Scrolling, shopping online, binge-watching—things we take for granted—rely on hidden systems built on exploited knowledge, labor, and resources. A few tech giants control these processes, making the digital world harder to escape. The AI hype only deepens this cycle, benefiting hyperscalers who own data centers and models. How do we break free from this exploitative system—and is escape even possible?

AI is changing how we work, live, and make decisions, but it’s not magic. It’s a tool, and its impact depends on who uses it and why. In this talk, Bruno draws on 20 years of hands-on experience to cut through the hype and explain what AI really is, what it can (and can’t) do, and how it’s already shaping society, for good and for bad. Expect a clear, honest look at real-world impacts like job shifts, surveillance, and the strain on democratic systems, plus ideas for how we can respond.

Lithium mines in the Andes and e-waste dumps in Ghana seem far from clean data centers—yet one cannot exist without the other. This interactive session explores why climate and environmental impacts must be central to digital rights struggles. We’ll cover raw material extraction, land exploitation, and the extractive tech economy harming climate justice—then brainstorm how all this connects to your digital rights work.

Digital surveillance is growing fast, embedding itself into daily life—from metadata extraction and spyware to biometric tracking in public spaces. Even without devices, our movements and identities are monitored. This session explores how surveillance erodes privacy and normalizes control. We’ll examine the tools, the myth that privacy is outdated, and the deep impact on human rights, including freedom of expression and dissent.

This opening session maps progressive struggles across the region. Activists, professionals, and journalists from ten countries will share insights into key fronts of struggle, modes of organizing, and obstacles they face. The session highlights local issues, regional trends, and geopolitical forces shaping them—setting the stage for deeper discussion on social change and the strategies needed to achieve it.

Faced with a climate crisis, democratic decline, and a digital post-truth era, this workshop questions if traditional activism and civil society models still work—or if new frameworks are needed. Is civil society tired or worse in a crisis? Can it adapt to shifting realities? Together we’ll explore how global trends impact activist identities, strategies, and visions for change—and whether new forms of political imagination are urgently needed across all levels.

As dominant systems deepen inequality, extract resources, and erode collective life, new forms of institution-making are emerging from below. This session brings together initiatives from Belgrade, Budapest, and the island of Vis that challenge dominant paradigms by reclaiming cultural, spatial, and educational infrastructures. Through practices of occupation, cooperative ownership, and autonomous schooling, these projects show how we can unlearn the systems that have failed us and build structures rooted in solidarity, care, and collective agency.

This session opens with a brief introduction to the Pirate Care book— a collective effort mapping struggles and autonomous organising around care across geographies. Rather than a finished model, the book is a prompt to reflect on building care infrastructures in hostile environments. After this provocation, a facilitated conversation will explore tactics, tensions, and practices of commoning care. Together, we’ll rethink mutiny as a generative force and ask what it means to federate in today’s fragmented landscape.

In this workshop, we’ll ground ourselves—in our bodies, in place (outdoors), and in the present moment—to explore extraction and liberation through movement, listening, and writing. Drawing on dance improvisation, organizing, and theory, we’ll let ideas emerge from embodied experience. No prior experience is expected. This is an invitation to connect personal transformation with collective liberation from extractive logics—and to carry these practices into the rest of the module and beyond.

This session examines how planning regulations enable the extraction of public space for private gain. Using cases from Montenegro, Croatia, and beyond, we show how planning tools—framed as development—legitimize dispossession and enclose commons. Through spatial plans and legal frameworks, we trace how spatial injustice is structured and normalized. We’ll also reflect on the limits and potentials of local resistance, situated knowledge, and reimagining planning beyond extractivism.

Global capitalism is undergoing major shifts as its growth model nears exhaustion. The “green transition” is central to this transformation, driven by the urgency to decarbonize. Yet the technologies behind it demand vast natural resources, raising doubts about its true aims. Profit still relies on extracting nature below its real costs. Unless radically reimagined, this transition risks repeating old injustices rooted in extractivism and the logic of endless accumulation.

Extraction is often justified by promises of growth and jobs—whether through mining or urban renewal. In reality, it brings resource loss, displacement, environmental harm, and rising inequality – quite a price for economic growth! Across the region, cities face large-scale investments backed by deregulation, privatization, and corruption. These transnational trends complicate efforts to resist. This panel gathers urban activists from four countries to explore structural drivers of extractive urbanism and strategies for confronting them.

Predicting the future from today’s crises often leads to dystopia or nostalgia. This session invites participants to explore nonlinear, non-dichotomous pathways beyond extractivism. Using backcasting, we’ll start from a desired future and work backward to identify actions and policies that connect it to the present. Instead of being bound by current limits, we’ll center hope, imagination, and collective visioning to rethink how we live, plan, and relate to nature and each other.

At present the notion of corruption is the focal point in contemporary political affairs. It has saturated the discourse of political parties and the imagination of the public. In this session we take a closer look at the history of the notion and changes of its meaning over time, as well as the implications for contemporary political life. Regarding the latter, we will survey the interpretations that see corruption as the key valence issues that gave rise to valence populism and the rise of neither-left-nor-right political programs.

Nation-states dominate global governance, seen as natural forms of modern life. While a nation conceives of itself either as civic or ethnic, the two are deeply entwined. Today’s surge in “patriotism”—especially in the West—reveals that civic nationalism also relies on exclusionary myths, often laced with racism, misogyny, and supremacy. If patriotism means aligning with a state’s proclaimed “national interest,” we must ask: in a world facing nuclear war and genocide, is that still a horizon worth holding?

Violence is one of the key elements of statehood, and diplomacy based on arms trade – and thus on securing and expanding spheres of sovereignty – is highly effective, as it turns a trade partner not only into an ally but also into an accomplice. How have the relations between Israel and Serbia/Yugoslavia developed – and what role has the arms trade played in that? How was Israel forged, whose weapons fueled the war in Bosnia, and what have Israeli military planes been persistently seeking at Belgrade’s “Nikola Tesla” airport over the past two years?

This workshop will recap means of private and state surveillance, further deconstruct targeted and mass surveillance, and provide useful tools and practices to counter them. More specifically, as most of us already have ideas about encrypting communication and data, we will dive deeper into workflows that will demystify and ease the adoption of various tools to mask our identifiers and identities online.

Violence is one of the key elements of statehood, and diplomacy based on arms trade – and thus on securing and expanding spheres of sovereignty – is highly effective, as it turns a trade partner not only into an ally but also into an accomplice. How have the relations between Israel and Serbia/Yugoslavia developed – and what role has the arms trade played in that? How was Israel forged, whose weapons fueled the war in Bosnia, and what have Israeli military planes been persistently seeking at Belgrade’s “Nikola Tesla” airport over the past two years?

During this session, we will discuss the ways how the growing trend of digitalizationof public services affects their delivery and excludes different communities andindividuals, with the specific focus on most marginalized communities and the socialwelfare sector. What are social, legal and other implications of the use of such digitaltools and how to beat the idea to digitalize everything? Come and join us to discussthese issues. By the end of the session, we might even start building out own DigitalLuddites community!

Erasing traces of collectivity, solidarity, and responsibility from local history fuels neoliberalism, privatizing and stratifying social relations. In Skopje’s post-WWII Railway Residential Building—once with its own yard, laundries, and cinema—the question remains: How can we live better together? Since 2015, If Buildings Could Talk by FR~U has used it as a performative space, blending arts to foster care, solidarity, and civic action, while reimagining the public realm in post-socialist cities.

Over the past decade, I hitchhiked across the Balkans, Europe, and the Caucasus, meeting people with vastly different—and often opposing—views. On a long ride, conversation continues despite differences, and by journey’s end, perspectives may shift on both sides. In this talk, I share hitchhiking stories that show how dialogue and storytelling can bridge divides, challenge prejudice, deepen listening, and transform the way we see ourselves and others.

The first pop-up city took place in 2023 in Montenegro’s Lustica Bay, led by crypto and longevity communities testing nomadic gatherings, thematic co-work, and alternatives to nation-states. As the Global Ecovillage Network marks 30 years and explores a Balkans+Hungary subnetwork, we’ll discuss the potential and challenges of bridging high-tech global ventures with local grassroots ecological movements—and how such experiments could shape territories, cultures, and policies locally and globally.

The final session is a feedback session, dedicated to recapping the concepts, ideas, dilemmas, emerging questions, and unresolved curiosities that surfaced before and during the Forum. Using sociometric techniques, participants will engage their bodies, minds, and hearts to reflect and speculate —individually and collectively — on how we might improve our circumstances and strengthen our resistance to dominant, unjust narratives and practices. Together, we will explore possible ways to face the obstacles, setbacks, and barriers that hinder the shift in perspectives necessary for more just and equitable forms of co-living and collaboration.