chadkoh

“What if people could just… do things?”

This was one of the themes of Causal Islands Berlin, the fourth iteration of the “Future of Computing” conference, and the first one to take place in Europe.

I flew out from Vancouver last week to reconnect with some old friends and meet new potential collaborators. I have been involved with CI since the beginning but this was the first one I could attend in person. The Hallway Track is legendary, and I can tell you I made so many great connections here in Berlin!

The talks covered the technical and the artistic, and there was an underlying message of keeping the bar to participate low so that more people can engage with technology on their terms: less power to giant centralized corporations, less siloing of our information, less intrusive surveillance, less disparity. But this is about more than merely the individual, it is about computing with our communities. To paraphrase one of the presenters (an actual poet who said this much better than I can reproduce here):

I want to co-train and co-own an LLM model with my friends. I would love to see me in their work and them in my work, since this is already happening.

💞

More local control, more agency, more flexibility, more room to remix and reform and customize software, more collaborating with friends, more parody and jokes, and many more experiments. More of what we saw on the Causal Islands stage.

The videos of the talks will be released in the next few weeks. I can’t wait to share them!

Thank you to all the attendees and supporters of Causal Islands. I look forward to continued discussion on the Causal Islands Discord, and I look forward to the next event!

(You can see some more snaps on Bluesky)