Decomputing

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= "Decomputing is the bottom-up recovery of alternatives that have been long buried under techno-fantasies and decades of neoliberalism - people-powered visions of convivial technologies, cooperative socialities and a reassertion of the commons.". [1]


Description

Dan McQuillan:

"Decomputing starts with the refusal of more datacentres for AI, on the basis they are environmentally damaging and because they run software that's socially harmful. Hyperscale datacentres are the platform for AI's assaults on workers' rights, through precaritisation and fake automation, but also for the wider social degradations of everything from preemptive welfare cuts to non-consensual deepfake porn.

Decomputing opposes AI because it's built on layers of exploitative labour, much of which is outsourced to the Global South, and because its reductive predictions are foreclosing life chances wherever they're applied to assess our future "value".

What's needed to salve pain and suffering isn't the enclosure of resources to power the judgements of GPUs but acts of care, the prioritisation of relationships that acknowledge our vulnerabilities and interdependencies.

Decomputing is a direct opposition to the material, financial, institutional and conceptual infrastructures of AI not only because they promote an already-failed solutionism but because they massively scale alienation. By injecting even more distancing, abstraction and opacity into our lives, AI is helping to fuel our contemporary crisis, furthering the bitter resentments that feed the far right and the disenchantments that separates us from the more-than-human lifeworld.

What we urgently need, instead of a political leadership in thrall to AI's aura of total power, is a reassertion of context and agency by returning control to more local and directly democratic structures. Decomputing argues that, wherever AI is proposed as "the answer", there is a gap for the self-organisation of people who already know better what needs to be done, whether it's teachers and students resisting generative AI in the classroom or healthcare workers and patients challenging the algorithmic optimisation of workloads that eliminates even minimal chances to relate as human beings.

Decomputing claims that the act of opposing AI's intensification of social and environmental harms is at the same time the assertion that other worlds are possible. It parallels contemporary calls for degrowth, which also opposes runaway extractivism by focusing on the alternative structures that could replace it.

As much as contemporary AI is a convergence of off-the-scale technology and emergent totalitarianism, decomputing offers a counter-convergence of social movements that brings together issues of workers' rights, feminism, ecology, anti-fascism and international solidarity.

Where AI is another iteration in the infrastructuring of Empire, decomputing recognises the urgency of starting to develop alternative infrastructures in the here-and-now, from renewable energy co-ops to structures of social care based on mutual aid."

(https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Labours-AI-Action-Plan-a-gift-to-the-far-right)