Michael Suantak
Michael Suantak is the founder of ASORCOM (Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities) and eimiAI. Operating at the intersection of indigenous rights and decentralized technology, he engineers autonomous, offline-first communication networks in extreme conflict zones, specifically along the India-Myanmar border.
During state-sponsored internet blackouts and kinetic warfare, Michael’s work focuses on keeping community knowledge, medical coordination, and human agency alive. He is the architect of the "Digital Tarzan" philosophy, which advocates for frugal, rugged infrastructure built from the soil up. His field deployments combine 12V DC-native solar power, tactical LoRa mesh networks, HF radio, and localized edge AI to ensure marginalized communities retain cognitive and digital sovereignty when the centralized grid fails.
Michael believes that true autonomy is not given—it is engineered. His ongoing mission is to help rural populations transition from vulnerable digital consumers into resilient digital sovereigns.
Sessions
Mainstream AI models often ignore or exploit marginalized and stateless languages. In this interactive workshop, we will explore the grassroots blueprint for building sovereign, low-resource language AI models—from ethical data collection to offline deployment in rural communities.
Join a high-stakes tabletop simulation to architect secure, offline communication networks for a hypothetical conflict zone experiencing a total infrastructure blackout. You will learn to engineer survival communication bridges—bypassing military surveillance and physical danger—using tactical LoRa mesh, HF radio (NVIS), and ancient pre-physics optical cryptography.
Decentralized technologies often assume a baseline of urban infrastructure, but true resilience is tested at the rural edge. In this session, Michael Suantak, founder of ASORCOM and eimiAI, shares the blueprint for deploying offline-first community mesh networks and sovereign, localized AI for stateless and marginalized communities.
In the face of increasing climate disasters, social unrest, and the collapse of long-held economic systems, people around the globe have been building innovative solutions that empower, engage, and protect their communities - providing alternatives that are both locally relevant and globally applicable.
This conversation invites practitioners working across countries and contexts doing the work to be in community with one another, share what's working, what we're learning, and where the challenges lie.
Together, we'll explore what is truly required for community designed, owned, and governed infrastructure to effectively mitigate the growing effects of climate, social, and economic rupture, and approaches to scale.
Join a collaborative, outdoor game where we completely disconnect from software and digital devices to build the original decentralized networks! Using day-to-night elemental techniques—like mirrors, smoke signals, torches, and acoustic Morse code—groups will take turns transmitting and decoding secret messages across the camp.
Join us for a collaborative brainstorming session on how marginalized communities in conflict zones can protect their cognitive sovereignty. Together, we will explore and co-design blueprints for eimiAI—an initiative to deploy fully offline, highly quantized Large Language Models (LLMs) on solar-powered edge devices to translate indigenous dialects and provide critical data without cloud surveillance.