🇺🇸Análisis | 'Pax Silica': cuando el imperio deja de fingir.
"Estados Unidos no ejerce su dominio a través de la innovación, sino por cárteles de chips. Ha abandonado el teatro del libre mercado y gobierna a través de servidores y nubes."
🖋Evgeny Morozov.
https://elsal.to/46458
I had a lot of fun taking on one of the main tech libertarian proponents of private cities in a new episode of Doha Debates. We did not exactly get along! youtu.be/RhkTk0heAPg
I had a lot of fun taking on one of the main tech libertarian proponents of private cities in a new episode of Doha Debates. We did not exactly get along! youtu.be/RhkTk0heAPg
I'll get the book. But for me, fixing theory does take precedence over correcting strategy and this might be where we disagree. Meaning: I do think there are analytical deficiencies in Marx (from theory of action to philosophy of history) that need to be fixed - or else strategy will always fail.
I did write a longer response to this on the other site but I do include the screenshots if it helps x.com/i/status/202...
Great exchange between @evgenymorozov.bsky.social, @abenanav.bsky.social, and @leifw.bsky.social in the ideas letter:
www.theideasletter.org/issue/eterna...
The Ideas Letter has hosted a debate on @evgenymorozov.bsky.social thought-provoking article on the need for an AI-inflected socialism that consists of critiques by @abenanav.bsky.social and Leif Weatherby as well as Morozov's response to Benanav's critique. www.indep.network/debate-in-th...
Well, there is a reason why the opening salvo in that debate is called "Socialism after AI" rather than "AI After Socialism." The intellectual and theoretical gaps around socialism are much greater than those around AI, however large those are.
This @evgenymorozov.bsky.social essay is sharp as hell www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-so...
By this logic, socialism would never be thinkable within capitalism for, at least within the Marxist tradition, with all its teleological baggage that I don't even like, it is about allowing for the possibility that the logic of industrialization can be sublated.
Trend-chasing? I finished a PhD in (history of science) focusing on cybernetics and early AI in 2018!
My position is: even the limited infrastructural/action possibilities of capitalist AI can reveal gaps in / new desiderata for socialist theory. I am not claiming those possibilities will lead to socialism - I am claiming those possibilities/contradictions are to be explored and eventually sublated.
Ok. I still think you reify capitalist AI too much. The socialist AI would be nothing other than the support infrastructure for human flourishing and ability cultivation. I pointed that out in my long essay "The AI We Deserve" last year www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai...
The Uber-Taliban.
"The Taliban" is a very precise, in-context term for someone preaching decomputing. On second thoughts, I should have gone with The Uber-Taliban.
I can't believe you are asking something so obvious: there is no limit to the levels of meaning-making that one can build around interpretative artifacts (entry points). That's Hermeneutics 101. It is not like Derridean deconstruction of a text gives you immediate access to the meaning either.
that's rich coming from someone unironically positing about the "technopolitics of the interregnum"!
Is that a new word for the followers of the Taliban?
I suggest you read my second essay, the sequel to the one you tweeted. There is no point in mixing a sociological reading of capitalist AI with a political-theoretic/philosophical position of what parts of socialist theory it reveals as overdue for revision.
I could safely leave all the BS about "technopolitics" to the plethora of liberal NGOs enforcing the neoliberal consensus. (Good luck out there!). Old-fashionedly, I am more interested in politics. And I know enough about it to tell undialectical and reactionary views from progressive ones.
Imagine: holding dialectical positions has become unthinkable.
I actually work with these technologies every day but I also couldn't care about appeasing the reactionary Talibanesque faction. It is more harmful to progressive politics than even Silicon Valley at this point.
A true scientific outlook, this. You should ask the Taliban if they need a consultant.
It is "poiesis"!
My essay on socialism after AI has triggered quite a debate - so much so that I wrote a much longer second essay. That same issue of The Ideas Letter also contains two lengthy responses to my original piece www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-so...
This is a great essay that you should read after reading the things it is responding to, but it’s screaming from the top of its lungs for a proper critical theory of technology. It also helps in sketching the contours on what needs to be tackled
This is remarkably Stuart Hall-esque argumentation:
"many pages of intricate design [...] with a striking silence about political strategy. How does any of this become plausible? Contestable? Lovable? Winnable? [...] It cedes the terrain of technological imagination to the Thiels and the Musks"
Don’t sleep on this battle royale: @abenanav.bsky.social x @leifw.bsky.social x @evgenymorozov.bsky.social on AI and socialism
⚔️💾
www.theideasletter.org/issue/eterna...
My essay on socialism after AI has triggered quite a debate - so much so that I wrote a much longer second essay. That same issue of The Ideas Letter also contains two lengthy responses to my original piece www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-so...
I've got a new major essay in The Ideas Letter - on the need to rethink socialism in the age of AI www.theideasletter.org/essay/social...