@online · Discussion on Technology · Culture Commons 2026

@online · Discussion on Technology

Can AI be held in common, rather than extracted as a resource?
No technology makes the tension between collective and extractive logics more visible: today's models are trained on the shared output of human culture — language, images, code, accumulated knowledge — yet the systems built from that commons are concentrated in a few hands, their compute, energy, and human-labour costs kept largely out of view. This node asks what it would actually take to build and hold AI, along with the digital infrastructures and knowledge that surround it, as a shared good rather than an enclosed one: from questions of governance, rights, and ethics to the ordinary, ongoing labour of keeping shared systems alive over time. It asks whether AI can be imagined as collectively governed and non-extractive by design — and where those models reach their limits.

Moderator

Cultural entrepreneur and strategist; Director of Initiatives at Institution.Art

Tom Cebic 

Tomislav Cebic is a cultural entrepreneur and strategist currently serving as Director of Initiatives at Institution.Art. He studied at The New School’s Milano School in New York. Tom works at the intersection of art, technology, and community-building, focusing on projects that enable new models for creative practice and institutional innovation.

Speakers

Zhanzhan Zhao

Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Science and the School of Artificial Intelligence at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

Zhanzhan Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Science and the School of Artificial Intelligence at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Her research brings together artificial intelligence, complex systems, and social science to study algorithmic governance, fairness, and collective behavior.

Aritstotle Tympas

Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Aristotle Tympas, professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, serves as director of the anglophone Interdepartmental Graduate Program ‘Science, Technology, Society—Science and Technology Studies' and as vice-president for research of the European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology (ESST).

Matt Prewitt

Co-founder of RadicalxChange Foundation and former antitrust lawyer

Matt Prewitt is a co-founder of RadicalxChange Foundation and a former antitrust lawyer. He was an early advocate of data coalitions and is a co-author of a recent proposal for associational data rights.

Francesco Rulli

Founder & CEO of Querlo, Entrepreneur, AI Innovator, Social Impact Advocate

Francesco Rulli is an Italian-American entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Querlo, where he develops Conversational AI and Digital Twin technologies that transform how people and organizations capture, manage, and share intelligence.