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  "Anthropic leaders to control AI lab via 'Founder LLC' to promote the common good" https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/anthropic-leaders-control-ai-lab-via-founder-llc-promote-public-good-over-market-2026-09-29/. If only Elinor Ostrom was still around to explain to these AI doomer numpties that 'common good' is something we decide _in common_, not via a cabal.

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  Book launch for 'AI, Infrastructures and Sustainability' on Wed 2nd; register for the livestream https://spui25.nl/programma/ai-infrastructures-and-sustainability with eds Anne Mollen & Fieke Jansen and authors Patrick Brodie, Gerwin van Schie & myself. The book is open access & downloadable from https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-09748-4

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  Dumping Big Tech isn't just a matter of personal politics or even of tech sovereignty (which is a con anway) it's a matter of survival. Big Tech is the latest flag bearer for civilisation-ending extractivism and all the delusions about progress that keep us addicted to it.

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  Where is the university ethics committee that has stepped up to the plate and said "There's no ethical way to use Generative AI"?

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  As media opinion increasingly tries to discredit data centre opposition for being reactionary populism, it's important for campaigns to squash any possible far right infiltration by explicitly declaring themselves as anti-racist and anti-fascist.

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  Two factors dominate UK higher education right now: 1) mass redundancies, especially in subjects that emphasise critical thinking. 2) the growing pervasiveness of AI. This is what we call 'technopolitics'.

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  Anyone seen a good analysis of colleague-skills https://archive.ph/uvqBx and anti-distillation https://officechai.com/ai/chinas-workers-are-weaponizing-ai-against-each-other-through-colleague-skill-files-and-fighting-back/? Seems like a 'moral panic' that fuses legit fear of bosses replacing workers with hype about limited and hugely unreliable agentic AI.

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  IPPR recommends: "Deploying AI engineers to schools, hospitals ... to experiment with where AI can improve outcomes" - why not ask people already working there about outcomes? I'm betting 'fix the leaking roof' and 'stop making cuts' would come out ahead of 'more AI please')

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  Looking forward to debating the contradictions of AI at 'Resisting Big Tech Empires' (Sat 25th). What's happening when $$$ is poured into extractive but failing tech? How is AI a diagnostic for the nihilistic turn in geopolitics? What can we do about it? https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/event/resisting-big-tech-empires/

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  My co-panellists on this BUP webinar will be Masoumeh Iran Mansouri, co-author of 'How to be ‘anti-AI’ in the 21st century' https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gpe/4/2/article-p185.xml, and Patrick Brodie, co-author of 'From the Bog to the Cloud - Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland' https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/from-the-bog-to-the-cloud

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  I have a 4th position on AI (not sci-fi, not productive, not normal, but diagnostic of systemic collapse). More in 'AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum' - paper https://zenodo.org/records/19457404, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U2o5Ysms

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  "Sweden’s Tesla Blockade Is Spreading: dockworkers in all Swedish ports will refuse to offload Teslas, cleaning crews will no longer clean showrooms, and mechanics won’t fix charging points as the labor dispute rages on" https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-tesla-strike-cleaners

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  The video is out from my Rogers Chair lecture at Western University in March: 'AI is a Morbid Symptom of the Interregnum' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh0U2o5Ysms (yes I did use an exploded view of a Gaggia espresso machine as a slide to accompany 'convivial tools')

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  RE: https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/116418724387191091 I posted my speaker notes from the opening plenary ('The Empire of Big Tech') and the afternoon panel ('Is This Technofascism?') https://danmcquillan.org/resisting_big_tech_empires.html

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  Anthropic doomers peddling delusions about the dangers of superintelligent AI have collided with fascist dumbshits who think an all-powerful death machine is a great idea. So what. The people most harmed by these masculinist fantasies will always be civilians, women, children. ¡Que se vayan todos!

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  The opening statement here is jarring: "the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty" - we are supposed identify with some sense of concern, because what? The self-sovereign US Army is a force for good? 'The Authoritarian Stack' https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/

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  Thanks to Mél Hogan for this wide ranging conversation about AI in which we cover simulation, shame, system collapse and even some hopeful ways forward. https://shows.acast.com/the-data-fix/episodes/simulation-with-dan-mcquillan

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  This week-long summer study session looks right on point: 'Low-Tech, Luddism and Liberation: reclaiming technology for the collective good' https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-9-degrowth-and-exnovation/ Also family-friendly & includes documentary viewings, poetry readings, hiking excursions and music nights.

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  RE: https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/116475171870358907 "Fascism doesn't return as a tick list of characteristics. Fascism is a fluid and dynamic force which operates at the level of social desires before it appears as jackboots. We need to learn to sense it in our infrastructures as well as in our political discourse."

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  Ever find it hard to get up to speed on a Friday morning? Here's a Burmese punk version of Bella Ciao for you 🏴🔥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddm5yNcuHPg

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  One of the lessons the Luddites learned the hard way, and the critical AI movement could avoid relearning, is that when it comes to the harmful social impacts of tech the state is NOT a neutral arbiter between private capital and the common people. 💻🔨 Recommended text 👇 'Writings of the Luddites' edited by Kevin Binfield

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  "So whatever problem AI attempts to solve becomes what philosopher Henri Bergson would call a ‘ready-made problem’ – a problem that is expressed as a function of things prior to itself that have already been turned into abstractions". ('Resisting AI', p43)

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  Just out: 'Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?' https://berlinergazette.de/resisting-the-techno-fascist-takeover-are-we-ready-for-decomputing/ in which I diagnose DOGE as institutional cyberattack and argue that the way to stop it spreading is to revive an alternative technopolitics.

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  I posted the text of my talk on 'Decomputing as Resistance' https://danmcquillan.org/decomputing_as_resistance.html It's a work-in-progress: comments welcome!

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  Really rather chuffed to see 'Resisting AI' pop up as a prop in an insta video takedown of techbros https://instagram.com/p/DM0XtRcx5lN/

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  Apparently, collaborating with AI impairs unassisted performance because it optimises on short-term goals not long-term. The frame is the trick; you can't actually 'collaborate' with a synthetic token machine at all. Myth-making masquerading as critique ⚠️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

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  "The enrolment of AI in the management of these various crises produces ‘states of exception’ – forms of exclusion that render people vulnerable in an absolute sense". 'Resisting AI' p72 (https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai)

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  So many continuities between AI and the Major/Blair private finance initiative (PFI); outsource vital public infrastructure to corporations who provide a shoddy substitute and continue to charge you through the nose forever. ¡Ya basta!

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  AI* does more for the far right than boost disinformation; it sediments it structurally and institutionally through - algorithmic states of exception - eugenic solutionism - bureaucratic cruelty - diverting from structural solutions [*all current AI, not just the generative kind]