Throughout August and September of this year, Embassy hosted an eight-week experimental residency program titled Automation for the People. We had four fellows living in the house with us as guests, and a number of remote participants and community members join our showcases and working sessions.
The topic was broadly geared around how technology and be employed in emancipatory and convivial fashion, in contrast to the stultifying and alienating manners in which technology often effects us. We hosted salons and open discussions around how technology factors into prefigurative politics and the relations of production, drawing from texts like Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and Karl Marx’s notebooks on the history of technology. One of our fellows, Clovis Vinant-Tang, also hosted several discussions on post-labor economics.
While the structure of the residency was quite loose and flexible, we did offer a basic timeline of four two-week phases:
Weeks 1-2: Imagine & Listen Weeks 3-4: Experiment & Prefigure Weeks 5-6: Demand & Defend Weeks 7-8: Build & Do
One of the guiding intentions here was to have a fallback structure to guide the residency, without constraining it too tightly. A major benefit of community living is the high degree of serendipity afforded by a group of friends living together and, in this case, working on similar projects. We wanted the structure of the residency to organically tie into this lifestyle, while also providing some minimal viable direction.
Local Attunement
As to the particular structural logic of the timeline, we were careful to set a tone of listening and reflecting before building. Given the contemporary culture of San Francisco, wherein the technology sector is culturally dominated by the venture-fueled AI gold rush, we thought it was an important intention to set. Much of the surrounding tech industry, and by extension the future it promulgates, is determined by the imagination of the entrepreneurial engineer. This visionary modality, if left untempered by our warmer human instincts, often tends to extractively commodify our attention, devolving into the impersonal sterility which characterizes much of late-stage capitalist culture. Indeed it is in response to this status quo of arid disconnection that community living is experiencing a renewed interest, hence the basis of our experimental residency.
In addition to living in community and helping run the house, our fellows worked on their own projects, with access to Embassy’s cultural reach and reputation. They could host events here, make use of our home server infrastructure and self-hosted AI, and benefit from the extreme serendipity of the cultural fabric surrounding the house. Becoming deeply enmeshed in the daily operations of the house, as well as the broader community, allowed fellows to deeply situate their visions and projects in a rich local context.
One of the other residency facilitators, Steven Elleman, describes this living arrangement as a serendipity engine, and points out how it contains the full product development cycle: you live with the end users of your technology, and you can self-host the infrastructure, often without any third-party dependencies. This sensibility is reflected in the broader movements of localism and local-first technology, with newer movements like cosmolocalism combining these values with global peer-to-peer protocols for information technology.
Local-first Technology
Over the course of the residency, we took a certain post-capitalist attitude toward technology. Specifically, we considered many of the incentives of market-driven software products and services, many of which handle the commodification of users’ data and attention in questionable manners. In the spirit of conviviality, we oriented our approach to technology around local community and relationship, seeking out solution which minimize third-party corporate dependencies, and prioritize local autonomy and utility.
For example, instead of using Google Home for home automation, we use Home Assistant. This allows us, namely the people who live in this house together, to better control the infrastructure connecting our devices and appliances. It also means we don’t need to trust Google with our intimate home data, such as when we wake up and turn lights on.
Accomplishments and Learnings
Over the course of the eight-week program, we hosted several public events, including our launch event, two residency project showcases, and various discussion groups around Tools for Conviviality, self-hosted infrastructure, and the labor implications of artificial intelligence. These events were publicly advertised, and were attended by our friends, colleagues, and community members.
Beyond these events, we made a great deal of progress configuring our home server infrastructure, with a number of self-hosted apps and services. The goal of the community home server project, colloquially dubbed EmbassyOS, is to pilot a framework for other community houses to reclaim their sovereignty and privacy in the age of technological abundance. We can now chat with our house documents, such as the technical documents we get from contractors and bookkeepers, using private self-hosted LLMs.
What does the stack look like? We are running Ubuntu, and primarily using Docker for our apps and services, including Home Assistant, ESPHome, Music Assistant, LLDAP, Headscale, Authelia, Hermes, and Ollama, as well as a couple open-source LLMs.