Hey, in about an hour at 8pm ET we're going to get together to chat about a couple of pieces

• Brian Merchant's latest essay "How to use AI doom marketing to dupe the media and rake in billions in 10 easy steps"
• Ed Zitron's piece "AI's Brokenomics"
• Ed Ongweso Jr and Jathan Sadowski's latest episode of This Machine Kills: "The Book of Ludd"

I've been thinking about some of the stuff Ed Ongweso Jr talks about in the TMK episode for a little while, namely the subsumption of data centers and AI (as a broader project) into the political machinations of settler-colonial state, and the risk that there will be no conventional bubble burst; instead, there'll be an inflection point where various governments either walk away from or double down on the project of AI.

I shared Merchant's and Zitron's pieces because I'm really interested in how tech companies are cynically trying to hype up their products to present a veneer of administrative power while never actually delivering those things. Merchant's piece illustrates a lot of the razzle dazzle of charlatans producing conspicuous displays of awe-inspiring supposed capabilities that ought to make all of us (but especially companies working with OpenAI, Anthropic, etc...) feel like they're getting something impressive. Merchant also points out the role the media have played in this, breathlessly reporting the crap that comes out of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Meanwhile, Zitron's piece benefits from all of a day or two more events to report on - the White House has bought into the "completely fantastical scaremongering about the 'rapid advancements' of large language models," and imposed export controls on Anthropic's latest LLM release, Fable and Mythos.

I don't want to go too deep into the weeds of Zitron's piece, although he talks about the economics of AI companies and that's worth thinking about when we think about what it'll take to stop data center projects that are heavily underwritten by inflated tech companies passing money around in circles to make it look like they're generating billions of dollars in revenue.

What I'm more concerned with is the state's buy-in of the scaremongering about AI, and how state violence is about as far from "smoke and mirrors" as you can get. Lately Wired reported about how US law enforcement agencies are looking at anti-AI organizing as a kind of extremism, with all of the implications of national security threats; The Intercept found similar contrivances and pretexts to treat AI/data center organizing as a "domestic violent extremist" threat in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Anyway, back to the This Machine Kills episode: I was really interested in the two of them thinking critically about the proposal of the public owning 50% of AI companies and how it means it'll be half-ours when it comes to light that OpenAI lost about 40 billion dollars last year. That's our torment nexus/financial disaster.

Ed: The Trump administration for the past 2 years has been fully captured, enthusiastically, you know, offered itself up as well, to industry in this way. A16Z, particularly, and the PayPal Mafia - but also to the tech sector and industry, ... writing executive orders, department memoranda, policy rules and regulations, controls, relations, ideas and rules that will structure relations with other countries.

I'm still working out how to pull together the threads where the government is earnestly taking a keen interest in AI and turning data centers into hardened military facilities (as is seemingly the case with the UM-LANL data center proposal) and this other thread where Sanders and some others on the left are dabbling with taking partial ownership of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic (or maybe to be more cynical, if I may... foisting financial responsibility on us).

How do we fight back against both of these concurrent forces?

When you're ready to join at 8p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.