It's 2035 and the truth is alive. It's surprising to say but the truth is alive because things weren't that good in 2024. The UN Secretary General was worried about media extinction, disinformation was on the rise, Gen AI had been invented, and people were equally worried about deep fakes and about cheap fakes. Perhaps worst of all we didn't value independent journalism. That crucial business of discovering the facts of creating shared truths in society, we didn't value it. We said we valued it, but talk is cheap, we didn't value it. We didn't put our money where it was needed. Politicians all over the world were talking about how crucial information integrity was for democracy, but they weren't doing much about it. What did we do when other public goods, let's say primary educational, vaccines, when they were failing, when the market wouldn't support them, one, the state stepped in and funded those public goods. Two, there was regulation in place to ensure that those public goods were accessible to everyone, that they were protected, that they were valued. But what were we doing about journalism? Nothing, no wonder it was dying in 2024. Let me take foreign aid as an example, right? In the global south where journalism economics is at its worst, we were not funding journalism. Just 0.3% of all foreign aid, one third of 1% goes to media and information. Worse 8% of that one third of 1% actually makes it to the global south. 92% is retained in the global north of our foreign aid. That's just $40 million a year. As a comparison in 2024, an F-15 bomber cost $93 million and we were spending 40 million on journalism. Secondly, there was basically no regulation in place to actually ensure that journalism was protected. AI companies were ingesting wholesale the decades of truth and trust created by journalists and were not paying for it. There was no fair value exchange between technology companies and journalists.

But let me remind you, it's 2035 the truth is alive, so what did we do? What did we change? First of all, we massively increased the amount of funding available for journalism from no 0.3% to 1% of foreign aid. Just 1% guys, it's not that much, but that was an extra billion dollars every year, thank you. More importantly, rather than spending 8% in the global south, we spent 80%, we trusted media organizations, we gave them core funding so they could invest in their futures so that they could, for example, develop their own AI capabilities to empower journalists, to empower audiences rather than technology once again, widening the gap between the owners of it and the users of it. We invested through the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which is an independent first of its kind multilateral entity to support journalism. We didn't allow governments to do this themselves because that's too political, it's too complicated, it's too risky. We channel the money through a multilateral fund, we supported the most innovative, the most important, and the most diverse and representative newsrooms in the global south. Secondly, we put regulation in place to protect journalism. We ensured that AI companies had to use licensing agreements to pay for the content that they were ingesting on an ongoing basis to ground and train their models. This became a commercial agreement rather than philanthropy or foreign aid. This fixed one of the market failures that we were facing. We ensured that regulation was in place so that those that were profiting from the truth and trust created by journalists were actually paying for it so that journalists could get paid to do their work and that's why in 2035, the truth is alive.

Whoa. What year is it? 2035. I've just climbed out of this portal that we invented and I swear to God I'm coming out of 2035 and you're not gonna believe the news that I have to tell you. We're celebrating the second year in a row of Africa having the world's fastest growing GDP for the second year running. I see the doubt on your face. You are wondering how I got here. You are doubting, this is a portal, but let me tell you about it. You heard me right? Finally, Africa of 2035 is a political and economic union of 54 countries and we opened up our borders for internal trade, we have a single currency. There's consensus amongst 54 states, we have 40% forest cover. You have to see it, it's so amazing. It's so cold here by the way. In fact, you see this portal that I just climbed through, it was invented by a bunch of Pan-African and Diasporan scientists and I'll tell you how this happened. When the idea was first mooted, I laughed, I laughed so much I went had a glass of wine. I said, these Afro dreamers, this continent that just dreams too much. Everybody said a functioning union wouldn't be possible. There was too much diversity. I mean, in Tanzania alone, there are 120 languages, in Nigeria, my friend, there are 520. So how on earth was this gonna happen? This coming together to really become this one space without borders able to do so much? The process would take decades, what happened? I'll tell you, it began with a TikTok meme. TikTok has 800 million users which grew to 3 billion after the American ban, they didn't know what they were about to do. And an army of young, increasingly political conscious young people more than we can imagine got together and a bunch of nerdy 16-year-old Africans started a meme called, Great Granddaddy, why did they cover us up in 1885? And that meme spread and spread and it morphed and it morphed and it got civil society thinking, it got governments thinking and it actually got all these people thinking, "We should actually have perhaps a single unified language." And it was already happening where you guys all are in 2024 and it started much earlier. And suddenly countries were all beginning to teach Kiswahili, there was a single language starting to form and the conversation had started earlier but what really inspired this TikTok movement? Well, I'll tell you.

In 2025, a group of filmmakers and storytellers and cultural organizers came together and Docubox was one of them actually. And we formed ourselves around a manifesto because we believe that narrative can change the world. And this powerful group of storytellers TikTok, as you name it, they had one thing in common, they were all Afro dreamers. They believed that Afro Colombians were cousins with Afro-Brazilians were cousins with Caribbeans were cousins with Cubans, were cousins with Kenyans, were cousins with Nigerians. They were like, yes, we are related and we are 1.5 billion. Why are we all in our corners, all alone, all afraid, we are 1.5 billion. And that manifesto, I tried to sneak it out of here, but somehow because it's such a secret and we didn't want the people of 2024 to know about it I actually had to write it. Is there something under there? I had to write it. And I'm just gonna quickly read you some of it because this is the manifesto. You are seeing it 2024 ahead of time but this is the manifesto that made this all happen. It was a declaration and it said this. It said, we are all African, every last one of us, every last one of us. It said Africa birthed the entire world and humankind has been evolving and reinventing itself ever since. It's that our ancestors were the world's first witnesses to walk it, to see it, to hold it in their hands and to tell stories about it. And when European leaders gathered in balloon to enslave and carve up the continent, the dismantling of our narrative began. The art of our artifacts were destroyed, our cultural practices were banned and 12.5 brutally abducted and sold into slavery and our sense of self was interrupted. Feel for a minute what that was like. The West grew, Africa shrunk, a continent that doesn't really know itself, doesn't know its history struggles to reinvent its future. So the answer was clear. A continent that didn't know itself, struggles to reinvent its future. So we had to kind of come together and recreate our narrative and re-understand who we are and we did that in 2025. And these stories have become embedded as...The stories that became embedded at truth were disrupted by reflecting our own realities. Film, my friends, has the power to shift perspectives, it doesn't just reflect culture and the world, it influences and changes it.

So just 10 years after the Afro dreamers gathered on the African equator in this amazing gathering, they began to produce stories and songs and films and a TikTok campaign called, Great Granddaddy, why did they cover us up in 1885? And it spread and it spread in a borderless, powerful, rich Africa United with the diaspora began a new chapter. It's kind of cold here in Oxford. I'm sorry, I've gotta go back, it's so good over there.

It's 2035 and you're walking to the polls. Yes, we still walk. Yes, there are still polls. You're excited to vote. You have agency and power for the first time in a long time. You have agency because your opinion wasn't manipulated by an algorithm in an echo chamber. Right now you control your information ecosystems. They're decentralized. The algorithms you use to find and sort information are open source. You calibrated them to your wants and needs and the relationship of your needs to others, which in turn are calibrated against historical and scientific facts and a multi-generational algorithmic common good.

Notice I said ecosystems, plural. The days of a single monolithic information ecosystem are over controlled by a few platforms are over. But how did we get there in just a decade? Well, I could share some 2030s jargon, data abolitionists, mesh network farmers, computational agriculture, But that probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you yet or I could talk about the seismic impact of the 82 global elections in 2024 and the wake up call that ensued. We were a world of lazy democracies at best, who greedily refused their own realization until then, but that hasn't happened yet for y'all either. So let's talk about a bigger picture. There's that thing when the masses take over that special thing, it's done like when neighborhoods get talked about in the New York Times, it's over, gentrification or when morning show hosts discovered the lyrical language of black trans women's kinship, it's quickly Columbus. By 2025 it became clear there was a new cast class system emerging from the co-option and massive non-consensual sweep of unfiltered information replicating the worst systemic harms, including those we thought we'd already laid to rest honestly. But we watched them reemerge like the rollback of rights across many continents until we said no more. These changes had a lot to do with AI, but probably not in the way you think. We didn't yell and scream about large language models, which is obviously what you thought was gonna happen or fuss over individual lines of python code, nerd. We the people from the neighborhood, the folks who made family in the clubs and on the ballroom floor, the diasporic travelers, the waterkeepers, the grandmothers, the singers of songs passed down from generations, the folks who knew their own names despite colonialism, imperialism, and the centuries old barrage of white supremacist violence found cracks in the sociotechnical bedrock and then widen them.

We found strategic points of disruption in their flawed misnomer intelligence and called forth wisdom. Intelligence can be defined as the ability to think logically, to conceptualize and abstract from a data point constructed reality. Wisdom can be defined as the ability to grasp human nature, which is paradoxical, contradictory, and subject to continual change. The function of intelligence is characterized as focusing on questions of how to do and accomplish necessary life supporting tasks. The function of wisdom is characterized as provoking the individual to consider the consequences of their actions both to self and their effects on others. We tapped into collective power. Training in AI model is pretty easy when communities and cities decide to pool resources and instead of generating billions of dollars for select shareholders, these public models generate value for billions of people. By the way, the energy for this public computing is net zero. Solar powered servers have their moment in 2029. So we pioneered more thoughtful data sets in smaller language models. We all consented to what goes in and what doesn't. We have more intimate control of our data and the result is intimate applications, AI that can solve real specific problems. It's funny, the way AI evolved was the inverse of how the web evolved. First, the web was open and then it was closed. We went from Linux and Apache to walled gardens and proprietary everything, from the wisdom of open to the myopia of closed. But first AI was closed and then it was open. We went from Microsoft and open AI, proper noun to a Luther AI and open AI common noun, from the myopia of closed to the wisdom of open wisdom. We made wisdom a necessary building block of AI, generational wisdom, ancestral wisdom, collective wisdom, the wisdom of experience. Wisdom replaced the old AI building blocks and of extraction and exploitation. We changed AI strategically, patiently, necessarily many small cracks, many small revolutions that eventually broke open AI. And in 2035, our information ecosystems are just one of the many prizes.

I have a message from the futures. I am a land defender in exile because of Guatemala and state and extractive industries. Since the age of nine I had been a communicator and a troublemaker. I have done film working, radio, TV, a lot of memes, but now I'm also learning the Mayan tradition of time counting. Today is the 5,152 year on the long Mayan count of time. And today's energy is the energy of the T, the energy of justice, the power of change. 10 years forward, the energy of the wind, thunder and the power of community will allow me to travel back in time to be here with you all today. I have a message from that futures. Indigenous resistance will continue despite and after 542 years after Western colonization, we will still alive. In the middle of systems collapses, climate crisis, massive displacement, water shortage our words will resonate in your mind and your heart. Indigenous futures don't wanna be colonized, don't wanna be saved. In 10 years the occupation war still continues, but you'll no longer support it quietly. After so many attempts to reform capitalism, you have understood that system change means resistive, extractive futures. You have understood that your responsibility is proportional to your privileges.

I time travel to deliver a message. In Hackeo Cultural, in 2021, we begun a school named Seeds of Ancestral Future, a network of indigenous land defenders and co-creating narratives to defend the mother earth. We are sharing narratives for system change with the children in our communities, on our native languages because that's the only way that we can decolonize our dreams and our desires. In 10 years from now, we will be in a ceremony. We will be honoring the fire, the earth, the wind, and the water that keep us alive. The people in this room in 10 years will finally understood that no change in the world is possible unless we stop the ecocide and the ongoing genocides. People will know that system change means defend what it's sacred, what sustain us in 10 years from now the seeds of ancestral futures will be the experts in this room, not only me, And they will explaining and the many 4,000 indigenous languages why time travel is possible because time is cyclical just as life. They will explain that land back is our collective action and back to the land is our ceremony to return to the knowledge of the earth. This is a message from the ancient futures. There will be hope, oh yes, because life will be our common sense and that everyone will know that the fight for mother land and mother earth is the mother of all the fights. I am coming back into my future. In 10 years, I will not be longer in exile. I'll be back in my community with my family, my forest and my territory.

If you don't know who that was that just played, he had more streams than Taylor Swift on YouTube in 2023. He is on the cover of this month's Rolling Stone and his name is Peso Pluma. When we think about changing information ecosystems in 2035 in the United States, we have to talk about Latinos. Latinos are literally changing the face of the United States of America. We are driving pop growth of the population and the electorate and we're on our way to be the majority in 2050. At Equis, we believe we are the X factor in politics and society for the foreseeable future in the United States. And when it comes to information ecosystems, there's been a lot of talk about Spanish language information. Latinos are not stupid. We are over consuming information in online spaces where disinformation is prevalent, saturated, and often going unchecked by platforms. For example, nearly half of all US Latinos are consuming news and information as their primary source from YouTube. Bad Bunny, who knows Bad Bunny here, please? Released his most recent album on WhatsApp for a reason. Most of the world's Latinos use WhatsApp regularly. 25% of Spanish dominant Latinos are using it as a primary source of their news and information. Shared information on WhatsApp knows no borders. And in a recent study from Nielsen, Mexican regional radio stations in the United States or are the best way to reach swing voters this election cycle, not just Latino swing voters, but all swing voters because Latinos are swing voters and swing voters are Latino.

The truth is, we can view these platforms as a place of risk and uncertainty and challenge, which of course they are. But to be clear, social media platforms need to be doing a lot more to be treating Spanish language disinformation with the same equity as they are in English. But we know that culture and media eat politics for breakfast. We can and should use those platforms and forces for good to change stories and narratives and perceptions for good, to change how we see ourselves for good. We know that Latinos are not a monolith. That is our tagline at Equis. There is great nuance to understanding this powerful block in the United States. Yet there is one thing we know for sure, in a world where Latinos by their sheer number should be a powerful block, we still feel like we don't belong. Whether you're first generation immigrant or 13th generation like my family, we feel like we are guests in our own country because that has been what has been told to us. At Equis we call this the guest complex. When you are a guest in somebody else's house, you don't sit down without permission, let alone move the furniture. And if we don't feel like we belong, we aren't going to feel like we can fully participate in all aspects of civic life. 50% of US Latinos choose to stay home every election cycle. The question becomes, how do we use stories and media platforms like YouTube and radio to change the story about ourselves to ourselves so that we can change our own sense of influence, a shared identity and a sense of belonging so that we no longer feel like a guest in our own country. That is when we believe leaders and systems will feel accountable to us, when we will be seen, when we will be heard, and when we believe we fully belong. That is true power.