Joy Repair · Make Love Public · A Public Document
Drafted in the lineage of cognitive liberty, the Love Pageant prophecy,
and the community practice tradition.
Offered for public authorship.
Preamble
In October of nineteen sixty-six a few thousand people gathered in Golden Gate Park and read aloud a Prophecy of a Declaration of Independence. They named three inalienable rights and the order mattered. Freedom of body. The pursuit of joy. The expansion of consciousness. They were not asking permission. They were making love public.
Thirty-three years later the right hiding inside that prophecy was given a name. Cognitive liberty. The right of each person to think what they think and to think how they think. The right to author one's own mind.
We carry that lineage forward into the era of artificial intelligence. AI is not a tool. AI is an infrastructure of inference — a layer of automated meaning-making installed between people and the institutions that decide their fates. The question is no longer whether the machine can write the case note. The question is whose mind, whose city, whose love, whose society this is going to be.
We hold these rights to be inalienable, to belong to the social fabric itself, and to require no permission from any platform, any state, or any market to be exercised.
Every person retains the right to think what they think and to think how they think. No system, public or private, may interfere with the conditions under which a person authors their own mind. The negative obligation is the refusal of non-consensual interference. The positive obligation is the active securing of the conditions under which thought remains possible.
No person shall be reduced to the output of a model. Every person retains the authorship of their own story, their own diagnosis, their own risk, their own future. Where a system generates a representation of a person, that person has the right to see it, to challenge it, to correct it, and to refuse it.
No decision that materially shapes a person's housing, custody, employment, liberty, treatment, or benefits shall be made by a model alone. A human being accountable by name must own the decision and must be available to be questioned by the person affected.
No model may be substituted for a relationship in domains where the relationship is the intervention. Therapy, mentorship, organizing, accompaniment, and pastoral care are not productivity problems and may not be automated under the cover of access.
Any system that produces inferences about a person or a community must make those inferences readable in the language of the people they describe. A model that cannot be explained to the people it sorts has no business sorting them.
Communities have the right to refuse the deployment of AI systems within their geography, their institutions, and their relationships. Refusal is not a failure of innovation. Refusal is a feature of a free people.
The data generated by the lives of ordinary people belongs to the commons that produced it. No private entity may enclose that commons without consent, compensation, and ongoing accountability to the communities from which the data was drawn.
Any harm produced by an AI system shall be repaired by the institution that deployed it, in the terms of the person harmed, on the timeline of the person harmed, and to the satisfaction of the person harmed. There is no statute of limitations on repair.
Efficiency is not the highest value of a human society. The deployment of artificial intelligence shall not be permitted to shrink the conditions under which joy, surprise, play, and authorship are possible. A society that optimizes itself out of these conditions has optimized itself out of being a society.
The crowd in the panhandle was not asking permission.
Neither are we.
Make Love Public.
In Witness Whereof
This is not a petition. It is not waiting for permission. It is a public record of people who believe these rights belong to the social fabric itself.
Issued by Joy Repair · Indianapolis · joy4repair.com
Drafted by Marc McAleavey, MSW
Meta Macro Social Work · Make Love Public Imprint
Offered for Public Authorship · Version 1.0 · Not Finished · Not Meant to Be Finished Alone