Stefan Heidenreich via nettime-l on Wed, 5 Mar 2025 12:15:15 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Stealing the spotlight

There is something that 'realists' like Mearsheimer tend to overlook. They take nation states as homogenous blocks.
A different perspective would describe the situation in the West as oligarch infighting. The NeoCon/Military-Industrial Coomplex/Democrat party right wing that provoked the war, hast lost and has to retreat to its last stronghold in Brussels/EU/Nato.
With Trump comes the TechBro / Data-driven Dictatorship, that strives for supremacy through an acclerationism.
Trump is cutting the US's losses. Ukraine can accept a subordinate position as US commodity source, at best.
Ukraine was destined to be the victim from the very beginning, as Mearsheimer rightfuly points out. 

 But, to be fair, it wasn't

Trump that threw Ukraine under the bus.



Besides, Silicon Valley might be high on their its supply, but they also
realize they have no path to profitability with GenAI.
Wrong imho. Bcs users are no longer profitable, the state steps in. That's what all the scare (Manhattan-project 2.0 ...) is about. And that's why the Tech-Oligarchs line up behind Trump2 and Musk's accelerationism. It won't work .. but that doesn't matter. The worse it works, the more money needs being thrown at it. 


I think they see the take-over of the state more as a way to insert
their products into the infrastructure and then charge exorbitant rates
to captured and dependent institutions. They probably also see it as a source of new data, now that the Internet has been strip-mined.
Alex Karp adds a techno-nationalist spin to the game, in his new book: Technological Republic. 


We're off the map, for sure.
Merve has a funny little book out ("Prompt"), discussing all these issues in an anonymous chat in great detail: 
https://www.merve.de/index.php/book/show/587
Unfortunately in German only, for now.

Best
s
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