I Don’t Want to Optimize My Way Out of Being Alive

What a room of filmmakers at Sundance taught me about agency, and the lie we keep calling progress

Hi you,

A few months ago, on a stage at the Sundance Film Festival, I told a room full of people to go ask the richest person they know what their favorite food is. If that person lights up about a perfect taco or their grandmother’s stew, wonderful, keep them close. If they start in about the optimal fuel for peak productivity (Soylent and supplements), be careful. You may be looking at someone who thinks being alive is a problem to be solved. Liking food is the new captcha. Write that down.

I posted a short clip of that moment, and it struck a nerve.

Here is what I think it was: We are being sold a future where you get to extend your life without ever having to live it. And the people selling it want us to call that progress.

The Sundance panel was called Who Stewards the Future?, hosted by my friend Emily Best of Seed&Spark at Solidarity House. I was up there with the filmmakers Valerie Veatch (Ghost in the Machine) and Charlie Tyrell (The A.I. Doc), Dayo Olopade from the Mozilla Foundation, and Christie Marchese of Kinema. Five people who make things for a living asking: Who gets to decide what this technology does to us and for us?

There is a certain kind of very powerful, very wealthy man (it’s always a man) whose entire project is to live long without regard for how to live well. They strip out food and friction and surprise, the whole messy experience of being a person, in order to add years to a life they have drained of its meaning.

This is the ultimate colonization project. We colonized land. We colonized people. The new frontier is your attention, your relationships, your Sunday dinner, your soul.

The plan is that you will not live your life so much as log into it… on a server you don’t control.

Which brings me to the word everyone in tech loves to throw around: Agency. We’ve written about this here before. They have their own definition, and I want to be precise about mine, because language is where this fight gets won or lost.

The agency they’re selling is purely individual. You can do more, make more, ship more, faster, with less effort. It’s pitched as freedom but it’s just being a better tool. You get more efficient inside a system you do not own and cannot change. You become machines.

Real agency includes power in the form of choice, control, and community. Not merely what can I do, but what can we do together. Beyond producing more inside someone else’s system, how can we change the conditions of that system?

The “technology” is not doing this to us. A large language model does not want your attention. It does not crave your data. It has no plan for your soul. People do. The machine is not the actor in this story. People are. Specific people, with names and incentives and quarterly targets. That’s the scary part, but it’s also the good news, because anything people decide, other people can decide differently.

This is not a throw-your-phone-in-the-ocean newsletter. On that same stage I talked about Michael Running Wolf, who is using machine learning to help keep Indigenous languages from disappearing, working with tribal partners on their terms, with respect for ceremony and consent. I talked about the Earth Species Project and its work to help us actually understand how other species communicate. (I remain deeply invested in learning what is going on in the group chat with the trees.)

The same tools can deepen our relationship with the living world or be used to manipulate it. Same hammer, different hand. The question is never only what can it do. The question is who decides what it is for, and whether they will be honest with you about why.

Late in the conversation, Dayo offered this show-stopping line: community is a technology. I want to turn it one notch further. Use technology in community. This moment feels so heavy because it has been engineered to be lonely. We each get our own account, our own feed, our own private spiral with a crushing worldview, and then we act surprised that there is a loneliness epidemic.

The answer is not one more app. It is logging in together. Watching together. Arguing together. Building better things together.

Emily told a story about being at a dinner full of executives gushing about adopting AI. She mentioned that her power bill in Georgia never drops below $400 now, thanks to the data centers her state is busy subsidizing. One guy waved it off as “politics.” No, she told him, that is community. Every time someone uses these systems to do more with less, somebody else, with a body and a bill, is paying for it in some way.

Naming that out loud, in a room that did not want to hear it, is an act of agency. It is also an act of love.

So here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now. The future is not something that is happening to you. It is a stack of decisions being made by people, and you are allowed to be one of the people. You have to be one of the people. Refuse the frictionless thing when it costs more than it admits. Ask, as Jonathan Flowers does in Valerie’s film, whether a given task even needs AI at all. And protect the parts of your life that were never meant to be optimized in the first place.

That’s my question for you in the comments: What is one part of your life you refuse to optimize?

Mine is dinner. I am going to go make some.

The full panel is below. Emily, Valerie, Charlie, Dayo, and Christie all said dope things. Watch the whole thing, then go find two people to watch it with.

Until next time,

– Baratunde

P.S.

If this stirred something in you, I am taking the same conversation further this Tuesday, June 9th. I am co-hosting a free virtual gathering called Declaring Interdependence with Valarie Kaur, alongside José Barreiro and Katsi Cook-Barreiro, on a deeper and older story of democracy on this land. 5pm PT / 8pm ET. Come build with us:

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