Lmst

"Silicon Valley leaders are no longer merely building tools for the battlefield; they are being formally integrated into its command structure"

"AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation", by Marwa Fatafta for Al-Shabaka: https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/ai-for-war-big-tech-empowering-israels-crimes-and-occupation/ @palestine

#dehumanisation #squash #technoCriticism #StartUpNation #TechBros #innovation #efficiency #technoSolutionnism #productivity #strikes #DefundIsrael #patriotism #JewishSupremacy #MilInt #military #army #IDF #Unit8200 #Gaza #warOnGaza #israel #tech #technology #AI #data #Microsoft #warCrimes #ethnicCleansing #militaryAI #Cloud #OpenAI #IDF #genocideSupport #entanglement #complicity #complicityInGenocide #AlShabaka

'Three syntactic patterns appear consistently:
• Passive constructions, such as “Data shall be retained,” which avoid naming the actor.
• Nominalizations, such as “submission,” which replace verbs like “submit” to obscure who acts.
• Instruction templates without subjects, such as “Confirm identity before approval,” which issue commands without specifying any agent.

'Each of these forms is grammatically acceptable and often institutionally adopted. What unites them is that they structurally remove the subject, the speaker, and the agent.

'Why This Has Consequences

'Where no one is named, no one is held accountable.
[…]
'Formality, once a guarantee of procedure, becomes a mask for the absence of responsibility.

'Documents continue to function. Authority continues to be exercised. Yet no one signs, and no one speaks.'

https://www.agustinvstartari.com/post/who-gave-the-order-when-ai-issues-commands-without-a-speaker by @agustinstartari

#responsibility #accountability #ethics #authority #technique #risks #assessment #algorithms #technocriticism #judicialBias #institutionsDeceive #ethics #justice #law #publicLaw #bias #justiceSystem #judiciary #genAI #generativeAI

‘It is not a Sunday in the countryside that we need, but a less artificial life.’
—Bernard Charbonneau, in « Le sentiment de la nature, une force révolutionnaire », 1937

It is our disconnection from nature that gives rise to the feeling that we lack something, that an essential part of our existence is missing.

@psychology @philosophy

#tourism #nature #wilderness #BienVivir #wellLiving #SilentSunday #ecology #ecologists #environmentalism #environmentalists #Charbonneau #BernardCharbonneau #postDevelopment #beliefs #degrowth #philosophy #quote #quotes #citation #citations #EstelleSays #technique #technoCriticism

Here I am slowly spining a yarn of Bernard Charbonneau 🧶

#development #revolution #conformism #progress #personalism #State #nationState #anarchism #anarchy #technoCriticism #technique #bureaucracy #technocracy #industry #economy #capitalism #spectacle #property #ecology #ecologists #environmentalism #environmentalists #goodLiving #city #rurality #historyOfIdeas #philosophy #politics #vote #elections #Charbonneau #BernardCharbonneau #longThread #yarn

It is rational to trust your peers or positions of authority, but it is a mistake.
Here is a concise argument for technoCriticism, in four items: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/followup-on-trusting-your-own-judgement/ by @baldur

#validation #AIRisks #science #bias #cognitiveBias #technoCriticism #responsibleAI #tech #techBros #growth #ai #AIRisks

"The experiment begun in 1492 was accompanied by a new relationship with the world and with each other, based on the novel idea that the prosperity of human societies lay in the submission of a wild and free nature to the rational act of exploitation. From then on, the entire living world was put to work, and in this first planetary empire, people, plants and animals became commodities circulating from one corner of the hemisphere to the other."

wrote Sylvie Laurent in her book "Capital et race : Histoire d'une hydre moderne"

#wilderness #progress #SylvieLaurent #capitalism #extractivism #capture #appropriation #grabbing #marchandization #Discovery #encounter #ChristopheColomb #Colomb #plantations #Antilles #America #Americas #history #slavery #agroBusiness #agriculture #NewWorld #quote #quotes #beliefs #belief #labour #technoCriticism

"Bender and Hanna show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account."

from the back cover of their upcoming #book

#AIHype #TheAICon #broligarchy #technoCriticism #techBros #tech #acceleration #growth #convergence #responsibleAI #enshittification

"Modern civilisation has a number of extremely delicate and highly interconnected components whose graceful degradation is effectively impossible."

It is "much easier to break things than to build them up. The government administrations of Britain, France and Germany for example, were set up at a time in the nineteenth century when the rising middle classes demanded a properly functioning state[…]. It took perhaps a generation for professional, neutral public services to fully emerge."

"Forty years of globalised neoliberalism have broken our societies, our economies and our political systems, and we no longer have the ability to put them back together."

https://braveneweurope.com/aurelien-the-end

#civilService #statehood #bureaucracy #complexity #risk #digitalization #quantification #technocracy #quantitative #repair #mitigation #redundancy #resiliency #Deregulation #Economics #politics #EUPol #EU #Europe #institutions #institutionsDeceive #finance #globalisation #NeoLiberalism #Privatisation #technique #technoCriticism

#Screens "train us in convenience, which is training in predictability, in the facade of certainty. And when that facade inevitably breaks, we often find ourselves at sea.

"In the brilliant and ever-relevant Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott outlines the many ways states fail; principle among them is an obsession with putting things in order, with simplification and efficiency. More often than not, that efficiency translates into brittleness and weakness, into systems so fragile they break the moment something unanticipated arises."

https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/make-life-possible

#engineers #engineering #smartphones #iPhone #Android #Culture #development #creation #creatives #art #entertainment #distraction #alienation #screen #technique #tech #technology #technocriticism #phones #mentalHealth #capitalism #statehood #technocracy #fragility #progress

a winding road photographed from the sky
big letters stating Seeing like a State - audiobook by James C. Scott

"Humanity has endured for 1 million years for one simple reason: it is bound by limits. It is effectively regulated, and it is this regulation that lies at the heart of its genius.
[…]
"Capital very quickly relied on the sciences, and this was not simply the result of cultural impregnation.

"Classical science separates and analyses. All capital relies on this powerful process and adds to it control through quantification. A principle of devitalisation at the heart of modern technique.

"This thanatocratic principle of capital, without which it is nothing, takes place in three stages: privatisation of the means, industrialisation of devitalisation, and being as a commodity."

Thread in French: https://piaille.fr/@Ciriaco/113083670282268574 by @Ciriaco

#acceleration #convergence #commoditization #commodities #accelerate #criticalTheory #technocriticism #capitalism #technique #tech #BigTech #technology #agriculture #science #supremacy #climateBreakdown #globalHeating #digitalization #engineers #separation #data #climateCollapse

Françoise #Dastur: "We must ask ourselves what constitutes the essence of theoretical science itself. #Heidegger shows in his lecture [of 1919] that the experience of the "thing", of what we call "reality", presupposes the objectification of life and a devitalisation of the living experience, in the sense of an eradication of the interpretation immediately given to the environment. The result of this process of devitalisation and disinterpretation is nothing other than the real in the form of the #data (Gegebenheit) which is in fact a false immediacy, a theoretical construct."

https://journals.openedition.org/noesis/264 @philosophy 🧶

#metaphysics #bigData #requisition #science #epistemology #supremacy #specism #beliefs #believe #technoCriticism #appropriation #seizing #taking #grabbing #grab

"Technique is no longer some uncertain and incomplete intermediary between humanity and the natural milieu. The latter is totally dominated and utilized (in Western society). Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature."

– Jacques Ellul in “Recherche pour une Ethique dans une société technicienne,” Morale et Enseignement, 1983, page 7

#acceleration #convergence #commoditization #commodities #accelerate #criticalTheory #technocriticism #capitalism #technique #tech #BigTech #technology #book #quote #quotes #agriculture

A review of Clia Izoard's book: https://archive.is/r3Def#selection-393.0-393.25

"Locally, the process of radicalization of industrial #mining is detailed through the prism of its social ravages. The mine is above all a gigantic uprooting machine (p. 54), which empties spaces by expropriating the last peoples of the plant. In addition, contemporary mining exposes populations to various diseases and poisoning. In the Bou-Azzer mine in Morocco, we extract responsible cobalt for electric cars; miners and local residents suffer from cancers and neurological and cardiovascular diseases.
"The overall scale of mining sector predation in XXIe century is also outlined through the growing production of waste and pollution. The mining sector is the most polluting industry in the world. For example, an industrial copper mine produces 99.6% waste. Stored near mining pits, the waste rocks, gigantic volumes of extracted rock, generate sulfur releases which drain the heavy metals contained in the rocks and make them migrate towards waterways. Factory pipes constantly spew toxic residues which can, depending on the ore processed, consist of cyanide, acids, hydrocarbons, soda, or known poisons such as lead, arsenic, mercury, etc. Finally, zero-carbon mines are pipe dreams because they are all very energy-intensive. The amount needed to extract, crush, process and refine metals represents approximately 8 to 10% of the total energy consumed worldwide, making the mining industry a major culprit in climate change."

#environment #ecology #mining #mines #extraction #extractivism #metals #transition #energyTransition #ecologicalTransition #ecologicalDebt #lithium #cobalt #digital #digitization #smartphone #iPhone #Android #electric #electricTransition #electricCars #industry #criticalTheory #technoCriticism #capitalism #technology #technique #sovereignty #supply #supplyChain #rawMaterials #commodities #development #exploitation #policy #pollution #NIMBY #CéliaIzoard #nickel #copper #book

What if one place was devastated because another was clean?

"On a basic level, exporting raw materials adds less economic value to the country that does it than processing, manufacturing, and reselling those materials, so for every watt of energy, every hectare of land, and every hour of work used to make goods exported from the global North to the South, the South has to generate, use, and work many more units to pay for it."

Laurie Parsons: https://www.laprogressive.com/climate-change/impact-of-climate-change @climate

@dys_morphia I just took a look at what #CriticalTheory gets me in the way of discussion, went down the rabbit hole and I am SO blaming you because now I'm following #technoCriticism as a hashtag and my feed has a few new people who may make me grouchy. Might not be what you're hoping for but I thought it was worth coming back to shake my puny fist at you and share the tag.

"Some companies get people hooked with pills and needles. Others with apps and algorithms. But either way, it’s just churning out junkies."

Ted Gioia: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024

#Culture #dev #creation #creatives #art #entertainment #distraction #addiction #Olympics #alienation #screen #technique #tech #technology #technocriticism #phone #mentalHealth #capitalism #spectacle #show #cinema #films

Culture: art eaten by entertainment eaten by distraction eaten by addiction

#AI enables acceleration to replace humans with machines.
@alex and @emilymbender are working on clarifying that: #TheAICon.
@estelle already has food for thought: https://techhub.social/@estelle/111811330219400218

#technoCriticism #techBros #tech #acceleration #growth #convergence #dataGovernance #responsibleAI #technique

B., the senior officer, claimed that in the current war, “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ @israel @data 🧶

#duty #protocol #conformance #AIRisks #riskApproach #risks #dehumanisation #AIWar #technoCriticism #ethics #efficiency #innovation #Targeting #industrialization #intelligence #AirForce #casualties #DataScience #DataScientist #SIGINT #Unit8200 #patriotism #JewishSupremacy #CrowdSourcing #OSINT #CROSINT #MilInt #military #army #ES2 #IDI #IDF #Unit8200 #Lotem #Habsora #Lavender #dataDon #dataGovernance #Gaza #Hamas #warCrimes #israel

Reuters, 2023 - Technologists with the Israeli army's Matzpen application and data operations unit work at their station, at an IDF base in Ramat Gan, Israel Palestine

It was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.

“We were not interested in killing operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Yuval Abraham reports: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

(to follow) 🧶#longThread @palestine @israel @ethics @military @idf @terrorism