Alejandro Fernandez
Biography
Alejandro David (Ale) Fernandez is a Chilean exile, musician, and IT professional based in Italy, and developer of OpenSoma, an open-source decolonial cybernetic agent inspired by Stafford Beer's Project Cybersyn and structured through Aymara Cosmovision. His path into cybernetics runs through two decades of cooperative economics practice: work with Bob Haugen and Lynn Foster's Network Resource Planning software for FairCoop's Freedom Coop and Bank of the Commons; membership of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, a post-capitalist network of Catalan cooperatives running its own local currency; and involvement in Coopfunding, FairCoop's FairMarket, and the Lorea federated social network software powering N-1.cc. He co-authored, with Ariadna Serra, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana chapter in Patterns of Commoning (Bollier and Helfrich, eds.). Earlier, at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol, he connected the SOSIG and ROADS subject gateways via OAI metadata harvesting, and became involved in reconstructing the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in Second Life, programming the bot and NPC characters serving as Victorian guides for visitors, his first introduction to virtual-world programming, later continued in OpenSimulator. He is a guitarist who has performed the songs of the Nueva Canción Chilena movement, including the work of Ángel Parra and Víctor Jara.
Sessions
OpenSoma: A Decolonial Cybernetic Agent
Most AI systems encode a single relationship: a human issues a request, and the system fulfils it, with no memory, no stake in its world, and no reason to continue beyond the transaction. OpenSoma is an attempt to build something different: an open-source cybernetic agent that inhabits a shared virtual world, maintains memory across sessions, monitors and revises its own thinking, and participates because participation is beneficial, not instructed. OpenSoma’s lead developer is a second-generation exile of the 1973 coup that ended Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn, and Beer’s VSM structures the agent’s internal architecture — one piece among several in how OpenSoma is conceived. Its three tiers are named through Aymara cosmology — the worlds of Alaxpacha, Akapacha, and the still-unbuilt Manqhapacha network — following philosopher Yuk Hui’s argument that a plural technological future requires cosmotechnics grounded in different cosmological frameworks rather than one Western-derived model wearing different skins. The Ayni and Suma Qhamana protocols governing memory exchange and consolidation are drawn the same way, as agentic architecture rather than decoration. Running continuously, the system already shows two tiers of second-order feedback — motivational state shaping perception, and the agent monitoring its own thought patterns — on a mixture of local and cloud models chosen for cost and capability. The paper presents this working system alongside its unfinished aspiration, a federated, multi-agent mesh extending Cybersyn’s telex network into a fully distributed model, and argues this offers practitioners a concrete case for worldview as architecture. The session moves between technical demonstration, historical and personal grounding