Generative AI is a prime example of the extractive circuit of contemporary capitalism: massive data appropriation, hidden and precarious data work, and hyperscale data centers that create a host of socio-environmental conflicts.

Second part of the essay:
medium.com/@j_camachor/...

Thanks a lot for reading it and for your comment. I really appreciate it 🙏

Thanks for reading and commenting, Diego! That framework may be a bit cumbersome but I’m glad you find it useful.

An Inconvenient Technology (Part 1) Excitement and Concern around Generative AI

Like many others, over the last couple of years, I've spent many hours trying to make sense of "AI" (and of my own concerns regarding "AI"). I wrote this first piece, which connects disparate pieces and frames "AI" as a politically inconvenient technology. medium.com/@j_camachor/...

Ha! Touché

Motion to redefine VUCA as Violent, Unfair, Confusing, and Absurd.

Moreover, it proposes the institutional framework of Public-Common Partnerships as a promising model for implementing and driving transition projects with three examples coming from the authors’ organization:
@abundance-org.bsky.social
www.in-abundance.org

… it is also much more than that. The book goes deep into the challenges and potential features of transitions, as well as cases and experiments happening around the world.

If you’re interested in transition design and transition studies, or in more general issues around sustainability, regeneration, and social justice, I highly recommend this book. As the title suggests, it’s a critical engagement with discourses around “abundance”, popular in the US right now. But…

I shared this piece with @jemgilbert.bsky.social after listening to an excellent recent episode of ACFM. There’s a great opportunity to better connect critical and political theory as well as cultural studies with futures studies and applied foresight.
novaramedia.com/2025/09/21/w...

Thanks for reading and sharing, Jeremy. 🙌

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

Thank you so much for this. I really needed it.

Decomputing as a response to AI and to the underlying conditions that make AI seem inevitable.

From “Everything everywhere all at once” to “some things somewhere eventually” in the span of a week. #tariffs #ArtOfTheDeal

3 alternatives to new years resolutions for seeding and steering change in your life/world/organization/community/family, a 🧵

Is prosperity without economic growth possible? | DW Documentary YouTube video by DW Documentary

This is a good documentary about prosperity without growth, including debates around degrowth and green growth. I would’ve left out the sufficiency “experiment” with the family for many reasons. Otherwise, it’s a good overview of a central issue of our times.

youtu.be/JUPrlfBoSzI?...

😥 espero que pronto se quede solo como un mal recuerdo 🙌

An artifact from the present that somehow feels like both an artifact from the future and an artifact from the past.

www.msb.se/en/advice-fo...

To paraphrase or, rather, hijack that great phrase by Tom Atlee, I've come to believe that things will get worse and worse, faster and faster before they get better and better, slower and slower.

The present is not here anymore — it’s just disappearing unevenly.

U.S. Emissions Fell by 2 Percent in 2023, Even as Economy Grew Collapsing coal use drove a reduction in overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but transportation emissions are still on the rise

Newsflash: Country responsible for 13% of global CO2 emissions and 25% of global cumulative emissions celebrates growing richer while reducing emissions at a rate that is 3x slower than needed to meet their internationally agreed mitigation targets.

To paraphrase or, rather, hijack that great phrase by Tom Atlee, I've come to believe that things will get worse and worse, faster and faster before they get better and better, slower and slower.

How to think computationally about AI, the universe and everything Drawing on his decades-long mission to formulate the world in computational terms, Stephen Wolfram delivers a profound vision of computation and its role in the future of AI. Amid a debut of mesmerizi...

I’m sure there’s a productive connection between @vgr.bsky.social’s essay and Stephen Wolfram’s latest work but it’s still a bit above my paygrade.

www.ted.com/talks/stephe...

A Camera, Not an Engine Modern AI puts us firmly into an age of exploration of computational reality

This is such a great, speculative, hyper-quotable, essay by @vgr.bsky.social conceptualizing Modern AI as a kind of discovery, a camera that allows to peer into “computational reality” (or, perhaps, I’d say, computational possibility?).

open.substack.com/pub/ribbonfa...

So, yes, let’s avoid falling (again) into the optimism vs. pessimism trap and face the future with a techno-pragmatic, tragicomic, scenaric stance.

5/5

An additional and compatible argument would be a call to supersede both optimism and pessimism through the “tragicomic,” “scenaric stance” (J. Ogilvy) that arguably characterizes futures thinking for at least 3/4 of a century.

4/5

The element that, for me, is most philosophically retrograde in the manifesto is the binary choice between optimism and pessimism. In his critique, Karpf calls to supersede that with techno-pragmatism.

3/5