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Decenter | Alternative Ideas & Culture

@decenter.earth

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Alternative ideas through writing, art and media. Searching the blurry boundary of being human. Editor @emildavityan. Seattle > Melbourne > Yerevan

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Decenter is an impact-focused media platform exploring how accelerating technology is reshaping society and the living world.

Decenter brings together diverse voices through media, cultural collaborations, and real-world projects to examine the future of AI, ecology, food systems, energy and cities.

Sign up using the link in the bio. by @decenter.earth

Read the full article - link in bio.

We eat in a surreal food system. We increasingly understand food through images, labels and stories. But the representation of our food system often bears little resemblance to actual food systems.

We are drawn to stories that evoke more traditional, simple, safe and ethical ways of producing food. These references enable us to efficiently navigate complex, global food systems that are often hidden from sight. But they also help us avoid uncomfortable realities about how food is grown and manufactured. Such references are tropes — recurring representations and stand-ins for how we think (or wish) food was produced that are fundamentally disconnected from the interwoven supply chains that stretch into every city on Earth to feed billions of urban consumers.

Industrialized food systems prioritize the supply of abundant food, with many of our other concerns placated through effective marketing or commodified into niche, high-value segments.

We can look to “pasture raised” dairy, “grass fed” beef, “single origin” coffee, “sustainably caught” seafood, “ancient” grains, “small batch” beverages, “probiotic” yogurts, “heirloom” vegetables, “artisanal” cheese and “locally foraged” mushrooms.

We all like and buy some of these products. They can be improvements on industrial-scale products and we should support local, smallholder producers wherever we can. But the truth is we often don’t understand who owns these businesses or how these products are made.

An appealingly natural description could imply better production methods or it could just be marketing from a multinational food company targeting high-income, inner-city consumers. An over-reliance on heuristics, even if the specific content differs, encourages us to think about food through aesthetics, perceived values and identity. We avoid looking at the systems that produce food or the material impact on ecosystems.

This all-surrounding simulacrum makes it essential to identify what is missing in the representations of food systems, and find a way past the often arbitrary distinction between “natural” and “artificial." by @decenter.earth

Join me for this wide-ranging panel on AI’s global impact on 10 September. Hosted in Seattle but online - register via the link in the bio.

We’ll discuss how AI is reshaping the distribution of ownership, knowledge, power and responsibility across society.

Who wins and who gets left behind.
The future for the labor market.
How trust and truth will be transformed.
How AI will redefine geopolitics.

SPEAKERS
Emil Davityan
Technology entrepreneur, political economist and investor working at the intersection of technology, environment and culture. Emil is CEO of Decenter and was previously President of Rezolve AI and co-founder of mobility technology company Bluedot. He has also served as a senior adviser to Australian Prime Ministers on foreign and economic policy. Emil holds two Master’s degrees from ANU.
Professor Adrienne Fairhall
Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Physics and Applied Mathematics. Professor Fairhall co-directs the University’s Computational Neuroscience program and researches mathematical approaches to understanding how neural systems process information. She completed her Honours degree in theoretical physics at ANU before undertaking her PhD in statistical physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Dr Todd Harple
Anthropologist, innovation strategist and founder of Red Table Solutions. Todd completed his PhD in Anthropology at ANU and has since applied that perspective across technology, sport, health and innovation. Over more than two decades, his work has included innovation strategy across four Olympic Games, five patents and the development of AI-enabled platforms operating at global scale. by @decenter.earth

LINK TO FILMS IN BIO.

Here are six short films worth watching: narrative and non-fiction films ranging from 2 to 23 minutes. Free to watch.

1. SERVING JOY (14 minutes).
A dark comedy by Aussie filmmaker @martin.j.sharpe. A wild journey into suburban social mores and secret hedonistic pleasures.

2. THAT’S AI (2 minutes)

Comedic social commentary by @harteliuslopez. A take on the skepticism and backlash surrounding AI-generated content that is now a fixture of everyday life.

3. PEOPLE PERSON (16 minutes)

A comedic short by @taylor.alden.thompson and @luigi.sarracino. A humorous look at the loneliness, self-involvement, and relentlessly chatty conversational style of some extroverts.

4. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? (6 minutes)

A short documentary directed by @maxxtobin. It explores the suspended life of a Zimbabwean refugee living in the UK and his turn to music for spiritual sustenance.

5. I’M NOT A ROBOT (23 minutes)

Winner of a 2025 Academy Award, directed by Victoria Warmerdam. Examines the contradiction between the unprecedented extent of our cyborg existence and its incorporation into our mundane lives.

6. A MESSAGE FOR THE BUTTERFLY
8 minutes.

Produced by @particle the film won Best Non-Fiction Short Film at the Seattle Artificial Intelligence Film Festival. It explores memory as a survival mechanism and a signal to future generations, rather than as a recollection of past events.

AI NOTICE
The final film on this list was made substantially or entirely using AI tools. AI in filmmaking, like AI across all creative industries, is controversial and moving ahead at hyperspeed (see recent writing "Antidote - Episode 2" via link in bio). There are major issues with the way large production companies are incorporating AI, which will lead to job losses, a flood of low-quality productions, and the misappropriation of past work and likenesses to train models. But I am sharing this film for two reasons: 1. Independent filmmakers will no doubt use AI to tell compelling stories and distribute their films in ways that aren’t beholden to the large budgets and financial gatekeepers; 2) even if you oppose AI, you should know what it is capable of producing. by @decenter.earth

The trope of the broke, struggling artist is damaging. It's true that work in creative industries can be precarious and underpaid - but a society that mystifies art and puts it in a different category from all other labor also undervalues and underpays artists for their work.

This situation is made worse by legal structures that don’t suit creative industries.

With AI replacing some paid creative work, it's more important than ever for artists to control their own business and financial future.

The founder of Metalabel and Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler, and the state of Colorado responded by creating the first legal entity for artists, the A-Corp.

What's different with A-Corps? Artists keep majority voting power and IP, even when investors come on board. There are also easier ways to collaborate and share value with other creatives and partners.

And the kicker is that creative work can be recorded as an asset on the books. This makes the company more valuable and makes it easier to borrow money or get other types of funding.

It was created in Colorado but creatives anywhere in the US can register an A-Corp.

Follow Decenter for alternative models for work and creativity. Link in the bio. by @decenter.earth

ANTIDOTE is a regular Decenter post where I explore the past, present, and future of technology, and how it’s changing our relationship with each other and the rest of life on Earth. I share the ideas and culture I’ve been engrossed in, with each section dealing with a different area.

Read Episode 2 of ANTIDOTE for free via the link in the bio.

The episode covers:
How the Black Death created AI.
AI in Hollywood.
Groundbreaking film history.
Protecting biodversity globally.
Latest on electric vehicles.

There's no paywall to access ANTIDOTE. by @decenter.earth

Technology has shaped writing and art for millenia (alphabets, dyes, paper, printing, oil paint, photography, video etc). But technologies aren’t just tools - they’re imbued with their own logic and impose new ways of seeing and working.

In 1935, the theorist Walter Benjamin said that the mechanical reproduction of images and film enabled by the camera transformed art from a unique object into a method of mass communication.

This mass reproduction changed how we represent and interpret reality.

Photography and film also change the relationship between creator and audience. More people create, reproduce, distribute, and comment on images.
Cultural production isn’t reserved for trained artists and wealthy patrons.

But photography and film still depend on people to imagine, frame, record and edit images. AI goes further. Unlike other technologies, AI generates new art and writing with little to no input.

So what happens? AI will produce some of the same effects: more people produce images as the cost approaches zero, so there is an oversupply (AI slop?).

There are fewer commissions (copywriting, graphic design). The client has greater leverage over the creator.

On the other hand, new forms of artistic expression and social critique emerge, as well as a longing for “authenticity”.

AI also scrambles authorship: If you prompt AI are you artist, client, assistant or audience?

And the boundary between creator and audience blurs even more. AI takes us from mass reproduction to mass generation.

Unlimited “intelligence” will affect not just how we see but how we think. Like with the camera, our perception and cognition will change in ways we can’t predict.

Follow Decenter for more on AI + creativity. Link in bio. by @decenter.earth

Unsealed court filings revealed details of Anthropic's Project Panama. Anthropic destroyed millions of often “uncommon” books when digitizing training input for their models. The company mechanically cut the spine of books to be able to scan the content, and afterwards discarded the damaged books. Work that is no longer in print could be lost forever.

AI models are trained on the work of creators, without credit or compensation, to build products that replace these human roles. The bleak symbolism of AI privatizing our collective output in this way is hard to miss.

It’s not just Anthropic, either. Now book sellers are lining up to offload more inventory to the AI labs. by @decenter.earth

Here in Seattle, there is a 12-month moratorium on large-scale data centers. New York became the first state with a similar ban. Both moratoria were approved in June this year, with opposition building rapidly across the US. There are now over 500 places with restrictions in the US, most put in place in recent months.

Why data centers? The conflict channels different objections, from a decade-long “Big Tech” backlash, to concerns about jobs, air and noise pollution, land use, scarce water, and utility bills. AI feels ethereal but it has a real material footprint that shows up in data centers. Where else, save Silicon Valley campuses, can opposition coalesce? But coalitions stitched together are hard to maintain. It will be telling if opposition splinters when some groups are assuaged (or bought off). by @decenter.earth

A Nikkei investigation revealed that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle reportedly have around $1.65 trillion in off-balance sheet obligations. This is on top of roughly $1.35 trillion in reported debt.

This amount includes loans, data-centre leases, commitments to buy chips and computing capacity, and energy contracts — most of it connected to the AI buildout.

If AI revenues don't justify this investment, companies could be left paying for infrastructure they don't need. This could trigger write-downs and job losses across the AI supply chain.

But there are other problems if the investment does pay off. Generating returns on trillions of dollars of infrastructure requires AI to capture enormous economic value. Delivering standard productivity gains won't be enough. It could mean AI replacing spending on human labor - one of the largest areas of spending in the economy.

The reality is that if AI underperforms, jobs could disappear as the AI bubble bursts. If it succeeds, jobs could disappear through automation. by @decenter.earth

Culture can't be separated from technology or political ideas. We want to break the genres and categories that stop us seeing the reality of why we perceive the world and express ourselves in the way we do.

Join Decenter to find a mix of storytelling, art, music, film and analysis that provokes new ways of thinking. by @decenter.earth

How can we take advantage of the latest technology - to power sustainable work, transport and communities - but without losing ourselves and our communities in the process?

Join @decenter.earth to get new perspectives on how we can live with technology - instead of running away or surrendering to it. Follow us to get beautiful writing, conversations, art, media and more. by @decenter.earth