Re: <nettime> techno-economic paradigm shifts ( was Armin Medosch: The Rise .....)

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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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