📌Save the date!
We are organizing a symposium on "AI & Democracy" (in German).
We will critically discuss the effects of AI on democratic ideals.
📆 When & Where
01. October 2026 (9–16h), Berlin in cooperation with the Einstein Center Digital Future.
Funded by the BMFTR.
@ectaiuos.bsky.social
We talk a lot about how much resources AI consumes. But this neglects a deeper problem.
Even perfectly efficient AI would still reproduce the climate crisis.
I spoke to @jackmcgovan.bsky.social
about this.
🔗Find the piece here:
www.sower.world/ai-resource-...
We talk a lot about how much resources AI consumes. But this neglects a deeper problem.
Even perfectly efficient AI would still reproduce the climate crisis.
I spoke to @jackmcgovan.bsky.social
about this.
🔗Find the piece here:
www.sower.world/ai-resource-...
📌Save the date!
We are organizing a symposium on "AI & Democracy" (in German).
We will critically discuss the effects of AI on democratic ideals.
📆 When & Where
01. October 2026 (9–16h), Berlin in cooperation with the Einstein Center Digital Future.
Funded by the BMFTR.
@ectaiuos.bsky.social
When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act Jan-Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, Rainer Mühlhoff First published: 18 February 2026 ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘AI resignation’ to capture how young people encounter AI not only as a helpful or flawed tool, but as an overpowering and seemingly inevitable force that can foreclose their sense of political and personal power to act in relation to the future. Building on qualitative work with high school students in Germany (ages 15–18), we conceptualize AI resignation as a future-oriented sensibility that emerges at the intersection of pervasive data-driven infrastructures and hegemonic narratives of AI inevitability. Drawing on Foucault's late work on subjectivation and subjectivity, as well as extensions in media and affect theory, we identify four contradictory pulls that structure adolescents' everyday engagements with AI—between enthusiasm and dependency, effortless access and eroded learning, self-governance and repeated failure, aspiration and foreclosed futures—and show how these double binds gradually hollow out experiences of self-efficacy. We further argue that AI resignation fulfils a strategic affective function within digital capitalism: by naturalizing dependence on predictive AI infrastructures and normalizing diminished expectations of the power to act, it stabilizes the very sociotechnical structures that produce it. The article concludes by outlining implications for re-politicizing AI and education, emphasizing power-critical curricula and collective spaces of reflection that enable young people to meaningfully participate in shaping sociotechnical futures.
📢 New Publication 🎉
We are excited that our latest article has just been published with Wiley @futurehumanities.bsky.social:
“When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act”
👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
an ad for the manosphere!
8. März: Internationaler Feministischer Kampftag
Heute ist Internationaler Feministischer Kampftag!
Einer Gruppe Sozialistinnen um Clara Zetkin ist es zu verdanken, dass am 8. März überall auf der Welt der Internationale Feministische Kampftag gefeiert wird.
AI is not just burning the planet. It is upholding a world in which climate action becomes impossible.
Climate apathy is not a political failure. It is the result of an AI-driven social order. It is not a bug, but a feature.
Find a very short version of this here:
kingsdh.net/2026/02/27/a...
AI is not just burning the planet. It is upholding a world in which climate action becomes impossible.
Climate apathy is not a political failure. It is the result of an AI-driven social order. It is not a bug, but a feature.
Find a very short version of this here:
kingsdh.net/2026/02/27/a...
Ben and I have a message for the Germans.
Thats great to hear! Thanks. I will share once its possible :)
Thanks! I will share as soon as possible.
Working at Barbican sitting on a sofa.
The british library from the inside.
Currently @ @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social as Visiting Research Fellow. Working in new spaces & seeing what ideas emerge where the PhD thesis used to be.
Thanks Sebastián Lehuedé for hosting. If you're around King's and want to talk political economy, critical theory, climate/AI please reach out!
🎉 Exciting news: I submitted my dissertation start of January.
Title: "AI and the Climate Crisis - A Social Critique"
I argue that AI's real climate damage isn't resource use. AI restructures the way we relate to each other and the world. It makes our extractive order feel natural & inevitable.
i was actually shocked to see the numbers on new research from Global Energy Monitor on new gas projects in the US: nearly 100 gigawatts of power—enough to power tens of millions of homes—are currently in development explicitly to power data centers. At the end of 2023 that number was 4 gigawatts
@rainermuehlhoff.bsky.social
@noralindemann.bsky.social
@awitschas.bsky.social
@Anja Breljak
Ich freue mich sehr, Teil des neuen Projekts „KI und Demokratie: Rechtsstaat, Teilhabe, Nachhaltigkeit“ @ectaiuos.bsky.social zu sein.
Mit dem Projekt schauen wir kritisch auf KI, Big Tech und ihre Auswirkungen auf Demokratie.
rainermuehlhoff.de/BMFTR-Projek...
📣🌟 Neues Forschungsprojekt:
Mit dem Start ins neue Jahr beginnen wir die Arbeit an unserem neuen Forschungsprojekt „KI und Demokratie: Rechtsstaat, Teilhabe, Nachhaltigkeit“, gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt (BMFTR).
Totally normal
Elterntipp:
Meine drei Kinder haben zum vierten Advent die drei Bände von Marx "Das Kapital" bekommen und jetzt gibt es Streit, weil sie sich nicht einigen können, wem der dünne Band 2 gehören soll. Absoluter Anfängerfehler das Eigentum der Bände nicht vorab in die Buchdeckel zu markieren.
Guter Text von @tadziomueller.bsky.social zum Zusammenhang von Klimakrise und
der “Faschisierung des globalen Nordens, … dessen Ursachen tief in die Strukturen unserer Gesellschaft eingeschrieben sind, und dessen Lösung daher tief in Gesellschaft gefunden werden muss”
steady.page/de/friedlich...
Today I made my way to Zürich. Tomorrow I give a talk about “Transhumanism in the Anthropocene” @ikmz.bsky.social @ikmzmediachange.bsky.social
Happy to be part of the lecture series on how “Digitalization and AI shape our society”.
Thank you to Michael Latzer for inviting me!
The Climate 8-ball is considering its options.
Wichtiger Artikel, der auch eindrücklich zeigt, wie verwundbar Befristungen das dt. Wissenschaftssystem machen: Befristetes Personal kann man ohne Kündigungsschutz loswerden & so Wissenschaft empfindlich schwächen. Für Resilienz braucht’s dringend mehr unbefristete Stellen! #IchBinHanna #WissZeitVG
Great article on the effects of AI on social relation 👇
lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...
I had a great 3 days at the #SustainableAI conference @iwe-bonn.bsky.social
Big thanks to the organizing team, it really was a pleasure to be there. I met and reconnected with wonderful people.
I had the chance to give a talk on AI‘s more fundamental problems in regards to the climate crisis.
On my way to #SustainableAI conference @iwe-bonn.bsky.social
Tomorrow I will give a talk on AI & the #Climate Crisis, discussing AI‘s promises of control and its antirelational character.
If you are there, I would love to connect! Please say hi, or write me :)
In a Hitleresque speech, JD Vance says there can be no unity with the left and vows to use the government to dismantle non-profit NGOs and liberal civil society who he says promote violence and terrorism.
📢 ✨ About two months ago I was on The Data Fix podcast @melhogan.bsky.social
We talked about the contradictions “sustainable AI” and its illusionary promises of control.
Listen here 👇
pca.st/ewnpxizm
