AI and the Fight for Justice: Van Jones on Life With Machines

Hey friends,

What if I told you that AI might be the closest thing to reparations Black Americans will ever get? That’s just one of the provocative ideas

Van Jones

dropped in our latest episode of Life With Machines.

Van is basically a big brother to me—we’ve got about a 10-year age gap—and I’ve spent much of my adult life operating in the path he blazed. He started as a radical activist, evolved into Mr. CNN with the clean suit and the shiny bald head, and never stopped fighting for justice. This conversation was personal for me, and it hit hard.

And no, A.I. is no a substitute for reparations, but as Van says, it could be a “jetpack” and not just a “hand grenade” in terms of accelerating the progress of Black people and other communities historically exploited and left behind.

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Baratunde (left) and Van (right) smiling in the Life With Machines studio

Baratunde’s Take

Some thoughts still spinning after my chat with Van:

(1) Digital Activism Is Old School
Van’s first big moment as an activist wasn’t in front of a camera or at a rally—it was coding. In the 90s, he built a relational database to track abusive cops in the Bay Area. That’s some proto-Black Lives Matter energy right there.

It hit me because I’ve been on that path too. Back in 2008, during Obama’s first campaign, Black voters were getting misdirected to the wrong polling stations and fed misinformation about voting dates. So I helped create the Voter Suppression Wiki—a crowdsourced platform where people could report and track these incidents. Van was doing this kind of work way before wikis were even a thing.

Tech has always been part of the liberation struggle—it’s just that we rarely talk about it that way. And as Van reminded me, the tools are here. We could be using AI to coordinate movements, spot disinformation, and hold bad actors accountable. But are we?

Seneca scholar John Mohawk defines “liberation technologies” as:

those technologies that can be implemented by a specific people in a specific locality and that free those people from dependency upon multinational corporations and the governments that they control. Liberation technologies are those that meet people’s needs within the parameters defined by the cultures that they themselves created (or create) and that have no dependency upon the world marketplace. Windmills can be a form of liberation technology, as can waterwheels, solar collectors, biomass plants, woodlots, underground home construction—the list is very long.

• John Mohawk. Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader (p. 56).

So for AI to be a true liberation technology in this sense and help “Make Wakanda Real” would require some deep customization. Simply using ChatGPT isn’t enough. We probably need to use open source models, control the dataset, and certainly avoid simply using A.I. to accelerate joining the current extractive capitalist model. I’ll share more on this over time as I’m very interested in this deeper deployment of A.I. for liberation.

This segues nicely to…

(2) AI as Reparations?
Van said something that stopped me cold: AI might be the closest thing to reparations Black Americans will ever get. Why? Because right now, the playing field is more level than it’s ever been.

Anybody with a phone and an internet connection can start experimenting with AI. You don’t need deep pockets or elite connections. That window is closing fast—but for the moment, it’s open. And Van’s point is that Black communities, poor communities, marginalized communities need to engage with AI now, before that window slams shut.

I see this happening in my own backyard. My neighbor Peter Loforte (who built our AI co-producer, BLAIR) has pulled me into this AI steering committee for Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. It’s one of the poorest school districts in California, but there’s also this deep well of creative and economic potential. Renewable energy, indigenous partnerships, tourism—it’s all there. The question is: can AI help build on those assets instead of just extracting value from them?

Here’s an audio version of this newsletter with even more thoughts. It’s like a podcast about the podcast. Following that we have one more thought about the power of an afro-futurist vision for making things happen in the real world.