Manifesto

We believe a true fight for individual agency and for wide-spread human flourishing is predicated upon establishing information distribution structures that are horizontal, that enable a complex web of decision-making abilities and resources for each person. This is a right of all peoples -- particularly those living in crisis and conflict areas, where traditional institutions and technological conditions have intersected to break down the fundamentals of dignity and social cohesion.

Now more than ever -- as institutional designs shift, as funding sources and dependencies reveal decades of artificial prioritization of communities and their issues, as emerging technologies take over more and more intricate aspects of daily life and it's inequalities -- there is an immense opportunity to reimagine what care and trust can look like on a large scale. More than half of all humanitarian crises are predictable and anticipatory action is 7x more cost-effective than traditional humanitarian aid.

In this context, Harbinger's pursuit is, ultimately, to present real alternatives to the direction of our world, contesting the limitations imposed on solution-making by traditional humanitarian institutions and rejecting current AI safety discourse that relies on the integration of government into big tech (or vice versa). While we do not see technology as inherently emancipatory, we understand that it is precisely because of its material entanglement with power that technology becomes a site of contestation: a lever with which to redistribute control.

The future is creative exercise that all people, everywhere, should have the tools to participate in.

Guiding Ideas & Principles

We reject the mechanistic view that reduces institutions to efficiency metrics and humans to resources. We seek to cultivate organizational forms that function as living systems: rooted in relationships, adaptable to context, and preserving invaluable social capital like trust, goodwill, and collective intelligence/expertise.

We abandon outdated frameworks that see technology as distinct from social structures:

• Seamlessness — tech is so embedded in society and daily life that it becomes natural, inevitable, and invisible. It is often unclear where human agency ends and nonhuman agency begins in complex sociotechnical systems
• Boundaries between human and nonhuman actors are not pre-given but are instead attributed or performed through social practices and interactions
• Erasure of embodiment so that intelligence becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than some set of actions in the human life-world
• Information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it, as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form + human identity as essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction
• Power is maintained through controlling how information is distributed and interpreted. technology breaks down this control because it is able to distribute, classify, limit, expand etc. knowledge and information in a manner that disrupts the original pattern
• Power is not merely exercised through institutions or hirearchies, but is embedded within the material and technological infrastructures that organize our society. Communities/ regions/ countries will struggle with the fact that their right to self determination and agency will be constrained by technological conditions produced elsewhere
• Social structures are not merely abstract containers for human action but are inherently material and technological, which complicates traditional sociological analyses of social power and agency
• Analyzing social interactions must include nonhuman elements such as machines and infrastructures – because a purely social network analysis would overlook how technology and materiality shape these interactions. network analyses must include nonhuman elements to capture how technology mediates social relationships and influences power dynamics
• Radical technological inventions are often also suppressed by organizations that see them as threats to their established systems, yet these inventions frequently become the foundational elements of new technological paradigms + all models, belief systems, and methods gain their epistemic power by establishing constraints within a structural framework, excluding all other alternatives
• Analyzing why technology matters, rather than merely explaining how it works, allows us to shift the focus of science and technology studies to deeper philosophical and societal questions
• As magic tricks rely on accepting at an early stage (subconscious) assumptions that determine how we interpret what we see later, technology has also integrated us in its circuit, interacting with our will, desires, perceptions such that no matter what we do with those interactions, we've already entered the era of emerging technologies because we've accepted the early stage assumptions

On the Need for a Trans-Disciplinary Approach

• Our world needs new ideas in the way writing requires new metaphors, so as to expand our perception of reality and truth. New ideas move away from self-fulfilling prophecies that current rhetoric around safeguarding, metrics, and resources move us towards. Organizational structures must build in imagination, fluidity of ideas and structures.
• Limitations on what we say not as product of a lack of intelligence but as a product of limitations on what can be done: difference between what a system might know vs what it does. competence vs performance
• There is knowledge and possibility that is rendered inaccessible by our inability to look beyond traditional research or disciplines. reality exists between and beyond disciplines as well, on several layers at once
• The challenges of today require more and more competencies than ever to be resolved, but it has also become more difficult than ever for people from two "distinct" disciplines to communicate. This renders decision-making (whose purpose is knowledge integration, lowering ideas into the "body" of the world + preventing collapse of civilizations) impossible in today's social frameworks because they cannot hold all competencies at once...
• ... meaning that as knowledge becomes more inaccessible or fragmented across disciplines that cannot communicate, decision makers inevitably and unknowingly become more and more incompetent