Audrey and I listened to a keynote by Dan McQuillan on Responsible AI Means Decomputing at Goldsmiths, University of London yesterday. There are a number of things he focus on that resonate with me, but nothing more than is vision of how we need decompute and descale. These are concepts that will get you laughed out of the room in Silicon Valley, but are essential north stars for me in how we need to respond to this moment professionally and personally. People’s immediate knee-jerk reaction to these concepts will be a 100% dismissal of technology, but in reality is about a pragmatic reduction in how we allow technology to take over our lives and businesses.
I am fascinated by just how captivated people in technology are by scale. It has reached some messianic levels in technology. You can’t do anything that does not scale. It is very disturbing to realize how lock step technologists are with venture capital on this concept as they work to dismantle and disrupt everything we hold dear in our lives. Scale is how you take good ideas and weaponize them and make exploitive and extractive. Simple and powerful technical concepts like HTTP, SMTP, images, video, and other essential building blocks become destructive and extractive at scale, turning everyday personal and business activities into data extraction and value generation for the tech oligarchs.
Decompute and descale isn’t about abandoning technology. It is about bringing things back down to sane levels out of reach of the platforms that have come to dominate our lives. Decompute and descale will immediately be rendered to the same sandbox as Luddism and Cybernetics because they don’t fit into the dominant narrative. However decomputing and descaling will become essential in defending ourselves, our businesses, institutions, and government agencies from the destructive, disruptive, and extract version of technology that has become dominant on the Internet today. When you are looking for ways to push back on the AI narrative in any way, always start with decomputing and descaling centered around care, and you’ll be fine.
Take a moment to look at your iPhone — which apps can you delete. Make a list of all the online services you use—which can you unsubscribe from. Look around your home—where can you minimize what you connect to the Internet. Compute is an invasive species. Scaling is how good businesses get infiltrated and made dependent on funding and complexity introduced by the latest belief system powered by the internet. I am going to be thinking about how I can decompute and descale everything in my personal and professional lives. I’ve already reduced my API Evangelist approach back to the fundamentals, but I think I will have to go further if I am to actually help companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies defend themselves from the aggressive technological class that has infiltrated all aspects of our thinking these days.
