The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit

We have done this before, we take a useful technology, wrap it in a huge financial story. We centralize it, try and monetize it to turn it into a platform. Then we pretend the social consequences were somehow an accident, it is what we are doing with LLMs. We took an interesting piece of software and started selling it as AI, then AI became AGI, became super-intelligence. This smoke and mirrors feeds the path of building gigantic data centres, burning enormous amounts of energy, raising billions, signing extraordinary infrastructure contracts and concentrating yet more power in a hands of the #nastyfew.

And now we are supposed to believe this is progress, nop, this is the normal #deathcult doing what the #deathcult does – take something useful and turn it into an extraction machine. the mess we need to compost is that “interesting software” doesn’t justify a trillion-dollar mythology – AI will transform everything – AI will replace everyone – AI will solve science – AI will destroy civilization – AI is the next industrial revolution – AI is the singularity – AI is almost AGI – AI is too dangerous to release – AI is progressing faster than anyone expected – AI will change humanity forever. Can you see the smoke and mirrors trick?

Both the utopian story and the apocalypse story sell the same thing, more #AI, more computing, more investment in data centres. More centralization of money for the companies already building the machines of control. Maybe the argument changes, the conclusion doesn’t. Pushing fear is also marketing, this is where the current AI “doom” industry pushes mess. Tell people your machine might destroy the world and you have simultaneously told them your machine is incredibly powerful. This is about grasping for the control of focus, creating scarcity, you have created fear you have created importance.

This mess is about #fashionista capture, its a old story, were you try to created a lever for governments, and the chattering classes, there servants to listen to you, for investors to keep funding you, to build even bigger machines. The apocalypse it self becomes a business model.

That doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real, #AI implementations can create real security, economic, social and political problems. But we need to separate those problems from the mythology. A badly isolated autonomous coding system is an engineering and security failure, it doesn’t mean the machine has “woken up”. An LLM producing confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, it is an LLM producing confident bullshit. And a company repeatedly telling us that its next model might be AGI doesn’t make AGI a meaningful scientific milestone.

Sometimes #KISS is the radical answer, please look at what the machine actually does, not what the marketing department says it might eventually do. We have already seen this mess play through.

Web 1.0.

Web 2.0.

Crypto.

Blockchain.

NFTs.

Metaverse.

Web3.

DAOs.

Now AI.

Every few years Silicon Valley discovers the next thing that will “transform” nothing. The technology changes, were the investment logic barely does. Hype → investment → infrastructure → more hype → bigger investment → pressure to monetize, it is #techchurn.

Except now the machines require gigantic amounts of physical infrastructure and enormous financial commitments. This is the bit that gets hidden behind the shiny chatbot interface, LLM’s isn’t floating in the cloud, it is powered by somebody else’s warehouse, somebody else’s electricity bill and somebody else’s infrastructure. The supposedly weightless future has a very large material footprint.

The #deathcult loves this machine – but something deeper is happening here – the #deathcult has spent fifty years teaching us to worship – growth – efficiency – scale – competition – automation – consumption – financialization – individualism – technology. The AI industry is the last-ist gasp at pushing the mythology – more computing, more scale, more automation, more investment, growth, more efficiency. And because this machine is called “intelligent”, we are encouraged to bow down even further. The machine knows, the machine decides, the machine optimizes, the machine will solve all our knee ach problems. Meanwhile, the #nastyfew who own and direct the machine accumulate power.

Its a part of the #geekproblem were technical people make things work, this has real value, but technical expertise is one tool, not the toolbox. You cannot engineer your way out of social problems, or code trust. You cannot automate democracy. You cannot solve inequality with a better interface. You cannot fix the political economy of capitalism by making the algorithms slightly cleverer. And you certainly cannot hand over social decisions to machines because the humans have become inconvenient to a few nasty people.

This is the same blindness we have been suffering from for decades, if the problem is difficult, make it technical. But then “common sense” technical people become the gatekeepers, becomes the institution, becomes infrastructure. Then fingers in ears, nobody remembers that the original decision was political, as the power disappears into code – #AI becomes just more #dotcons.

To balance this mess, by composting, we need to open our eyes to the history of the #openweb. The original web was built messy on #4opens standards. hyperlinks, RSS to grow small websites were people published, people connected built by people making their own tools. Then Web 2.0 arrived, the UX got better, the platforms got bigger, the money arrived and the web became #dotcons.

Blindly, repeating this same mistake with the dotcons LLM’s in the era of #climatechaos is stupidity. Its a big mistake to be building another generation of giant closed systems of control. At best we should be asking – what would an open AI infrastructure look like? What data? What standards? What ownership? What governance? What accountability? What local control? What human oversight? What right to challenge? What right to rollback? What happens when the system is wrong? Who gets to decide? These are political questions.

That is backwards, technology is a tool for people, and yet here we are. agen we are generating the problem to feed the machine built to solve the problem, peak #techshit. So what do we do? We don’t have time for another #fashionista moral panic please. Not “ban everything”, not “AI will save us”, not “AI will kill us”. Not another fucking blinded conference where everybody agrees that governance is important and then goes home and builds the same centralized paths.

What we do need is to compost is this mess, take the useful technology, the useful research, the open models to build automation that actually gives people more time and power. Knowledge is always useful, but please throw the mythology onto the compost heap, the fake AGI worship, the #nastyfew billionaire saviour stories, the singularity smoke. We cant survive the endless-growth assumptions, of the #closedweb platforms, the surveillance economy, we need to compost this social #techshit.

Composting this is why the #openweb is a tool that still matters, not because openness is fashionable, or that another technical architecture will magically save us. It matters because power has to be distributed somewhere. Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process – The #4opens. To make this tool work we need to grow the path of human moderation, community trust, distributed infrastructure and shared public knowledge.

The #OMN has practical projects for this path – archives with #makeinghistory – news with #indymediaback and eventually governance with #OGB. A practical #KISS path that understands that we need useful technology, to help communities organize, remember, communicate and act. We need infrastructure that belongs to the people using it, And the community to use this “shovel” to stop worshipping the mythology of the #deathcult machines and start rebuilding the commons.

Yes, this is a first small step in the path we need, not a dogmatic answer to everything. We clearly do not need more blinded technological salvation story’s. What we do need is a practical path to build news, archiving and eventually governance around open flows, trust and participation rather than surveillance, extraction and platform ownership.

The #deathcult has had fifty years, look at the mess, now lift your eyes and let’s start composting.

As the worshipping the #deathcult for the last 50 years becomes harder to hide, the lies are more naked. The lie of endless growth, trickle-down wealth, technological salvation and individual freedom are running into the material reality they created. The mess can no no longer be hidden in the abstract.

#Climatechaos. Inequality. War. Social fragmentation. Political decay. #techshit. The question now is impossible to keep ignoring, not whether the system has problems. It is whether we can see the problems clearly to stop worshipping the mess that created them.

This is where we need social composting. Turn the pile. Expose the assumptions. Keep what is useful. Let the dead ideas rot down. Then grow something alive.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #deathcult #lifecult #techshit #techchurn #dotcons #geekproblem #AI #LLM #commons #compost #KISS