Luigia Tricase and Alice Mattoni - Contesting AI Futures: Social Movements and Solarpunk AI [Hype Studies Conference 2025 presentation]
Tricase, Luigia; Mattoni, Alice
- Publisher
- Zenodo
- Language
- en
Abstract
Governments around the world are devising national AI strategies that regulate how, in the next few years, Artificial Intelligence and its technological derivatives will be implemented in different fields of public life, such as healthcare, justice, border surveillance and education. These strategies, as well as the dominant narratives about AI that they upheld, often come with promises of AI’s potential for improving democracies, one that depicts these emerging technologies as a revolution, a discontinuity from the past. National strategies promising an AI revolution are, however, often uncritically reproducing the industry utopias, discursive closure and technological sublime of narratives elaborated by the tech firms behind AI development, a mostly proprietary, venture capital-backed, black-box field of innovation. If promises of democratic improvement are prominent among dominant narratives, they are problematized in the contentious political arena. Here, civil society actors are often developing critical accounts of the way emerging AI technologies are already employed- or plan to be- by institutions, as well as of their overall revolutionary value for societies. Among them, social movement organizations and their networks are primary developers of alternative, contentious and re-politicized visions of AI. Through their practices, these actors 1. delineate AI as an object of contention, 2. Develop alternative uses of AI as a tool for contention. Nonetheless, despite research agrees on their productive, future-making capacity, grassroots practices are currently understudied in the field of AI. This empirical paper emerges from this literature gap, addressing it through an ethnographic approach. Starting from the case study of a social movement network active in two Italian cities throughout 2023 and 2024, we conducted participant observation and interviewed eight key actors of the network. By observing and inquiring about AI practices, our aim was to discover how- and if- AI permeates activist spaces, how it does so, and what alternative meanings about AI are being constructed by activists through their AI practices. Conclusively, we evaluated the potential of these practices to contest dominant promises and visions of AI. While individual AI practices have been discussed with interviewees, with most of them employing Generative AI to code, write and generate images but with careful evaluation of downsides, the focus of participant observation has been on collective AI practices. Two types of collective AI practices are identified: a) present-oriented practices, and b) future-oriented practices. Through a) present- oriented practices, activists in the network elaborate alternative meanings of existing AI and its current value in societies: they discuss existing AI Errors in fields of labor, information, human rights and environmental impact; addressing these errors, they ground in present fact and re-politicize AI, rejecting dominant revolutionary narratives. Through b) future-oriented practices, activists foster imagination moments through which alternative AI futures are discussed: they experiment, through workshops and labs, desirable AIs, first by imagining and then by building and platforming prefigurative AI projects inspired by Solarpunk principles. While they remain situational and are far from implementing long-term alternative AI futures, we highlight the political potential of these practices to question dominant AI promises and utopias.
Full text
Contesting AI Hype Through Solarpunk Imagination and Practice Luigia Tricase Alice Mattoni Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Bologna Hype Studies Conference September 12, 2025
2 As soon as the ears get used to the hum of the processors, the heat becomes the strongest sensation. A dry heat that comes from the machines stacked in dozens of hallways. Busy in who knows what calculations, processing who knows what data. And the closer you get the more this heat becomes a metallic breath capable of drying your throat, drying your eyes. Bologna. Via Stalingrado. Northern suburbs, just a few kilometers from the center. In the Tecnopolo spaces, until a few decades ago, were stacks of tobacco leaves hanging to dry, machinery to process them, shred them, roll them up. 120 thousand square meters of the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi became today the cradle for one of the most futuristic projects in the entire panorama of Italian innovation. Those processors in action are the heart of Italian supercomputing. (...)
3 With Cineca's new supercomputers, Italy will be the second country in the world in terms of computing power. It is currently third, behind the U.S. and Japan. A European record. In a Europe seeking its own way to become a producer of AI-based services. It is not an impossible chase. In 2022, ChatGpt went public. The competitive advantage of the U.S. seemed unbeatable. Then other companies came along: American, like Anthropic; European, like Mistral; Chinese, like DeepSeek. Competing is possible. To do so will require all the buzz possible from Leonardo's boards. All the heat of the supercomputers to come. But above all, a model that works.
4 “Artificial intelligence (AI) is in a phase of extraordinary development,in which it is being characterized as a catalyst for change in the way we live, work and interact with the world around us. This development is propelled by the driving force of intense research activity, which has led to numerous advances in the definition of AI architectures and models, and which has been supported by enormous investment, particularly from private companies and leaders in the field.” “The advent of generative AI systems has,in the past year, made the innovative and transformative power of AI even more evident, enabling the development of automation processes marked by unparalleled ease of use. Driven by large international investments that are unprecedented in the history of computing, this revolution has rapidly transcended academia and research centers, taking on the connotation of a true social phenomenon.” “It is essential to know how to grasp the need for innovation, reading and analyzing the changed context conditions, and valuing the acquired awareness (i) of the strategic importance of increasing our ability to implement and promote the use of AI solutions in the productive, entrepreneurial, educational and social fabric, as well as in the Public Administration, and (ii) that the promotion of our country's distinctive traits will increasingly pass through the codification and availability of AI data and models capable of representing and enhancing its specificities.” Italian Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2024-2026:
5 •URGENCY •LOCK-IN, NECESSITY (ARMS RACE) •REVELATION/APOCALYPSE •FUTURITY •TERROR/FASCINATION •SUBLIMATION/MAGIC Semantic dimensions of AI Hype HYPE Does not prescribe to categories of true or false –Mythical - Apolitical
6 “Maybe the baddies don’t have an agenda, maybe they’re just trying to make money” !!!
7 “Maybe the baddies don’t have an agenda, maybe they’re just trying to make money” !!! AI Hype de-politicizes AI futures by hiding/naturalizing the anarchocapitalist political agenda of the TechBroTopia
8 Let’s talk alternatives Or, how are dominant AI narratives being contested?
9 Introduction
16 Solarpunk is different than Cyberpunk (techno-determinist dystopia) because it challenges the notion of AI as a technology affording a perfect system of social reproduction without agency (black-box AI, GenAI uprise, Sentient AI…) Solarpunk is different than Ecomodernism (techno-determinist utopia) because it stresses the need for social and political radicality (refusal of AI to “fix the system” and “fix the environment”, refusal of “decoupling” imaginaries). So, what is it? Results – the Solarpunk imaginary
17 Solarpunk as a contentious imaginary “An emerging speculative movement in fiction, art and activism, that offers hopeful alternatives of habitable futures in the midst of environmental collapse and climate chaos (Reina-Rozo 2021). Solarpunk attempts to reinject the future with hope by emphasizing radical decentralization, community empowerment through bottom-up innovation and the extensive use of renewable energies and sustainable technologies (Hunting 2020). Premised on anarchic, ecological, and socially just futures (Gillam 2023)” (Gerola and Robaey, 2024)
18 Solarpunk as a contentious imaginary •Unveiling the political project of the TechBroTopia, re-politicizing tech •Radically imagining new futures starting from political goals and *not* from tech •Addressing one’s use of tech starting by political goals
19 •URGENCY •ARMS RACE (LOCK-IN, NECESSITY) •REVELATION/APOCALYPSE •FUTURITY •TERROR/FASCINATION •SUBLIMATION/MAGIC Addressing *existing* AIs, unveiling its materiality, economic model, value for human society, potential (not)use for radical change •SLOWER TIME •CARE •GROUNDEDNESS •FOCUS ON THE PRESENT •TINKERING/HACKING •ATTENTION TO MATERIALITY The Solarpunk imaginary and AI Hype
20 Discursive mechanism 1: diagnosis of undesirable AI present •Labor •Information •Human Rights ( + AI and war) •Environment →What AI actually is and how it is affecting the world *right now* Solarpunk imaginary worked into practice?
21 •Discursive mechanism 2: prefiguration of desirable AI future •Radical re-imagination: Although AI originated as a technology from data and surveillance capitalism, its affordances are re-imagined in transformative contexts: how can AI serve social and political struggle? Feminist AI, Activist AI •Experimentation: Reclaiming, tinkering, hacking.Labs and workshops with grassroots tech projects to build alternative models of AI: free software, open, decentralized, federated, small •Protest: Political pressure on policymakers and industry actors to steer AI innovation towards desirable outcomes: G7 counter-summits, protesting in Bruxelles •→DEALING WITH AI IN SLOW, GROUNDED AND EXPERIMENTAL PRACTICE Practices of Prefiguration
22 Results – Practices of Prefiguration Radical re-imagination Experimentation Protest “I tried to realize an AI that tells the truth by feeding an opensource model only with data “biased” in the movement direction, with archive movement material. (…) I noticed that open-source models hosted locally were performing even better than big ones”. (I8) “Our project works towards imagining and designing a different kind of AI, one that is made of many small federated models. In this way, not only user privacy and control over data is ensured, but also the environmental impact is reduced”. (I6) “We organized this assembly in the main square, open to the public, at the same time as the official G7 summit, so to express that we are open and transparent while they are just a few people closed in one room.” (R1)
23 Conclusions – The Solarpunk AI Discursive Mechanism
24 Solarpunk as concrete utopia: Prefigurative tech activism → activism that, starting from a critique of data, surveillance and anarcho-capitalist logics embedded in commercial tech, attempts to realize alternatives to it in the present
25 Solarpunk as concrete utopia: It doesn’t need to be revolutionary → small scale, local, incremental It doesn’t need to be perfect → experimentation, tinkering, hacking It doesn’t work if it’s not collective
