CelloMom On Cars
"AI"
For whom?
By whom?
To what end?
Here is a fascinating essay by Abi Awomos. I've had to read it several times, it's long AND dense with ideas that are new to me. And opens the questions above.
It starts with the booing of "AI" bros speaking at this year's commencement ceremonies.
"Only 5% of Americans feel AI development is led by people or organisations that represent their interests."
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
"Most vendors do not publish foreign-policy doctrines. Most vendors do not argue against pluralism, call for the re-militarization of Germany and Japan, advocate for universal conscription in the US, or position themselves as the software layer of a new deterrence regime replacing the atomic one. Palantir has now done all of those things, under its own name, on the record.
Palantir has elected to be read as a political actor rather than as neutral infrastructure"
CelloMom On Cars
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, says that with AI "you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party’s base – highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat.
Karp has declared that Palantir is “completely anti-woke” and, as we all know, feminism and women’s rights are very woke-coded. Meanwhile Thiel has strongly suggested that giving women the vote was an error."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/14/palantir-ai-marco-rubio-afghanistan-katy-perry
CelloMom On Cars
For whom?
"I am not anti-AI. I build and ship AI products every day. What I object to is the pattern where a CTO wins applause in Q1 for bold AI-driven headcount cuts, and then in Q4 is quietly rehiring those same roles through an offshore agency while attributing the reversal to "integration challenges." That is not progress. That is a career arc dressed up as transformation. And it is costing shareholders, employees and customers at the same time."
CelloMom On Cars
By whom?
"Palantir exists not only to make money. With its ties to state power, and in particular the Trump regime, the goal is power accumulation. Not so much for the state in question, but for the tech executives themselves.
Technological elites begin to function as quasi-political authorities. The engineer, the data scientist, especially the billionaire, is recast as arbiter of social order. Who needs a parliament?"
"But this is not inevitable."
CelloMom On Cars
"What would it mean to build AI on a foundation that doesn’t require extraction?
The people who have been excluded from every previous system are the same people who built the alternatives. Not because they are more virtuous. Because they had no choice
That is where the most important innovations have always come from. Not from the centre. From the people the centre forgot, excluded, or actively suppressed."
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
The people who will live next to the gigantic data centers that are being built everywhere, are fighting that build, because it is based on land grab, water grab, electricity grab.
It is certainly not for the benefit of the people living nearby.
Cities have started to ban data centers.
New York state is on the verge of a moratorium.
And the question underneath: For whom?
CelloMom On Cars
"One student secretly asks AI to write their essay. They feel shame. They learn nothing about how the medium works.
One community organizer builds a small AI system trained on their city’s zoning law documents, planning meeting transcripts, and council voting records. They use it to identify patterns in gentrification-enabling decisions, produce rapid analysis of new proposals, and brief residents before public meetings."
CelloMom On Cars
Inspiring example: Négritude.
"Black colonial subjects in France, they wrote in French. They published in French literary journals.
They didn’t say: French is the colonizer’s tongue and we will not speak it. They said: we will speak it better than you, and we will use it to say what you cannot hear about yourself.
The result was not assimilation. It was structural transformation. Négritude ran through African independence movements across the continent."
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
"In Indonesia — 80% of Gen Z report AI as beneficial. In South Korea, 80% of Gen Z workers turn to AI first when facing work challenges." But they are not uncritical.
"What I’m showing here is the difference between populations experiencing AI as infrastructure built for them, and those experiencing AI as infrastructure that is being built over them.
It’s between who was taught to read the medium and who wasn’t."
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
"The medium does not determine the outcome. The structure it lands inside does."
You can have land grabs, water grabs, IP and copyright violations. But that is a choice not a necessity. Counterpoint:
"China: a national mandate requiring 80% renewable energy for all new data centers in national hub regions. Computing explicitly framed as public utility — accessible, low-cost, and clean as coordinated national objectives."
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
"Every medium has grain. Every medium shapes what is thinkable, sayable, and doable inside it, whether you notice or not."
Then the grain interacts with the environment it's put in.
In some environments, it can lead to deskilling and labour elimination.
But
"If you hand the same medium to a state or institution that treats education as national capacity building rather than individual debt — the grain runs toward mass upskilling. Same technology. Same grain. Different container."
CelloMom On Cars
But elsewhere, it's different.
"In India, AI is being deployed in rural clinics and prenatal care — augmenting doctors, not replacing them. In Brazil, AI is extending healthcare into communities that had no access before. In Latin America, the conversation isn’t whether to use AI — it’s that mainstream AI doesn’t serve them well enough, so they’re building their own: Latam-GPT.
That’s not a rejection of AI. That’s a demand for AI that actually works for you.
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
Whether or not you like it, you are already in the AI world. AI is in everything, from your email sorting to your Netflix queue to your insurance premium.
"That is why literacy is resistance.
The real question was never entry. It is what kind of presence you have in something you’re already inside.
One of the most important things to learn when developing literacy in any medium is to understand its grain."
https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial
CelloMom On Cars
“They’re effectively saying ‘our tools aren’t meant to serve your foreign policy. They’re meant to enforce ours’,” - Arnaud Bertrand
“Palantir has a track record of flagrantly disregarding international law and standards, both in the violations of the human rights of migrants in the United States, and its ongoing supply of AI products and services to the Israeli military and intelligence services that are linked to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
CelloMom On Cars
For whom?
"The language we are using about AI adoption is very similar to how Clayton Williams described rape.
“It’s happening whether you want it or not.”
It's language of coercion. Because this appears to be something that the leaders in this field are very comfortable with. Force. They look out over a decimated workforce, struggling to pay their rent and they call it abundance. (For who?!)"
https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-use-no-as-a-complete-sentence/
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