This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.
About the original
This post is adapted from a talk given at “The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives” at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 18 September 2025. The original ran to about 1,103 words and 13 images.
Abstract
Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.
The post argues that AI infrastructure (data centres, compute, platforms, APIs) constrains what designers can do at the application level, and that every smart device reinforces Big Tech’s control of that layer. It recalls Amsterdam’s De Digitale Stad as an early example of community-owned digital infrastructure and of its capture through privatisation. Drawing on the socialist republican ideal of freedom as collective self-determination, it proposes three moves for democratic AI design: from applications to infrastructures, from individuals to collectives, and from idealism to realism. It closes by positioning this agenda between technocratic management and populist anti-politics and points to the full paper, an OSF preprint.