Fembots, sexbots, killerbots, chatbots: all these and more are the subject of Tracey Spicer’s latest book Man Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future. But while the book offers an overview of the problem just as AI dominates the news, its critical analysis falls short.

The debate about how our data is used is a valuable one, but a more substantial one can only be had once we stop seeing the internet as an immaterial flow of information and begin to see it as a vast material infrastructure, with equally vast resources demands and its own environmental impacts. We need to understand the construction of smart technology and the Internet of Things as coming from mines running on slave labour, lakes of toxic sludge, data centres with militarised security, and will possibly result in a second scramble for Africa.

Months before Zuckerberg’s big announcement in October 2021, Dave Karpf explained that virtual reality was the ‘rich white kid of technology‘: no matter how many times it failed to live up to expectations, it would always get another chance and more investment. Just as the VR hype has come and gone multiple times in the past, the metaverse looks to be following the same trend. I wonder how long until it rears its head with another set of inflated promises for how it will forever transform society.

almost fifteen years after approximately 57,000 books by and about LGBTQIA+ folks disappeared from Amazon’s search results, bestseller lists and sales ranks, the company’s algorithms are still unfairly targeting books by historically marginalised authors, including queer folks and people of colour, and controlling how readers can discover them.

On one read, chokepoint capitalism is really just plain old capitalism. The regulatory barriers (or moats) that companies erect to protect their monopolistic/monopsonistic power—including regulatory capture, neutering of competitors, complex contractual terms with suppliers, and straight up non-compliance with their legal obligations—are how capital works to protect and reproduce itself.

Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.

By giving the most insipid music the biggest platform—not because it’s what listeners want, but because it’s one of the ways they can most easily fatten their profit margins—Spotify is reducing music to a kind of aural wallpaper, and marginalising if not erasing the work of actual musicians in the process.

These industries lack the capacity (and inclination) to focus on human flourishing, and have actively skirted accountability for design decisions. Through this book, the social structures that have shaped our lived environment are not just rendered visible, they become hard to unsee. Road to Nowhere pulls the mind of the reader towards the myriad of possibilities that come into view if we think of our world without the car.

As much as I still rely on Twitter, using the site has also trained me to think of the whole practice of social media as cynical and corrupt, something that could only persist in a commercially incentivised form or as a bad habit.

There is a dystopic implication in the current shift towards online platforms—a kind of standardised production that constitutes the backbone of today’s institutionally-endorsed ‘culture’. It’s not all bad news though; after all, the failure of online platforms as a worthy substitute for a meaningful social life is a success for culture itself.

In crisis-managing the critique of unlimited growth, neoliberal environmental initiatives orient us away from the possibilities of alternative political worlds to capitalism. Instead, using the flattened discourse of sustainability and the utopic imaginary of speculative aesthetics, they promote another iteration of capitalism—this time predicated on the interdisciplinary potential of nature and capital.

People who rely on the ability to be anonymous or use pseudonyms online are not bad people, or ‘cowards’, as the prime minister would have us believe. The reality is that anyone seeking community or connection online without the risk of attracting stigma or discrimination in their day-to-day life offline might choose to be anonymous at some point—and they should be allowed to do so.

By inviting news providers to join the platforms they cannot beat, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code effectively commercialises all news content. Even public service content is now reliant on the attention it can generate on platforms like Facebook and Google News to reach an audience.

The Facebook news ban in Australia was a brief skirmish in the longer war to control private and unregulated domination of our public spaces and libraries. It will take global coordination and willingness to wrest these spaces into public hands to serve our world community, support the essential role that journalism plays in our societies and not feed the domination fantasies of tech bro billionaires.

In case it still wasn’t clear: Facebook is not a public service. Today, it has shown it by taking an unforgivably heavy hand to banning content – targeting everything from the Bureau of Meteorology to the Australian Council of Trade Unions. In doing so, it continues to show us what the company is really like: it’s time we finally believe them.

With the defeat of Donald Trump, we face a critical moment for users of technology and citizens of the digital world. An appetite among the public for reform is about to face off against a well-resourced industry that is looking for ways to contain the regulatory impulse.