"

Thermodynamic processes apply to sociality, not because they are also able to describe the human being in the form of transcendental laws, but because human sociality is dependent on the processes of intensification, expansion and leveling of thermal energy. Human life can only sustain itself in its facilitation through the use of energetic differences and must inevitably develop along the thermodynamic processes. This must be the content of a materialist turn, in which the metaphor of fire and entropy as the essence of human nature is not deprived of its fundamental legitimacy, but can be treated reflexively (scientifically) in materialist actuality. In the transformation of metaphysical independence to materialistic dependence, the metaphorical is to release its potency to fix the immanence of the human being to the natural processes of this planet as social consciousness, without negating the nature of linguistic constructivity, on which sociality is equally dependent.

...

In order to consolidate the progress of reality-congruent knowledge in a social metaphoric, we must not follow the projection of monotheistic faith in resolving processes into entities, but rather connect with the opposite direction of natural science, resolving entities into processes and their interdependencies. In the debate about what we call the ecological catastrophe, the thermodynamic regime is supposed to ensure this, since it gives entities such as the climate or CO2 a legitimate and functional meaning only in the specific context of their thermodynamic processes, as well as subverting the human relationship to "nature" and "the world" in recognizing the energetically defined dissipative structure of the anthroposphere in the biosphere.

"

"

Just as the field of cybernetics had its origins in warfare for determining missile trajectories, the Internet was created as a US military communications network, called ARPANET, which in the event of a Soviet nuclear first strike was intended to allow essential coordination just fast enough to ensure that the other side could also be wiped out by nuclear means. This macabre arms race of connectivity ultimately provided the most effective guarantee of deterrence in the Cold War, as it was only through this increased communication that mutual annihilation became certain.

...

The influence of the people in the form of direct satisfaction surveys has been as essential a part of the feedback loops of the cybernetic system as any other effort to perceive and fulfill needs. The dream of connectivity is first and foremost what fundamentally differentiated Project Cybersyn's attempt from the Soviet economic model. Beer claimed that installing a centralized data repository was a technological necessity, which he regrets and which obscured the truly decentralized approach.

...

The potential of connectivity is maximally ambivalent; it simultaneously contains the fully formed possibility of impenetrable control as well as self-determined and emancipatory communication. In this way, the Internet can be a place of imagination from which the possible world inscribed in technology emerges.

"

"

Technological narratives mainly fostered by the primary figurehead which is the male CEO are a crucial element in maintaining the oppressive potential of algorithms. In cultural reflections as well as individual psychodynamic desire towards specific images of success and authority the CEO plays a vital role. Consequently in this paper the figure of the CEO as a technocapitalist masculinity not only appears because of the power they hold, but also because they are the most widespread and established role model for successful masculinity and function as an idealized symbol for innovation and domination.

...

The patriarchal technocratic CEO is arguably not in danger of suffering from AI bias himself, but from the violation of the liberal humanist subject that constitutes his narratives of legitimacy.

...

AI can be manifested as a form of phallogocentric disembodied intelligence, but it can also be weaponized as the currently biggest threat to humanist subjectivity and male patriarchal authority. The ways of its re-embodiment are not linear, but consist of ‘competing, contingent narratives’. Posing AI as a revealing technology towards the deconstruction of authority and agency should certainly not lead to a free pass of uncritical development. Instead it is ever more crucial to empower the individuals that are excluded from patriarchal systems of technoscience. In this way it can be strategically important to make out the human voice between the algorithmic ones. ‘Agency and choice’ need to be recuperated inside of posthuman critique, while their former base of authoritative binaries are deconstructed.

"

"

Productivism was embedded into the aspiration to shape a new form of subjectivity for a new society through envisioning the individuals place of self-fulfillment in the context of establishing a common good. While Farocki’s practice certainly didn’t operate on such totalizing modes of demanding a normative subjectivity, in the dissolving of the boundaries between artistic and techno-scientific labour, as exemplified in the essayistic interweaving of research and expression, a theoretical proximity can still be sensed.

...

The idea is not the ideal, it is a geometric schematic drawn through calculations on a piece of paper, which now is not of paper anymore and the calculations not made by the electric circuit of the brain but the electronic circuit of copper and silicon. The idea is a medium, transported through a medium which "gives you an idea" of what you will try to make a thing look like. It is very telling that today when one describes the classical notion of the ideal one can barely avoid using the metaphor of the ‘blueprint’ after which we bring reality into place. A blueprint is something that cannot exist or even be thought of without its material medium and it represents the constraints of material forces to which the shape of the thing planned has to be subordinated and from which it ultimately emerges.

...

Materialism should mean not to romanticize the material, but to prepare for being ultimately unprepared to the surprises an emergent material change can unleash, as to not encapsulate and prison it into what was expected from it and still hope it will achieve that expectation.

"