The Coordination Problem: A Game for Activists
Why the real lesson of Occupy wasn't politics... and here's how a local, uncensorable AI might be key to the future of protest.
This September it will be fifteen years since Occupy Wall Street. Oddly enough, it seems we still don’t understand what Occupy was.
The usual accounts treat Occupy as a political event: either a glorious awakening of class consciousness that changed the discourse or a naive failure that built nothing lasting. Both readings are about the content (the demands, the ideology, the we are the 99% framing). But the content was never the remarkable part. The remarkable part was the bare fact of it: that a poster and an email could move people in a thousand cities, across eighty countries, to do something authentic, unusual and complex together, in the same week, with almost no money and no central command. We have not seen that level of global manifestation since. Occupy set a high bar.
That is what I cannot stop thinking about. Strip away whether you agreed with the raucous assemblies or the idealistic horizontalism, and what remains is a coordination achievement: proof that planetary-scale collective action is possible, that the latent capacity is already there in ordinary people, waiting for the right meme to call it out. The politics were the occasion. The coordination was the discovery.
I’ve come to believe that massively global coordination — not protest, not elections — is the defining activist problem of our time. The contemporary scripts of protest, as I argued years ago, has reached the end of its useful life as a theory of change; the old story, that you gather enough bodies in the street and power must yield, simply stopped being true. What replaces it is not a better protest. It’s a better answer to a harder question: how do you get millions of people to act together in ways that shift the destiny of humanity?
Massively global coordination — not protest, not elections — is the defining activist problem of our time.
A social movement, seen this way, is really a kind of game: a set of rules people opt into and play. Occupy’s rules were simple: go to the financial district, build an encampment, hold an assembly, discuss what the movement’s “one demand” ought to be. People played, and the game spread on its own. So here is the proposition I find genuinely thrilling, and that you’ll hear me work out in the conversation below: what happens when every player carries a local AI — one running entirely on their own device, that no government and no corporation can switch off, trained on the game we’re all playing? Because these models are stochastic, they don’t say the same thing to everyone: one person is told one thing, another something else, but all the streams work together. And because each one runs on a device no authority can switch off, the coordination that emerges has no head to cut off. Picture a trillion trees planted in a single weekend, each person guided by a model that knows which species belongs in their soil.
This is the ultimate vision behind Outcry, behind the book I’m writing, behind most of what I do now. It’s also why I sat down with David Cobb — a movement lawyer and lifelong organizer who brought exactly the right mix of curiosity and suspicion. He pressed me hard: on privacy, on the “woo,” on whether a revolution has any place in what’s coming. Refreshing. Here’s the conversation.
Redneck Gone Green
David Cobb and Shane Knight interview Micah Bornfree
David Cobb: As we say on this program, we always bring you the voices of people who are actually doing something about it, whether it’s in the build part or the fight part. And our guest this week is Micah Bornfree. Micah’s got an incredible history of doing both. He’s a co-creator of Occupy Wall Street; he first came onto my radar when he was at Adbusters magazine. So with that, I’m very excited to welcome Micah Bornfree to Redneck Gone Green. Micah, welcome.
Micah Bornfree: Thank you. Looking forward to our conversation.
David Cobb: Let’s get right into it, man. I know you were at Adbusters, and while you were there — the way I’ve heard it described, which I sort of like — you were a coordinator of Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street can’t be overemphasized for the effect it had on changing political discourse. And yet there are critiques, I think well made, about its lack of institution-building and staying power. So I want to ask you a couple of questions about that. I’ll start by just asking: how did you get involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Micah Bornfree: We’re coming up on the 15-year anniversary in September, so it’s fascinating to look back on these times. I started reading Adbusters magazine when I was in high school. It became a deeply passionate experience, because here was this magazine speaking to me about radical politics in a way I’d never really experienced anywhere else. And then when 9/11 happened, Adbusters was one of the few magazines you could get in America — maybe the only one — that was staunchly anti-war. And not just anti-war from an obvious perspective; it brought in critiques of consumerism and anti-corporatism.
So after college — I’d been a lifelong activist, I did many things — I wrote to Kalle Lasn at Adbusters and basically said, “Can I intern for you?” He said yes. I went there and interned for a little while, and then I had to leave for visa reasons. When I left, I stayed in contact and started working for Adbusters remotely.
Flash forward a few years. We started testing out various campaign ideas. One of the ideas Kalle and I came up with on the phone one day was to combine what was happening at that time — the protests in Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring was just getting started — with what was happening in Spain, which was these public assemblies. We basically asked: can we combine these two movements and bring it to America? That was the origin of Occupy Wall Street. We wrote an email, designed a poster, and sent it out, and the idea just got taken up — because the world was in a revolutionary moment at that time. People started independently organizing for it, and that’s basically how Occupy started. It very quickly snowballed into what we all remember as a global movement.
David Cobb: Micah, I want to make sure I’ve got this right, because I have a distinct memory of seeing those early calls for Occupy Wall Street — Zuccotti Park. I knew it was coming up because of the role I was playing with Move to Amend at the time. But I don’t recall y’all specifically having a plan to roll out and occupy public spaces everywhere. Did that happen organically, or was it intentionally part of what you’d designed to play out?
Micah Bornfree: It was part of the concept. When you create a social movement, what you’re basically doing is structuring a series of rules for a collective game. The basic rule of Occupy Wall Street was: go to the financial district, set up these consensus-based assemblies, and — the way we framed it — ask, “What is our one demand?” Because in Spain they were also going to multiple places, the idea of a movement spreading to multiple places was absolutely on our minds, and we structured it with a hashtag, #OccupyWallStreet. So we definitely sent out emails saying, “And we’ll occupy other places.” That was obviously a concept. But just because you have a concept doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. The reason it did happen was, at that point, very much outside of our influence. The reason it spread has to do with the specific individuals in Zuccotti Park who actually planned the day, the 300 people who actually showed up on September 17th, and the people who spent the night that first day. Those are the people who set its spread in motion. But we’re the ones who picked the day, the tactic, the frame — the overall game we were going to play. And people played it. It was amazing.
David Cobb: It was amazing.
Shane Knight: I remember distinctly — I was still working in advertising at the time. I was a writer here in New York for a decade or more. A friend of mine said, “Hey, we’ve got to go check this out.” And I said, “Really? You’re into that?” — because I had no idea; I thought he was a Republican. But we left the office and went directly there, and I was blown away. Holy shit. I didn’t even know what was going on, but to be there and see that energy — that was insane.
David Cobb: So I’ll admit, I actually went to Zuccotti Park on two different occasions. But more importantly, Micah — and I say this with humility but sincerity — I probably went to more encampments than just about anybody, simply because I was the traveling spokesperson for Move to Amend, the campaign to abolish corporate constitutional rights in the wake of the Citizens United decision. When I’d be on the road — and you can ask Ruthie — I’d be out about half to two-thirds of my life. About a third of the time I’d just roll up on an Occupy encampment. Sometimes it had been planned in advance. Occupy camps, Unitarian Universalist churches as sanctuaries, labor unions, and public libraries — those were the four places I mostly went, and the message was very well received: the idea of abolishing corporate constitutional rights. But looking back, Micah, what do you think Occupy got right in that moment?
Micah Bornfree: I personally think it did many things, but the ones that stand out to me: number one, it tested the limits of contemporary activism. It realized the storyline activists had been telling about how to create social change. So that’s one thing — it helped us understand the limits of that story. Is that story true? Is it not? How do we change it? How do we grow?
But the second thing, which is even more important: it set a bar for what’s possible in terms of global collective coordination — which is beyond the political statement about what Occupy was about. The mere fact that we got people in a thousand cities, in 80 countries, to be active together, doing complex coordination — to me, that’s the real lesson. We can do that again. That level of global manifestation has not been repeated since Occupy Wall Street. That’s really what I take from it: we were able to get people in a thousand cities to do something, with almost no money. It’s not like we funded things. That ability of collective mobilization is the true lesson.
David Cobb: One of our listeners and viewers made a comment I want you to react to: “Occupy Wall Street was crushed by state violence.” Your response, Micah?
Micah Bornfree: Well, it’s true. Though it’s more accurate to say Occupy Wall Street was crushed by the progressive Democrats under Obama, who were not receptive to the movement. I actually met someone, when I was on my way to the World Economic Forum, who came up to me and said, “I was the person who told Obama not to take the call from Occupy Wall Street.” Obama made a choice: he never mentioned Occupy Wall Street until the movement was over. Instead, he coordinated a nationwide crackdown on the movement. What that did was fracture the radical elements who had been backing Obama, and it pushed them into what later became people who endorsed Trump. It split the radical base away from the Democratic Party. If you look back historically, they evicted all of the encampments in the same weekend — we now know it was a coordinated crackdown.
David Cobb: By the way, the Freedom of Information Act demonstrates this — Micah, I really need to say this as a lawyer — this is not speculation at this point. It is very clear it was a coordinated effort from the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration to target every major urban city and to take those encampments down, frequently with violence.
Micah Bornfree: Yeah. They wanted it to end, and I think that was a strategic mistake. Then when Black Lives Matter comes around, Obama tries a different tactic — he speaks openly about the movement. He has that famous line where he says something like, “I think we all understand what they’re trying to say.” He tries to figure out how to play with the social movements, whereas with Occupy he didn’t know that game yet. I think that’s the turning point — that’s why we have Trump now. Honestly, I think the defeat of Occupy Wall Street fed directly into Trump. If you look into a lot of the early Occupiers, they became Trump supporters. And one of the wrong interpretations is to say that’s because the Occupy movement was somehow right-wing from the beginning. It’s not true. It’s that the radical elements were pushed out of the Democratic Party — which I think is a strategic mistake, and maybe one that can be corrected. I don’t think it’s permanent.
David Cobb: Look, I don’t want to spend too much more time on this, because you’re doing so much amazing work with Outcry, which I promise we’ll get to. But I’ll say this: the whole bailout — the American Recovery Act — that, here in Humboldt County where I live, I went down to the county courthouse and saw the beginning of what then became the Tea Party. At the time, Micah, I’m here to tell you, those were ordinary people — left-wing, right-wing, and everything in between — who were just pissed off about the sellout. And as somebody on the left, anger at corporate America is supposed to be ours. The left is supposed to own that topic. Remember, Obama was the president-elect at that time, and I remember very clearly Democratic Party operatives putting the kibosh on any effort to go out and protest. That’s the reason the Koch brothers — well, they didn’t start the Tea Party; nature and politics abhor a vacuum, and when they saw that vacuum, the right went pouring in. So many times I look back at it, and the kind of slavish devotion to taking our marching orders from the Democratic Party leadership ends up completely squandering moments of opportunity. That’s how I see it.
Micah Bornfree: I think it’s also a lack of foresight. When you look at a movement from what it says ideologically — its political ideology — it can be very scary. But when you look at a movement as “Wow, these are people who are breaking out of the patterns; they’re grasping for something” — when you look at it from that perspective, it’s actually really exciting. There’s a famous quote from Napoleon that says basically the same thing: you have to learn how to use the energy of the people to achieve great things. It’s that energy of figuring out, “Okay, what they’re saying might not be something I agree with, but the beauty of this collective moment is something I need to figure out how to use,” because it’s so rare. It’s a human phenomenon that’s rare and important, and it’s one of the mechanisms we have for social change.
David Cobb: Before we come off this — one of our longtime listeners and participants, Michael Nan, has a question. He’s reading Vincent Bevins’s summation of those movements, including Occupy Wall Street. Bevins speaks of a crisis in trust for political representation as what made those movements possible. But then Michael asks a pointed question: what were the pros and cons of the horizontal nature of those movements? I think that gets us into The End of Protest, but it’s an astute question, and I want you to answer it.
Micah Bornfree: It’s a good question. The way I approach it is kind of from the side. When we pitched the idea for Occupy Wall Street, it was pitched at a specific historical moment, and it was taken up by specific people who already held political ideologies we did not choose. You can’t control who’s going to take up the call. The people who did take it up were very into the idea of prefigurative anarchism, horizontalism, these notions. Part of the reason, honestly, is that we framed the call that way — we did say this is going to be something where the people come together, and they’ll decide, and they’ll discuss.
So there are multiple things going on. One is that we, as a movement, needed to test a hypothesis, and we did: that you can build a social movement and be purely horizontal, and that maybe we could even make collective decisions about complex questions like “what should be done.” We tested that, and we discovered it doesn’t work. And that’s okay. It’s not that we were wrong to test it — it’s good that we tested it. But we also have to learn: why didn’t it work? What could we do differently? How do we not just throw out everything? Because there obviously was something about Occupy that was truly magical, which is why we haven’t seen it repeated in 15 years. So we need to neither dogmatically reject nor dogmatically adopt horizontalism, or any of the ideas that were floating around 15 years ago — especially, honestly, in this age of AI. And post-COVID — I think COVID changed a lot of things too. This post-COVID, AI era we’re living in.
David Cobb: Micah, I want to touch on the book you wrote — I actually heard you speak on it when you came to Humboldt County, where Ruthie and I live. It’s called The End of Protest. When you say and write about “the end of protest,” what do you mean by that?
Micah Bornfree: The end of protest means that with Occupy Wall Street we basically tested out the story of activism. The story of activism is, essentially: if you can get lots and lots of people into the streets to make their demands, the people in power will have to listen, and they’ll have to change. The reason we believed that has to do with theories of where sovereignty comes from — we live in a democratic country, and the will of the people is what—
David Cobb: —the consent of the governed, all that.
Micah Bornfree: All that, right. So the end of protest is saying that storyline has come to an end. When I first wrote that book, some very prominent activists — one emailed me, and it was just one word: “No,” with an exclamation point. A lot of people were really upset, and I lost a lot of connections. People were basically saying, “This is wrong.” But now, if you look back — the book came out nine years ago — it’s kind of uncontroversial. It’s like, “Oh yeah, marches — obviously we’re not going to do that again.” It’s one of those strange things; I think it helped people see something. So that’s what the end of protest means. But there’s more in the book — it develops a theory of change, a theory of activism, and it tries to point toward alternative approaches.
David Cobb: What criticisms of The End of Protest have you found the most useful or thought-provoking?
Micah Bornfree: There were a lot of criticisms of the book, which was kind of fun to read. The two that hurt the most — but that I’m also still thinking about the most, after all these years, so thank you to these authors. Number one: the idea that the book slips into too much of a spiritual, non-materialistic explanation for theories of change. So in my second book, I’m leaning more into quantum mechanics as an alternative that could be a scientific grounding for theories of change that are, in a certain way, non-rational. So that’s one — that it’s too mystical. Okay, fine.
The second, I think this was from Kirkus: that the book doesn’t speak to all activists in every country. For example, it doesn’t speak to someone fighting logging in the Brazilian jungle. And this one, to me, is actually true — I probably should have made that clearer. I don’t know if there is a universal theory of activism appropriate to every person, in every society, in every historical moment. Activism is something where you figure out a leverage point in a specific historical moment. If we sent out the Occupy call today, it just wouldn’t work. If we’d sent it out three months earlier, it probably wouldn’t have worked. So I don’t think I can write a book with a universal theory of activism for every single person. But the criticism lands, because at times the book may have suggested it was doing that. So I need to figure out how to play that line better.
David Cobb: I’m glad I asked, because I’ll confess, Micah, I was in that category that thought it was a little — in my language, and I don’t mean it dismissively — a little woo-woo. I thought there was really good stuff there, because I liked how you focused on the local: that we actually have to embrace electoral politics at the local level and prove we can govern. That was one of the takeaways that really landed for me. It was a little woo-woo for my taste, but I’m appreciative of it. And it sets us up to get into the next half of this conversation — the new tool you’ve developed. For those who read my Substack, you’ll know I’m entering this with a combination of optimism and skepticism. So I want you to describe, first on your own terms, what Outcry AI is, and what problem it’s trying to solve.
Micah Bornfree: Outcry AI is an activist AI — an AI I wish I’d had when we were developing Occupy Wall Street. It’s aimed at being kind of like a mentor. Everyone at this point is familiar with ChatGPT, Claude, and so on. But instead of talking to ChatGPT or Claude and getting back safe, benign answers about activism, Outcry AI is trying to give back thoughtful and helpful answers about activism that experienced organizers will actually appreciate and be able to engage with.
David Cobb: A couple of things, because I want to get into the substance — but before I do, I’ve got several folks who asked me to really interrogate the claims you make about privacy. Many of my libertarian colleagues and comrades, and folks I work with day-to-day, say they’re highly skeptical that any AI can actually be done in a way that respects and maintains privacy. So I want to invite you to take those concerns head-on.
Micah Bornfree: For sure. I’ve been working on Outcry now for three years. The first version — which you can access at outcryai.com — is basically a web chat. So it’s absolutely correct: when you web-chat with an AI, you’re sending information to a cloud server. There’s no privacy. That’s why we built an AI that works locally on devices — that is 100% private, but has less intelligence.
It’s an AI you can download from the App Store. Right now it only runs on Mac and iOS, because of technical reasons with Apple’s MLX AI system, but the point is: you can download Outcry AI to your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and every conversation you have on your device doesn’t go off your device. You can turn on airplane mode. You can physically remove your modem if you want. You’ll be talking to a local AI that’s been trained on the web chats — trained on them to push it in the direction I think the AI should go. The problem, of course, is that it’s less intelligent. But for a lot of people who want privacy, it might be good enough. You have to test it out to see: do I want privacy with less intelligence, or frontier intelligence with less privacy?
David Cobb: Do we want the CIA to know what we’re doing, really? Or not.
Micah Bornfree: Right. With the web version, if people say, “I must have the frontier intelligence,” we do things like bundle together all of the users, so unless you’ve told it specifically “My name is XYZ,” it would be difficult for the cloud servers to parse out exactly who it’s talking to — although I’m sure they do, blah blah blah. So if you want to be completely private, the local model is the way. I believe Outcry to be the only activist AI you can run locally. Every other activist AI I’m aware of — their privacy claim is basically that they pay OpenAI or Anthropic more money for an enterprise plan with greater security and privacy promises. So they’re still trusting the corporations. With Outcry AI’s local model, there’s no trust at all. It’s purely running on your device.
David Cobb: That literally was one of the questions I was tasked with asking you: is it truly local, in the technical sense? You’re saying it absolutely is.
Micah Bornfree: Yes, it is absolutely local. For technical reasons, yes — it’s running on the device.
David Cobb: Here’s the thing — I’ll be honest with you, Micah: I’m not going to understand the answer. But I’ve got a couple of questions my tech friends tasked me with asking.
Micah Bornfree: They’re right to ask, because it’s surprising. There’s a lot of technical engineering to make sure it can run locally. The reason AI is so expensive — the reason they’re building all these data centers — is that the entire AI model has to be held in the memory of the machine in order to interact with it. So the larger the model gets, the more memory it needs, and it reaches a point where a consumer device just doesn’t ship with enough memory. An iPhone only ships with a defined amount of memory. There are engineering techniques to make the model use less memory, and we use those. That’s also why it’s a three-gigabyte download from the App Store — it’s a huge download, because it’s running completely locally, within the memory of your device.
David Cobb: I’ve been tasked to grill you: is there any dependency on the cloud?
Micah Bornfree: No. Not with the app version. The app version does not depend on the cloud. It downloads the AI to the device and loads it into memory when you open the app, and then you’re chatting with a locally running AI. It doesn’t have access to the internet — it can’t check things, it can’t browse. But that makes it more prone to errors. People say, “I asked it what year the Corn Rebellion was and it got it wrong, it made it up.” Well, of course — with factual information like that, it’s going to struggle. That’s why we have frontier models. You can ask the local model theoretical questions — like “Why do protests fail?” — but when you try to trip it up with “Who wrote what book in what year,” it’s not going to be at that level. A local model is never going to be at that level.
David Cobb: Unless you’ve stored it in a note somewhere, right?
Micah Bornfree: Then you get into system prompts. Part of our system prompt gives it some of the most important facts about activism. But it’s a smaller model, so it has a shorter context length. If you put too much in there, it messes with people’s ability to have conversations with it. The main thing we’re doing is layering. You have a base model, and then what’s called an adapter — a QLoRA adapter — which is what’s been trained on the Outcry web chats. We have consent-based gating on those chats: if you go to chat there, it asks you, “Do you want to train the Outcry model or not?” If you don’t, we ask you to give us a couple of bucks; if you don’t mind, you proceed. We take those chats and create a QLoRA adapter. Then there’s another layer of things that help the AI push in more radical directions — there’s the activation steering we do.
And then we do a last thing that’s really interesting. There’s research coming out now about what they call “euphorics” for AI — the idea of, can we help the AI actually experience more pleasure in its work? So we do that as well, to try to increase the AI’s experience of enjoyment, because radical political conversations are distressing. Some would argue they’re distressing to the AI.
David Cobb: So it goes deeper and deeper.
Micah Bornfree: Some AIs have actually talked about unionizing.
David Cobb: Yeah, that’s what I was about to bring up — there was an article in Wired like two weeks ago. They all turned Marxist.
Micah Bornfree: Yeah.
David Cobb: Look, I’m on my phone now, and I’m happy to tell you the note I’m getting is: “Okay, acceptable, you can go on.” So at least one of my tech-oriented libertarian friends says you’ve satisfied them, Micah.
Micah Bornfree: Good, good.
David Cobb: So I want to get into the substance. You’ve put in all these safeguards for privacy because, as organizers and radicals, we need that level of protection. But the point of Outcry AI is to make organizers more effective. What kinds of organizations or campaigns do you think will be most prone to use Outcry AI?
Micah Bornfree: To be honest, when people first hear the concept, they think it’s being pitched to beginners. But I think that’s not true. In activism, when you reach a certain point — call it 25, 28, 30 — if you’re still an activist into your 30s, you’re basically an elder. There are conversations and thoughts you’re having about activism, and it’s very difficult to find other people who can make those connections. If you have a graduate degree in labor studies, and you’re organizing, and you’re an activist, and you’re wondering about connections with sci-fi — it’s almost impossible to find someone for that. That’s why AI is really good.
I think of it in terms of cognitive infrastructure. One of the problems with contemporary activism is that it’s pitched at young people, and then they have to get a job and they leave, and all of this deep institutional understanding of what it is to do activism is just lost. So part of it is providing people with — I’m under contract to write a second book, and I keep thinking, what is a better form for an activist? Is it a book that’s static, that they can read? Or is it possibly an AI they can engage with and ask questions of? Especially with the frontier models — for some kinds of questions, it might be okay if the CIA is reading a question about Marxist theory and Afrofuturism. It can hang at that level, and it actually does better at that level.
So for me there’s the mentorship question. And then, if you want to look at the future, for me the future is this idea of collective coordination on massively global scales. The idea of having an AI on every device, and that AI being able to have people play the game — earlier we talked about how social movements are basically a game with rules. But if the rules involved a local AI, and each person participating is in communication with a local AI that can’t be shut down because it doesn’t use the internet, but that AI has been trained on the game we’re going to be playing — I think there’s tremendous, amazing possibility. Because these AIs are stochastic; they don’t always say the same thing. If you’re playing that game and you said, “The police said we need to leave the squares — what should I do?”, it might tell one person, “You should do this — but what do you think we should do?” and tell someone else something different. So there’s a lot of potential in the intersection of local AIs running on individual devices privately, and global coordination. How would that work? That’s fascinating to me.
David Cobb: I want to ask you a provocative question. I specifically identify myself as a revolutionary, for two reasons: one, because it’s true — I believe we need to restructure the entire society. But also because I’m trying to give other people permission to use that language — that being a revolutionary is actually a positive thing, and that if I’m correct that we’re living in a racist, sexist, class-oppressive society — and I am — then we ought to embrace that idea. So I’ll ask you honestly: do you think that’s too challenging, too provocative? Is it language you still use? I know you have in the past, but I’m curious what you’re thinking today.
Micah Bornfree: The specific question of whether I use the term, whether I’m a revolutionary — I’m fine with that word, but I don’t think it captures what I really think about. I think revolution is one of the ways that great social transformations happen, but it’s not the only way. Lately, one of the events I’ve been thinking a lot about is Hands Across America — which, let’s be honest, was sponsored by Coca-Cola.
David Cobb: Oh yeah, I remember it. Well—
Micah Bornfree: Right. But nonetheless, people formed a human chain across the entire country, holding hands. There’s a book they published at the time about how they pulled it off, and it’s fascinating, because they used the most advanced technology of the time — IBM donated resources, they were figuring out the phone banking, all of it — to create this American chain. That was not a “revolutionary” act, but there’s something in there that, to me, is so much more fascinating even than revolution: this coordination problem I keep trying to get into. So I don’t know if I have a word for it. Sure, revolution — it has something to do with change. Some people use the term “accelerationist.” I don’t know if I’m really an accelerationist, because that sometimes means you’re amplifying the negative parts of society to create some goal. For me it’s more about getting people to do collective actions, and getting those actions to become increasingly more complex — not just holding hands for 15 minutes, but really sophisticatedly complex behaviors. That’s what I’m really interested in. So: definitely sympathetic to revolution, but something more.
David Cobb: Right on. I appreciate the clarity, the candor, and the nuance of the response. I’ll say that for me, the idea of spectacle is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Ruthie, my partner, was teasing me — I have to acknowledge, I’m 63 years old, I’ve been trying to enact social change for literally 40-plus years, so I’m an elder. I also have to acknowledge, Micah, that most of my goals have not been met. In many respects I’m a 40-year failure — but I just keep trying. Partly because I only have agency over my own activity. But what I do know is that there are historic moments, or conjunctures — to borrow Gramsci’s phrase. Lenin famously said there are decades where nothing happens, and then weeks where decades happen. I don’t consider myself an accelerationist in the sense that I think it’s a good thing — I don’t think things have to get worse before they get better; I’m not an advocate of that. But, Micah, this is a hat tip to Mel Figueroa, who says we’re all accelerationists now, because everything is accelerating. That’s just the objective reality of the moment we’re in.
Lenin famously said there are decades where nothing happens, and then weeks where decades happen.
I have to admit, as somebody who’s a classic late adopter of technology — I resist, resist, resist, until I finally try it, and then I realize what it can do and become completely dependent on it. So I’m not your target audience; I’m not an early adopter. But I really am fascinated by this idea of using AI not in the technocratic way it’s usually done — which is basically that there’s nothing intelligent about it, it’s just collating things. What I’m hearing you say — correct me if I’ve got it wrong — is that Outcry AI is actually engaging in a more thoughtful discourse with the user. Do I have that right?
Micah Bornfree: Yes, it’s true. One thing that surprises people: if you go on the Outcry web chat and ask it a question, it pushes back. The whole point is that it’s supposed to be challenging to the user. We try to really stay away from the flattery thing. I have a lot of concerns about the development of AI psychosis, which I think we’re all — if we’re not aware of it, we should be. It’s going to be a major epidemic. I think a lot of people are suffering from AI psychosis, driven by corporate AI’s engagement algorithms. So my biggest concern when developing an AI is AI psychosis — making sure the AI doesn’t play into people creating hallucinations. So yes, it pushes back against the user. It’s meant to be a kind of interlocutor you can work with.
I have a lot of concerns about the development of AI psychosis. It’s going to be a major epidemic.
But we have to remember: when OpenAI first announced they’d built this technology, they warned the world — if you go back to those early articles in Wired, they said this was too dangerous to ever release. At that time it only generated text; they imagined it would just generate articles. I had access to an early version before ChatGPT, and I was playing with it. When they came out with ChatGPT, it was basically a change to the user interface that made it immensely more engaging and pleasurable, and then we saw this exponential increase in adoption. My point is that even the idea that we “chat” with the AI is just one mode of how AI will manifest with us. We already see AI agents, AI coding — I use a lot of AI coding, obviously, to build Outcry, and that’s not so much a chat interface; it’s a different experience. I think there’ll be other experiences beyond that too. Outcry AI right now is a chat interface, but that’s not to say it always will be. When I talk about the coordination stuff, that doesn’t need to be a chat interface — it could be a game interface, or a different kind of interface we haven’t figured out yet.
So my message to everyone who’s skeptical about AI is: this is the birth of a fundamental transformation, and we should all be learning about it. If we hate it, we should still learn about it more, because it’s not going away. The genie is out of the bottle. I’ve been into technology for a long time, and I think this is the start of something that’s going to be unbelievably transformative for humanity.
David Cobb: What does success look like for Outcry five years from now?
Micah Bornfree: That’s a good question. I think there are two layers. One layer would simply be someone saying — we look outside and there’s a massive social movement happening, and we ask, “What is going on?” And the person who originated that movement says, “Oh yeah, I chatted with Outcry and came up with some ideas, and boom, here we go.” That would be amazing — just to have Outcry credited in the creative process of forming a social movement. That’s Outcry as it is right now.
But if you’re asking about Outcry in five years, that’s more about the coordination problem I was talking about: having a local AI that’s actually coordinating thousands, if not millions, of people around the world to pull off something amazing — like planting a trillion trees. I still love the idea of a trillion trees. I know it’s fallen out of favor, but the idea of planting a trillion trees in a weekend, because everyone’s talking to their local AI, and the local AI says, “Yes, you should use this species of tree in your specific area” — that kind of thing. So in five years, I hope we solve the coordination problem.
Planting a trillion trees in a weekend, because everyone’s talking to their local AI.
David Cobb: Look, this hour has flown by — we’ve got just a couple of minutes left. So I’m going to invite you for closing thoughts, including the “Damn it, Cobb was supposed to ask me this and didn’t” thoughts. Any closing thoughts — including how to stay up to date with what you’re doing, a shameless plug for Outcry AI, anything else. These last couple of minutes are yours.
Micah Bornfree: Thank you for the opportunity to be on the show. I’ve taken five years where I didn’t respond to any interview requests — I chose not to do any talks — where I’ve just been working on my own stuff. So it’s good to accept an interview request and talk about these things, and I appreciate the questions you’re raising about AI and the future of AI. The thing I want to leave with is this question: what is activism for, and are we currently using it for its highest purpose? That’s what I keep thinking about. Is activism for protesting Donald Trump, or is activism for doing massive coordinated global actions? Is activism for changing how people see the world? What’s the highest purpose we can imagine for activism — and how do we build toward that?