danmcquillan

Boycott Palantir. Boycott AI. Divert all AI investment into democratic planning for more doctors, nurses, care workers and teachers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DEek40YOoRC/

We don't need sovereign hyperscale data centres because we don't want them or the shoddy tech that depends on them. What we do need is a democratic control of our energy and water resources that orients towards sustainability. Goodbye Thames Water, and take Anthropic with you!

I have a 4th position on AI (not sci-fi, not productive, not normal, but diagnostic of systemic collapse). More in 'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' - paper https://zenodo.org/records/19457404, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U2o5Ysms

The video is out from my Rogers Chair lecture at Western University in March:
'AI is a Morbid Symptom of the Interregnum' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U2o5Ysms
(yes I did use an exploded view of a Gaggia espresso machine as a slide to accompany 'convivial tools')

What we see operating through AI is an attempt to re-legitimise centralised power despite a polycrisis of its own making, & to do so by invoking the aura of high tech and the material force of energy politics. Decomputing advocates instead the infrastructuring of the common good.

Looking forward to debating the contradictions of AI at 'Resisting Big Tech Empires' (Sat 25th). What's happening when $$$ is poured into extractive but failing tech? How is AI a diagnostic for the nihilistic turn in geopolitics? What can we do about it? https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/event/resisting-big-tech-empires/

I'll be badmouthing AI as part of theis panel on Sunday alongside @abebab@bird.makeup, @emilymbender@dair-community.social , @alex@dair-community.social, @shengokai@zirk.us and director Valerie Veatch. Register at https://notaidoc.com/literacy

Apparently, collaborating with AI impairs unassisted performance because it optimises on short-term goals not long-term. The frame is the trick; you can't actually 'collaborate' with a synthetic token machine at all. Myth-making masquerading as critique ⚠️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

RE: @danmcquillan@kolektiva.social

"Fascism doesn't return as a tick list of characteristics. Fascism is a fluid and dynamic force which operates at the level of social desires before it appears as jackboots. We need to learn to sense it in our infrastructures as well as in our political discourse."

Ever find it hard to get up to speed on a Friday morning? Here's a Burmese punk version of Bella Ciao for you 🏴🔥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddm5yNcuHPg

The problem with having 'AI Safety' advocates as partners or funders in campaigns to resist AI is that their higher truth supercedes people's lived experience. It won't end any better than Leninist entryism. AI doomers' commitments are closer to tech bros than to the rest of us.

Two factors dominate UK higher education right now:
1) mass redundancies, especially in subjects that emphasise critical thinking.
2) the growing pervasiveness of AI.
This is what we call 'technopolitics'.

Luddism is our literacy
#AlLiteracyDay

"So whatever problem AI attempts to solve becomes what philosopher Henri Bergson would call a ‘ready-made problem’ – a problem that is expressed as a function of things prior to itself that have already been turned into abstractions". ('Resisting AI', p43)

One of the lessons the Luddites learned the hard way, and the critical AI movement could avoid relearning, is that when it comes to the harmful social impacts of tech the state is NOT a neutral arbiter between private capital and the common people.
💻🔨
Recommended text 👇 'Writings of the Luddites' edited by Kevin Binfield

IPPR recommends: "Deploying AI engineers to schools, hospitals ... to experiment with where AI can improve outcomes"
- why not ask people already working there about outcomes? I'm betting 'fix the leaking roof' and 'stop making cuts' would come out ahead of 'more AI please')

Really rather chuffed to see 'Resisting AI' pop up as a prop in an insta video takedown of techbros
https://instagram.com/p/DM0XtRcx5lN/

Anthropic doomers peddling delusions about the dangers of superintelligent AI have collided with fascist dumbshits who think an all-powerful death machine is a great idea. So what. The people most harmed by these masculinist fantasies will always be civilians, women, children. ¡Que se vayan todos!

Anyone seen a good analysis of colleague-skills https://archive.ph/uvqBx and anti-distillation https://officechai.com/ai/chinas-workers-are-weaponizing-ai-against-each-other-through-colleague-skill-files-and-fighting-back/? Seems like a 'moral panic' that fuses legit fear of bosses replacing workers with hype about limited and hugely unreliable agentic AI.

RE: @danmcquillan@kolektiva.social

I posted my speaker notes from the opening plenary ('The Empire of Big Tech') and the afternoon panel ('Is This Technofascism?') https://danmcquillan.org/resisting_big_tech_empires.html

Thanks to Mél Hogan for this wide ranging conversation about AI in which we cover simulation, shame, system collapse and even some hopeful ways forward.
https://shows.acast.com/the-data-fix/episodes/simulation-with-dan-mcquillan

This week-long summer study session looks right on point:
'Low-Tech, Luddism and Liberation: reclaiming technology for the collective good' https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-9-degrowth-and-exnovation/
Also family-friendly & includes documentary viewings, poetry readings, hiking excursions and music nights.

So many continuities between AI and the Major/Blair private finance initiative (PFI); outsource vital public infrastructure to corporations who provide a shoddy substitute and continue to charge you through the nose forever. ¡Ya basta!

I posted the text of my talk on 'Decomputing as Resistance' https://danmcquillan.org/decomputing_as_resistance.html
It's a work-in-progress: comments welcome!

My co-panellists on this BUP webinar will be Masoumeh Iran Mansouri, co-author of 'How to be ‘anti-AI’ in the 21st century' https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gpe/4/2/article-p185.xml, and Patrick Brodie, co-author of 'From the Bog to the Cloud - Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland' https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/from-the-bog-to-the-cloud

"Where any view of [AI] exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only"

(apologies to Wm Blake https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Laocoon_(Blake))

The opening statement here is jarring: "the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty" - we are supposed identify with some sense of concern, because what? The self-sovereign US Army is a force for good? 'The Authoritarian Stack' https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/

"The enrolment of AI in the management of these various crises produces ‘states of exception’ – forms of exclusion that render people vulnerable in an absolute sense".
'Resisting AI' p72 (https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai)

"Sweden’s Tesla Blockade Is Spreading: dockworkers in all Swedish ports will refuse to offload Teslas, cleaning crews will no longer clean showrooms, and mechanics won’t fix charging points as the labor dispute rages on" https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-tesla-strike-cleaners

@miss_rodent@girlcock.club That might mitigate some frustrating moments! I think, though , that the very visible bullshit of AI is a symptom of a much deeper malaise in systemic claims of legitimacy. I argued that a bit more here: https://zenodo.org/records/18908530

AI* does more for the far right than boost disinformation; it sediments it structurally and institutionally through
- algorithmic states of exception
- eugenic solutionism
- bureaucratic cruelty
- diverting from structural solutions
[*all current AI, not just the generative kind]

@inquiline@assemblag.es great!