Activists who Challenged Industry Inevitability Myths
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Activists who challenged Industry Inevitability Myths: A Charla of Rich Seeds with Omar Lázaro García and Aurora Gómez to Inform the Development of a Luddite Praxis
Brought to you by: Omar Lázaro García, Aurora Gómez, Sue Kasun, and Erin Anderson
If you would like to read today’s post in Spanish, you can do so here.
Introduction
Depending on where you live, the threat of powerful interests (political machines or human-run corporations) seizing your land or your access to clean water is real. In fact, we argue that it's real for almost the entire planet, given the current, insatiable drive to build more data centers. At the same time, data centers aren't the only threat to land and community, and we designed this interview more as a charla, the Spanish word for conversation, with activists who have fought against data center construction and the oil industry, among other actors who see Earth as a territory for exploitation and profit.
Erin and I took this seriously for many reasons. I, Sue, come from West Virginia. The land was first stolen from its Indigenous peoples and then multiplied and exploited by large out-of-state landowners who never looked back when the coal industry collapsed and walked away with the profits (even leaving behind neglected mines that degrade waterways) or who turn a blind eye when permanent chemicals kill livestock and increase the incidence of cancer. Each of us turned to networks where we know people who saw the moral imperative to defend their lands to help illuminate our imaginations and spaces of possibility for when these threats seem "too big to break" or too "inevitable"—the term these human-run machines often use. From the ensuing conversation, we recognize that we have been given many seeds to sow in our lives, now.
As education researchers, we see too many parallels with what is happening in our formal education systems regarding the current need to defend against the "inevitable." Teachers, students, and school systems worldwide are struggling to manage the tidal wave of educational technologies and AI-integrated products flooding their practice. On the one hand, overburdened teachers are receiving marketing messages promising to personalize their students' learning (i.e., Khan Academy), close achievement gaps (i.e., Mindspark), prepare students for career readiness (i.e., Pathful), and increase student engagement (i.e., Suitable), better support students' mental well-being (i.e., Alongside), all while giving teachers more time (i.e., Schoology) and improving their decision-making (i.e., PowerSchool). Companies and administrations spoon-feed these claims to exhausted educators while insisting that these technologies are inevitable, warning that those who refuse to participate could fall dangerously behind.
However, what is often omitted from these messages are the problems that these same technologies can exacerbate, as highlighted in Logan, Nicols, and García's (2025) article, "Teach Like a Luddite." The authors cited research showing that using technology to address systemic educational problems yields mixed results at best (Cuban, 2003; Reich, 2020) and compounds existing inequalities at worst (Crooks, 2024). They encourage educators to learn from the Luddites, a 19th-century labor movement in England in which skilled textile workers, weavers, and spinners destroyed their employers' new machines that threatened their livelihoods (Merchant, 2023).
Logan, Nicols, and García encourage teachers to adopt a Luddite praxis to questioning, negotiating, and, at times, rejecting technologies that do not serve learning. A Luddite praxis has educators (1) adopting strategic playfulness to disrupt the narratives of educational technology companies, such as using humor to highlight questionable claims; (2) employing local tactics, from posing technoskeptical questions to administrators to writing op-eds in local newspapers; and (3) building networks of resistance. In these times AI-integrated times, such a praxis is essential to protect our young learners, especially since AI products marketed as safe for children, such as AI-enabled plush toys, have been shown to produce content that crosses appropriate boundaries and encourages children to engage in unsafe role-playing, use drugs, and even enact self-harm (Klein, 2026).
To better understand how we might adapt and hybridize strategies from a Luddite praxis, my colleague and I at Georgia State University interviewed two prominent activists with decades of experience disrupting corporate narratives of inevitability and organizing community coalitions to drive change. Our combined expertise focuses on critical design strategies with educational technology, as well as language, identity, and transnationalism, particularly with Mexican immigrants. Together, via Zoom, we met with Omar Lázaro García, an Indigenous Totonac activist from Mexico, who is fighting to locate some of the thousands of people disappeared by brutal Mexican cartels, while also holding large oil companies, such as Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex Oil, accountable for polluting his sacred ancestral land (Lázaro García, 2025). The second environmental activist on the call was Aurora Gómez, a Spanish environmentalist and fellow Luddite, who opposes the proliferation of data centers in Europe (Mozur, Santariano, and Rodríguez Mega, 2025). Both are acutely aware of the hegemonic power of Big Tech, but both have initiated movements to break with corporate narratives, build community coalitions, and reject claims about the inevitability of technology. We brought them together to learn more strategies for adapting Luddite teaching practices to combat harmful technological practices in schools.
The interview
Erin: So when companies came to your community, when they told you that projects coming to your community were inevitable, how did you counter or resist that framing?
Aurora: Well, in my case, in my family's hometown, they built an airport and expropriated all our land. And, by the way, my story is also connected to the oil companies, because I live a mountain away from a refinery. So when they told us that the airport was inevitable in our case (I was 15 at the time), my grandfather said, "Those who don't fight for what's theirs have no dignity." So we said, "Alright, that's it." You know, we might not have been able to win (we couldn't stop the airport's construction), but we had to fight for dignity. Also, in my case, as an activist, I'm always looking for examples of resistance that have worked, and Latin America is a powerful example. There's a book I treasure like a precious gem that compiles many examples of successful resistance movements in Latin America. It was written by some friends who traveled there, studied those cases, and said, "We want to hold on to that moment of hope." So when the data centers appeared and companies claimed they were inevitable, we said, "No, we have to fight, because we know there are other cases where these projects were stopped, and they aren't inevitable." For example, in the first case that mobilized us—Meta's data center in Talavera de la Reina—we initially didn't know the story because there are many languages in Europe, and although we can get by in English, some languages like Dutch are very different. So, when we dug into the local press, we discovered that Meta's data center had been expelled from the Netherlands. It was a success story. That's why we fought together.
Omar: When the oil companies arrived to my part of Mexico about 100 years ago, they didn't just bring oil operations; they also brought religions. They came from the United States and England. One very famous company was El Águila, a British company. Many Christian denominations also arrived, and this was a strategy to fragment and weaken the communities of the Totonac region.
At the same time, many communities were already engaged in a struggle for land, trying to reclaim lands lost over time. Many elders recall that when the oil wells were drilled, the companies never explained the broader consequences or impacts of hydrocarbon extraction. Many elders refused to sign documents; instead, they were forced to leave their fingerprints on papers, which facilitated the companies' entry into the territory.
In 1996, another important phase occurred with the arrival of fracking in the region. The Indigenous communities of Totonacapan were not consulted about the introduction of fracking, and that is why we now have a formal legal complaint against Pemex, since they were not consulted, despite the fact that consultation is an internationally recognized right in agreements such as ILO Convention 169, recently signed by Mexico, Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and other legal provisions that protect Indigenous rights to consultation, territory, and autonomy.[1]
In 2008, another intense phase began, years after President Enrique Peña Nieto's energy reform. This time, the incursion into the territory was marked by direct violence. We began to observe the territorial control exerted by organized crime: different drug cartels operating in distinct areas. At oil wells and in regions affected by hydrocarbons, we discovered that the oil concessions granted to foreign companies coincided with the territorial maps of the organized crime groups that were beginning to establish themselves. In other words, the expansion of the cartels and oil interests were deeply intertwined.
This marked the entry of a new system of violence into our communities. At that time, the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent in the world, controlled the region. They were trained as special forces (GAFE) of the Mexican army and abroad, in and by the United States and Israel, and came to control the Totonacapan region, facilitated by the narco-state that governed Veracruz for its own interests related to oil concessions linked to the energy reform that had been in place since 2013.
Because of this, there have been periods when conditions for open resistance were extremely difficult. Even so, resistance continues through community assemblies and collective organizing. However, communities have faced severe reprisals for defending their territory. The issue of forced disappearances is also deeply linked to economic interests, as many oil wells were used as kitchens, sites where people were burned in large ovens to make them disappear. There are multiple extermination sites, or kitchens—La Gallera, La Lomita, La Galera —and we have found many of them, especially in petroleum zones where cartels operate. This has also become a mechanism to control territory.
So the ways of resisting are different. The Totonac people have their own rhythms, their own forms of resistance, such as the [MOU2] Assembly. Many of these are what we call silent resistance, quiet practices that allow us to sustain hope for 100, 200, 300 years and more. When I asked how we could continue to resist amidst the violence, oil spills, poisoned land, and polluted water, an elder told me, “The only way to resist is to keep dying on our own land." This reflects how the Totonac people have learned to endure through the generations.
Many of these forms of resistance are silent: we continue to celebrate traditional festivals, plant native corn, and maintain cultural practices. These are different from the legal strategies, which we also pursue, and from political organizing through assemblies to rebuild awareness and heal community fractures caused by religious divisions, political parties, and other sources of social fragmentation.
Sue: Omar, I wanted to ask you for some clarification. You mentioned the assembly. Could you explain what that is?
Omar: The assembly —we've called it the Assembly of Thunder, primarily because for us, water isn't a what but a who. Water is not a resource, but a living being, something you can speak to, something with spirit. That's why we refer to the deity Atzini. Atzini is connected to Tajín; it's another name for it, and it means raindrop. We use the suffix -tzin as a term of reverence or sacredness. When you hear names like Tonantzin or others in different Indigenous communities, the -tzin is always there, and it's sacred. We've brought together an assembly made up of more than 25 communities from the region, which we call the Assembly of Thunder. It exists to carry out legal and political processes to file complaints against Pemex, the national oil company that has severely polluted the territory through multiple major oil spills. These spills have polluted our water and our farmland. That's why the assembly meets every two months in the region, and we call it the Assembly of Thunder as part of our defense of the territory.
Sue: Everything Omar says is historically grounded—it gives you chills, because the violence that arrives feels almost diabolical. You think, "This can't be real," but it's like the outer limit of what the human imagination can conceive in terms of destruction. It's the politics of death, necropolitics, and it's disgusting. It makes you want to distance yourself from that reality and avoid confronting it.
Aurora: I'm honored to hear your story, Omar. It's truly wonderful because, as I already told you, for me, hearing stories of resilience is hopeful. It's what helps me keep going and feel that we're doing the right thing.
Sue: And if I may add something, Aurora, I agree with you. In resistance, a key element is the connection to Mother Earth. I remember when I met Omar about four or five years ago, we were walking along what he called a camino real, and I thought, "What do you mean by a camino real? I only know the hotel chain." And he said, "No, these are real paths that our ancestors walked for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived." And I thought, "Wow!" As the Mexicans say, “me cayó el veinte,” it finally clicked for me— this helps explain why there is such a deep love for Mother Earth, because that vibration has been passed down from generation to generation. And you see the love they have for corn—truly. And in a way, I also connect with that hope, because I feel a deep need for us to reconnect with the Indigenous peoples who defend the land, because that's where the real roots are.
Erin: You’re talking about different stories, and on that line, what other stories have you leveraged to help your community understand that your issue is a political issue? That these are choices people are making, rather than this is just going to be how it is? What other stories or arguments have you found successful in helping your community see that?
Aurora: These other examples have helped our communities understand that this isn't just about technological destiny, but something deeply political. In our case, with data centers, the issue becomes very clear because about 20 years ago—around the time of the airport in my region—there were many real estate speculation schemes where people tried to profit by privatizing public goods and making money from them. So there has been a lot of what we might call speculative development: airports, nuclear storage facilities, projects that are always very costly for those who live in those areas. That history helped communities understand what's happening now.
When I say "we," I mean rural people, because even though I live in the city, I'm rural by origin, as I explained. My family has lived there since the Bronze Age. There's a broader argument around what's called "emptied Spain" or rural Spain, and why all these megaprojects keep being located in rural areas. We talk about this using the concept of sacrifice zones. We learned this term from Lerner, an author who explains how the most polluting industries in the United States are located in the poorest areas. And that connects to what you said earlier: when you witness the violence suffered by the Totonac people, you almost want to look away. That's what people in more privileged positions often do: they don't want to see the pollution and damage that occurs in the places we label as sacrifice zones. They stop looking, whether it's coltan mines in Africa or other extraction sites.
So, depending on the audience I'm speaking to, I use different terms. We give about one talk a week. In rural areas, terms like sacrifice zones or urban speculation resonate strongly because they connect with a recent history that people already recognize as corruption, capitalism, and injustice. In other communities, the concept of colonialism works better. Specifically, we use Mejías and Couldry's idea of digital colonialism to describe these ongoing processes, which have never really stopped and which reflect older patterns of land dispossession from Indigenous peoples. Digitization becomes a tool of extraction and colonization, but at the same time, the very process of building digital infrastructure is based on colonial practices. I don't know if I'm explaining myself clearly.
Sue: So, Aurora, when you say "Indigenous peoples," do you mean rural people?
Aurora: For us it's different, because in Europe, for example, when we say "Indigenous people," we're referring to someone like Omar, someone considered Indigenous. But my grandfather, for example, doesn't have that same deep spiritual connection to the land. He has an ancestral connection—we live here, we defend the territory—but he doesn't believe that the land has a spirit, a god, or a life that should be respected. As an environmentalist, that was something I often felt put me in tension with people from my own region. The people there don't necessarily see the land that way. In Spain—on the Iberian Peninsula—since colonization, the Romans already imposed a worldview in which the land was meant to be exploited. So we carry that cosmology inherited from the Romans…
Omar: Well, in our region, technologies like TikTok and all these new media have arrived, and children use them so much that they're starting to stop speaking or reproducing their Indigenous language. I once visited a community called Coahuitlán, in the Sierra de Totonacapan (territory where the Totonac people live), and when I went, the adults didn't speak Spanish. When we arrived at a house, the person they called on to translate was a child. Because the children watched cartoons, they had learned Spanish, and translated for their mother or grandmother. Children as young as five and seven were already going through what I would call the process of acculturation. And this has now intensified very strongly in the region with media and information technologies, affecting cultural identity, worldview, and community life.
But I don't think it's just about technology; I would also point to social programs. Many social programs, intentionally or not, weaken or dismantle local organizational processes. There has always been this attitude toward Indigenous communities that "they can't develop on their own," so outsiders have to tell them how and send them programs because they supposedly need them. What this has done is seriously disrupt traditional community organizing. Currently, the government has given us programs like Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life), [MOU3] and combined with information technologies, this has had a significant negative social impact where petrochemicals and genetically modified seeds are further introduced into our lands. Therefore, the problems are not only environmental but also social; now young people want to be oil workers, not farmers.
So yes, globalization, especially through the media, has affected us greatly. But we've also learned to use technology strategically. We've been working with video as a tool to make these problems visible in other contexts. For example, when we made the short documentary film El Canto del Papán, or The Song of the Papán, which is an endemic bird of the Totonac territory, it allowed us to reach audiences we never would have been able to reach without video and film. These technologies have allowed us to appear in other spaces and bring visibility to what is happening in our territory.
We've even come to see technology as something that helps keep us alive. For example, the article [2025] we published in The New York Times , even though it strongly criticizes what’s happening in our region, it has offered us some protection. Since the issue now has international visibility, "bad people" think twice before attacking us, disappearing us, or harming us. Lately, though, things have become more complicated...
Sue: All the information you shared is very helpful. I think the question was more about how to change or challenge the narrative of large corporations that what they're bringing is "inevitable." How do you confront that discourse through your organizing?
Omar: Yes, just to add that in our communities we see this as part of a longer process. When the companies arrived with agrochemicals and plastics, the elders now refer to that period as "the time of sickness." When chickens started growing to full size in just one-and-a-half months, when processed foods and industrial plastics became widespread—this was all part of a push that made people sick, not only the land, but also our bodies. And today, the elders see it very clearly.
I believe we are living through a very important moment for the Totonac people. We have already seen the consequences of plastic pollution and agrochemicals, and how they have damaged both the land and our health. Thanks to this awareness, many collectives and small community schools have emerged throughout the region. We are living in what seems like a post-war era: there were communities where important dances were lost, for example, in El Ciruelo, Santa Catarina, where a key dance related to planting disappeared. But now, after seeing the falsity of the supposed discourse of "development," the communities are choosing to recover ancient knowledge and practices that had been lost over time.
Now there are many small community schools: pottery schools reviving the last traditional techniques of the region, traditional dance schools, and schools of traditional medicine. Much knowledge that had been lost and subjected to severe discrimination is being recovered. Even traditional foods are being revived, with grandmothers reconstructing recipe books, because people have realized that the promise of industrial development was a lie.
The development model driven by the Green Revolution and industrialization brought pollution and disruption. Today, when visiting homes, we sometimes see trash in yards—and people might judge—but these are traces of a historical wound, vestiges of a period of pollution and imposed industrial lifestyles. Climate change is now further complicating matters and profoundly impacting communities.
There's an elder nearby who plants native corn twice a season because he knows that one planting might fail, since it doesn't rain like it used to. He confronts climate change by planting native seeds, which he considers more resilient and essential for making traditional atole, thus strengthening his cultural identity.
For many outside Indigenous communities, this may not be obvious, but we Totonacs say: we are men and women of colorful corn. This is part of our worldview. Preserving native seeds preserves identity. If we lose the seeds, what will we tell future generations? How will we say we are people of colorful corn? How will we say we are bird-people if the dances disappear? If the birds disappear?
So this is a moment of profound importance for the Totonac people: a time of hope, in which knowledge that was once silenced or discriminated against is being reclaimed. There are many forms of resistance: through celebration, ceremony, planting, and the silence of water, fire, wind, and earth. I have learned a great deal from silence. From silence, love can arise: for the people, for the land, for the water. It is intangible, yet it becomes material: in struggle, in dance, in culture, in survival. And I believe that therein lies much of our strength.
Erin: What advice would you give to other communities trying to build similar resistance networks? Coalitions? What advice would you give to other communities?
Aurora: I would say look for inspiration in other networks and communities, even if they aren't exactly like yours. Sometimes, that inspiration helps a lot. For example, here in Spain, we mobilized because we knew that in Chile they had mobilized and managed to stop a data center; they were trying to stop it, and they succeeded. The Cerrillos case inspired us. Then, we learned about the resistance movements in the Netherlands and Ireland. And a couple of months ago, I said to my colleagues, "Hey, did you know that in England they filed a lawsuit funded through crowdfunding?" They called it Crowd Justice. We said, "Let's do it." And two days ago, we launched our own campaign and we've already raised 60% of the money to take on Amazon in a major strategic lawsuit. Now that other communities have found out about it, some in Europe, they've said, "We want to do that too." So I encourage people to focus on hope and to learn positive lessons from other communities.
The second point is that each community is affected differently. In Spain, when we work with different data center cases, the realities are very different. For example, my region, Castilla-La Mancha, is extremely dry; I feel more connected with what people in Arizona experience than with communities in northern Spain, where there is much more water and wealth. In Valencia, people are concerned about data centers because they have already experienced a construction boom linked to tourism. In Málaga, they also connect their concerns to gentrification. Therefore, each community has its own reasons, its own context. We must avoid homogenizing these struggles; each story needs to be different and grounded in why that specific community is fighting. And these differences, in fact, make us all stronger and more resilient.
Omar: Well, I belong to the Concejo Nacional Indígena, National Indigenous Congress, and we say that the National Indigenous Congress is an organization that unites the struggles of Indigenous peoples throughout Mexico. We unite in resistance against the megaprojects of death. When we meet in national assemblies, we all come together to share what we call our pains—our collective wounds—and to understand that we suffer the same pain, even though it comes from different "projects of death." For example, there are hydroelectric dams, fracking, the Maya Train, the Interoceanic Corridor, gas pipelines, mining, and many other projects. Each community faces a different megaproject, but we understand that this is systemic. This shared understanding helps us develop political awareness and organize strategically. It allows us to better understand the national and even global context of the struggles and to learn from the resistance of other peoples. We say that we see ourselves reflected in the struggles of others, and this helps us to grow and learn collectively.
I also want to say that there is a great deal of spirituality in Indigenous struggles. I think there is much we can share with other movements to encourage them not to lose hope. There is still so much hope. We live in a time when capitalism is beginning to shake. Yes, there is a profound climate crisis, but there is also a strong spirituality in our communities that helps us continue walking forward, even while enduring what feels unbearable. We often say that we are like a small light in the midst of great darkness, but the darker it gets, the brighter that small light shines. So the message is: don't lose hope. Keep walking forward and walk together in networks, because that is what strengthens the struggle and reminds us that we are not alone.
Erin: In this conversation, part of me fears that the struggle Omar is going through—the brutality and violence—I’m afraid that violence will eventually manifest within the data center fight. It's almost as if we're seeing what the future might hold. But the irony is that there is so much light in Omar’s discourse. His answers are so hopeful. When trying to work with organizations, individuals, and coalitions, when trying to bring them together, what tactics do you suggest for building a coalition with all these disparate people?
Omar: Yes, yes, there are security measures that we use. We've had to adopt many, because each region is different and each context is distinct. For example, in Guerrero there are community self-defense groups that fight against organized crime, such as Los Rojos and Los Ardillos in the Tierra Caliente region. When they attend assemblies, they sometimes disappear in their communities weeks in advance without telling anyone and use ancestral routes to reach Mexico City, walking for days to avoid passing through certain towns controlled by the organized crime that is threatening them. There are many strategies of this type that the communities use.
And going back to what I said before, many of these strategies operate through silence. Communities have learned that celebration and festivity are also forms of struggle and resistance, and a way to move forward. I think Indigenous peoples have learned that with globalization, capitalism, pollution, and these broader systems, we've been encouraged to stop looking at the land. We learned this from our elders: an elder once said that we've stopped looking at the earth because food no longer comes from the milpa. The milpa is a traditional agricultural system full of biodiversity: corn, squash, beans, mushrooms, wild greens, tomatoes, and many other foods. But agrochemicals and industrial systems are trying to make us stop looking at the land, to disconnect us from it. I believe modern technologies also play a role in this: they disconnect us from reality and from the earth, making us live in a world separated from the land. This weakens the deep meaning of our relationship with the earth.
The elders say that when we wake up again, when we once return to feeling and seeing the earth, when mushrooms, tomatoes, and native foods return, we will also change the way we see the world politically.
That's why the system concentrates people in cities: to disconnect us from the land, to overwhelm us with noise, speed, and distraction, and thus make us lose ancestral forms of dialogue. Our elders say there were ways to communicate through silence, through birds, through stones. Much of these forms of knowledge have been lost, along with our relationship to the land, and that is precisely what the system wants. Because if we lose that connection, the system grows stronger. So these are some of the strategies we use to resist.
Aurora: In terms of tactics and strategies, we work with very different groups. Let me explain: our struggle is digital, but we also live in rural areas; we work with environmentalists, but not all of them are the same; and when we talk to people in the tech sector, many are programmers who initially thought they were choosing the least harmful profession within capitalism. Then they realize they are causing harm, often unknowingly, and that discovery causes real pain. From that pain, resistance can emerge.
One of our main strategies comes from a Spanish collective called Enmedio, which theorizes about activism, especially how to blend art and activism. One of the first things they teach is making the invisible visible. In our case, that means showing that "the cloud" is physical: it's data centers, supply chains, and AI infrastructure. So we begin our talks by explaining that these supply chains start with extractivism: lithium in Chile (and also Ciudad Real), coltan in the Congo, chip factories in Taiwan that drain water, device factories in China, data centers in Spain and around the world, and even resource extraction in Greenland. We map the affected communities in each location, some facing extremely high levels of violence.
For example, mining racism absorbs much of the violence linked to these infrastructures, while we, in comparison, face less. Another tactic is naming things. People in communications sometimes frustrate me when they say, “Let me explain how to communicate; I’m a journalist.” And I reply, “Let me invent my own words.” My reality is new. This phenomenon is new. I invent new language. I’m not only a tech person or an environmentalist; I’m a techno-ecologist. I talk about technology from an ecological perspective, so I create words that reflect that.”
Another key tactic for us is coherence. We are long-term activists. People like Omar's network, for example, along with others like the Sursiendo in Mexico, are a great inspiration to us. We believe it's crucial to be consistent with the technologies we use. We rely primarily on free/open-source software. We try to self-host our tools rather than depending on data centers. My work and digital life run on my own small server. My computer has been repaired countless times. We repair everything because we understand the material suffering embedded in these devices. In the village, we even have a full-fledged repair shop; we learned that culture of repair from our grandparents. We don't use proprietary AI. People are often surprised: "Is it possible to live differently?" And I think: I've been doing this for 30 years. Living outside the reach of Big Tech isn't new; it's possible.
Another important tactic is imagination. When we talk about resisting the narrative of inevitability, we draw on climate justice thinking. When we run workshops with children, we do it in two parts: first, we explain the global damage and impacts, and we finish with stories of resistance that have worked. Then we delve into Solarpunk. If you're not familiar with it, it's a creative genre: it's less about reading and more about imagining and creating hopeful futures based on social justice. Climate change still exists in these futures, but communities fight it together, reclaiming technology from Big Tech.
We ask participants to write stories or make short films imagining better worlds. It works beautifully. One of our colleagues even founded a Solarpunk publishing house called Anticatastrophe. She imagines alternative technological futures inspired by Al-Andalus, a period in Spanish history when water management and technology were far more advanced than in the rest of Europe. Just as Afrofuturism imagines technology shaped by African self-determination, she imagines a future where technology is reclaimed through social justice, water, and community stewardship.
Erin: Before we go, do you have any final thoughts or messages for teachers and students?
Aurora: At one point, we realized that a large percentage of the attendees at our talks were teachers at all levels: university professors, high school teachers, elementary school teachers, and even Spanish teachers for migrants. So we created a communication channel on XMPP for those who wanted to critically reflect on teaching without AI. It's called something like Docenc, but without the "AI" in XMPP, if you want to look it up.
It became a very interesting space, as many of these teachers wanted to adopt a critical stance on technology in their schools, but felt isolated. In this virtual forum, they found a community: they could support each other, share strategies, and exchange ideas.
Sometimes it's not that I need to teach them something; it's more that we can serve as a kind of virtual bonfire, a place where people can gather, talk, and feel less alone.
Omar: Regarding teachers and students, I've learned that there are many other forms of learning that take place in different spaces. For us, the fogota, the bonfire, is very important and has given us a lot of hope and warmth. Recently, we were in a community resisting an illegal landfill that has been operating for years and is contaminating several aquifers. To organize themselves, the community gathers around a bonfire. These become learning spaces that allow us to continue resisting through the knowledge passed down to us by our elders: knowledge full of profound meaning.
In our community, fire is a form of communication. It alerts us to danger and hope. So it's another way to learn, understand, and share knowledge.
We have also organized intergenerational camps in the region, which allow us to invite elders to share their wisdom and community knowledge. Recently, we held one focused on safety, where we screened a video we produced in collaboration with traditional schools, called “Who are the Totonacs?” Children who performed traditional dances came to introduce the film.
Through this, we have learned to value other forms of knowledge that are equally important and that have helped us reach other spaces such as cinema, video and cultural storytelling, always connected with the bonfire and collective learning, and many other practices.
Conclusion
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The next best time is right now. We encourage readers to take on these ideas–seeds of wisdom from Omar and Aurora–to play and grapple with them, to enact some of them, even in your own community.
It was an honor to have Omar and Aurora, in different parts of the world, come together on Zoom to share their stories. Despite fighting different industries — from oil companies to drug cartels to data centers — in vastly different lands, they each know that tech inevitability, those human-led political machines, are political myths. They draw on their histories to inform their present work, with Aurora highlighting her familial struggles and Omar leveraging his historical ties to Totonac land. They both draw strength from learning stories of collective resistance. To counteract necropolitics, the politics of death, as we mentioned, they bring wisdom, water, light, and community, punctuating corporate messaging with the intensity of collective voices, balanced with strategic silence. In times of darkness, they combine spirituality and joy to spark community bonfires, bringing people together to heal collective wounds. Where can the healing start in your community?
Towards the consideration of adapting some components, or all, towards a Luddite praxis, Omar and Aurora give the resistance more tools, including festivals and assemblies, and language such as Sacrifice Zones, Digital Colonialism, and Enmedio, a form of activism which combines art, media, and political action to make the invisible visible. Aurora highlights the power of naming things, along with the power of the imagination.
Omar speaks of the power of spirituality and turning back to the earth for answers, referencing the milpa, which was not only a form of Mesoamerican agriculture but also a sociocultural and ecological way of being. Milpa as a metaphor can be a way for educators to reimagine modern educational systems, which currently prioritize concepts like individuality and rationality, and instead, shift towards collaborative learning environments to “form polycultures of reciprocity where animate and inanimate beings are all connected inside a web of relations belonging to the land” (Gallardo, 2023).
Both Omar and Aurora call for people not to turn away from inequities, a privileged position to find oneself in, but instead, face them head-on. As big tech continues to push brash, often unfounded claims into unsuspecting school systems, Omar and Aurora’s message encourages us to work together to continue disrupting dominant corporate narratives by grounding efforts in both our Earth and each other’s collective wisdom and strength. Is it time to plant the next tree or milpa?
References
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Gallardo, D. (2023). Embodying Milpa: Centering Place to Cultivate Polycultures of Reciprocity in Learning Environments. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 18(2), 70-83.
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Lázaro García, O. (September 12, 2025). They came for the oil. They took everything. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/opinion/mexico-oil-pollution-fracking.html
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Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can’t transform education. Harvard University Press.