the barricades and at many life festivals.
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