On 6/28/25 07:12, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
Because under the worst of circumstances, we are witnessing an
attempt to launch a new techno-economic paradigm, based on AI and
its applications in automated production, logistics, management,
spectacle and war.
....
Yet what today's stock-market peaks also represent is something
like a risk of last resort, an investor appetite born of cynical
desperation. The thing is, this really feels like the last possible boom,
before the civilizational decay that everyone sees coming
These two things really go together, at least in the US, it seems to me
as an observer from a distance. There is a clear attempt to transform
the industrial base, most explicitly in the military because it plays
such a central role in the US-economy and industrial policy.
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, stated this very directly, just a few days
after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in an open letter to
European leaders.
"An embrace of the relationship between technology and the state,
between disruptive companies that seek to dislodge the grip of
entrenched contractors and the federal government ministries with
funding, will be required for Europe and its allies to remain strong
enough to defeat the threat of foreign occupation."
https://www.palantir.com/newsroom/letters/in-defense-of-europe/en
Such a transformation would be an element of a paradigm shift, but other
elements, such as a transformed institutional landscape, are really not
visible. The willful destruction of the institutions and norms that
shaped Fordism and Post-Fordism (say, the administrative state, "big
science," the paradigm of social mobility through education, cultural
diversity to enhance creativity) is not enough.
It's curious to me that there is so little interest in
institution-building and long-term strategy. I think this has to do with
the fact that the elites are in full end-of-times mode. The negative
version is socio-economic collapse, the positive version of the same
underlying feeling is "singularity," the moment when AI is improving
recursively beyond human grasp.
Sam Altman recently said "I think once we have a really powerful
superintelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly
difficult for a system like that. ... You know, if you think about a
system where you can say, ‘Tell me how to make a lot of clean energy
cheaply,’ ‘Tell me how to efficiently capture carbon,’ and then ‘Tell me
how to build a factory to do this at planetary scale’—if you can do
that, you can do a lot of other things too.”
Quoted from Andrew Becker's great book: More everything forever: AI
overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley’s crusade to control the
fate of humanity. Basic Books. 2025
It's hard to say if this is serious, but I think it's serious enough to
create an unlikely political coalition that shares the notion that the
world as we know it is ending. Some see this as a good thing (AI, second
coming in Jerusalem), some see it as inevitability, but want to survive
it individually by becoming as rich as possible (Trump and its inner
circle), while a third group wants to build a wall, upgrade the military
to make sure that in the minus-sum-games of the future, the world ends
only for the "others." Until then, institutions are replaced by carrots
and, mostly, sticks in transactional schemes.
China, on the other hand, is doing "proper" paradigm shift, it seems to
me as an observer from an even larger distance. They are not just
transforming their industrial capacity to the level where the rest of
the world simply cannot compete (witness the embarrassment around the
"made-in-USA" Trump phone for laughs, or the need for tariffs for real),
but also doing institution building on their own with BRICS and the SCO.
Whether they can succeed under the rapidly declining global ecological
conditions remains to be seen, not at least because, quite possibly,
they will have to deal with US milleniarnism at some point. But at least
they are trying.
While it seems the US is playing a very different game of
auto-destruction, and Europe, well, isn't even playing, but reverting to
its worst instincts: military Keynesianism for the center, racist
nationalism for the right.
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