We get to help make this.

The students at UBC brought pots and pans. People inside the conference had come to talk about AI. The argument between those rooms is a good place to begin.

I build with these tools. I teach them, photograph the people around them, and bring people together to figure out what we can make. I also want to know who gets to refuse, who owns the work, and who carries the cost when a demo becomes somebody else's daily life.

That curiosity runs through this publication. Robots assembled from parts you can understand. Hackers making a small corner of the internet their own. Artists trying something strange. Communities asking a technology company to answer a question it would rather put in the FAQ.

The protest gives this first collection its opening question: who gets to shape what happens next?

At Futureproof, that question came through conversations, creative experiments, and people meeting each other. In the workshop, it becomes more practical. Can somebody else reproduce the robot demo? What happens when an AI has to paint with a brush instead of taking a shortcut? What might a lullaby for a data centre let us hear?

Those are different ways into the same curiosity. Technology changes what we can make and how we live together. We can be interested enough to build with it and interested enough to challenge it.

This publication starts with work I've already been doing, brought into one place. The dates stay attached. The people who made the photographs and contributed the ideas keep their credit. A future story might begin in a lab, a basement, a festival, a forum, or the street outside a conference.

I want to follow it far enough to find something useful, and leave enough of the process visible for someone else to pick it up.

Let’s get into it.

Kris