Monday Resistance Update #5

Bit of a lightweight contribution this week as I've been buried in paper writing recently (hopefully coming soon!) and not paid much attention to what's going on around the place. More next time no doubt...

Resistance - Humanising Musk and 'The Zuck'

Pedestrian crossings in California have been hacked to give out messages that make Musk and Zuckerberg more human, not the intention to be fair but those involved can't help it if a metal pole with a recorded message is more likable than those two.

"One Musk impersonation offered to buy passing pedestrians a Tesla Cybertruck if they agreed to be his friend."

No word on if any of them mention buying horses for airborne eugenics sex but who knows? It could be in the mix.

Article - Why the AI backlash has turned violent

Good article from Brian Merchant about the uptick of violent, anti-tech actions in the US. Raises some interesting questions too - how much anti-tech actions are more anti-capitalist rather than techno-negative, how much those acting on Doomer narratives actually understand the things they're reacting against, how viable is physical resistance against data infrastructure etc.

One other thing that strikes me is the absence of a particularly clear cultural identity for those resisting. There are Doomers who think AGI will kill us all, there are Luddites, a label which in my experience can be incredibly scattered in intent (even with the historical namesakes offering some framing) - but neither of those groups represent a particularly prominent or organised cohort. For most people the only consistency is 'Anti-AI' as a kind of generalised impulse.

Will be interesting to see as the spirit of resistance keeps spreading what starts to emerge. I can imagine degrowth as a pillar for some, primitivism, spiritually motivated slants on Doomerism, a new model of workplace Luddism which isn't tied to academic fixations on history etc. There are forms to be found and it's daft for any of us, especially those more embedded in thinking about this stuff, to assume that our politics and aesthetics of resistance will be the obviously dominant one.

Anyway, that's a side thought, article's well worth reading.

- Dylan