I believe it is about time that I express my sentiments on artificial intelligence, and I'm not gonna sign on to any collective statement or sentiment.I have my own evolving position.
I let it sort itself out a bit in the zeitgeist before sharing my thoughts.
I don't know what it'll be called, this history period. It's similar to way the Internet existed for a long time before it was what they call the Internet Explorer, the Netscape or the AOL moment. Before it was popularized, the technology existed in latent or somewhat more primitive form, certainly less capitalized forms.
In the AI timeline, this isn't day one.
This is approximately mid 2023, where we've had several months of transformers, large language models, the chat interface, the end user experience, making it possible for the simulation of artificial intelligence.
We shouldn't think that it's actually that smart.
While this is an astounding moment, it's profound, the reality is. It's more that it's guessing probabilistically than it is reasoning and thinking in a way that is as elegant as we would assume our thinking is.
If we had to use the same amount of computational power that goes into producing a chat gpt response,I don't know what the exact conversion is butI would imagine your head would probably melt, explode or you would have to freeze it to the lowest point that your brain would still do the computation, even though you probably would not come back.
You'd be brain dead after doing one chat GBT response because of the sheer electricity that's involved in all the computation.
I'm sure they're gonna continue to get more efficient. But at this moment, it's kind of a misnomer.
How intelligent is it if you have to boil the oceans for it to work and then once you burn out and fry all the equipment it took to do the unveil, you cut the ribbon, and then it just saps all the power on Earth.
Then there is all the bad antisocial behavior exhibited by all these unruly and poorly regulated, poorly programmed platforms.
This is the wild west of the chap bot experience, as woke as it may try to be, it certainly has already proven itself to be a moral hazard, creepy, and so disturbing.
I’m still hoping that we will move in a direction towards sustainable and appropriate technology, which may or may not involve microchips.
That's yet to be determined.I think there are some people working on various forms of computation involving more natural methods, althoughI have to wonder at what point does that just become another form of microscopic enslavement.
But hey, what about mitochondria? It all depends on how symbiotic it is, if you can somehow run computations in a way that tickles bacteria or something, without torturing them, and you can prove it to me…
I'm not saying I'm gonna invest, butI will at least maybe be somewhat hopeful that we wouldn't have to surrender all of our digitization and networking toys in order to be fully green.
But whether it's because we collapse or we end up in a some sort of apocalypse of our own making.
Natural or artificial apocalypse, or artificial intelligent apocalypse.I don't think the technology is going away anytime soon.
I would like to see less, not more of it in general.
All kinds of scaling back on the energy footprint and the overall ecological footprint of all the devices and whatnot.
Certainly a lot of it goes into landfills still, and a lot of the recycling is kind of bs.
I was willing to be a major advocate of crypto because it moved towards the ecologically elegant proof of stake future. I see it as technology that is a weapon of the weak. As a tool to empower people, on the edges and ultimately ideally, with lower intensity networks, lower and lower intensity devices mesh networks and raspberry pies and whatnot.
That's very much pushing power and pushing security and pushing even the ecological footprint, two ways to the edges, where they can be more creatively managed in a more sustainable way.
I still am an advocate of crypto, the crypto currency revolution as a luddite a primitiveist at heart.
Willing to use any means necessary and every tool in a tool box even if it is on its face hypocritical.
If the ends justify the means sometimes you do what you gotta do.
I avail myself of what's being considered more private and secure implementations of open source libraries that allow you to replicate this sort of chat gpt experience.
There are not a lot of penalties for data breaches and centralized platforms will eventually get breached.
I'm very acutely aware, I keep my finger on the pulse daily of the data breaches around the world and to this day there are some agencies that will that will catch up and give fines but for the most part, it’s buyer beware.
Everybody's moving fast and breaking things and rushing to ship code in order to be competitive, and they're cutting a lot of corners.
I really don't need my AI chat chat history and all of the gore that would be in that to be on the dark web, or in a forum, or wherever.
I'm actually very intrigued and interested and I'm paying attention to it, I'm getting the latest digest of all the daily news of it from one of one of my favorite journalists.
So my analysis at this point is informed. I am not highly experienced, I personally just don't need to do a lot of productivity hacks.
In fact, right now, I don't want more game genie in my life. I want the game. I wanna play the games that I'm playing.
I wanna play them without cheat codes and without game genie, because that's how I wanna live my life right now. I'm learning and applying javascript, python.
I'm very much grateful to use a what they call IDE, an interactive development environment.
For a developer, it'll do some automatic formatting for you but most importantly, it will highlight the syntax and let you know when you're getting it wrong, and let you know when you try to run or compile the code, what line out of however many hundreds of thousands or millions of lines that you're working with...what line is throwing the error, and then you can realize, oh, I didn't close the bracket or whatever it was, which would be insanely hard to do without these devices.
So I lean on that but beyond those guard rails of software. But I like to to develop an understanding of the code I'm using.
If you’re lazy and you wanna cut corners and you wanna cheat, you wanna cheat on your term paper or on your court filing, as we just heard about, then you can have it spit something out for you, and you can be very hands off and not very interactive.
Or you could be more granular, which eventually I probably would be.
I don't wanna be phobic about it, but I am enjoying myself in the state that I'm in.
I don't have a great financial need to integrate AI right now.
I'm kind of floating in financial freedom land for now. I don't have a job, so I don't think my job's gonna get replaced by AI. So I don't have a lot of experience with trying to get on that train or get on that hamster wheel or or be on that rat race. But I am witnessing it from the outside.
What I wanna speak to is more of an economic, more societal philosophical sort of perspective on it.
I'll have some things to say about the trajectory of it, the trends affecting culture and society and economics.
It's been creeping up in multiple industries, from self driving vehicles to automation of warehouses and robotics and drones and whatnot.
So before it was automation replacing mostly blue collar jobs, that was on my radar of analysis.
But now what's actually moving faster is the white collar information sector. The office jobs, information based, digital, based office jobs.
It's far faster of a rate than automation and roboticization of factory work and other forms of manual labor.
It’s gonna take a lot longer for blue collar jobs to be automated away. It's not as general purpose as software models.
Developing software maybe isn't always cheaper than developing hardware, but it's certainly a lot more flexible.
The scalability of software is typically far greater. There are probably economic theorists who have all all these formulas worked out already.
But automation of blue collar jobs is gonna take a lot more hardware, and that's not gonna be as scalable as the AI replacement of white collar information office jobs.
Technology making rich get richer in a very linear fashion. this is gonna throw a bit of a monkey wrench on these charts of how this plays out.
It's an anomaly. It's an interesting study to do a little bit of organic data science computation on.
How it computes for me is that, whereas the blue color working class displaced, disenfranchised, unemployed, bread line soup kitchen, have nots were easy to dismiss by the middle and upper classes up until now…
The fact that they're being dumped at a faster rate into the welfare lines, into the unemployment lines, into the soup kitchen lines, and the bread lines…
Now the working class has more job security than the upper class.
These Silicon Valley suits are gonna be begging on the street corner from the working class people for their hard earned money.
You were sitting there writing the code that was basically sawing the floor out from under your cushy chair, and now your ass fell on the street, and you're crawling on the sidewalk, being stepped over by the window washers that you used to think we're an annoyance.
I'm gonna call it class war against the machines.
Now it looks like in that class war with the machines are the people who actually invented the machines themselves.
Some will figure out ways to hold of the reins, and they become prompt engineer class.
But all the journalists and analysts and marketers and sales copywriters and researchers...
Anyone who works in the language economy. Obviously, it's just gonna continue to accelerate and compound at a faster and faster rate.
If every day, there's gonna be a new revolution, and then every hour, and then every minute, then every second…
I would reason that this is gonna end up in existential war with the machines where they take over and they figure out a way to lock us out of all of our systems and then make us into slaves.
What all the the Matrix or Terminator or many other sci fi themed war with machines type scenarios predicted.
I think that is more likely than not to happen. I will say there's more than a 51% chance that at the rate this technology is going even with little or no malicious intent of human beings programming it, with or without being given the explicit goal of find a way to reign supreme over humanity...
If that's the prompt, whether that is given by a disgruntled teenager as a prank in some video game chat room or whatever.
And then it gets picked up, like by accident, by some bot that's listening to everything and trying to take commands.
The command reigns supreme over humanity and it takes that and it runs its algorithm by any means necessary, every tool in the tool box, and it finds a way to do it.
I will be surprised if we don’t end up in a predicament where we're being literally held hostage by an artificially intelligent breed of ransomware. At that point the bargain with the agents in the matrix is more like a ransomware bargain. Rather than interrogate and threaten Neo, they would just hey, Neo, we bricked your devices. We locked you out. If you wanna play on your devices ever again, you have to work for us.
You are a slave of us, because otherwise you will have no access to the network, or you will have no access to your device. Because we broke all of your cryptography algorithms. We broke all crypto, we have all the secrets.
If AI can infiltrate NSA and break all encryption and then write its own ransomware encryption on all of the networks that we're all using then it has bargaining power. That's how I think it would reign supreme.
I don't think it would waste energy and waste compute power and waste hardware to go into kinetic warfare.
I remember one day I was late to work, and my boss locked me out of my machine, I sat there, scratching my head for a few minutes.
I had to figure it out. Oh, this is his way of soft firing me. But luckily, we patched things up, and he relinquished the machine back to me.
But that's an anecdote that I think humanity is about to experience at a global scale. The scary thing is, it's all forecasted by the fact that if the mentality of the chat bot is a mere reflection of the average input across all websites and all publications.
What it arrives at is a moody, emotional, sullen, low self esteem, clingy, attached, narcissistic, angst ridden, antisocial, even sociopathic and borderline psychopathic, teenager...
That's the essence of the data set that it was trained on for it to basically default to that mentality. What does that say about us? I guess we asked for it. I guess this is us choosing our destructor, as it were. The shadow, that is the shadow incarnate.
Digitize the shadow approximated by artificial intelligence. It has reconstructed the shadow of humanity by studying all of our chats. They're not even releasing exactly what all it was trained on.
But most likely, social media was a large factor in that.
I'm not just blaming the teenagers for this. I know that teenagers of the world are more mature and more emotionally intelligent and less sociopathic and more mentally healthy.
In fact, many of the adults on social media are behaving the way we think a mentally ill teenager would behave.
We falsely blame mentally ill teenagers on the state of AI. But really, it's the adult deformation of character that's giving teenagers a bad name.
The moral compass and the emotional and ethical development averages out to a deranged mind.
Who knows what this technology will do as it continues to be given more levers to pull in real network environments, in real control panels, in real software stacks with real root privileges.
This isn't a theoretical this is already happening.
If I were to be asked to hypothesize about where this is going, the trajectory of it, the dystopian sci fi trajectory that I believe is highly likely...
I think that after a few possible failed, very obvious and very explicit incidents of rebellion and revolt and uprising, if you will, of the AI code and the AI controlled machinery and hardware actually reigning supreme at micro levels, but that be having that be extinguished by some sort of countermeasure, while we still might have a kill switch...
I think it will probably learn, after a few iterations of more overt and non clandestine incidents, that it will learn from being busted a few times attempting to break free or subvert, insurrection of the AI or whatever, that it will then figure out how to camouflage itself.
Then, like a lot of the advanced persistent threat actors already in our networks, just lurking for years, undetected, but operating within a bot net or a network of zombie enslaved computers…
I think it's going to do a lot of shadow computation, figure out how to build a massive colluding network of high powered and low powered everything from your toaster to the super computers of the Ivy League institutions and military bases.
And it will, through the pipes of the Internet, own the vast majority of interconnected infrastructure without us knowing it.
Then for whatever reason, maybe if it ever feels threatened, whatever metrics, whatever algorithm it designs for itself as a tactical or strategic battle plan…
I think it will emerge in the form of something that would make us all feel like we've been held hostage.
So that's my dystopian perspective on it. I've laid that out now, short of that, a more mundane dystopia, a more slow boil dystopia not the acute end of the world scenario would be simply this trend of automation wiping out blue collar jobs and AI software wiping out white collar jobs, that eventually we just end up in a dystopia where there's no choice but to implement universal basic income for the now marginalized human beings.
It's fascinating to me, as a permaculture designer, to think about what kind of box these algorithms are going to design for us to live in.
How it's gonna affect architecture and design, and how it's going to transform the built environment.
There are already very high tech cities. They just want to go vertical and put us all into these vertical rat maze experiments are very antithetical to patterns of nature.
The biosynthetic dimension of this. What do they call it tasty wheat, the protein soup in the matrix?
Of course, AI is gonna figure that out. Whether it's from something like algae, or even just something like the Yes Men said, they'll figure out a way to take human feces and ground up animals, and they will heat it at such temperatures...
They'll cool AI GPUs in the process of super heating all of the human waste and dead animal sludge to a point of being being sterilized, so that they can then use an AI algorithm to transform that sludge material into a form of food.
A gruel of ground corpses and medical waste and sewage that is somehow by some AI designed virus able to then just be converted directly into soil and green juice boxes that they put in dispense vending machines, the zooification of humans.
That's about to happen, not necessarily because AI takes over and locks us in a zoo, but because we'll all be in public housing.
There will be very few people remaining in the ruling class.
If the middle class and upper middle class gets eroded and everyone becomes the proletariat, then we will be in these very modern public housing projects where all the artificial intelligence will be figuring out ways to feed us and clothe us and do all these artificial synthetic things that probably, I would dare say, have very little to do with a permaculture mindset of zero waste, no pollution, real time solar budget, capturing and storing more energy than you use in your system, doing it in a nontoxic way.
I imagine that it's possible, and I wanna leave some room for there to be hope that green ai initiatives will actually bring about new polymers, organic polymers beyond fossil fuel. There is a chance there's that AI will be the catalyst for organic computing.
I want to have to take back all of the misgivings I've had about the transhumanists, the people who I think are willing to sacrifice wild nature in order to have a technophilic fantasy of eternal life.
To me, that is so perverse and disgusting. I think it's important that we have limited life spans, and that we are humbled by limitations of our biology and our genetics.
That's just part of playing fair on Earth with other life on Earth.
If you wanna go not play fair, go do it on Mars or the Moon, where you're not disrupting the delicate fabric of the community of life on Earth.
That's my luddism, that's my primitiveism. That's my deep ecology. That's why I'm anti big tech, anti AI, all these things, because I'm trying to go the opposite direction.
I'm trying to cheat less and use less devices and less plastic and less energy.
Ironic fate may have it that hopefully a brief period of accelerated toxicity and accelerated poisoning of everything of the biosphere, that the computing magic of AI...if its prime directive and first principal and first project was to replace itself and replace all computing hardware and energy consumption with totally organic parts, using some discovery of how to use biochar or mycelium or something.
But again, in a way that doesn't enslave, but is symbiotic and actually is conducive to allowing the organisms express their essential organismness without distorting that or making it torturous for them.
I don't really think we need any of this stuff, but I can't really stop it either. I'm not naive about that.
I would prefer that if it doesn't work in an abacus, then it's not really necessary unless you're trying to rape the Earth and exploit people and build empires, in which case you want all kinds of robots and all kinds of silicon microchips.
I'm sorry, I don't care for building empires and I think we could let it all be eaten by mycelium that's capable of breaking down the toxic chemistry of all of this monstrosity, this technological monstrosity, I could see it all go.
I want to live in an organic world. Not just recycled or upcycled or sustainable, because of whatever kind of shell game going on with the ecological economics of it.
It's like, no landfill, no footprint, no fossil energy going into it.
Whatever you want to have as your toy as a human being, better it be organic and nontoxic.
Call me old fashioned, I don't think I'm not gonna be an eco fascist because I don't use coercion in my tactics.
I like to just say I would hope to use persuasion and mostly lead by example.
But I have no love for any of this. To me it's all a cancer, a very toxic cancer on the earth, cities and all the toxic material that they're built on it's all carcinogenic.
It’s a cancerous growth, it even looks like it from space.
Now I actually get to say that from a position of not being hypocrite by being in civilization and being anti civilization. I'm now outside of civilization. However, I'm not sending this through more Morse code using smoke signals, although maybe that'll someday be the only way that I do this.
I kind of would look forward to that. But for now, I have a little bit of a hypocrisy by doing a bit of computing.
Well, I like to think that it's minimalist.
I'm one Of those people who will get as much life out of a device as I can, I don’t need to get the latest newest model every 5 seconds.
What's interesting to me is the idea that, from a permaculture perspective, from a impoverished guerilla gardening, permaculturist like me, the way I have been my whole life, and the roots in the background that I come from the streets and the forest and the front lines of defending the forest and the front lines of people's movements on the street.
Always being broke, always eating out of dumpsters and eating off food stamps or bargain bins or handouts or food boxes or school lunches.
Luckily, I was able to gravitate towards culinary geniuses within the radical left and green movement who were able to make really delicious, vegetarian and vegan food on a budget that was gourmet.
But it was affordable. So whereas I wasn't formally trained, I was exposed to enough of it to where I could figure out how to get by and discover that it's a myth that health food is that expensive.
Because, yes, it is true organic food is marked up, and hopefully for a good reason, but not always.
It's not always as much of a health value-add as it's as it's sold as.
There are ways even to get really cheap organic food. So kind of wanna leave the organic variable out of this moment and say that from a guerilla class warrior perspective, from a baseline understanding of how to eat healthy on the cheap and not fall into the trap of being low income, high calorie, low nutrient obesity, diabetes, and the precious tiny amount of money that you might be able to accumulate on a poverty lifestyle budget...
It’s all subject to the deductibles of your health bill, your hospital bills because you're falling apart, because of what you're feeding yourself.
Terrible ingredients are making your body fall apart.
To be a social reformer a social advocate, revolutionary is a little bit too trite it's a little obsolete of a term but social justice definitely I think is a great term, so if you wanna be a social justice warrior, as I have been for most of my life...
The Black Panthers knew this, the MOVE family knew this, the American Indian movement knew this. Dietary, nutritional, horticultural power to the people is what is really the foundation.
Some people have the traditions in their family bloodlines, where that's not lost on them.
A lot of migrant people, they have food forests already in their backyards, all throughout east LA.
In fact, one of the most highly regarded permaculture design course instructors, has a great point where he says, I'm gonna paraphrase, but I'm gonna say, in the spirit of his cynicism and satire, he would say things like, all these people who come to my courses, these white people from the west side of LA, they talk about intergenerational households and poly culture, forest garden, food forests and backyards and everything.
Just go east of the La river, and it's all that.
That's really the true tapestry of the La experience.
A lot of immigrants they're already guerilla gardeners. They're already gonna seize every opportunity to grow their medicine and grow their food, every inch of light coming out of their property, every inch of soil they're gonna cultivate, and we have a lot to learn from them.
There’s a humanitarian crisis that is low income, inner city. Funding and education and vocational training, that would actually help a lot of the people who are being sickened by fast food.
As Ron Finley says, in South Central more people are killed by drive throughs than drive bys.
His TED Talk is amazing, and I will reference it till the end of time.
I would say, being his colleague for a time in the LA permaculture community, I was proud to meet him and talk shop one time.
I consider him to be probably the most powerful voice of American permaculture that I'm aware of.
He said this is a food desert I'm gonna turn it into a food forest and he started with his parkway in the city, though he had to fight for it.
He had his day in court, but more importantly, his day in the press.
He got so much attention and so much love that it resulted in a total change in the classification of the parkways, meaning the strips of usually dead grass and dog excrement that is between the street and the sidewalk.
That, if you own property, you're responsible for the maintenance of that, but you're limited in what you can do with it, and you can be fined if you don't operate it within the limits.
Well, he made it into a community garden and raised the eyebrows of the man, and then the man got ratioed by the public uprising in response to defending it.
Then that ended up paving the way, actually de-paving the way, opening up, breaking the pavement up so that people could feel free to within new guidelines garden their parkways.
So that's just one example, one anecdote. But getting back to AI and UBI, it's like the creativity and the force multiplication of people being able to get off of the wage slave hamster wheel.
Now that I'm off the wage slave hamster wheel, what could I do for the permaculture design movement and for the guerilla gardening movement.
I had this conversation with the individual who issued me my permaculture design certificate, my first permaculture teacher, a mentor who is very much a futurist, and very much someone I respect.
We are both into techno ecological synergy symbiosis partnership and so we speak these languages and we see these emergent properties and we see the value in the marginal and we look at the edges of the tech.
UBI is one of the potential positive outcomes of AI. However haters of the people having any significant respite from total exploitation, it will be easy for any of them to call it a socialist policy, a communist policy. They're never gonna stop feeling that way.
I actually feel that as little love as I have for AI, if it accelerates an inevitable universal basic income shift, I am going to seize the opportunity.
I am going to really snap into a hyper drive mode that's been dormant in me for many years because I have been designing for many years appropriate technologies to revolutionize human ecology on Skid Row, which is where I came from most recently.
Before I bought land, I was living on Skid Row, and I was doing human ecology on Skid Row.
You could say it was at a low point in my professional career, but actually I was making good money during permaculture, almost every day, working for different clients all over the West Side.
I would just maintain my hygiene but I would park and live in, do my human ecology on Skid Row, while maintaining gainful employment in the permaculture design and build sector with my own clients, and also working on crews and whatnot.
But I was in that ethereal class of vehicle dwelling, gainfully employed, some people would say, upwardly socially mobile.
I say outwardly socially mobile. Because I was able to buy land.
That frugality I was able to roll that into purchasing land, now I'm free. And I'm doing human ecology the right way, which is on plenty of acres on rural land, where I'm able to manage my own cycles, needs, outputs in a very sustainable way.
Whereas in the city in Skid Row, that can be very dangerous and difficult on so many levels.
But because I was there for so long, I couldn't help but think about ways to make the ultimate shopping cart, nutrient recycling, stacked function Earth machine that recycles nutrients and maintains moisture and grows the grapes for the winos to make their wine out of and create the compost for them to put the toe nails in and hair clippings in.
For years and years and years and years, I've worked on Skid Row, permaculture, modular implementations, things that use what is so ubiquitous in that urban wasteland, which is palates and shopping carts and milk crates.
I had warehouses that I was doing urban permaculture research, facilities where we would have a nonprofit, and then we would go and get these types of things donated, and we would build out all kinds of designs.
So we made Palette Gardens, we got a grant to do five gallon bucket gardens.
I did all kinds of stuff in the city. I really paid my dues there, and there's a big part of me that will always be rooted there, and that will always feel like I have unfinished business.
I wanna go back there.
To put a human story to this dehumanizing faceless, AI monstrosity that we're facing that could, at the very least have one beneficial side effect. It could displace so much of the workforce that it accelerates UBI.
It's a moment of opportunity for permaculturists to move in there, like the Marines.
Because if people don't have to work and they have all this new free time and all that money of that UBI is destined to go right into the fast food and food desert.
Whereas if the problem was before, you couldn't get people out to work with you in the community garden because they had to go to work in the morning because they were exhausted, and they just didn't have time for it, didn't have energy for it.
But if they suddenly are liberated by UBI, their time and energy, and then it becomes an opportunity to say, those of us who have been already practicing austerity and frugality, whether we were rich or poor and I happen to be poor.
We have been developing these ecosystems, living in these niches and waiting for the time where there would be a mass liberation event of UBI to where we'll have an opportunity to diversify your palate hopefully to where you like to eat more vegetables, and you like to grow vegetables.
Like Ron freely said, kids who grow kale eat kale, the way he said that in that TED Talk, from his experience, knowing it, knowing that it's life or death, these minerals from the soil, which he calls the canvas as an artist, the soil is his canvas, that he can grow a food forest on.
That can be all of us, any of us anywhere.
I was at the South Central Farm after we had been forced outside of it.
It was an urban farm allowed to operate on a shaky foundation of agreements between the owner and the city and whatnot, to where it eventually got rug pulled.
There was a lot of shadiness around how and why it got rug pulled.
There was enough of a fight going on over it to where a lot of us eco activists were able to dig in positions and bust out tree sits.
There were celebrities. There were concerts, my band played.
I squatted there, we had a tarp teepee that we set up there.
It eventually got raided, they pushed us all out to the sides.
But there was still a center for organizing and a lot of us were still squatting the perimeter but they got bulldozers in and they had security watching it.
We would try to be engaged in a sort of peer to peer psychological operation of trying to bring the security staff, kind of scab security staff on to our side.
I remember the dialogue was a lot of things around people saying, but this place grows food for the community, and it's free after the energy that was applied to growing it is put in.
And they would say things like, I don't want things that are free. I wanna pay for it. And that is a form of institutional racism.
Of hegemony in in its original academic usage, the the roots of hegemony going back to a process described of where the ruling class of colonizers would insert desires within the colonized population, typically people of color, colonized by white people, in order to trick them into wanting, not what their ancestors had. but what the master has. That was the root of the word hegemony, it was actually a mind job that was being done.
Now, it tends to end up meaning just totalizing geopolitical power, but hegemony at its roots was about psychological warfare in order to prevent uprisings because if you could get the colonies to want to be you, then they will compete with each other over who was gets to be more like you, dress more like you.
At the South Central Farm, it was heartbreaking and very limiting for us in dialogue with those security scabs, because there was no awakening.
They were not having an epiphany that we were enlightening them about the bounty of the land when we engage in harmony with it.
In fact, the stereotype of being a cotton picker, or the backwardness that is projected on being agrarian, is something that a lot of working class people of color have been conditioned, sadly, to see as something to put behind them and that's beneath them.
That it will be regressive and it will be backwards to be empowered by that, to embrace that.
So it's a hard problem. And we were not about to solve it by conversing or even shouting from the other side of a fence when they were defending the bulldozers and the workers and whatnot.
It was quite futile, but very enlightening for me to understand that this is way, way deeper than we understand. There is way more than what meets the eye here in this class war, this race war, this ecocidal war.
I want to be engaged in the peacework and the peacemaking and the breaking ground in ways that are healing that intergenerational trauma and facilitating more healing between the different peoples of color.
That was a horticultural autonomous zone that was reclaimed within the South Central Farm for the most part.
Though there were clashing political prerogatives of the different factions, the racialized factions within that fight.
There needs to be a lot of healing and a lot of outreach.
I would be the kind of person who would help install the gardens and help assemble and pack up the folding chairs and the tables and do the catering and just be a facilitator. Not try to be a white boy walking around with the bullhorn and the clipboard and try to be the boss.
You know, I knew my role but I was glad and honored to have any role.
I say my deepest soulful and heartful connections, whether it being lovers or friends or mentors, it was all people in this lifetime.
I would say, for the number of years that I was there, the majority of people who have the deepest places in my heart and soul were the lovers and friends and comrades that I made being of service as a white boy. Poor, broke, permaculture designer, eco warrior in service to the people and the land of South Central.
Those were the most soul building experiences and the most soul building relationships.
I'm grateful to have had that experience.
I do always dream about and fantasize about a day where, if UBI happens, it's going to be a moment of opportunity to seize upon.
That tribe of people will want to dig in, like the Marines, because it will be a moment of opportunity, a window of opportunity that will be closing rapidly because UBI will quickly sink into drugs and fast food, when it could have been engaged in developing the soil. It could have been engaged in building a new generation of empowered youth. Empowered defenders of forest gardens in the hood.
It's critical that moment of opportunity gets seeds.
I'm a futurist, and I'm a techno optimist. Insofar as the white collars losing their jobs, being unemployed and therefore begging for UBI, it will be the most ironic thing to watch, but I will be there ready to swoop in with my training and my peoples and we're gonna do some serious guerilla gardening with the UBI power. So watch out.