felix stalder

festal@tldr.nettime.org

Researcher, teacher, and activist at the confluence of culture, technology, and politics. Binary, so you don't have to be. Born at 324 PPM.If you are on this instance, I won't follow you because I'll read all your posts in the local timeline. Why? Because I want to get a sense of place as I'm currently one of the moderators of this instance, and I wish to recover some of the collective dimensions of social media (rather than simply individual social graphs intersecting).

Posts

Post #4249170
Interesting story about the use of AI writing on Chinese webnovel platforms. It's a quite familiar picture, people resent AI written stuff, not only for the quality, but also for the lack of effort and care that goes in. Culture is, in one way of another, about human connection. Hard to draw the line, though. https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-web-novels/
Post #4249169
RE: https://mastodon.art/@stefanie_wuschitz/116885478934952781 If you are in Vienna, this is tonight!
Post #4249168
»Der Faschismus triumphierte, weil er in der Lage war, eine (reaktionäre) Antwort auf Fragen zu geben, die an sich nicht reaktionär waren«. Antonio Gramsci, via Carlo Ginsburg. https://jacobin.de/artikel/carlo-ginzburg-mikrogeschichte-antifaschismus
Post #4249167
🖥️ GOOGLE Kronstorf. Wir fordern eine transparente Gesamtprüfung aller Risiken! 🖥️ In Oberösterreich entsteht eines der größten Google-Rechenzentren Europas. Die Auswirkungen auf Grundwasser, die Enns und die regionale Stromversorgung sind jedoch noch nicht ausreichend geklärt. Es braucht Transparenz, unabhängige Prüfungen und demokratische Kontrolle bei einem Projekt dieser Größenordnung. ✍️ Unterschreibe dafür jetzt: https://mein.aufstehn.at/petitions/stopp-der-einzelgenehmigungen-wir-fordern-ein...
Post #4249166
The use of GenAI makes people more confident even as accuracy goes down. https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/19/using-ai-makes-people-less-likely-to-admit-they-dont-know-something/5274567
Post #4249165
1.5 billion to authors and publishers sounds like a lot, but it isn't. It's 3000 per plaintiff to be made redundant (potentially) and it firmly establishes that training on copyrighted materials is fair use. Just don't download torrents with 1000s of books for this purpose. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/
Post #3713672
RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@metaviews/116889858230538356 There's the questions if not all corporate-supplied are double agents, pretending to work for you while, in the last instance working for the corp.
Post #3475463
https://crankgpt.com/
Post #2263412
Come to think if it, it's something of a social miracle that open BitTorrent trackers and the file-sharing community still exist. Not only have they been subject to long-term, well-resourced and targeted repression, but they also require a large number of people continuously contributing time and resources without a direct return. While I can see how trackers try to make money, seeders are a different story.
Post #1933898
I'm fascinated by this image. Meta's planned 5GW Hyperion Data Center overlaid on Manhattan to demonstrate its size. If you ever needed an image of how digital colonialism looks at home, here it is. And, remember, Zuckerberg published it himself. Btw, 5 GW requires 5 dedicated nuclear power plants (probably more if you factor in redundancy). https://www.threads.com/@zuck/post/DMF6tMAxkX8?xmt=AQF0I6-Ctn0leigUTf6ExxSz9KzG2zhB17D-AQ5kfFzBZQ
Post #1905017
Letzte Woche gab ich ein Interview bei Deutschlandradio Kultur zum Urteil des EuGH (Pelham II), das nun endlich Sampling erlaubt. Ich hatte das alles schon nicht mehr ganz präsent, weil ich mich nicht mehr viel mit UHR Themen beschäftige, aber das Urteil setzt genau das um, was wir 2006/07 mit der Initiative Kunstfreiheit.ch gefordert haben. https://felix.openflows.com/events/2026.04_intverview_breitband_uhr.html Und schon damals dachten wir, dass das eigentlich überfällig sei. Nun ist es...
Post #1902124
"Doch am Überwachungskapitalismus ist nicht die Überwachung das Problem, sondern der Kapitalismus!" Ein Satz genügt und ich will das Buch lesen.
Post #1902119
Is it just me or can't the current calibre deDRM plugin remove adobe DRM from an epub? Usually, I don't buy DRM book, but here I didn't pay attention... I hate this so much!
Post #1887127
We live in a moment of highly subsidized #AI. Even expensive subscriptions generate significant losses for the providers. Many people think this will lead to a collapse of the industry once the inflow of speculative capital stops. I think something else will happen. The costs for powerful models will rise significantly, to the point where they are available primarily to corporate users. Most others will be left with cheap models, which are more of a distraction than an actual tool. This wi...
Post #1499848
"The instrumentalisation of everything: how nothing seems to be of value in itself any more but is only seen as useful in the service of some utilitarian function." https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/apr/14/art-sex-nature-why-is-everything-sold-to-us-as-a-means-to-an-end-rather-than-an-end-in-itself
Post #1499846
@m It will improve your heart rate by 0.003% :)
Post #1499845
"A recent report found that although only 40% of companies had purchased official LLM subscriptions, employees from more than 90% of those companies reported regular personal AI use for work tasks. In many organizations, employees use LLMs multiple times daily while their company’s official AI initiatives remain stuck in “pilot purgatory.”" https://hbr.org/2026/04/the-hidden-demand-for-ai-inside-your-company
Post #1499844
RE: https://social.servus.at/@servus/116409427898334983 One of the best, and the most humane, electronic arts/culture festivals in Europe!
Post #1499843
RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/116373402644907518 Capitalism really cannot live without "accumulation by dispossession". This is true self-cannibalization.
Post #1499842
Wow, only now I came across the brilliant term "scenius" (the collective form of the singular genius) by Brian Eno.
Post #1438229
I'm still remembering the Draconian rulings the courts handed down against non-commercial "file sharers" in the 00s. So I cannot but marvel at how flexible they are towards the interests of capital. Altman's "right to learn" argument was quickly picked up, setting a potentially major precedent. "Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works,” J...
Post #1418546
"Versucht man, die „Kultur der Digitalität“ als historische Epoche über die letzten 50 Jahre als ganzes zu betrachten, lässt sich ... eine deutliche Verschiebung von gemeinschaftlichen, zu referenziellen und aktuell zu algorithmischen Aspekten beobachten. Zu Beginn – in unabhängigen Medienprojekten der 1970er- und 1980er-Jahre, wie in der frühen Netzkultur – standen gemeinschaftliche Aspekte im Vordergrund und die medialen Projekte wurden entsprechend ausgerichtet. Dies inspirierte große...
Post #1215672
Oh, Sci-Hub has now an AI interface that queries and references its huge repository of scientific articles and provides access to the full source papers. I think this is the logical next step in access to large archives. "Hear the good news: recent advances in artificial intelligence enabled Sci-Hub to launch a robot that gives scientifically-grounded responses to questions. The robot starts with searching for relevant literature in Sci-Hub database, then turns to selecting and reading mos...
Post #1211231
RE: https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/115665774194799840 This offers an intriguing pathway into a multiverse future. If we manage to replace all humans in the process of production and consumption with AI, we effectively fork the economy. A fully automated, virtualized capitalism of bots competing with bots, and people free to reinvent themselves.
Post #1211226
My life improved instantly now that I finally got Firefox to open YT links directly in Freetube!
Post #1180588
Fascinating paper introducing the term “cognitive surrender”: "the decisionmaker no longer constructs an answer, but adopts one generated by an external system.” The authors arrive at this term by introducing a novel theory of cognition in the age of AI, Their Tri-System Theory, is "extending dual-process accounts of reasoning [e.g Kahnemann's fast and slow thinking] by positing System 3: artificial cognition that operates outside the brain. System 3 can supplement or supplant in...
Post #1137264
Oh yeah, fast track model collapse!
Post #1121559
"Scaling is no longer the essence of innovation," writes Gary Marcus on the fusing of LLM and symbolic AI that is happening in recent Claude coding models. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-biggest-advance-in-ai-since-the It seems an acknowledgement that the central flaws inherent on LLM (being probabilistic and therefore unreliable) are, well, inherent and can only be dealt with through a different paradigm. If scaling is not the essence of improvement, then this makes the inf...
Post #1114439
I'm looking for official policies/position paper vis-a-vis AI adopted by art schools. Like my art school has "critical curiosity" as a motto. https://www.zhdk.ch/en/ki I'm also interested in student positions, such as this: https://oberlinreview.org/35718/opinions/luddite-club-implores-oberlin-to-opt-out-of-ai/ Any good pointers?
Post #1096669
Beyond AI and Copyright A new report by @paulk It highlights two key structural risks of AI-driven information access: the concentration of control over knowledge in the hands of a few powerful actors, and the erosion of the institutions and economic foundations that support human information production. To counter these trends, it calls for the development of public AI infrastructures and a broad redistributive framework to sustain the digital knowledge commons on which these models depend....