Automate the C-Suite

The Socialist Charcuterie Board - The Ideas Letter

Taking issue with Benanav’s institutional vision of a democratic political economy of technology, Morozov argues that generative AI exposes a deeper problem that socialism has yet to solve: how to…

Our Spreadsheet Overlords

Weatherby argues that the current discourse around AI, especially the buzz around “artificial general intelligence,” is a distraction from its actual impact: the expansion of bureaucracy through massive data systems…

AI and the techno-utopian path not taken

Open access // by Evgeny Morozov (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, August 2024)

The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people an…

From the Platform Society to the AI Society: Towards Critical Studies of Generative AI

The era of AI has begun. Generative AI is rapidly reshaping knowledge production, culture, and political authority, giving rise to an emerging AI society. Yet this transformation did not emerge ex nihilo. This paper argues that the AI society can only be understood in relation to the platform society from which it arises. Tracing the transition from platforms to AI, we identify interlinked economic, epistemic, and political shifts. Economically, AI emerges within platform-based rentier capitalism but reconfigures the monopoly mechanisms on which its accumulation depends. Epistemically, LLMs mark a shift from predictive to generative epistemics, entangling theory formation and knowledge production with private research-as-a-service infrastructures. Politically, governance shifts from data politics to alignment politics: from shaping visibility to shaping what can be said, thought, and imagined. Together, these transformations signal a qualitative shift in mediation—from governing interaction to governing cognition itself—and call for a Critical AI Studies.

Is there something it is like to be an AI?

Posted on Wednesday 2 Jul 2025. 1,593 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.

March 2026 Global Dialogues Survey | Windfall Trust

Here’s what the world had to say about the AI economy

The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.

A Thesis on the History of the 21st Century: Technocracy, AI, and the End of the World

Reviewing a trio of books by a sextet of ruling-class ideologues, Mathias Fuelling finds an ambient anxiety hanging over a perceived crisis in American capitalism, with visions of bolstering a Silicon Valley-led technocracy fueled by AI investment reflecting American fears over the dawn of a "Chinese Century."

What we can’t measure about AI – yet | Aeon Essays

The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear: it’s the longterm gains that are hardest to understand

AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum

This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.

AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum

This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.

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