While Web Summit suits pitched "AI solutions," we gathered in a planetarium to witness actual humans using AI to solve real problems. Gabriel using custom GPTs for his council campaign, Carol Anne feeding colonial legislation to AI and diagnosing systematic tomfuckery, Kevin building Hollywood-grade first alien contact footage for $10000.

This is revolution built by people who give a fuck.

The Real Opening

Gabriel George Sr brought ceremony. His people went from 10,000 to dozens through European diseases. Four fluent Halkomelem speakers remain across 10,000 Coast Salish people. We're building AI that amplifies his voice—his "six pillars" became "house posts" because words carry worlds.

Global Perspective

Vipul Kansal flew 37 hours from India. His $500M company makes AI shoes, but he talked about finding a rural family business where three generations refuse other brands because "it's in our blood." His success metric: growing from 5,000 to 10,000 employees because prosperity means more families fed.

Technical Fire

Kushal Goenka exposed why search still sucks: we built the future on a lie. The open web became a private index. Reddit sells our conversations to OpenAI for $60M while we can't access our own contributions. Aaron Swartz died fighting this battle.

Indigenous AI Justice

Carol Anne Hilton fed the Indian Act into AI, personified it, then ran diagnostics. Result: severely disturbed individual exhibiting systematic abuse patterns. Her Indigenomics Institute found a $200B Indigenous economy GDP calculations miss. "Economy as ceremony"—technology serving cultural values.

Creative Destruction

Kevin Friel built complete alien first-contact news in 2.5 days using VO3. Traditional cost: $100,000, three months. His cost: $10,000, two days. Tools evolving monthly—adapt or die.

What We're Building

Fifty-five core memberships. Constituency building. Launched BC + AI Ecosystem Industry Association. Subgroups spawning subgroups. Distributed leadership, no guru dependency.

The Challenge

Every successful alternative gets co-opted. Open web became private. Social platforms became extraction machines. How do we build something that can't be absorbed?

Answer isn't in code—it's in culture. Gabriel's ceremony, Carol Anne's values, monthly gathering grounding technology in relationship.

Revolution will be distributed, polite because we're Canadian, but not corporate.

Keep building. Keep gathering. Keep ceremony alive.

Next meetup: Last Wednesday monthly | Core membership: vancouver.bc-ai.net

Sponsors: Dmitri Sportsman Real Estate, SEGEV Law, Sons of Vancouver Distillery, Michelle Diamond Photography, Victor Serbin Documentary Spotlights, Philippe Pasquier MetaCreation Lab, MötleyKrüg Media, TheUpgrade.ai, Creative Mornings Vancouver

The future belongs to people who show up.

This episode captures an unfiltered night inside the Vancouver AI community—where analog gear hums alongside AI-generated visuals, and Indigenous songs echo through a room full of technologists, artists, and systems thinkers. This is the sound of a grassroots AI ecosystem growing in real time.

It’s less a conference and more a convergence. A gathering of those building tools, telling stories, and raising essential questions about what kind of intelligence we want to build and who gets to shape it.

Episode Highlights

• OJA, the AI Band — Combining hand-built synths and generative visuals, the group shares how AI helped translate code into collaborative audiovisual performance.
• Damien George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation — Offers a powerful welcome, history, and song rooted in this territory. A reminder that this is not neutral ground, and that memory and ceremony are part of technological futures.
• Mind, AI & Consciousness Group Launch — A new working group exploring questions around consciousness and machine intelligence, emerging from this community and led by Loki Jorgenson.
• Community Announcements — Projects growing from the roots: a Women in AI series, a Surrey meetup, an AI-powered emotional health video lab, and the formation of a member-led AI association.
• Mr. Canada Premiere — An AI-generated satirical series that blends geopolitics, song, and synthetic imagery to provoke discussion about civic identity and digital propaganda.
• Workshops & Microcredentials — SFU’s Philippe Pasquier announces open-access AI workshops, local model training sessions, and new microcredential pathways for lifelong learners and creators.
• Zen and the Future of AI — Ian Waugh, a Zen priest and CTO, offers a model for how emotional responses in AI might evolve if embodied, and what we can learn from our own interruptions.
• Closing Reflections from the Floor — From Myra to DeepSeek, a debate unfolds over open source, security, and institutional power. Community members speak candidly about how AI policy intersects with politics, privacy, and perception.

Major Threads

• Emergence over Management — New groups, themes, and relationships are forming through participation, not planning. This isn’t a program—it’s a process.
• Decentralized Culture — From community libraries to donation-based infrastructure, the Vancouver AI movement is building its own operating system—resourceful, improvisational, and community-owned.
• Territorial Intelligence — Indigenous knowledge and presence aren’t an add-on—they are part of the core logic of how this community operates.
• Open Source Tension — Debates around DeepSeek, security, and institutional censorship highlight the ongoing friction between open models and closed systems, especially in academic contexts.

Calls to Action

• Join or start a local AI meetup—Women in AI, Squamish AI, Surrey AI, and more are forming.
• Add a book to the AI community library. Share what shaped your thinking.
• Participate in the Rival Technologies x BCAI Hackathon — apply your tools or storytelling instincts to real data.
• Volunteer, build infrastructure, or contribute to community-led experiments. It's not about perfection. It's about participation.

Context

This event was recorded at a Vancouver AI community gathering hosted at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre and curated by The Upgrade Academy. It represents a slice of the larger BC + AI ecosystem—a unique zone where creative tech, grassroots values, and critical inquiry intersect.

Post-Interface Culture, Fungal Code & the Sandwich Tribunal

Welcome to the living archive of Vancouver AI Meetup #16—recorded in a round room built like a woven hat, vibrating with ceremony, creativity, and code. This isn’t a recap. It’s an artifact.

🧠 The Night in Signals:

• Code as Paint, Code as Portal An ex-engineer turned software artist breaks open the idea of creative coding as ecological interface. Think: 3D mushrooms instead of static field guides. Not “apps”—living systems.

• Document Everything, Especially the Rituals Our community’s unofficial archivist has been capturing every meetup, reel by reel. No hype. Just memory. What doesn’t get documented gets erased. This is how resistance gets remembered.

• AI Grounded in Land, Story & Ceremony The night opened not with a keynote but with a drum. An elder shared sound and story, tying our tech rituals to place and kin. The room resonated with more than just electricity.

• Field-Notes from the Edge of AI Culture A researcher shared a new study chronicling how grassroots AI communities are self-organizing—not waiting for institutions to catch up. The themes? Mutual aid, obsessive documentation, values over velocity.

• Governance Isn't a Buzzword, It’s a Battlefield New organizers are convening a summit on AI ethics and governance. Less about frameworks, more about power mapping. The questions aren’t theoretical: Who decides? Who benefits?

• Subcultures as Infrastructure Spinoff meetups are forming like mycelium—women-led nodes, philosophical deep dives, pedagogical experiments, satellite groups from the suburbs to the margins. This is growth by propagation, not scale.

• Hackathon, but Make it Absurd The first round of a new storytelling hackathon used public opinion data to ask serious questions disguised as food fights. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is cereal soup? One entry turned survey data into a full-blown courtroom comic. Another built a multi-agent visualization platform that made the absurd look transcendent.

• Small Data, Big Resonance An experimental lab previewed tools built not on surveillance-scale AI, but on localized, artist-built, micro-models. Sonic agents. Generative instruments. This is AI as co-creator, not colonizer.

• Interface is Dead. Long Live Interface The closing keynote made it plain: we’re past chat. Right-clicks are becoming actions. Filters are becoming conversations. The future interface is ambient, assistive, adaptive—and totally invisible until you need it.

THE THREAD THROUGH IT ALL

This is not a meetup series. It’s a counterculture.

• Rooted in land.
• Documented like folklore.
• Built by people, not platforms.
• Run on open source, values, and straight-up stubbornness.

The theme of the night wasn’t AI. It was agency.

Not artificial. Not delegated. Lived. Distributed. In motion.

Hit play. This is your dispatch from the edge. And if you’re not part of it yet, you’re already late.