2026-07-10 –, AI Barn
We have a working vocabulary for the bottom of the decentralized AI stack: weights, nodes, training runs, federated learning, on-device inference, cryptographic attestation. We have almost no vocabulary for the top of it.
What does decentralized AI feel like in a kitchen, a clinic, a forest school, a co-op? What are its rituals? Its onboarding? It's repair culture? Its etiquette? Its grief?
This session treats those questions as load-bearing rather than ornamental. A decentralized AI future that wins the protocol war but loses the human layer just hands the cultural surface back to whoever has the slickest centralized interface. The interface is the politics.
I come at this as a community/ecosystem builder: someone who spends most of his time asking "what do we actually want from these systems, and what do they want from us?" In my own writing I've been developing the idea of AI Nodes: hyperlocal, embodied, ritualized points of contact with AI that belong to a place and a people, rather than to a platform. A node is not a server. A node is a shared practice with a server attached.
I am Foresight's AI Node Manager in Berlin. I consider myself somewhere between speculative designer and AI ergonomist. I write at @bradleyroyes on Substack, mostly about embodiment, rituals, hyperlocal infrastructure, and what we want from AI. I recently ran adjacent sessions at DeSci Berlin and the New Cypherpunk Summit; DWeb is the one where I most want to actually prototype the human layer rather than just argue for it.