https://soundcloud.com/james-tindall/flows-of-desire
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Dark Capital: Halfway
solidarity in carbon
“January’s quiet quitting has the streetlights pulling double shifts when the feeds are abruptly filled with footage of Palestinians celebrating news of an apparent breakthrough in ceasefire negotiations. At first, it is mostly the children who dance or raise their flag, while their families watch on, having witnessed too many atrocities and too many betrayals to trust an Israeli ceasefire.”
https://atomless.substack.com/p/dark-capital-halfway
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Crowing at the sudden volatility of tech stocks in the wake of Deepseek, as it will hurt venture capitalists, is perfectly justified. But it may well serve to further concentrate the arena of AI and restrict entry into it to only companies able to risk big losses. A risky, volatile market tilts the board towards the largest concentrations of capital, just as climate instability does --as ever, prediction machines, capital and (climate) crisis are deeply interconnected.
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While Deepseek does seem to have cut the cost of developing prediction machines on a par with OpenAI by an order of magnitude. $5.6m still puts the price of entry at a level where the "race to AI" remains a capital concentration game.
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Another interesting tidbit from Deepseek, is that despite being based in China, they appear to have been captured by the same Longtermist ideology as those driving AI in the US. The whole TESCREAL thing and the moral relativism of the near term sacrifice of billions in the interests of the trillions of lives in the potential light cone of humanity's future. Pic attached is a screen grab of their twitter bio.
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The excerpt attached is from OpenAI's "Economic Blueprint" published on Jan 13th. You might recall, Rocko's Basilisk and Andreesen's Basilisk (see my post on these if not)? Well, this is Altman's Basilisk. He ensnares Trump & America (to the tune of 500B USD) through its need for economic Imperialism with the threat of future Chinese ASI: "this is a race America can and must win." Thus he makes the race to ASI an existential one, implying that failure to back this effort would be v P(doom)
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What’s interesting about Deepseek is just how novel it seems when we see real competition in the AI space and from entrants beyond the usual big-tech monopolies. The stock markets were clearly not accustomed to or anticipating such a challenge to the big-tech hegemony. Is that the sound of a bubble popping just as Trump went all in on project Stargate? 1/
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If Trump completes his wall and his promised mass deportation, who will be next in line to get the blame for the continued drop in our living standards caused by the billionaires?
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Come on. Whatever Musk says he meant when performing this verboten gesture changes nothing.You cannot perform it stood on a podium in view of billions at all, and certainly not with such vigour and repeated for emphasis, without normalising the symbolism of its original form, without providing a permissions structure for those who prescribe to the set of beliefs invoked by this gesture to again proudly air them in public, with impunity.
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This reduction of the multicoloured order created by life to a homogeneous grey chaos, of variable labour to dead labour, of distinct human expressions to a blur of latent machinic predictions, is the increasingly dominant operation of capital. Revealed in its most horrific form in the waking nightmare of Israel's reduction of Gaza to a grey deathscape, but also in the reduction of the archive of human culture to the brutal mathematics of deep learning models.
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Lines of Palestinian people —a procession of the ghosts of a genocidal erasure— silently walking through a jagged grey apocalypse towards the geographic location of their Gazan life that has been entirely foreclosed; less a return to the remains of their homes and their loved ones, than a pilgrimage to a mass grave, to an absence of life and the viability of it.
Photos by https://www.patreon.com/eyeonpalestine
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How do we keep our networks warm? The fediverse is feeling a little more machinic and cold recently; faster feed, less engagement. I was hoping for conversations not soliloquies; human community not another machinic void. Any tips, similar or contrary experiences?
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If you've not yet read @danmcquillan 's take down of Labour's AI "plan," and how it is a "gift to the far right," it is well worth your time.
https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Labours-AI-Action-Plan-a-gift-to-the-far-right
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https://www.owenjones.news/p/western-journalists-must-be-held?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-f432fcf6-a505-40e9-8fcf-8c28526d4576
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OpenAI: “this is a race America can and must win.”
AI always was capitalism’s new War Basilisk.
By that I mean not only does it operate according to the logics of war, but as a Thought Basilisk that invokes the future threat of being dominated by an imaginary ASI equipped hostile state unless we pour every resource at our disposal into supporting the few companies building next-token prediction machines.
https://openai.com/global-affairs/openais-economic-blueprint/
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Of course Labour's Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson capitulated to Thiel, the broligarchy and their next-token prediction machines. Now they promise to mainline the stolen content approximated by these machines, directly into the veins of UK's school children while sucking the marrow from our NHS.
Make no mistake, this is Thatcherite 'Privatisation by Stealth' given a new face(-in-the-kill-cloud).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/mainlined-into-uks-veins-labour-announces-huge-public-rollout-of-ai
https://99-percent.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Privatisation-by-stealth.pdf
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In platform capitalism, exactly as in predictive capitalism (next-token prediction machines), moderation is always a small scale patch over a large scale problem.
The problems being "moderated" arise from vastly inequitable machinic capitalism. The moderation patches not only seek to hide the operations of that system of inequity but perpetuate it.
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Content moderation by platform capitalism was always a charade. They never accepted responsibility as publishers. Any moderation was always in the interests of advertiser confidence not user benefit.
They now increasingly seek to outsource all moderation labour to users, in the same way as they outsource all content creation labour.
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The problem with next-token prediction machines, especially in agentic form, is not even the gullibility of the users embracing them.
Rather, that these machines exploit the attack surface of human vulnerability by design, and this is fundamental to their operation.
As conjoined twins, they feed from the same libidinal root as the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm. Removing this aspect of their operation would be akin to a recommendation algorithm configured for minimum engagement.
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text/gemini
