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Breath of Civilization

A documentary, and the piece of land it leads to

Breath of Civilization is a feature documentary in development. It follows two filmmakers from a six-person household in Seattle to communities in Virginia that run their own homes, power and food, and on to a city being planned in Bhutan and a protected forest in Ecuador.

The second part is a district built the same way, and filmed while it is built. The people who live there would own and run their homes, power, water and food, and the computers and AI they use, and could switch the AI off while everything they need to live keeps running.

Switch the district’s AI offThe film

The sky over Seattle right now, drawn in your browser from the date and time.

What keeps running when the AI is off?

A plan for the district, drawn before any land is held. Each system people need to live has a way to run with the AI switched off, and the residents practise switching it off.

The blue dotted lines are what the AI touches.

A district, drawn as a planA piece of land beside a river. A pump with its own solar panel draws from the river and feeds the fields. Three clusters of homes, each one long building with its own rows of solar panels and its own small room of computers, are linked by a power line that also feeds a shared workshop. A hall sits between them. Dotted lines run from each computer room to the homes, the pump, the fields, the hall and the workshop near it.riverHomesThe hallWaterPowerWorkshopFieldsComputersa sheet on the doora meeting, signedhand valvespanels drive the motorsprinted manualsplans on paperswitched off
A plan of no real place, not to scale. Each cluster is one building of 6 to 10 homes with its own panels and its own computers, and there is no central power plant. Nothing on it has been built.
Each system, with the AI on and with it off
SystemWith the AI onWith it off
PowerSoftware forecasts the sun and moves loads that can wait, like water heating and the workshop, into the sunny hours.In daylight, pumps and motors run straight off the panels. No computer sits between the sun and the motor. Living Energy Farm, Virginia, runs its machinery this way
WarmthA model decides when to fill the heat stores.Heat is stored, never electricity: thick walls, and sun-warmed air blown under the floor. A warm room needs no controller.
WaterSoil sensors and a model decide when to irrigate.Hand valves and a printed watering calendar, kept by whoever has the week.
FieldsPlanting plans, seed records and harvest counts kept by software.The same plans on paper in the hall. Nothing in a field needs a screen.
HomesAn assistant books the shared rooms, tracks repairs and rotates chores.A sign-up sheet on the kitchen door, the way most shared houses already run.
The hallAn assistant drafts summaries of proposals and objections.People meet, read the proposal aloud and sign it. Nothing an AI writes enters a decision or the record without a named person’s signature, and the record keeps a paper copy.
WorkshopA local model reads manuals and helps find faults.Printed manuals, and the people who did the repair last time.
ComputersEach cluster has its own small room of machines and keeps its own data. It may use at most a tenth of the cluster’s energy, and heavy work runs in daylight only.Any resident can switch it off. The keys that start it again are split among five residents drawn by lot, and three must agree.

Why a district is AI safety work

As AI systems take over more of the work that economies and governments need from people, those institutions can stop needing the people they were built to serve, and then stop serving them. Researchers call this gradual disempowerment. It happens through many small, reasonable decisions to let a machine do a job.

A district cannot change what the frontier labs build. It can keep a few hundred people able to run their own power, water, food and decisions, count every month how much of that they can still do without AI, and publish the count. Nobody has measured that yet.

What the research says, and what a district cannot do

Three parts of one project

  • The film

    Seattle, Virginia, Washington DC, Bhutan and Ecuador, in three movements. It asks what happens when a measure of how people live is given power over their lives, and who the measure misses.

    The film

  • The land

    How a piece of land would change, in stages, starting in one household before any land is held. Each stage has a test it has to pass before the next begins.

    The land

  • AI safety

    What the research on gradual disempowerment and on people losing skills to automation says a place like this can test, and the larger problems it cannot touch.

    AI safety

Where it stands

  • Done

  • Applied for or planned

    • Development funding for the film, applied for in August 2026.
    • The first household practice: written rules for the AI one household uses, an exercise run with the AI on and then off, and a day with it switched off.

  • Not started

    • Filming beyond the draft cut.
    • Land, and a housing partner to build on it.
    • Funding for the district.

If you hold land, or live on some that could become this, write to me.

Bentley Moon · Seattle