Article: Rewildpunk: The Counterculture AI Actually Needs

Punk took music back from the labels. Here’s how we take intelligence back from Silicon Valley.

I was describing the AI architecture I had been building: the mycelial technology, the bottom-up circulation, the small communities discovering uses outside institutional permission. And Rushkoff, who has been mapping digital countercultures since before most of the current AI founders were born, said something that stopped me.

He said this reminds me of punk.

Not the aesthetic - the actual infrastructure.

Quotes

Plurality over monoculture. Relationship over command. Local usefulness over universal scale. Human judgement over automatic optimisation. And infrastructure people can shape and steward, over platforms they merely consume

I say that artificial intelligence is not actually artificial. It is one of the most natural things ever built, assembled from accumulated human language, culture, relationship and pattern. “Artificial” perhaps describes its manufacture, not the intelligence from which it draws. The hardware is extraordinarily centralised, but the intelligence that runs through it is not.