The Tech Industry: An Autopsy

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The tech Industry, and the fields that grew from it, are dead.

 The Industry, which, as Yasha Levine details in his book, ‘Surveillance Valley’, was always a tool of oppression, and never ‘good’, in some children’s book sense.

But for a time, during the not so longue duree when the consumer and ‘enterprise’ markets expanded, starting in the 1980s and reaching a peak in the early 2000s, many of us carved careers from the material Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco and others created.

Capitalist elites hate workers and despise worker expertise. I don’t have a scientifc study to prove this (if one exists, let me know) but I do have decades of experience, sitting in rooms with (mostly) men who, it was easy to see, hated that a wage servant possessed technical expertise they needed, but were too lazy, arrogant or stupid to grasp.

During the not so long duree when ‘enterprise IT’ assumed its place as capitalism’s command and control layer, business elites dreamed of a world free of worker expertise but carrying on, like the machine haunted houses in Ray Bradbury’s story ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’, automated and bereft of humanity (yet somehow profitable).

The ‘AI’ scourge, is more than a propaganda campaign, it has mutated (as all things do) into a sort of religion. Unsurprisingly, considering the combination of capitalist mania, resurrected eugenics, and hatred for workers that spins, like a molten core, at its center, the scourge is relentless, deforming everything it touches.

Today, it is nearly impossible to propose a technical solution without having to endure the utterances of ‘decision makers’ who don’t know what they’re talking about, insisting that somehow, ‘AI’ will make it better. This isn’t merely enthusiasm, or delusion, it’s the expression of a sinister hope (nurtured by the tech industry in its late stage decrepitude): ‘soon, we won’t need you troublesome peasants.’

A vain endeavour.  Like all desperately quixoutic pursuits, this only leads to madness as a stubborn reality refuses to play along. The feedback loop between goals, requirements, engineering and design is breaking, thought is discarded as one supposed answer, ‘AI’ is held aloft, a golden idol.

 

…

In the final sequence of the 1982 released film, Koyaanisqatsi, the explosion of an Atlas Centaur rocket, launched in 1962, is shown in vivid color.

After a fireball blossoms, then dissipates, the camera’s eye (footage from military observation) focuses on the descent, back towards the ground, of an engine fragment. At times, fuel remnants ignite as if the engine is struggling to resume its task, sending a spacecraft into orbit. The metaphor, though beautifully presented, is a bit on the nose: you believed you were flying high, but nature is indifferent, your fall is inevitable.

…

So it is with the US tech industry which, for years (but not as long as it seems) has been roaring skyward. In its quest to destroy labor, it is, supreme irony, destroying itself.

It is dead. All that remains are engine fragments, spouting flame from fuel remains, as they crash to earth.

The AGI Inquisition

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Many people, particularly women, who are in what is loosely and pejoratively called the ‘anti AI’ cohort, have commented on an increase in rhetoric about ‘artificial general intelligence’ (a meta marketing term that implies an ‘AI greater than AI’) and, hand in glove, statements about machines killing humanity; also known as ‘AI doomer-ism’.

Scientists and researchers such as Olivia Guest, Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender and Iris van Rooij have been contending with an increase in online attacks on their work and characters (you can visit their Bluesky accounts to see examples of misogyny and stupidity directed against them) from an army of sock puppets; partly organically grown, as all boosterism is, but also partly, surely orchestrated by corporates.


Doubtless, there are many others facing harassment.

There are immediate reasons: OpenAI’s release of GPT-6 Astra and statements from the usual suspects such as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI frontman Sam Altman that this release means we have ‘entered the age of AGI’ is a key factor. Mad bursts of enthusiasm for ‘AI’ related company announcements are nothing new but this time, there seems to be a strong whiff of desperation in the air. The attacks are more unhinged than usual and have the quality of people flailing about to avoid drowning.

That flailing is prompted by a merciless material reality, moving towards you like a train: slowly at first, and then upon you, as if from nowhere (though predictable for those paying attention). The tech industry overall, and the ‘AI’ division of tech capitalism specifically, face the material consequences of the US’ war on Iran: a constriction of hydrocarbon flow and processing and reduction of the availability and increased cost of byproducts (diesel fuel, plastic, helium, aluminium and more). This is taking shape alongside a growing resistance to the presence of ‘AI’ data centers in communities across the world: easily identifiable manifestations of capitalism’s terminal mania for growth at all costs, including life itself.

Hard limits are in view and true believers, with no vision for the future beyond whatever they think ‘AI’ or ‘AGI’ are (usually whatever they’re told by the corporates), dimly aware of these limits but unable to accept what it means, are lashing out.


In this, we can detect an effort to police thought so analysis, or even a simple request for evidence to support claims, are considered not merely differences of opinion or approach, but a deviation from the catechism of a church; by insisting that boosters and doomers (often, the same people) show their work, you display your lack of faith.


And the punishment for this, is an inquisition.

…


Richard Feynman was, by many accounts, a complete bastard but it’s important to properly attribute sources. At the conclusion of the 1986 US Congressional Rogers Report on the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, Feynman, commenting on how managerial and marketing decisions overrode engineering recommendations, leading to an avoidable calamity, stated that “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

This is good counsel and applies as much to ‘AI’ mania, now threatened by natural, geopolitical and grass roots obstacles as it did to a foolish and fatal decision to launch a spacecraft decades age.

Nature cannot be fooled. The ‘AI’ age will end, one way or another. What will we build from the ruins?

On Entryism

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AI mania, as described in an essay by Nikhil Suresh titled, ‘AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision Making’, is still very much with us, bereft of life but still moving, like a zombie, aimlessly shambling about in search of a gruesome meal.

Even so, cracks are appearing.

These cracks are the result of no promises being kept and very little (actually, no) money being made despite the billions spent, tossed into a giant, flaming pit of anti-worker fueled delusion. The business press, such as Bloomberg, have noticed which has opened a space for critique and the cohort described as being ‘anti AI’. But as the old saying goes, ‘not all skin folk are kin folk.’ Not all ostensibly ‘anti AI’ or anti AI industry people are really anti at all. They are what Harry Zehner, writing in the Baffler Magazine, (September 2024) about support for Israel masquerading as critique, calls critical counterinsurgents.

Another term for what we’re seeing, as Dr. Olivia Guest tells us, is entryism. In an essay admirably direct in its title called ‘Entryism’, Dr, Guest describes the problem:

“In the context of the push back against AI, entryism takes on the form of actively sending infiltrators to join universities or related organisations (in the strongest case), or recruiting members of those institutions, or spreading rhetoric or cultish language (in the weakest, and likely easiest, case) in order to undermine push back against AI. The important part is to do all this by looking like one is not against the organisation’s goal (i.e. knowledge production and education) or even more insidiously by looking like one is staunchly anti AI explicitly. For the weaker case of rhetoric: success is measured by the organisation adopting harmful concepts through terminologically vacuous or damaging language (see me explaining this over video here).”

Corey Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ thesis, or, statement is more like it, ‘thesis is far too grand, firmly falls into the entryist category. Doctorow tells us that once upon a time, the industry was good and now, no longer serving the interests of customers, it’s bad. At the foundation is a belief that the tech industry is essentially alright, but has gone astray. It’s a ‘critique’ that obscures fundamental issues.

Continuing her analysis, Dr. Guest writes:

“I have a core take away I must repeat: just because somebody claims to be anti AI does not mean they are not doing entryism. Sadly, that is (in isolation) entirely consistent with entryism. Yes, these people lie about their beliefs.

I repeat this quote from Marx that I put right at the top of our work critiquing this correlationist logic from 2023:

“[A]ll science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. (Marx, 1894, p. 592)”

This is the logic of AI, of fascism, of sexism, of racism. That is, because things look a certain way, that therefore they are a certain way. Internal properties are wrongly derived from their superficial appearance.”

[…]

This is a fine essay which I highly recommend. Do not be fooled by appearances, the entryists walk among us, fifth columnists who undermine the clear minded analysis needed to resist.

Link

Entryism by Dr. Olivia Guest

Computational Mutual Aid

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US-based tech companies dominate the global technology space, in commercial, government and personal markets (Microsoft, for example, commands approximately 70 percent of the Dutch corporate and government market). For decades, this was accepted, or at least, tolerated, or surrendered to, because the common view was that Silicon Valley firms were politically neutral or even benign.

This tolerance was a mistake, because as the book, ‘Surveillance Valley. by journalist Yasha Levine describes, the US tech industry has, from the start, been a key part of the US’ intelligence, surveillance and military systems and campaigns. It has always been a threat vector.

Under the Trump regime, this has become starkly obvious and undeniable (I discuss this in the essay, ‘State of Exception’).

Because of this, it is important for individuals and organizations and, particularly activist groups, to avoid American tech platforms such as the ‘cloud’ services sold by Google and Microsoft.

These people and groups need guidance and technical assistance. This can be called, computational mutual aid.

Principles

The effort should be guided by the following core ideas:

  1. American tech platforms, especially ‘cloud’ systems, should be avoided and alternatives should be encouraged
  2. These alternatives should, ideally, be on-premises (local servers, running Linux, for example)
  3. If on-premises options are not ideal, non Silicon Valley based online solutions (such as virtual servers hosted on Hetzner, and cloud services provided by Cryptpad) should be recommended instead)
  4. The mutual aid service should be hands-on, that is, not just technical advice but engineering and deployment and even management of systems
  5. The mutual aid service should provide technical mentorship to help younger techies and non techies gain necessary skills that have been degraded in the ‘cloud’ era
  6. The mutual aid service should provide answers and resources to help people understand difficult topics such as what is AI and how to build and manage network systems

Conclusion


The above is the beginning of what I hope will be a document that others will add to with their ideas and resources. Let’s build something good together for the people! If you’d like to participate or need help, you can reach me at compupraxis@proton.me

Resources

Below, a list of resources. More will be added over time. Feel free to suggest more via email.

Getting off US tech: a guide

https://disconnect.blog/getting-off-us-tech-a-guide

KDE for Activists

https://kde.org/for/activists

Surveillance Valley (Book)

http://surveillancevalley.com/

State of Exception

State of Exception: Part One

Civert

About CiviCERT

More to come…

More Clown than Vulcan

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The ancients, who looked to various gods and spirits to guide and punish them or, exact vengeance on their enemies and enforce balance enjoyed a higher quality mythological catalogue than the current set.

Zeus, Huītzilōpōchtli and the notables of countless pantheons, whatever their storied faults, were better entities to think of as being, in at least some sense, real, than modern, deified concepts such as the sober, data driven business person, a figure as mythological as anything depicted on canvas, via marble or on the wall of a cave by dim torchlight but far less nourishing.

A word comes to mind: savvy, followed by a phrase, situational awareness. These are lacking in the modern capitalist who, even when judged by the narrow, profit fixated limits of business, shows little sign of possessing either.

Particularly when it comes to the carnival that is so called ‘AI’.

The promise, from Microsoft, OpenAI and their co-conspirators was that, by surrendering business processes to ‘AI’ workers could be eliminated, thus boosting profits. The tech press, a cheerleading squad about which it’s hard to say a kind word (there are exceptions but their rare appearance only illustrates the problem’s scope) broadcast this yarn, shouting about labour in sectors from fast food to law being replaced by chatbots.


In Greek mythology, the goddess Nemesis ensured retribution for offences against the gods; an enforcement of consequences. Nature cannot be fooled; consequences always arrive and often, precisely as people who pay attention, who are savvy and possess situational awareness, predicted. It doesn’t take special insight to know that stepping into traffic isn’t a good idea, you just have to know how the world works (the not at all theoretical physics of metal, travelling at high speed, impacting your soft body). It should not have come as a surprise to business types that the ‘AI’ they looked to as a means for enhancing their bottom line was, in fact, built by the ‘AI’ vendors for exactly the same purpose.


At some point, well, from the start, really, it should have been obvious, that introductory prices for access to ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot etc would be replaced by real pricing. Microsoft has bills to pay (data centers aren’t cheap) and profit targets too. It should have been obvious that once you were dependent, the manageable price would disappear, ‘like tears in rain’, replaced by bills that inspired weeping.


A dispatch from Nemesis in the form of a recent CNBC article: ‘Tokens or humans? The new corporate trade-off’

From the article…


The root of the squeeze is that the technology works but doesn’t yet pay for itself.

“The way AI works today, it’s very powerful, but it’s very inefficient,” Jain said. “The value that AI drives at this point is trailing the cost that businesses are incurring.”

A big part of the problem is inefficiency in picking models. Roughly 95% of enterprise AI usage is still running on the most expensive frontier models, even for tasks that could be handled by cheaper alternatives, Jain said.


Thus spoke Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, an ‘AI’ company. Jain is trying to sell a product whose utility is now being questioned so of course, he presents the problem as being that ‘AI’ is very, very good but too expensive or, you’re doing it wrong. But even for Jain, it’s difficult to edulcorate (a marvellous word, which I learned about recently, that means to sweeten) a souring situation. To say ‘it’s powerful but inefficient’ is akin to declaring a car to be very fast but unable to get you to the store.


In other words: useless.


I started this brief essay by talking about mythologies: sublime and stupid, ancient and modern. In the case of the 21st century business class, who depict themselves as grim faced gods, staring deeply into luminous screens, they are more clown than Vulcan, prat-falling rather than thinking, chasing after a world without workers and buying magic beans in the hope that world will arrive.

Nemesis is calling.

The Dialectics of Data Center Mania

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It’s annoying that the journalists and academics who, not long ago, were nattering on about ‘AI’ as an ethereal force, untethered from the Earth, are now talking about data centers with the fervor of new converts. Some of us have talked for years, and from the start, about the dirty, industrial nature of what’s called ‘artificial intelligence’ (and indeed, the entire tech industry).

Better late than never, I suppose.

More than one thing can be true at a time, people say; usually while trying to appear subtle. It’s a true statement but insufficient. Not only is more than one thing true at a time but many things are true, simultaneously and in relation to each other, moving through time. This is the heart of a dialectical view which can be applied to understanding the mania of data center construction, a mad dash to a landscape, dotted with ruins.

…


Recently, as if from nowhere (but of course, not as suddenly as it seems), data center projects have been spreading across the United States. On social media, the rough consensus is that these warehouses are evidence of a plan for mass surveillance and population control that requires hyperscale computing. This is plausible, Palantir exists, after all, but not the entire, or even main mover: it is a factor among factors moving dialectically with other elements.

It’s common for US people (who vaingloriously claim the title of ‘American’ as if the rest of the hemisphere doesn’t exist or arrived from the 12th dimension) to fret about things worth fretting about while failing to see political economy. In the case of data center mania, the circular economics and failing quest for super-profits motivating the tech industry and its camp followers (the ‘Neocloud’ firms and venture capitalists waiting for investment returns).


David Gerard recently said:


“The story of the AI bubble, is setting real dollars on fire to put imaginary valuation dollars on the books”


To set those ‘real dollars’ on fire requires having something physical to show for investors’ capital; thus, a plague of data centers. Capitalism is not rational and as Ali Kadri informs us, is based on the accumulation of waste.


Another factor to consider, from Ed Zitron:

In reality, OpenAI and Anthropic are the only meaningful companies in the AI industry. They are the majority of revenue, the majority of capacity and the majority of demand. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have exploited the desperation in a tech industry that’s run out of hypergrowth ideas, and created a near-imaginary industry by propping up both companies.

The mistake that most make in measuring the circularity of OpenAI and Anthropic is to focus entirely on the money raised — $13 billion from Microsoft and up to $50 billion from Amazon for OpenAI, and as much as $80 billion from Amazon and Google for Anthropic.

The correct analysis starts with measuring infrastructure. Based on discussions with sources and analysis of multiple years of reporting, I estimate that of the roughly $700 billion in capex spent by Google, Meta and Microsoft since 2023, at least 5.5GW of capacity costing at least $300 billion has been built entirely for two companies. This has in turn inflated sales through multiple counterparties involving NVIDIA, ODMs like Quanta, Foxconn, Supermicro and Dell, and created a form of market-driven AI psychosis that inspired Meta to burn over $158 billion in three years and the entire world to convince itself that AI was the biggest thing ever.


Zitron calls what’s occurring “AI psychosis” – an apt description (though one based on an idea of the lost sanity of an inherently insane system) for a massive build-out of infrastructure for a project that has not, and will not produce profit or useful work for the organizations in the grip of this mania.


This financial ‘psychosis’ is what the (mostly liberal) doomsayers who predict a world of perfect surveillance and control are missing. Of course, elites want this but they also want to make money and, having failed to accomplish this are doubling down in a way never before seen on this scale.


Exhibit C, a story from Tom’s Hardware:


New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O’Leary’s 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved


These stories are breathlessly reported, as if, by waving a magic wand of billionaire wish fulfillment, a gigantic data center will spring from the Earth. But there are other factors (remember, think dialectically) such as the impact of hydrocarbon supply constriction on the PCB supply chain and the lack of transformers.

…


The data center ‘boom’ or, more accurately, to borrow from Zitron, ‘psychosis’ is the final act in the inflation of the greatest of all bubbles, rivaling mighty Jupiter in size. Because the US is little more than a nuclear armed used car sales lot, commanded at every level by people looking for an angle, there is no one to stop this process.


It will run its course, leaving the population to pick up the pieces and scavenge for parts when the power and water run out. One can hope that at long last, as children of the not too distant future wander the ruins of data centers, lessons will have been learned.

Return of the Old Gods

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In Greek mythology, the titans were the first gods, directly tied to the universe’s primordial forces, who arose before the Olympians people once learned about in school and who are still depicted in popular media (you know the names: Zeus, Aphrodite and other cosmic celebrities).

From the Wikipedia article:

The Titans were the former deities, the generation of gods preceding the Olympians. They were overthrown as part of the Greek succession myth, which tells how Cronus seized power from his father Uranus and ruled the cosmos with his fellow Titans before in turn being defeated and replaced as the ruling pantheon of gods by Zeus and the Olympians in a ten-year war known as the Titanomachy (‘battle of the Titans’). In the aftermath of this war, the vanquished Titans were banished from the upper world and held imprisoned under guard in Tartarus. Some Titans, such as Oceanus and Helios, were allowed to remain free.

Recently, the Titans came to mind when I read this post on Twitter:

A key quote:

“In Silicon Valley, [there’s] almost this Copernican principle — where people used to believe that the world revolved around the Earth, then realized that it revolves around the sun.”

“There’s a Silicon Valley parallel where people think that all of technology, all of industry, revolves around Silicon Valley, but it’s actually kind of the opposite.”

Typical of Americans, Sequoia Capital’s Maquire unnecessarily added, ‘kind of’ when, in fact, there’s no doubt or partial truth: the tech industry and all of its products and apparent power, are entirely dependent on a vast, complex supply chain of capital and resources commanded by older, and far more powerful sectors of the global system.

At the foundation of this system, primordially tied to the world like the Titans of myth, is oil.

For many years, we were encouraged to believe that ‘software was eating the world’. In fact, software and the software industry, were eating at the pleasure of the gods who were, from a media perspective (away from specialist circles) banished to the netherworld, outside of our thoughts as if to Tartarus. The tech industry builds (or, increasingly, pretends to build,) data centers that are supposedly temples in celebration of a glittering future. In fact, Cronus, drenched in crude, laughs in the dark recesses of the Earth at the pretensions of the tech lords who, despite all their talk of nuclear fusion and other exotic escapes, still need petroleum to function.

The US/Israel war on Iran, and all that has, quite predictably followed, has raised the reality of the old gods who never left to our consciousness. What is the United States, in its Olympian thrashing about, disrupting, perhaps even dismantling?

…

On 14 April, Twitter user ‘Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation’, (also known as ‘Mikey’ on various podcast appearances) posted what you see above to their account.

People who claim Marxist or, at the very least, materialist commitments should focus on how the world works and help others learn.

Unfortunately, in western Marxist circles, there’s a tendency to run from such understanding as if fleeing a ghost. This may be due to the balkanisation of Marxist thought (and inaction) in the academy, coordinated by the state (as Gabriel Rockhill compellingly argues in his book, ‘Who Paid the Pipers of Wester Marxism?‘).

Whatever the cause, as we approach a global crisis, it’s important to do what we can to correct this lack.

Below, some introductory guides. I’ll add more as I learn about them.

Key Aspects of the Global System That Will Be Disrupted by the War on Iran You Should Understand

Videos on Youtube

What is Oil Used For?

Petroleum Economics

Logistics of Natural Gas

What is Supply Chain?

Fundamentals of Supply Chain

Supply Chain Management

The Financial Market

Social Media as a Field of War

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Social Media Reply Doctrine Flowchart

I created the flowchart shown above a few years ago, while still an active Twitter user.

The purpose, was to illustrate the doctrine I applied to my social media usage to share with others as, hopefully, an aid and spark for thought.

Social media has always been terrible and has always been a field of struggle, indeed, war.

How could it be otherwise? The world we live in, a capitalist tyranny, built on mass death, has produced terrible human beings whose inhumanity is on display via electronic networks. It’s a big world and far from everyone is a monster but hard questions must be asked about a global society that openly supports and conducts genocide (shown on social media), violently suppressing dissent against mass murder.

Since October of 2023, when the genocide of Palestinians accelerated, it became clear to many of us that we were in the midst of a global war, waged by elites against all of us to reverse whatever gains had been made in the post World War Two period. In a time of war, our social media usage should become more deliberate, more disciplined and less open about our plans.

On Strategy

There are several books on war that are considered classics. The most venerable is Sun Tzu’s 5th century treatise, ‘Art of War’. In the 1980s and 90s, business idiots, inspired by the Gordon Gecko character in the 1987 film, Wall Street, imagining themselves to be generals (rather than coke addled thieves) flocked to the business section of bookstores to buy, and, mostly misunderstand the text.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter titled ‘Tactical Dispositions’ from the 1910, Lionel Giles translation:

1. Sun Tzŭ said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

2. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

4. Hence the saying: One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.

5. Security against defeat implies defensive tactics; ability to defeat the enemy means taking the offensive.

6. Standing on the defensive indicates insufficient strength; attacking, a superabundance of strength.

7. The general who is skilled in defence hides in the most secret recesses of the earth…

[…]

Full at the Project Gutenberg eBook of the Art of War

Today, we lack a “superabundance of strength” and must assume an intelligent, defensive posture.

On social media, this means:

Information Discipline

Resist the urge to overshare. This only provides your enemy with information that can be used against you. Needless to say, activist groups must be especially cautious and only communicate the bare minimum on social media required.

No Study, No Right to Speak

Social media platforms are designed to encourage stupidity, such as: arguing with people you don’t know, will never meet and who may not be people at all (i.e., bots). Conversation on complex topics is not possible with people who are unfamiliar with the topic. When people respond to a post about an article, book, etc with objections based on nothing, ignore them. Argumentation is a time waster and sometimes, a psyop.

Treat Social Media as Enemy Territory

There is a difference between paranoia and intelligent movement through hostile terrain. Do not be lulled into thinking you are among friends (though you may have friends on a platform). The platform owners are your enemies and so are many of the people monitoring and responding to your posts.

The World at War

We are in an age of global war. To many of us, relatively comfortable (though increasingly less so as supposedly democratic states use escalating tactics of control, including via algorithmic means, to suppress ever more restless populations) this sounds dramatic and seems counter-intuitive. After all, bills still must be paid, children cared for and kitchens cleaned. Nevertheless, it is true.

It’s time for each of us to put away our illusions and move more intelligently, ideally in cooperation with others. A critical part of this is changing the way we understand, and use social media.

From the Department of Self Promotion

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There is neither gold nor glory to be found in challenging cultural assumptions. Particularly those shaped by propaganda.

This is all for the best. In these appearances, I chat with people I respect about the state of the ‘AI’ industry: what is happening and why.

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: Propaganda Masked as Critique: Jacobin and ‘AI’

A Materialist Approach to the Tech Industry: From Household to Military Tech

Saturdays with Renee

July 31st, 2025 Edition of Doug Henwood’s Behind the News Radio Show:

A conversation with Mtume Gant for his ‘Within Our Gates’ podcast about ‘AI’, cinema and the history of atomic tests. There is a valence:

The Cybernetic Brain Reading Group

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I propose that cybernetics, as a practice area and way of thinking, has been hijacked by the tech industry and the military industrial complex. This has robbed us of a vital tool because we associate its use with our enemies.

To shine a light on the past, to hopefully help build a way to the future, let’s study cybernetics as it was imagined by its pioneers. To help in this effort, I suggest using ‘The Cybernetic Brain‘ by Andrew Pickering, as a grounding text.

Here’s a description from the Univ of Chicago publisher:

“The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging.”

Participation:

To join the group:

  • Join the Patreon (it’s free)
  • Get a copy of the book (let me know if that’s a problem and I’ll try to find other ways to share the text)
  • Join the Discord for discussion (the invite will go to Patreon members once seriousness has been vetted; there are a lot of clowns out here, we need to be a good group)

When we have a ‘critical mass’ (at least five people) we can begin. The plan is to go through the book, chapter by chapter, meeting once a week to discuss what we’re learning and help each other understand and research.

Forward!