| XLterrestrials via nettime-l on Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:57:18 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> The Case for Gouging Out The Eye of The Cyclopes ! |
Hi Mond, Carsten et al,
Appreciate the responses and clarifications...
Though we aren't coming from computer science or IT, the XLt have worked at times with orgs who have ( supposedly ) fought for digital rights and environmental protection... and been to too many depressing tech + climate conferences to count ;) ... ok, tbh honest, a few contain very inspiring moments !
We would agree that Industry narratives are utter bullshit ! But what their agenda, tools and platforms are successfully implementing is a Total Surveillance + Control Mousetrap, one that the users themselves have been dupped into not only paying for ... BUT also becoming their own data-sucker-providers-builders ! And it's all a Total Economy SUCK ! Like the world's greatest MIC sinkhole ever invented !
The GREAT AI GIFT to HUMANITY is on a demented and diabolic course to be The GReat Total Disenfranchisement, and Total Dependency for things like a scooter/bus/train/flight, a lunch, a flat / shelter, education, a library, access to water, access to health care, a dentist, etc etc...
( check out the cutting-edge of tech invasiveness and control and f*cking over the most vulnerable in DE ( and elsehwere no doubt )... the bezahlkarte / payment systems for refugees and asylum seekers.... and coming next for ALL ? ... or maybe just fine for the undesirables! ) ...
...
For us, we've been reading all the hype + hypnosis as a very effective smokescreen for actually holding the current monstrosities accountable for the last 20 years of data abuse ! i.e. using all that unethically collected data for massive privatization and monopolization, massive cultural wealth and public asset sponging ... and more currently assisting in mass media spectrum takeovers, stealing elections, to directly facilitating assassinations and genocide...
The Hype around what AI can supposedly do for or to our future ... is preventing a functioning civic society ( which is being clearly hijacked ) from thinking clearly enough to sue the fuck out of these entities, and putting their execs in the dock for THE most serious crimes against humanity ever perpetrated at mass scale ! That's NOT stuff you would normally get to pay a fine for, and walk !
A legal case that was won just last week against Meta for 20 billion in the state of New Mexico?, was supposed to be 220 billion ... ( related to Cambridge Analytica, and its being able to manipulate elections ) ... and Zuck's still at the wheel of mega-corp Meta !??
Arundhati's example of getting a check for a few thousand dollars for her life's work is also out-fckng-rageous !
...
But the supposed tech policy specialists like EFF's Cory Doctorow ( who no doubt has zero time for Global South artists / writers and anti-fascism panels ) are still out prancing around on book tours... AND discouraging intellectual property lawsuits ?!! There's a supposed reason for that ( which we haven't fully unraveled, but not buying it ! ) ... we'd call it : Non-stop Technotopian Psychosis +/or Career Opportunism... after numerous netzpolitik FAILURES... to simply reject Survelliance Krapitalism ... by any means necessary !
Recently he was here to pitch for a Made-in-Brussel's Eurostack !? at Re-publica, GAG ! Sure, that'll surely patch the catastrophes of techno-imperialisms. HAHA !
And EFF also just recently fought a case that AI-scraping is FAIR USE....
WTFFFFFFF !?!
...
The point here... is...
What's REALLY To Be Done w/ the Techno-Cyclopes !?!
cheers,
the XLT
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:44:37 +0100
> From: franz schaefer <schaefer@mond.at>
> To: nettime <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> Cc: XLterrestrials <podinski@mailbox.org>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> The Case for Gouging Out The Eye of The
> Cyclopes !
> Message-ID: <at-7tW-YB_Z_01AW@mond.at>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Dear XLterrestrials, dear Felix,
>
>
> > "And then there is the apprehension from the world of non-tech humans ?
> > climate-change activists distraught about the carbon footprint of the AI
> > industry; students and workers who see mass unemployment and blank
> > futures; artists, musicians and writers, like myself, who can sense the
> > centrifugal churning that is sucking the beating heart from our bodies and
> > drawing the steel threads of societal control together into one clenched,
> > mechanical fist."
> >
> > https://www.equator.org/articles/arundhati-roy-artificial-intelligence
>
> Thanks for that link. I am really a big fan of Roy and often quote her. Also
> the essay is quite good ? it already acknowledges a lot of problems that are
> about to come where others are still in denial.
>
> I also like the part where she criticises Bernie Sanders. While Sanders is
> one of the few on the left who really warns about AI, his suggestion to
> nationalize AI companies only in the US was something worth criticising. AI
> is a problem for humanity and not for the US. AI is built on all of
> humanity's knowledge and thus must belong to all of us. So we need to
> demand that it is open sourced. And in general it is sad to see that
> nationalism and patriotism is so prevalent even in the left in the US.
>
> But there is a part where I have a problem: Where she basically repeats
> that story we heard for years now: that when there is talk about the
> dangers of AI that this is mostly marketing. She writes:
>
> ?Why would Whittaker and Gebru and their very specific indictments worry
> the oligarchs more than the prophets of all-out extinction like the AI
> scientist-turned-critic Geoffrey Hinton, or Jacob Coxon? Perhaps because,
> like a big fireworks display, Hinton and Coxon?s warnings add frisson to the
> atmospherics. They end up augmenting the oligarchs? power play, which, when
> their companies go public, as they are set to do soon, will serve them very
> well indeed. Their valuations will depend on how sophisticated ? and, in
> the case of AI weapons systems, how lethal ? their models are. ? A. Roy
> from the article linked above
>
> Now she does not draw the conclusion that the warnings are only marketing.
> But this is one of the lines of reasoning that has supported the AI-Denial
> now for years. And thus it is one of the reasons why the left is so late
> with this topic. And moreover: I still meet people who cling to this straw.
>
> Trade Unions? One would assume they are all up in arms. After all when AI
> replaces us at the work place we lose our ability to go on strike. But no.
> The best you can get is some lukewarm recommendations for some regulations of
> AI in the workplace. Well, all nice and good as long as there is a workplace
> where people work.
>
> Felix wrote:
>
> > But it might be simply a normal technology, one that needs to work under
> > normal economic constraints and (eventually) within biophysical
> > boundaries.
>
> We could hope that. If we actually manage to tame the cyclops. But I am a
> pessimistic here: With the ignorance and denial on one hand and the sheer
> speed of this exponential development on the other hand the future looks
> rather bleak. Now, as I tried on my previous posting on this topic, it is
> important to not fall into gloom and despair.
>
> And I do not see the economic constraints: Again: If AI works, then its
> worth is all of the global economy: 120T$. Also the biophysical boundaries
> are not really stopping this on its own. You say the training of models now
> takes 400 times more energy than the first ChatGPT models. On the other
> hand the energy per token went down by a factor of 200 in the last 3 years.
> At some point AI will be just "good enough" for many applications and not
> much further training needed while it can be optimized to take less power
> for the majority of tasks. There is this company ?Taalas? that was recently
> bought by AMD: They can hard-code AI models on chip (which means the model
> is baked in and cannot be replaced), but this again offers an order of
> magnitude in cost- and power-saving. So even if we manage to stop them
> building new data centers (as we absolutely should), it will not stop the
> AI.
>
>
>
> mond
>
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> . Franz Schaefer GPG: 3774ECD160719558
> .. +43 699 106 14 590 Fingerprint: 5025 A74A
> ... schaefer@mond.at 01DF F2AE 75E9 57C8
> ... http://www.mond.at/ 3774 ECD1 6071 9558
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2026 09:39:46 +0100
> From: Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>
> To: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> "collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> The Case for Gouging Out The Eye of The
> Cyclopes !
> Message-ID:
> <d63cde141855312e852911c53a73cf67a9d864c8.camel@modspil.dk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Dear all
>
> I was not going to weigh in on this discussion, yet I do feel a need to
> unmuddy the waters a bit.
>
>
> man, 26 10 2026 kl. 21:44 +0100, skrev franz schaefer via nettime-l:
> >
> > Now she does not draw the conclusion that the warnings are only
> > marketing.
> > But this is one of the lines of reasoning that has supported the AI-
> > Denial
> > now for years.? And thus it is one of the reasons why the left is so
> > late
> > with this topic.? And moreover: I still meet people who cling to this
> > straw.
> >
> >
>
> The critics you might call "AI deniers" would be people like Timnit
> Gebru, Emily Bender, Alex Hanna and other critics of the current "AI"
> based on large language models.
>
> I'd like to be absolutely clear:
>
> When these people criticize the current hype around "AI", it is from an
> understanding of what the technology is and what it does.
>
> When politicians say that it heralds a "new age", that it can do
> practically all our jobs, that it can save enormous amounts of money in
> education, health care, social services and a very large etcetera, it's
> because they really have no clue what the technology is and what it
> does. "AI", or rather LLMs, cannot do anything of the sort.
>
> When AI bosses and workers say that it can, when Dario Amodei says that
> AI will solve climate change, cure all cancer and double the human
> lifespan, when Sam Altman says it might eradicate all jobs, they are a)
> lying through their teeth, b) engaging in wishful thinking or c) both.
>
> In that sense, AI cannot pose an existential risk, because it cannot
> have any agency or intention - hence, it cannot suddenly "go rogue" and
> attack humanity.
>
> Why is that? Well, because all current AI is based on LLMs, and LLMs
> are basically word-guessing machines, a glorified autocomplete.
>
> What can an LLM like GPT 5 *really* do?
>
> Well, if you feed it a sentence, it can generate a statistically
> plausible suggestion for the next word. In reality, based on its
> training material and its actual training, it calculates a probability
> distribution over all words in the language (OK - tokens, really, but
> that's not important in this context) and then randomly chooses a word
> using that distribution.
>
> You can then append that word to the input sentence and feed to the LLM
> again and get a new word, and rinse and repeat (yes, this is a very
> inefficient process).
>
> Since these LLMs are trained on practically all texts in the whole
> world, the text they can generate in this way can be very convincing.
>
> However, it has no relation to any kind of "truth" or to any
> understanding of the world whatsoever - it's pure statistical
> inference.
>
> This means that such an LLM can have no intention of eradicating
> humanity, because it can't have any "intention" at all. Also, it
> doesn't understand (by definition, it has no "understanding" of
> anything, it's basically just a huge abacus used to output words) the
> limitations we are under, it has no notion of "being in the world" in
> the Heideggerian sense, and hence it simply doesn't understand anything
> about how the world works.
>
> So yes, this technology works. It can output very convincing text;
> sloppy programming code, mediocre essays, bad poetry, technical texts
> which look so convincing that you have to read them very carefully to
> spot the glaring errors.
>
> That they can do that is definitely something. Some peopl us it to
> pretend they work or to output sloppy and unconvincing images and
> presentations, but they are not and will never be worth "all of the
> global economy".
>
> Note that I'm not saying that no AI technology could ever be developed
> that *could* have real understanding of the world and hence *could* be
> very valuable in that sense (though "all of the global economy" might
> be pushing it). I'm just saying that LLMs can't because of their
> inherent limitations.
>
> Yes, but what about Jamie Coxon, Eliezer Yudkowsky etc. who are warning
> against the AI takeover. Well,these are not disinterested parties. They
> belong to the very strange Silicon Valley cult of transhumanists, also
> known as the Effective Altruists. Temnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres
> wrote an excellenet article about that in the magazine First Monday,
> and ?mile Torres explains this ideology with Cal Newport in this video:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt508VjX2H8
>
> Cal Newport is someone you'd want to listen to if you really want to
> understand what the technology can and can't do.
>
> All of that doesn't mean that "AI" can't do us real harm.
>
> The oversize abacus may not be able to do our jobs, but it *can* be
> used as a pretext to fire us anyway. It can be used as a responsibility
> sink: Have it generate targets for bombing in a war, and when you
> murder innocent civilians as a consequence, say "the AI did it". AI
> datacenters are gobbling up an enormous amount of money, blasting away
> all climate targets and hugely accelerating global warming.
>
> Also, guess what? The accelerationists behind transhumanism and
> Effective Altruism don't care if they destroy the Earth, because all
> they care about is humanity's alleged future among the stars, in space.
>
> So, let's not fear AI, let's fear the people driving this combined scam
> and power grab. The fear of "rogue AI" is a red herring that the big AI
> labs themselves promote all the time.
>
> I admit to being an AI sceptic, but if you really want to label me an
> "AI denier" because I understand how the technology works (my
> background in computer science is helpful in that regard) I don't know
> what to say to you.
>
> Best,
> Carsten
>
> --
> Carsten Agger - agger@fsfe.org
> https://fsfe.org --- https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/
> FSFE Denmark Coordinator, General Assembly & European Team Member
> Free Software, Free Society!
>
>
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