Tag: community computing

Designing socially useful computing, together

Today I gave a short talk at a teach-in on the politics of data centres. The teach-in was part of the Stop Dirty Data Centres European Days of Action on 6 and 7 November, when local groups across Europe protested and called for a moratorium on large data centres.

The teach-in took place during a support demonstration organised by Fossielvrij NL at the Plimsollweg in Amsterdam Sloterdijk. That’s the site where Pure DC is building a hyperscale data centre for Microsoft, despite the city’s ban on hyperscales. Fieke Jansen and Charis Papaevangelou organised a line-up of Dutch university teachers, each of whom had five minutes, outdoors and without slides, to explain one part of what is at stake. Thanks to them for inviting me, to Fossielvrij NL for organising the demo and to Geef Tegengas for their direct action.

A rough abstract of what I said:

I don’t need to convince anyone at a demo like this that we should resist the buildout of big corporate AI. The question I asked was: what could computing be instead? I shared three lessons from my research as a designer. First, look past the app to the infrastructure underneath it. To really be able to shape applications, people need a say in the stuff they are built on top of. Second, you can leave an app, but you can’t leave the infrastructure, so pushing back takes durable organisations with members, in addition to individual protest. I used De Digitale Stad from back in 1994 as an early example of community computing. Third, in addition to opposing big corporate AI, I am mainly interested in exploring alternative forms of computing. Like the Luddites, we can reject exploitative technological practices without rejecting all technology. One test is whether a system resists extraction or accelerates it. This brings me to design. In my view design is always political, so designers should join communities and communities should become designers, both to resist extractive computing and to build regenerative computing that meets social needs.

Update 9 November 2026: Delta interviewed me about the teach-in. Read it in English or Dutch.

Kars speaks from a red lectern on a flatbed trailer in a grassy field, gesturing with one hand. A handwritten sign on the lectern reads "nobody asked for AI." People sit on the grass in the foreground, some in keffiyehs, and one holds up an Extinction Rebellion sign. Others stand behind them, and a BIJ1 flag flies in the crowd. Behind the trailer, a white construction fence surrounds the half-built Microsoft data centre: concrete pillars with rebar sticking out of the tops, scaffolding with a Palestinian flag, and a crane. Office towers rise against a blue sky.
Speaking at the teach-in at the Plimsollweg, Amsterdam, 6 November 2026. Photo: Dorotea Pace / Fossielvrij NL.

People’s Compute: Design and the Politics of AI Infrastructures

This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.

About the original

This post is adapted from a talk given at “The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives” at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 18 September 2025. The original ran to about 1,103 words and 13 images.

Abstract

Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.

The post argues that AI infrastructure (data centres, compute, platforms, APIs) constrains what designers can do at the application level, and that every smart device reinforces Big Tech’s control of that layer. It recalls Amsterdam’s De Digitale Stad as an early example of community-owned digital infrastructure and of its capture through privatisation. Drawing on the socialist republican ideal of freedom as collective self-determination, it proposes three moves for democratic AI design: from applications to infrastructures, from individuals to collectives, and from idealism to realism. It closes by positioning this agenda between technocratic management and populist anti-politics and points to the full paper, an OSF preprint.