@gamithra.com
building things for a less dystopian future 🙆♀ creator of TVÍK: http://tvik.is 🤖 co-founder of Icelandic Association for Humane Tech 🟡 excited about: dissolution of narratives, human governance & alignment, reward systems, cool shapes https://gamithra.com
I'll be hosting a workshop on building self-organization systems. It'll be an exploration into the digital and non-digital extensions of our brains, and the common pitfalls and bottlenecks that sometimes make our systems work against us. 🧠
In Reykjavík on Saturday: the hafnar.haus summer school!!!
Join for 7.000kr and attend as many workshops as you want. We've got kintsugi, color theory, comic making, 3D art, writing, improv, and mechanical watches.
hafnar.community/summer-schoo...
I was surprised at how complex and multidimensional the discussion already was. Art combined with GDPR, activism combined with legalese, sci-fi combined with academia. All around, a wonderful time.
From a personal perspective, I was excited about everything touching on future narratives – if we can't collectively decide on a vision of a future to work towards, we'll always be fighting fires instead of building up.
No photos of me. Forgot to take. Will go back next year to fix.
I focused on gathering intel on funding for curricula on harms of social technologies, brainstorming values for recommender systems for a potential new social media project for Iceland, and gathering clues on data extraction from social media platforms to analyze political sentiment in Iceland.
• a workshop on scraping social media platforms for public interest research (SUPER exciting)
• a book discussion on data protection law and emotion, and our failure to repeatedly act against our own best interest when it comes to data protection
• the use of AI-powered warfare in Gaza
• a panel on reclaiming personhood during the age of online behavioural advertising and non-consensual personalisation
• a discussion about future visions, using Black Mirror as a tool to explore long-term effects of social technologies, and the science of foresight and scenario matrices
• a gamified approach (it had role-playing monsters!) to debating common arguments against the European Open Web Index (sounds boring, was extremely exciting, let's make this)
• a book discussion around migration, racial capitalism, and Silicon Valley logic powering raids and family separation
• a workshop discussing envisioning alternative futures, solarpunk visions, and roleplaying mindsets to approach the future with + sharing our favourite science fiction
• a panel discussion tackling cyber surveillance and data violence in Palestine
• a panel exploring social media recommendation systems that minimize polarization, providing new ideas for values that these systems could be built upon, and alternatives to addictive design
• a discussion assessing the European impact of Trumpist policies, and asking whether the culture wars will be over by the next election cycle, or whether we're looking at long-term erosion of trust
• a workshop test-driving a tool to assess policies' impact on fundamental rights, highlighting how much of a task it can be to assign numerical values to potential suffering
• a panel discussing how algorithmic regulation erodes rule of law
• a screening of a short film about surveillance in cyberspace by aaajiao, a Chinese artist + and a talk about counterhistory that permanently shifted something in me, although I can't yet properly explain what, and maybe that's the point (link: lnkd.in/gFft8wti)
gamithra's activity log from this year's CPDP.ai conference:
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Key takeaway: we should spend significantly more time discussing how our brains feel like from the inside.
Gave a guest lecture in St. John's School in Tallinn for their meta-thinking course. I discussed how we often adopt external metrics that define our self-worth through number-go-up dopamine cycles, and building simple systems to store information outside one's own brain.
We had so much fun on the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection book club/workshop session, and such a great turnout for talking about literature in the morning!
I wrote on Vísir about technology's promise to capture and preserve culture, but only if we stop waiting for the private sector to do it for us.
www.visir.is/g/2025272558...
Hosting a side event at Innovation Week to ask questions about innovation itself. Are we innovating just because we can, or because we should? Will be speaking about solving global issues while trusting our messy human instincts, and about projects that don’t fit into boxes.
RSVP: lu.ma/gzxc1698
Next week, a chat in hafnar.haus with Ben Gruber about a new social media platform for Iceland. 🥰
lu.ma/nzsg8z4r
Dóra and I went live on the most popular radio station in Iceland to talk about tech ethics, the Icelandic Associaton for Humane Technology and the very urgent need to prioritize the well-being of humans and societies over profit-driven growth and personal interest.
I gave Arnar the challenge of figuring out how we can fall in love with the Internet again. He promised to find out by Thursday. Answers presented in hafnar.haus tomorrow.
Yesterday, a discussion evening with @thorlaug.bsky.social about why privatized digital "public" spaces no longer support democratic societies. Next week, we continue the discussion with Arnar Sigurðsson and (attempt to) imagine a healthier Internet.
Speaking at this conference on Thursday. My talk is called Spreadsheets, souls, and fragile futures. Expect a passionate case for trusting messy human instincts rather than praying at the altar of infinite growth and a rant about the number-go-up approach to measuring solutions to complex problems.
Væri gaman að sjá þig þar!
We're hosting a discussion evening about the effects of techno-capitalism on the future of democracy with the Icelandic Association for Humane Technology on Tuesday.
📆 hafnar.haus (Reykjavík), 18:30, 1st of April
www.facebook.com/events/57476...
