Renting Knowledge

Kia ora,

I've been thinking about

the movement of humanity towards renting

knowledge,

and

obviously there are sort of key drivers of

that, who are that

kind of tech bro, [sighs] Elon Musk,

Sam Altman kind.

Wealthy white men who

have achieved very little in their lives

by any measure other than finance,

who think that

the next angle of human exploitation

should be

seated around

essentially leveraging the education

system that's been undermined and

destroyed by conservative and neocon

governments

all over the world,

with that

really forced focus on literacy and

numeracy rather than anything that

resembles critical or creative thinking,

anything that resembles applied knowledge

even, which is just mind-blowing when you

think about sort of the

history of conservative governments,

and their role in education systems,

right? Because

education is sort of considered this

battleground for the minds and wills of

the people.

Their answer to that obviously has been

reduce access, increase inequality,

focus more on things that

create subservient, compliant young people

that they hope then will grow up to be

susceptible to the messaging

that they have manufactured,

which is one of division, hatred, anger,

[lip smack] amongst the 99%, rather than

looking at the 1% who are the source of

all of these problems.

But now it's like, oh, we don't really

even care about that so much in education

as we care about

letting corporations strip mine the

remaining commons and publics that are the

internet,

and turn that into

[lip smack] a for rent forum

where you go to do things that were

typically human and quite creative,

almost in a traditional intellectual and

in some instances quite business-focused

sense. Like you think about [lip smack]

consultancies where there's lots of

reports are written. You think about

application development even, like

programming and coding,

design,

all these kinds of industries which AI can

scrape and then create kind of the average

middle point of

fairly easily,

which were professions and traditional

intellectual positions up until that

point.

And because it's now a market, right? It's

like you're marketizing knowledge.

It's important to suck all of the

intellectuals out of those spaces, the

traditional intellectuals out of those

spaces,

throw them to the curb, and replace them

with a rental model.

The problem with that

is that we have

a complete lack of

technological development in the AI space

that actually enables that to be

economically sound, ecologically sound,

sound on a human level. Like the responses

that come out of AI are, at best,

median.

You can push them if you know the right,

they say prompt engineering, but it's

like, if you know the right buttons to

push, you can push them to do slightly

better than the average of all of the

fields that they've subsumed. But because

they are trained,

the

vast majority of knowledge that was on the

internet,

or in commons which had been digitized,

is sort of the hegemonic middle. And the

hegemonic middle itself has never been

very smart. They have strategists that

come along every now and again who are

absolutely evil, [lip smack] but the

public faces of them certainly are not

smart. The

excretions of those spaces are not,

they're not clever, they're not

intelligence. And the deep irony of Trump

calling it super intelligence, super

intelligent compared to him.

But really, the sort of the fascist

pedophile class

believes this thing so deeply in

themselves that they get enraged about it.

And it's,

at best, it helps you automate some tasks

that otherwise could have been quite

tedious,

at massive environmental cost.

We're seeing increasingly, I've been

following quite closely,

out on my country,

this campaign

that's being done jointly with the

Australian government to install a

hyperscale data center, which is the thing

that kind of hosts these big corporate

LLM models,

in Alice Springs. One of the most

notoriously difficult places to get power

to, one of the most notoriously hot places

in the center of Australia,

in a community that cannot afford to carry

the burden of

the power load, let alone

majorly lacking fiber optic connection

that will connect it at speed to the rest

of the world. And so we're seeing massive

investment in money in places that

just doesn't make sense.

Some countries are looking at putting

data centers under the ocean for cooling.

Some countries, the sort of

... European, more northern-placed

countries have put data centers in cold

places with heat piping that runs to

civilian homes, civilian citizen homes.

There is some

clever use of the massive amounts of heat

and the massive amounts of

power load that these places create. But

by and large, they are toxic to the

environment around them

in so many ways,

and the only purpose they serve is to rent

pretty mediocre knowledge back to

knowledge workers who are being

stripped of their jobs,

because these systems are supposedly so

much smarter, so much more efficient, so

much better.

But then,

it's like the market cannibalization

is

really interesting, and

I think it speaks to that

ladder climb that's

seen really dumb, very mediocre, nasty

people climbing corporate

ladders. And by corporate, I mean

public spheres, anything from a university

through to private

enterprises and even small and medium

business, where increasingly the most

sociopathic people are the ones running

the place, and they are dumb. They're

really stupid.

And that's without even applying a

colonial lens. That's without applying a

racial lens. That's without applying a

gender lens to any of this.

So,

even just from a mainstream perspective,

the dumbest people have been put in charge

of creating dumb systems that do a really

bad job

at doing something really badly.

I'm not inherently anti-AI. In fact, I

think there's probably...

Well, there are. I know that there are

quite reasonable applications of edge

models, things that you can run on your

own device in small amounts of memory with

small amounts of power,

that can kind of speed up

general tasks that you might do with your

day.

But instead, we're seeing

what they seem to call frontier models,

these big LLMs, [lip smack] take over,

like be the source of knowledge,

and we're expected to

buy it back.

And it's just fundamentally stupid on so

many levels, and it

depends on people being dumb. And so, it's

just another capitalist cannibalism

that's racing towards enclosure around

the few remaining commons that are out

there

that are enabled through technology. And I

think that's really sad, because more and

more people associate technology with

just being computers and

maybe the media at a stretch, when

technology is fundamentally human.

Obviously, I'm talking to you through

technology. I'm wearing technology.

We live surrounded by technology and tools

that are fundamentally human. It's the

thing that

makes

us and monkeys and a few other animals

kind of different from others, is our

ability to create technologies to meet our

shortfalls.

And yet, what we've allowed to happen

as

humans, and

particularly

straight, white,

middle-class, upper-class

people as a whole, have enabled us to move

all of our technologies into spaces

that

mean that we have

less and less agency, less and less power,

less and less autonomy,

and are stripped of our

creative, critical

potential.

I think, to me, it's

been much more obvious because

our indigenous knowledges are stripped

from us as

Aboriginal people in Australia, and here

living in Aotearoa

with my wife, who's Maori, looking at the

really obvious friction

and wealth divide between what is

quite obviously maybe a 5% of the

population who are exceptionally wealthy,

and the remaining 95% who are

almost teetering on poverty as the Western

world withdraws from the periphery.

This is one of those countries that's

being hit really hard with that in really

obvious ways,

and yet

AI is

sort of coming in as

being touted as being this kind of like

the golden solution. And it's like, a

solution for what? It's accelerating

our heat death

through accelerating climate change, and

it's not accounting for any of the

knowledges that

I think so many people are seeking or

returning to.

People that we talk to

are

despairing about the lack of human

connection and how much

control there is by these

giant corporations, particularly Meta,

over our social sphere,

when you participate in it. And if you

don't participate in it,

you're actually not just on the economic

out in terms of mainstream economies, but

because Meta now has such a hold in things

like Facebook Marketplace, even the

alternative economies and secondhand

economies that exist are being

increasingly captured by this nasty

behemoth that's really just interested in

stripping

more and more out of the people who are

most vulnerable.

And this has been something that's, these

knowledge systems

trending towards the median

is something that's been really obvious

for a really long time. And technology

could offer us a way of doing better and

doing more, and finding our people and

finding our knowledge, and yet

we aren't, and we can't, and

we're pushed away.

And so I think

finding ways to use technologies to return

to connection to country, connection to

fenua,

connection to our humanity

broadly, and I don't just mean that as

indigenous peoples, I mean that broadly as

humanity.

We've all come through colonization,

enclosure.

We've all come through

some form of this same pattern.

[lip smack] Anything from the patriarchy

through to dispossession of land, through

to

dispossession of human expression,

in the LGBTQIA+ community.

We're so suppressed in our expression of

what makes us human. [lip smack] So many

of these things

all pile up, and yet for some reason,

we're not clicking. What's the bit

that enables us to take back the tools? If

the tools are the things that define

us, we should be defining them. We should

be involved in their craft and their use

and their development,

and we're just not.

And I think that it's not only a really

sad missed opportunity, it's also

the end of the world as we know it, in a

way,

that I don't think is going to go

peacefully and gently. It's really obvious

to me that

the thrashing that's happening between the

rich and poor on the periphery is only

going to get worse.

And

in

countries where access to knowledge and

access to

ways of relating

with

each other

are paywalled

or

completely controlled by a hegemon, be it

Meta or be it

whoever,

and our ways of relating to

the place that we live in, that we have a

responsibility to care for, we all have

responsibility to care for

country, for the place that we are in,

that we are from,

that's obstructed away from us too,

because we aren't able to access that

information

because it's deliberately taken.

And now it's being put behind,

pay this much a month to access it,

and we'll give you a really shitty

interpretation of the

median [chuckles] of what is largely

hegemonic knowledge that's been sucked in.

And

people who are a little bit cluey can push

AI to do things that are a bit beyond

kind of the median,

but often it's just crap or it's

really average, and people think, "Oh,

wow, look what this machine can do for

me,"

particularly knowledge workers.

And yet

the human potential of it,

the things that we could be doing

that don't require fucking hyperscale data

centers in the middle of Australia,

on my country, [chuckles] is boundless.

We're already carrying

phones with us everywhere we go that

have

the capacity to do a lot.

We don't need to buy knowledge back from

data centers. We worked this shit out.

We worked out knowledge sharing. You do it

human to human. You share it, you pass it

down. You are custodian of knowledge.

If you want to write it, you write it. If

you want to record it, you record it.

We've worked that out. It's like asking AI

to replace educators or asking

AI to be the guardian of

tomes of knowledge in any form.

It's such a

fucking dumb decision.

And we can do better.

We already have the tools and the

knowledge to do better. It's called

connecting with each other. It's called

connecting with our place where we are in

the world,

and rejecting the fucking pedophile

fascist dictators that are taking the

world over

while we do nothing about it.

So here I'm trying to, I don't know, raise

awareness or something. Fuck, I don't

know.

Talk to your fucking neighbors.

Talk to the people where you are and find

ways of returning to connecting through

technology or to the land or to each other

in ways that don't put these fucking mega

corporations right in the heart of the way

that we interact with each other.

There are so many solutions, the simplest

of which is talk to each other.

The more complex is find free and open

source software that enables connections

with like-minded people. It's like

back to the days when people were hosting

websites on a fucking computer on their

dial-up connection,

that had a trove of information about

shit that they were planting in their

garden or the places that they'd traveled

to where they'd met cool people.

Technology can enable all of this. We know

how to do that,

and yet we don't.

But we can, and there are spaces where

that's thriving and flourishing, so go

find them. Look at the Fediverse. Reject

use of fucking mainstream communication

tools that keep forcing us to engage with

these shitty AI.

So much of our communication is done

through Facebook Messenger, through

WhatsApp,

through fucking Telegram, you name it.

Big companies control the ways we

communicate with each other, and

there's no excuse for engaging with that

in this day and age.

And all it does is control the narrative,

and all it does is dispossess us from our

knowledge and our connection to each

other, to our land, and to our

responsibility to make a better world for

those that come after us.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with this if

you did, and

I don't know. Go out and be radical and

rebellious, I guess. [chuckles]