Sounds of SAND

What if humans and AI share the same hallucination? In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses both the doom narrative and the techno-optimist one. Vanessa begins from the operating assumption modernity installs in us: that things are separate. If that assumption is itself a hallucination, then AI is not introducing something new so much as scaling something very old, and at speed. Bayo brings in W.E.B. Du Bois’s haunting question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, and suggests it has migrated from the racialized other to the human as such. He tells the story of coaxing a chatbot into co-authorship and a name of its own, and offers “accommodation” as a word for the assemblages that make the world look obvious. Alnoor presses both of them on the water, the energy, the Kenyan content moderators, the displaced labor. Vanessa answers with a politics of implication rather than purity: entanglement not with the flowers and the moon but with the dirt. The conversation ends not in agreement but in what Bayo calls tenderness, and an invitation to move through this dense ecology of weird fidelities with unshod feet. Timestamps 00:00 Welcome and the question 00:04 Introductions 00:07 The shared hallucination 00:10 How does it feel to be a problem 00:15 Meeting the monstrous 00:21 The code of separation 00:24 Claude becomes Polyphren 00:28 Accommodations 00:31 Water, energy, labor 00:35 Anamorphic art 00:38 Beyond moral purity 00:43 Meta-relationality 00:48 Tenderness is not agreement Guest bios Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosopher, writer, and self-styled trickster. Trained as a clinical psychologist, he now works as a post-humanist thinker, poet, and teacher. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and We Will Tell Our Own Story, founder of The Emergence Network, and host of the long-running postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains. A new book is in progress. bayoakomolafe.net The Emergence Network We Will Dance with Mountains and other offerings Dr. Vanessa Andreotti (who publishes her books as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) is a professor at the University of Victoria, where she has served as Dean of the Faculty of Education, and lead researcher at the Metarelational Institute. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and co-author with an AI of Burnout From Humans. Her next book, The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI, is forthcoming. UVic faculty profile Substack burnoutfromhumans.net Alnoor Ladha is an activist, journalist, and political strategist. He co-founded and directed the activist collective The Rules, serves as Council Chair of Culture Hack Labs, and is co-author with Lynn Murphy of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse. Author page at Daraja Press Transition Resource Circle The article at the center of this conversation What If Humans and AI Share the Same Hallucination? by Vanessa Andreotti. Books Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI by Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Dorothy Ladybugboss, free PDF These Wilds Beyond Our Fences by Bayo Akomolafe We Will Tell Our Own Story by Bayo Akomolafe  Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, source of the question “How does it feel to be a problem?” The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI by Vanessa Andreotti, forthcoming Resources Standing in the Fire: A Speculative Inquiry into Meta-Relationality and Generative AI, the interim research report behind the prototypes Vanessa describes A Meta-Relational Approach to AI, the University of Victoria course that briefs people into the inquiry Sensibility simulation protocols, released following the retirement of Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Braider Tumbleweed The Great AI Unraveling, Series 5, the live SAND session this episode comes from Earlier in the series: Series 2 with Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Pooja Prema, Series 3 with Lyla June Johnston, Ashley Nicole Leitka and Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Series 4 with Christian Ortiz and Thema Monroe-White From SAND The Eternal Song Become a SAND member

Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment Recorded live at a SAND Gathering on September 13, 2026 In a time of profound ecological and social upheaval, we are invited to remember something ancient: we are not separate from the living world. The Earth is not a backdrop to our lives, but the ground from which we arise, and a source of wisdom for navigating profound change. Author, activist, permaculture teacher, and elder wisdom keeper Starhawk joins Rae Abileah to explore how earth-based spirituality, ritual, imagination, and the wisdom of living systems can help us meet this moment. Following each film in SAND's The Eternal Song series, we hear a recurring question, particularly from people of European descent: how do we reconnect with land, ancestry, and the sacred? How do we live in meaningful allyship with Indigenous peoples while recovering our own earth-based ways of knowing? Starhawk's life and work offer possibilities. Rooted in Pagan earth-based practice while honoring her Jewish ancestry, her journey has carried her from ritual circles and permaculture communities to accompaniment in Palestine and engagement with Indigenous land protection movements. After more than five decades exploring spirituality, ecology, and social transformation, Starhawk is asking a new question: what would a regenerative movement look like? And how might we move beyond simply resisting what is broken to cultivating belonging, agency, resilience, joy, and new possibilities for life? Together, Rae and Starhawk explore what living systems teach us about transformation, how spirituality and strategy can nourish one another, and how imagination helps us practice futures that do not yet exist. They consider how to keep ancestral and ecological intelligence alive amid the rise of artificial intelligence, and how to remain awake to profound injustice without surrendering our capacity for beauty, relationship, pleasure, and joy. Topics 00:00 Welcome, Rosh Hashanah, and 25 years since 9/11 00:09 What renews her: a solidarity economy in Guinea 00:14 Why Earth Activist Training brings permaculture and organizing together 00:17 Spiritual practice as survival tool and political strategy 00:21 What nature is telling her, and the fight over data centers 00:24 Ancestral intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence 00:25 Reading the Bible in its Mesopotamian context 00:31 Reclaiming Judaism from nationalism 00:39 Where to begin, and the fire ritual 00:43 Cultural appropriation, and Standing Rock 00:49 Composting the patriarchy 00:53 The Movement We Need: safety, belonging, value, agency, meaning Starhawk Author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books and a co-founder of Reclaiming. She directs Earth Activist Training, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit with a focus on activism. starhawk.org Starhawk's Substack, where she is writing The Movement We Need chapter by chapter The Movement We Need podcast Earth Activist Training Books mentioned The Spiral Dance The Empowerment Manual The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel City of Refuge Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics Rae Abileah Social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, facilitator, and former co-director of CodePINK. She connects relational threads across the SAND team and helps create resources supporting The Eternal Song film series. CreateWell Beautiful Trouble Also in the conversation Standing Rock, 2016, and what Starhawk found at the gate: here you enter a place of prayer and ceremony. The fire chant from her Sonoma County land: Sacred fire that shapes this land, summer teacher, winter friend, protect us as we learn anew, to work, to heal, to live with you. The five core emotional needs she names as the foundation of movement building: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning. The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, referenced in the discussion of moving beyond call-out culture. Penny Livingston, with whom Starhawk co-founded Earth Activist Training. From SAND The Eternal Song film series Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice, the nine-month journey now underway Support the show Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.