Reclaiming hope for alternative futures ⊗ The miraculous tradition in Silicon Valley thought ⊗ The Great Tech Heist

Reclaiming hope for alternative futures

This first essay in a series, was co-authored by Jessica Prendergrast and Sally Lowndes of Onion Collective. They explore the difficulty of imagining alternatives to capitalism, drawing on Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism”—the idea that capitalism so dominates our consciousness that we struggle to envision any other economic system. The authors examine various models that help conceptualize systems change, including Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies iceberg model and transition frameworks like the Three Horizons model, all of which reveal how alternatives exist beneath the dominant narrative. The piece argues, based on the “collective’s own experience that peripherality is a key frame in understanding emergence—that new things happen at the edges and in the cracks.” The view from the edge however, becomes an issue in itself, by keeping the dominant narrative at the center.

The petal model, developed by Onion Collective, deliberately reframes systems change by placing emerging alternatives at the center rather than the periphery. Using the metaphor of a flower, it positions new practices and mindsets in the vibrant center (emerging), with transitional approaches in the middle layer (evolving), and the declining dominant paradigm at the edges (ebbing). The model emphasizes that change happens across multiple sectors simultaneously, with practitioners often working across all three zones as they navigate late-stage capitalism’s contradictions. By visualizing alternative futures as the core rather than the fringe, the petal model helps shift what’s “thinkable,” showing how relationships and networks can gradually expand the center outward until new approaches become dominant, while always allowing for continuous evolution and new emergence.

All these models, without fail, position the radical as outliers — trying to break in — rather than centre-ing them as dominant forces of change, reinforcing their radicalism as oddity. […]

The commonality in the centre of the petal reflects not that practices converge, but that they are compatible with a shifted mindset, based on a different set of values, principles and ways of working and seeing that reflect what a just, regenerative, post capitalist future might look like. […]

Gal Beckerman, in his book The Quiet Before¹⁵, explores how profound changes in our world happen. He argues compellingly that it comes not in the loud cry of revolution but the quiet conversations and exchanges over many years in which new ideas and ways of doing are built below the surface, ready to emerge when the time comes. […]

The new centre draws the attention of and envelops the evolving practice in the orange petals and sidelines the old ebbing practice which falls out of the picture. Finally, the petal model allows for a continual evolution and for a new ‘emergence’ to begin again at the centre, since change never stops.

On the miraculous tradition in Silicon Valley thought

Dave Karpf, in part as an answer to Ezra Klein’s interview of Ben Buchanan (which I featured in No.347), critiques the pervasive belief that technological advancements, particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), will serve as miraculous solutions to pressing societal issues. He argues that while some Silicon Valley leaders view AGI as a means to resolve complex problems, this perspective is overly optimistic and neglects the current challenges we face, such as a crumbling administrative state and climate change. Karpf explains that relying on technological innovation as a saviour is not a viable plan; instead, we must focus on addressing immediate, urgent issues through collective effort. Let’s also remember that scientific progress is fraught with complex challenges that cannot be solved simply by betting on future technological breakthroughs, as seen in the narratives of venture capital and science fiction.

Although I agree with the piece almost in its entirety, kind of like techno optimists use AGI as a coming miracle, techno critics often use AGI as a cloudy endgame that they find easy to dismiss, using an “old” definition. In his interview, Buchanan gave this “canonical” definition instead:

A.G.I. is a system capable of doing almost any cognitive task a human can do. I don’t know that we’ll quite see that in the next four years or so, but I do think we’ll see something like that, where the breadth of the system is remarkable but also its depth, its capacity to, in some cases, exceed human capabilities, regardless of the cognitive discipline.

That’s a much tamer definition than what used to be called AGI, and Karpf seems to be using the old version. Recent claims are basically using “AGI” to say that it’s a general purpose technology, it’s hard to agree that it’s not. We shouldn’t let AI evangelists move the goal posts every time they miss their proclamations, but it might also be useful to align with the current use of the term when critiquing the project of AI as a whole. Old skool AGI is not close, the tamer version is very near.

The thing about this type of miraculous reasoning is that it is stable of two narrative genres: science fiction and venture capital investing. […]

The reality of science is that it thorny problems all the way down. Once you solve the current hard challenge, a whole set of adjacent hard challenges reveal themselves. […]

Enough with the miraculous thinking. Democracy and social institutions are fragile things. They require collective effort and maintenance, or else they fall apart. Let’s devote ourselves to the immediate, urgent challenges of the here-and-now, and leave the potential transformative futures to our future selves. We will be in a better position to make the most of those potential futures through the good work we do today.

Also → Sentiers reader Tod Mesirow sent me this interview he did in 1995, which lines up very well with the above piece and various other recent ones. Science fiction and prophecy: Talking to Arthur C. Clarke.

The Great Tech Heist - How “disruption” became a euphemism for theft

If you were or are fans of technological innovation, this might first hit as exaggerated, but it’s hard to find fault here. It’s also not a wholly new argument, but definitely worth revisiting in these tech-oligarch-fuelled hell times.

As I was reading, I started thinking that part of the reason so much of tech is based in Silicon Valley / the US is the fact that it’s the place with the greatest overlap of funding and living conditions, yes. Rests on decades of tech research and innovation, also yes. But it’s also a place where you can do all these things largely unhindered. Predatory subsidising, monopolistic network effects, regulatory lawbreaking, etc. It takes all of it to “work.”

Westenberg argues that the so-called “disruption” brought by tech entrepreneurs often masks a predatory business model that extracts wealth from existing systems rather than creating genuine value. This digital colonisation leaves devastation in its wake, as companies prioritise profit over the welfare of workers and small businesses, ultimately leading to precarious poverty. She calls for a reevaluation of how we perceive innovation, asserting that many tech practices are akin to legalised theft, cleverly disguised as progress. To combat this, Westenberg advocates for public digital infrastructure and stronger regulatory frameworks to protect the very communities these companies exploit.

We don't need venture capitalists to own the digital rails of our economy. Any economy. Cities and states can and should develop public digital infrastructure of their own. Every dollar that flows through Silicon Valley’s toll booths is a policy failure. […]

Yes, previous systems had flaws. But the appropriate response to those flaws is to fix them—not to replace them with techno-oligarchy that extracts unprecedented wealth while creating precarious poverty. The modest convenience improvements these platforms offer users come at catastrophic costs to workers, small businesses, and communities. […]

When tech founders proclaim “we’re disruptive,” what they really mean is “we’ve found a legally dubious way to build wealth on the back of a system that worked fine before we showed up.” Their “disruption” is a form of digital colonization—invading functioning markets and leaving devastation in their wake.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Stories from the future “Plan International invited 15 adolescent girls and young women from 11 countries from around the world to imagine a future 30 years from now where governments and policymakers fully adopted the recommendations made by adolescent girls and young people on the occasion of the Beijing+30 celebration.”
• Creating an Institute for Sustainable Worlds. “I think we need to focus on a particular way of approaching the intersection of sustainability and creative research methods, and the angle that makes most sense to me is imagination, and how it relates to our collective futures.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Everything is Ghibli. “Reggie James dubbed the trend ‘Ghibli slop,’ not as dismissal, but as critique of what happens when distinctive artistic vision becomes infinitely reproducible at scale. ‘What was once valuable in the awareness of painstaking labor, beautiful stories, and coherent aesthetic,’ he writes, ‘is now valuable PURELY in our reception to, and reproduction of, the aesthetic.’”
• Google is grounded and needs to learn how to soar. I’d much prefer we stop multiplying uses of AI for simple search, but this is smart. “Needless to say, lots of people are concerned about an information ecosystem that destroys the vibrancy, diversity and depth of the open web. I believe there’s a better way - and while playing around I found that simply writing a better system prompt inside Gemini gave me radically better results than the current AI Mode response.”
• OpenAI’s Sora is plagued by sexist, racist, and ableist biases “In Sora’s world, everyone is good-looking. Pilots, CEOs, and college professors are men, while flight attendants, receptionists, and childcare workers are women. Disabled people are wheelchair users, interracial relationships are tricky to generate, and fat people don’t run.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Piezoelectric catalyst destroys forever chemicals “Instead of simply filtering PFAS, our solution actively degrades and mineralizes broad-spectra PFAS into harmless byproducts, eliminating the need for polluting, costly, and complex secondary waste management.”
• Wild parrots in cities are a delightful development I had no idea! In the Anthropocene, urban green spaces are increasingly safe havens for flocks of these colorful, intelligent birds. Awesome!“”

Asides

• 1.5-million-year-old bone tools discovered in Tanzania are the oldest ever, reshaping early hominin technology. “This finding has pushed back systematic bone tool production by more than a million years and challenges previous assumptions about the technological capability of early hominins. Crafted from the bones of elephants and hippopotamuses, these tools showcase an advanced level of cognitive ability and craftsmanship, which was thought to have emerged much later in human development.”
• How Elon Musk’s SpaceX secretly allows investment from China. “In December, Kahlon testified that SpaceX prefers to avoid investors from China because it is a defense contractor. There is a major exception though, he said: SpaceX finds it ‘acceptable’ for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles.”
• Tavares Strachan. These “collage-like artworks” are very much to my liking.