SKYWORLD-CLOUDWORLD
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
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SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD, the layer of sky which protects our world, maintains our atmosphere, and which has given us the ability to communicate through invisible signals through satellites, tubes and more importantly through dreams and imagination.
I am currently designing Honor Native Sky a chat-based protocol via sms (chat bot) which can serve as a conversational means of teaching about honoring native land. This project is a part of a larger art project I have called SKY WORLD /CLOUD WORLD where I am examining the sacred nature of our 'cloud'-based communications. SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD tries to understand 'the cloud' as both a spiritual place and a vehicle for the ephemeral way in which we choose to communicate with our kin over distance and time. This concept of the cloud in web-based applications has interrupted our notion of a SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD which is the grand connective tissue all humans have with one another. We must maintain and honor our SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD, the layer of sky which protects our world, maintains our atmosphere, and which has given us the ability to communicate through invisible signals through satellites, tubes and more importantly through dreams and imagination.
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SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD, the layer of sky which protects our world, maintains our atmosphere, and which has given us the ability to communicate through invisible signals through satellites, tubes and more importantly through dreams and imagination.
I am currently designing Honor Native Sky a chat-based protocol via sms (chat bot) which can serve as a conversational means of teaching about honoring native land. This project is a part of a larger art project I have called SKY WORLD /CLOUD WORLD where I am examining the sacred nature of our 'cloud'-based communications. SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD tries to understand 'the cloud' as both a spiritual place and a vehicle for the ephemeral way in which we choose to communicate with our kin over distance and time. This concept of the cloud in web-based applications has interrupted our notion of a SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD which is the grand connective tissue all humans have with one another. We must maintain and honor our SKY WORLD/CLOUD WORLD, the layer of sky which protects our world, maintains our atmosphere, and which has given us the ability to communicate through invisible signals through satellites, tubes and more importantly through dreams and imagination.
If history was written by the victors
The Future will be written by the vectors
Artificial Intelligence will radically change our world, our lives, our planet and it remains to be seen if it will be positive or negative. It is said that:
Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it
And I would add those who ignore data have underfitted models -
When Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were looking for a new model to serve as a basis for the United States government, and they were very impressed by the Iroquois Confederacy (Hodenoshoune, People of the Longhouse, Made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondoga, Mohawk, Tuscarora). Thomas Jefferson spent a year with the Iroquois in upstate New York, in one of their large cities of a very sizable portion of the US and Canada.
When Jefferson, Franklin, and the other founders drafted the constitution they cherry picked the parts that were most beneficial to their political purposes, the bits that seemed to align the best with their Enlightenment-era ideology. Representation, voting, checks and balances etc. BUT
They left out the social and cultural networks that sustained these practices in the actual Iroquois Confederacy.
What did they leave out:
In the Iroquois constitution, women (clan-mothers) from each tribe, were the only ones who could vote, for the representative, who was always a man, a chief.
There was a balance of power- only men could serve, only women could vote
Their economy was driven through complex agricultural arrangements; everyone in the community participated in planting and harvesting. NOT an economy of slavery-dependant plantation agriculture.
This is an example of colonial mindset. I see it; I like it; I want it; I’ll take it. I take what will benefit my own paradigm, but I’m unconcerned with the effect that it will have on the people I take it from.
This is like trying to run a program without checking its dependencies. What if it turns out that confederate democracy (or lasting peace and prosperity) is dependent upon a balance of power along gendered lines? Or upon a different economic model than the one practiced by European settlers in North America? Or imagines a system of agriculture where the environment is protected and maintains sustainable practices.
We all have colonial mindset no matter who we are— just bc our culture has colonial mindset.
But here’s the thing— we are not colonial subjects, we don’t live under a colonial empire anymore!
In data science we talk about models suffering from either overfitting or underfitting. Overfitting is when a model exhibits a low degree of bias, but a high degree of variance. In other words it accepts a lot of differences within the data, but it doesn’t have very much predictive power.
Underfitting is the inverse of this— high bias, low variance. This is what happens when you make a generalization without enough data, or with data that is not diverse enough to represent the real world.
The big problem with colonial mindset is one of underfitting— extracting an idea without the context that made it work in the first place.
I’m here to say: don’t colonize the future. Our plans for the future need to include more data from diverse cultures and societies, and not only those ideas that flatter what we already think!
For instance, let’s say you want to lay the groundwork for a society run on the blockchain. What does that look like? How does that work? What are the consequences? If we don’t have significant data we may have to wing it.
BUT we actually have thousands of years of data about decentralized economies. The use of Wampum (show shell) among the Iroquois functioned as a decentralized, distributed ledger of contracts, and it helped us govern our society for centuries.
Wampum is an example of what I’ve termed “antecedent technologies” and there are many more cases like this. In South America the Inca had a Turing-complete system of knot-tying called Quipu which predated modern computing by hundreds of years.
When we want to use powerful new technologies such as A.I. or blockchain, and we want as much data as we can to help us imagine positive change in the world. We do not need to throw out thousands of years of data that can fuel the next giant leaps our communities will make with technology.
I want people to KNOW that indigenous people had technologies that have solved complex issues, I want us to use their data to help us dream of our future and I want us to believe that just because we have had 500 years of slavery, worker exploitation, poverty and gender imbalance, WE HAVE HAD thousands of years of peace, prosperity and equality here where I am standing now.
References:
“From the American Indian Institute in New York this statement
Before the idea of inalienable rights, liberty and democracy were strung together in words they were strung together in beads made of shells. In this Iroquois Confederacy Wampum Belt, (Our Hiawatha Belt). It represents 1,000 years of democratic principles that we Indians shared with our newer brothers and sisters (Including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin who openly acknowledged in speeches and writing that our Contribution formed the bases of the US Constitution.) We shared our belief that leaders should represent and serve the people which was a startling belief in a world of kings and queens. We shared what we call, The Great Law. Which is the natural law of human dignity that proceeds and underlies all other laws. Even, We The People began as an ancient Indian phrase and it is important in the pursuit of all our happiness that We The People now means, and continues to mean, We, All of Us, Who are Americans.