Re: <nettime> Technopolitics now

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 27/09/2026 21:56, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:

> Armin used to do interviews for Austrian public radio, and the thing
> that really blew his mind was a researcher named Carlota Perez. She
> wrote about how technological revolutions happened through great
> surges of investment. We had all just witnessed the internet being
> built in that way, and how it transformed all of social life. Looking
> back in history you could see other such moments - like state-led
> investment in the US, Germany and Britain during and after World War
> II, leading to radar, nuclear power, early computers etc. Perez is
> fundamentally an institutionalist, and she wanted to look beyond the
> combination of government-sponsored research and stock market frenzy
> to see how technology is absorbed and channeled by societies, not
> only through government regulation but also through labor struggles, 
> organizational forms, educational and cultural developments,
> international relations and so on. This was a Pandora's Box of social
> history, and once you opened it, all sorts of other butterflies flew
> out. Armin was fascinated up to his untimely death, and I went on in
> the same vein for a few more years after that.
>
> While we were all so interested in this, the next revolution just
> didn't happen. We got the Global Financial Crisis and the
> increasingly sickening world of social media. Then later, during the
> Biden administration, institutionalists like Mariana Mazzucato
> briefly kindled the hope that government policy and stock market
> avarice might together lead to a green energy transition.
>
> Instead we got AI.


Hi Brian,

An interesting recent analysis of the institutional side of the current
technopolitical moment is, in my view, this one:

Alami, Ilias. “Imperial State Capitalism: Fusing State Ownership with
Frontier Tech Power”, September 22, 2026. https://www.illiberalism.org/
imperial-state-capitalism-fusing-state-ownership-with-frontier-tech-power

Imperial State Capitalism is defined as "the fusion of a resurgent
global drive toward state ownership with a turbulent reconfiguration of
empire, with each process feeding and destabilizing the other. This
explosive fusion is real and rapidly intensifying, fueling geopolitical
and imperialist scrambles abroad, while deepening illiberalism at home."

The main instrument is state taking controlling stakes in key players
long the AI chain: software, hardware, minerals. The article details
these investments in quite some detail. Strangely, though, China is not
included.

For us, after 40 years of neoliberalism, state investment in what used
to be called the "commanding heights of the economy" might sound
strange, but as Alami points out, it's a recurring feature of capitalism
in phases of imperialism.

"States have used ownership as a strategic weapon for as long as
capitalism has had a global dimension. And competition between rival
imperialist powers has repeatedly compelled states to reinvent their
economic role as direct owners of the most strategic or capital-
intensive means of production, extraction, and destruction—from precious
metals and plantations in the 16th century, to colonial trade and
infrastructure in the 19th century, to heavy industry and armaments in
the 20th century. Today’s frontier technologies and critical sectors,
from semiconductors to critical minerals, are the next iteration in this
long history of state capitalism."

He goes on to argue that "imperial state capitalism is ... an enduring
historical phenomenon that has been repeatedly activated during periods
of intense tensions in the global structure of empire, each time with
long-lasting consequences. It opened entire technological trajectories
and areas of specialization, notably related to the defense-industrial
base, which fueled imperial violence, global militarism, and the
suppression of internal dissent. And it repeatedly served as the
crucible in which new ruling classes formed in and around the state."

Imperialism, as we know, is both a foreign and a domestic policy. "This
is not simply a story about aggressive foreign policy and geopolitics.
Much like previous instances of imperial state capitalism, the same
fusion of state power and capital reshaping the world order abroad is
producing a distinctive and dangerous political formation at home."

But, as Alami points out, "this moment should not be read only as
catastrophe. State ownership has always been a genuinely dual
instrument: one through which powerful states have expanded global
capitalism, enforced imperial domination, and waged war, but also one
through which Third World states have asserted claims of sovereignty
over economic resources, however imperfectly."

Which makes it so important what happens next. Yes, AI is here to stay,
and in my view, it will play the same infrastructural role as the
internt plays today, seamlessly woven into the fabric of everday life.
More industrial automation than super-intelligence.

But will it be the current technopolitical formation? I'm not so sure.
The AI boom is clearly economically and politically unsustainable, which
is most clearly visible in the development of hyper-scale data center.
There is real popular resistance against them and it is, it seems to me,
not clear if they are need at that scale.

The US has currently 45 hyper-scale data centers operational, while
China has only 6. The US has 21 more under construction and China just
1.  And the Chinese ones are small (500MW) in comparison to the US ones
(5.5GW).

Even if we take numbers from China with some skepticism, the difference
is stark. Yet, they are still supposed to be in a head-to-head
competition on AI.

https://aidatacenterindex.com/compare/united-states-vs-china/

So, what happens once this infrastructural bubble burst? Where will be
enormeous machine be directed to?

My guess is towards geo-engineering. The situation is rapidly 
escalating, costs are mounting, some desperate measures are more and 
more likely to be taken, indeed, smaller scale interventions, like 
cloud-seeding, are already quite common. Not only that, it's totally 
inline with cybernetic thinking. Remember, John von Neumann proposed in 
the 1950s to use atom bombs to permanently re-arrange planetary weather 
patterns (to green the Sahara desert).

It's entirely possible that this will be done on-top, in order to
preserve, the fossil capitalism, or that it will speed up an energy
transition. Which is already underway everywhere where vested interests
have not captured state capacity to suppress it. This is why many
"failed states" leapfrog the fully industrialized countries in solar
adoption, check out Sierra Leone, for example.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-first-evidence-of-a-take-
off-in-solar-in-africa/

Either way, China, it seems, has a massive lead in state capitalism and
in green energy transition.

From a Western perspective, the picture is pretty grim, globally,
perhaps less so. Particularly should the current war with Iran dampen
the US desire to wage more wars abroad.


all the best. Felix








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