Re: <nettime> The case for the Neo-Luddites - Rage against the machine learning

[Louis Rawlins via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi Felix, Mond.

I wanted to echo a bit of what Felix says, though my resonance with "AI" is
through the lens of AI / CD-ROMs / Macromedia Director and all the "new
media" promises of the 1990s rather than nuclear power. My memory of it, in
hindsight, was much ado about.. something, but probably not so much what's
being stated today. Things that felt exciting then lost temperature and
relevance thirty years on.


Today, I spent some time reading through dialogues on the Project VRM
mailing list with Doc Searles. Somebody there shared this:

Greg Kroah-Hartman / Kernel Recipes 2026 - Security in the LLM age
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q

It's oriented towards a more-technical audience than we usually cover on
nettime, but the salient points ought to land just the same.


My personal concern alongside Felix's point is that the "faith in markets"
will be seen as anomalous rather than general. We'll have a global "come to
savior" moment, but we'll mistake the AI-tree for the
planet-out-of-balance-forest. Rather than divest from – I don't care what
we call it: a global neoliberal order – we'll continue to double-down on
hope for the future, strip-mining the next available resource (surprise me!
we always do).

And this is not to be negative, from my standpoint: I've gotten great
"value" from utilizing Gemini as a quasi-health companion for workouts to
navigate chronic health. I'm still planning on running local models so that
I can program locally. I'm neither denying, nor affirming the use of these
systems. The scale of use matters.


Peace,  Louis


------------------------------
louisrawlins.com
248-808-8908


On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 10:04 AM <nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org>
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>    1. Re: The case for the Neo-Luddites - Rage against the machine
>       learning (Felix Stalder)
>    2. Re: The imaginary institution of society (Louis Rawlins)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:24:41 +0200
> From: Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>
> To: nettime-l@lists.nettime.org
> Subject: Re: <nettime> The case for the Neo-Luddites - Rage against
>         the machine learning
> Message-ID: <c31ccd44-25a6-4cd4-a695-9a332c2feac8@openflows.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> hi Mond,
>
> like everyone else, I have no idea where recursive self-improvement
> might lead. Technical improvements have been impressive lately, truly
> but for now, it's entirely unclear how they fit into the real world.
>
> Under current conditions, its foundations are really unstable.
>
> For one, the economics are not there. The faith in scaling laws (more
> data and more compute = better models) has been leading to a massive
> build-out of data-centers that is largely debt-driven. There has been a
> real speculative mania, less driven by the prospects of AGI than by the
> prospects of monopolistic windfall profits. For now, they seem like a
> very distant promise (for many reasons, including Chinese open source
> models and companies becoming more cost/benefit aware in relation to
> AI). At the moment, it's not clear how long that promise can be upheld.
> We already see cracks appearing. Interest rates and default insurances
> for bonds are going up, certain hyper-scaler bonds, for example,
> Orcale's, are traded below nominal value. I
>
> Second, chasing scaling law visions has lead to larger and larger
> models. The current version of ChatGPT (v6) requires 400 times(!) more
> computation in training than the first compelling version (v3.5) that
> came out some four years ago. This puts enormous strain on the
> infrastructure, not just in terms of financing, but also in terms of
> energy, water, and hardware.
>
> Third, this strain triggers new coalitions, perhaps even social
> movements, which quite effectively challenge this unchecked expansion.
> Here, the cloud becomes material, local and immediate, inverting the
> usual dynamics of digital politics. ...

[snip]

------------------------------
>
> End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 40, Issue 13
> *****************************************
>
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