Our failure to mediate the mess

AI companies are not paying the real costs of their operations, including copyrighted training data, environmental resources, and social impacts, as they sell services below cost with investor subsidies. The author argues that this pattern, seen previously with social media and crypto, requires democratic social mediation of technology rather than market-driven development.

The current AI https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/ai/ boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in mainstreaming https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/mainstreaming/ terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content. Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs. The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the deathcult https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/deathcult/ , where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking and acting on questions the tech industry never asks. This is where the OMN https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/omn/ approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems. This mess is a part of our long-standing geekproblem https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/geekproblem/ , that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless techchurn https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/techchurn/ : one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power. We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these techshit https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/techshit/ outcomes. The 4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the nastyfew https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/nastyfew/ . That’s the work of the openweb https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/openweb/ , and the path of OMN https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/omn/ .