Abstract for a forthcoming chapter in an open access volume on 'AI Infrastructures and Sustainability', to be published by Palgrave

The advent of generative AI has thrust aspects of AI infrastructure into popular awareness, not least its seemingly insatiable demand for energy. At the same time, various insider ideologies circulating in Silicon Valley have aligned with the far right. This chapter argues that these developments are intimately connected. The scaling of AI's energy, labour and computing infrastructures not only increases environmental and social harms but becomes the 'total mobilisation' of material and human resources, justified by an openly supremacist worldview.

In the face of this reactionary turn, this chapter calls for a strategy of decomputing; that is, for the refusal of hyperscale computation, the rejection of AI's social solutionism, and the development of alternative infrastructures that disrupt total mobilisation through mutual aid and the matrix of convivial technology.