The Cyberpunk Rebellion: Forging Private Agentic AI

About this session

Sandi Fatic argued that AI was repeating a pattern he traced through earlier technologies: a system starts decentralized, gets captured by centralized operators, and eventually has to be won back by people willing to build alternatives. He cited email's shift from an open protocol to one defended by encryption, and Bitcoin's origin after the 2008 financial crisis, as earlier rounds of the same fight. He introduced the cypherpunk movement, recommending the novel Neuromancer as a portrait of a future where corporations control both data and thought, and argued that corporate-controlled AI was now the target for the same kind of rebellion. He presented Calimero Network's peer-to-peer, local-first infrastructure as one attempt at a counter-system.

He grounded that argument in his own career at Facebook, Google, and NEAR Protocol, recalling that he was told early on to bring his true self to work, and that a colleague warned him doing so honestly would get him fired. He used a panopticon, a prison design where a single guard tower can observe every cell but inmates never know when they are being watched, to argue that the uncertainty alone is enough to make people self-censor. He extended that into what he called corporate AI surveillance, pointing to the gap between the data a user can export from a centralized service and the far larger volume it actually holds, and to European proposals to scan private messages, as signs that any standing capability to monitor communication eventually gets used.

On Calimero itself, he described a peer-to-peer network rather than a blockchain: data lives on a user's own device, and nodes use a conflict-free replicated data type instead of blockchain consensus, so local changes broadcast to peers who verify and merge them without a central server. He cited a hackathon project built on this where medical institutions trained a model by exchanging only weight updates, never patient data. On payments, he pointed to the HTTP 402 status code, revived for agent-to-agent micropayments, as a useful building block undermined by running on public, traceable rails, and argued it needed private, encrypted settlement using stablecoins or tokens instead.

He closed by saying the talk was about values rather than product, urging the audience to rejoin the cypherpunk movement and build systems that protect user data instead of selling it.