A(I)mbivalence

There is an enormous amount of talk about AI, yet surprisingly little discussion of the conditions under which it is produced.

A(I)mbivalence begins with this contradiction. AI can be useful and still rest on exploitation, appropriated knowledge, enormous resource consumption, and a growing concentration of property and power. People can benefit from individual tools while still having very good reasons to reject the system behind them.

The first part of the book therefore looks behind the user interface: at labor, data, ownership, value extraction, environmental costs, productivity promises, and an industry that has been remarkably successful at selling its own interests as the future we all share.

Then it becomes more personal. Even those who understand all of this still live inside these conditions. Should one use AI or boycott it? Consume responsibly? Choose a better provider? Hope for personal purity? A(I)mbivalence examines what individual action can achieve and where a political question becomes only the personal guilt of one person.

The book does not stop there. The most interesting question at the end is not “What can I do already?” It is why so many people are convinced that they cannot change anything, why their outrage and frustration so often remain isolated, and how collective agency can emerge again from that state.

A(I)mbivalence is therefore not about tolerating contradictions and learning to live with them. It begins with them. From there, it moves through an analysis of power relations and the limits of individual responsibility toward community, organization, co-determination, resistance, and the question of what people can achieve together that no one of them can achieve alone.

A(I)mbivalence is currently in progress. The manuscript is still being written, and along with it, the themes and conversations on this page are still developing.