Global Logistics | Computational Impacts

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.

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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?

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?

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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