{"id":669423,"date":"2026-05-28T04:34:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T04:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/669423\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T04:34:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T04:34:17","slug":"occupy-wall-street-co-founder-built-an-ai-app-to-help-activists-seize-the-means-of-computation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/669423\/","title":{"rendered":"Occupy Wall Street Co-Founder Built an AI App to Help Activists Seize the Means of Computation"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an era where Silicon Valley\u2019s conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it\u2019s strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today\u2019s tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X\u2019s openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok<\/a>) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a small group of very powerful, very conservative people.<\/p>\n

But does it have to be this way? Can LLMs and AI agents find a place in the toolkit of progressive activist groups? The conviction that they can is the idea behind a new app called Outcry<\/a>, which provides a chatbot designed specifically as a \u201cprivate, on-device AI mentor for activists, organizers and movement builders.\u201d (There\u2019s also a web version<\/a>, although it obviously lacks the privacy benefits of being entirely offline.) It\u2019s the brainchild of Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White, who recently wrote a blog post<\/a> about the thinking behind the project.<\/p>\n

This is actually a fascinating idea. It\u2019s certainly not the only way in which activist groups are leveraging Big Tech\u2019s own products against it. We reported last month<\/a> on the ways in which locals are using LLMs to assist in their campaigns against the construction of data centers. But it\u2019s the first example that I\u2019m aware of in which an LLM has been designed specifically for the use of left-wing activists. In addition, it\u2019s also an example of an increasingly common use for LLMs\u2014as specialist advisers.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, LLMs are databases<\/a>: they\u2019re a fancy, natural-language way of querying large datasets for the information you want. Generalist chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on pretty much anything and everything. In theory, this means you can ask them about quantum chromodynamics just as easily as you can ask them to provide advice on how to roast a chicken. In practice, it creates a huge problem with distinguishing reliable information from nonsense, because otherwise there\u2019s nothing to distinguish a peer-reviewed study on the efficacy of mRNA vaccines from a bunch of cookers in a Facebook group wringing their hands about how the Covid shot has given them Morgellon\u2019s, or something.<\/p>\n

However, if you restrict the training data to a given subject and to sources chosen specifically for their reliability and relevance, you can create something like Outcry: a specialized chatbot that you know has been trained on high-quality data. This isn\u2019t to say that the app can\u2019t make mistakes\u2014the nature of LLMs is that they\u2019ll try to collate various pieces of data into a coherent, natural-language result, and given that they\u2019re ultimately relying on their internal weighting parameters and pattern recognition algorithms, sometimes the result they spit out will be inaccurate. (This is separate to the problem of LLMs spontaneously generating fake information, commonly referred to\u2014inexplicably and irritatingly\u2014as \u201challucinating.\u201d)<\/p>\n

This certainly isn\u2019t the first application of this idea. It was reported<\/a> earlier this month that something like two thirds of doctors ask a specialized medical LLM called OpenEvidence for advice in making diagnoses. This isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing; doctors certainly Googled things before the advent of LLMs. It really just depends where they\u2019re asking, and whether they\u2019re checking the responses they get to make sure they\u2019re factually correct. (Having said that, if you see your doctor asking ChatGPT about your symptoms, you should probably find a new doctor.)<\/p>\n

Outcry\u2019s other distinguishing feature is that its dataset is entirely offline\u2014it\u2019s included with the download. According to the readme, the entire dataset is downloaded to your device at first launch, and stored in your library\u2019s Application Support directory. I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the data, but despite all manner of grep-ing and rummaging through both my user library and the computer\u2019s main library, I couldn\u2019t find the file in question. It doesn\u2019t seem to be in the download package, either, despite the weighty 3GB download. (Asking the chatbot where its data was stored also got me nowhere.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clearly somewhere, though, because the app itself is clear about its offline nature.<\/p>\n

\"Outcry\u00a9 Gizmodo <\/p>\n

So with all that said, how does Outcry fare in its role as an organizing mentor? I\u2019d say that its information is pretty high-level and general, not least because its offline nature prevents it from accessing specific details not contained in its database. Take, for example, its answer about local anti-ICE groups in NYC:<\/p>\n

\"Outcry\u00a9 Gizmodo <\/p>\n

With that said, with a bit of prompting it\u2019ll suggest concrete actions you can take, and sometimes do so straight off the bat:<\/p>\n

\"Outcry<\/p>\n

According to White, the Outcry app is \u201cimperfect,\u201d and he\u2019s asking activists to test it out and let him know what works so they can improve it.<\/p>\n

So is Outcry any good? On the whole, I\u2019d say \u201cyes.\u201d This app has the potential to be a really valuable resource, especially for people who are just beginning to become involved with activism and genuinely don\u2019t know where to begin\u2014and getting over that first step can be hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an era where Silicon Valley\u2019s conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":669424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[17235,182,181,507,44035,292258,74],"class_list":["post-669423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-activism","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-llms","tag-outcry","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}