6-Pack Comics

Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘ATTENTIVENESS — PROBLEM’: a calm rabbit ticks a multiple-choice ballot reading ‘bad guy / worse guy / no chance of winning’ beside a red, chaotic screaming match of monstrous figures, illustrating that citizens get only an occasional vote or an online shouting match; three small icons below stand for finding facts and values where we agree, being constructive where we disagree, and finding truly new solutions.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘NOT: only the powerful and popular, BUT: voices from every community — SOLUTION’: diverse animal-headed citizens sit round a table as a citizens’ assembly, with notes explaining that the Polis platform has no ‘share’ or ‘reply’ button and lets people vote Agree / Disagree / Unsure to surface the ideas that best bridge divides, so technology enhances rather than replaces our voice; a crowd of small figures and a large hand-drawn heart sit below.

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Hand-drawn comic page headed ‘RESPONSIBILITY — PROBLEM’: a huddle of cartoon animals each shout a blame-shifting excuse such as ‘I’m just selling what the customers buy’ and ‘I’m just following orders’, under the line ‘When no one is responsible, no one is responsible’, with a caption on Taiwan’s 2024 Facebook deepfake scams quoting the platform’s deflection, ‘it’s an algorithm pushing to you’.

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Hand-drawn comic page headed ‘NOT: vague promises, BUT: exact commitments — SOLUTION’: a thoughtful cat clutching an orange heart looks up at a stacked column of questions — WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHY, HOW — beside text proposing auditable engagement contracts that name the specific person responsible while leaving the method to them, closing with the note that a Taiwan citizens’ assembly earned over 85% deliberant support for its recommendations and targeted deepfake-scam categories fell by more than 94% within a year.

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Hand-lettered comic page titled ‘COMPETENCE — PROBLEM’ tracing how the algorithms that run our lives grew from understandable to opaque: a simple average rating, then a dense fraction-and-logarithm formula only coders could follow, and finally a tangled machine-learning diagram beside a small figure and a grey box reading ‘To become a mind so vast, even It can no longer speak Its own true name’.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘NOT: just trust us lol, BUT: everyone can check the process — SOLUTION’: algorithms that affect everyone should be inspectable by everyone, illustrated with Community Notes on X (formerly Birdwatch) and three animal figures checking the inputs, the free and public code (a checklist marked ‘MY CODE’) and the output, closing ‘to trust the process, we must be able to check the process’.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘RESPONSIVENESS — PROBLEM’: a rabbit holding a compass explains that society needs metrics to know where it is going but those metrics are often broken; paired charts contrast a rising ‘average income’ with the reality that income soars for the upper class while stalling for the lower class, and a table maps clicks to clickbait, comments to rage-bait flame wars, and user approval to sycophantic chatbots.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘NOT: metrics that mislead us, BUT: metrics made by us, for us — SOLUTION’: three steps — measure what we actually care about, measure it in multiple ways, and re-evaluate metrics often — illustrated with Weval.org, a public collection of AI-chatbot evaluations measuring values like honesty, cultural fluency, conflict resolution and mental-health best practices, with green ‘BY US’ and ‘FOR US’ arrows rising above a crowd of animal characters.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘SOLIDARITY — PROBLEM’: when people want different things we slip into negative-sum or zero-sum thinking — two chefs both want one orange, so they could fight over it and both end up worse off (negative-sum), or split it equally, which still assumes one side’s gain is the other’s loss (zero-sum); a win-lose diagram sits below.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘NOT: mutually assured destruction, BUT: as win-win as possible — SOLUTION’: look behind each what to the deeper why, then craft a new what that satisfies both sides — the two chefs discover one needs the orange peel for liqueur and the other the juice, so both are fully satisfied with no waste; and Taiwan used the pol.is platform to turn divisive debates into win-wins — including the Employment Gold Card that welcomed scientists and artists, showing how better conversations help everyone gain.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘SYMBIOSIS — PROBLEM’ reading ‘Don’t put all your society in one basket’: cartoon animals are packed into a single purple basket that then breaks apart, illustrating how routing modern culture, news and politics through a handful of multinational platforms creates a single point of failure — and how, even when those platforms do not fail, a bland one-size-fits-all ‘success’ flattens the thick middle layer of churches, local communities and the like; a row of grey figures stands below.

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Hand-lettered comic page headed ‘NOT: a one-size-fits-all overlord, BUT: local solutions for local folks — SOLUTION’ urging ‘fight for the users’, with three recent examples — the nonprofit ROOST.tools making open-source, un-centralised tools to detect and prevent child abuse; the open-source gpt-oss-safeguard that lets a community bring its own policy so it assists rather than replaces human moderators; and this book itself, made with a bounded local-spirit Kami fine-tuned to steward one specific relationship and run on one specific laptop — closing that sharing power, not concentrating it, is how we build the future.

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