Earlier this week, I wrote an article about startups that are spending money on AI compute (tokens on tools like Claude and OpenAI’s products) rather than hiring human employees. There are all sorts of ways this business strategy could fail, and we are beginning to see signs that one of the most obvious ones could be coming to pass: AI companies can’t endlessly subsidize their AI products by charging users less than it costs to actually run them.

This is the AI compute crunch, and the signs are all around us: 

• GitHub announced it is pausing new signups for Copilot, tightening usage limits, and removing access to several more expensive AI models. 
• Anthropic has tightened access to Claude Code, and tested removing access to Claude Code entirely in its $20 per month plan (keeping access in its $100 per month plan)
• As noted in The Verge, Anthropic restricted Claude access to users of OpenClaw because the heavy usage was unsustainable
• OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has been talking endlessly about how the company does not have enough compute, which has manifested in decisions like deciding to shut down Sora
• Software that has AI tools embedded in them have increased between 20 and 37 percent according to some analysts; this has included increases in prices for Microsoft 365, Notion’s Business plan, Salesforce, and Google Workspace prices
• There is a general rationing of AI products and services
• Meta is laying off 10 percent of its workforce in part because it sounds like the company wants to spend some of the savings on AI infrastructure: The layoffs are “to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” the company told its remaining employees. Its main recent investments have been data centers and the tech to run data centers.

But it’s not just that AI companies are restricting access to their products, shutting down products altogether, and beginning to increase prices. The broader impact of the current unsustainability of AI can be seen across various sectors of the economy. 

• RAM, graphics cards, and hard drive / solid state storage for consumers have skyrocketed in price and are sold out in many stores. The same 2TB external SSD I bought late last year cost me $159 at the time, cost $449 a month ago, and costs $575 today.
• Similarly, the general cost of consumer electronics is increasing as chip manufacturers and production lines shift their focus to building more AI capacity. The largest consumer electronics manufacturer in the world, Apple, says it is having trouble securing chipmaking capacity for upcoming iPhones. 
• Home electric bill costs have skyrocketed in some states with high concentrations of AI data centers, leading in part to a widespread, concerted effort by some towns and states to reject and restrict new data centers entirely. There is a fear among experts that similar shortages and price increases could come for water supplies as well.

What this means is that the age of cheap, underpriced AI appears to be ending, or at least the compute crunch means the venture capitalists and investment firms funding OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to be willing to burn even more cash in order to continue subsidizing their products. 

On the podcast this week, I compared this situation to Uber (and any number of fast-scaling startups that sought to lock in customers then jack up prices). This comparison is only useful in that, like Uber, what AI companies are doing to this point is wildly unsustainable and is being subsidized by investors. For years, Uber’s investors subsidized the cost of individual Uber rides to keep prices for consumers artificially low in order to gain market share, crush competition, and destroy the taxi industry. Uber and its investors could only lose money on each ride for so long as it continued to burn cash. This eventually led to enshittification for both riders and drivers as Uber suddenly jacked up prices for consumers and sought to find ways to pay drivers less. The difference, as Ed Zitron has pointed out, is that Uber’s costs were extremely low because Uber is essentially an app that owns none of the infrastructure, and so jacking up the cost of its service went quite a bit further toward getting it to break even. 

Some version of this is coming for AI companies, but the path toward sustainability is far more complicated because of the enormous infrastructure and societal costs of scaling AI even further. “Make Claude more expensive and limit its services” is a lever Anthropic can pull, but AI companies are also burning money trying to build new data centers, juggling the political backlash to those data centers, fending off various copyright and public safety lawsuits, and spending huge amounts of money trying to train the next frontier versions of their large language models. None of this is remotely sustainable as it currently stands. 

This means that the startups that are using AI agents to scale their operations are doing so at a time when AI costs are unsustainably low and may wake up one day to find that their compute costs suddenly double, 10x, or that they simply aren’t able to access compute anymore. 

The general, long-term hope for the AI industry seems to be one in which multiple things need to happen to avoid a broader AI bubble burst. There needs to be a widespread renewable energy revolution (which society and our environment desperately needs), vastly increased chip and component manufacturing, and models need to become more efficient. On top of that, AI needs to be widely adopted and prove to be enduringly useful and reliable across a bunch of different sectors and use cases, something the jury is still very much out on (and some studies have already shown AI use is creating more work for humans, not less). All of this must happen while AI continues to put pressures on these systems that are making the problem worse (AI is making energy more expensive in the short term; lots of data centers are powered by fossil fuels; AI is pushing up the costs of components, chips, and gadgets, etc). 

Finally, all of this must happen while society juggles whatever potential mass unemployment / economic fallout comes from AI and the ensuing problems this causes for these employee-less companies who expect to sell their products to a populous that is struggling to find work. As many commenters pointed out in response to my last story: If companies begin replacing their employees with AI agents, who are they going to sell their products to? 

For some, the idea of entering a yoga studio can be fraught with feelings of intimidation and anxiety. What is meant to be a calm and meditative space can often be perceived by the inexperienced as exclusive, judgemental and unwelcoming; even those who are familiar with the discipline and have a long-established practice can be hesitant to join a new studio if it feels uninviting. Basic Space in Camberwell, South London, is decidedly not one of those studios.

Established by Jaime Hepburn as a “neighborhood practice,” Basic Space is warm, open, and inviting, thanks in no small part to its design. Devised by architect Matt Hepburn–founder of London’s haat studio and husband to Jaime–the studio fosters a sense of inclusivity and community through its considered material palette of frosted glass blocks, polished concrete, birch plywood, natural linen and organic plaster.

“The materials set the tone,” says Matt Hepburn. “They’re honest and tactile, the concrete underfoot, the texture of the plaster, the softness of the linen. We wanted every space to contribute to a feeling of uplifting calm.”

That feeling is noticeable as soon as one walks through the transparent glass door. Crisp yet serene, the reception lobby is flooded by natural light that streams in through the windows and is scattered about by a wall of frosted glass blocks. A sculptural plaster pedestal by architect and artist Freddy Tuppen anchors the space; serving as the check-in desk, the organically shaped podium is an approachable focal point that helps orient oneself within the space.

A corner of streamlined open shelving displays product in a neat and orderly fashion, while a low-slung Kashima sofa from Ligne Roset provides an opportunity to lounge before class or linger after. “It’s not like an ‘okay, in and out, see you later’ kind of place,” says Matt Hepburn of the lounge-like area. Beyond the reception, the changing rooms, clad in yellow-hued ceramic tiles, beckon with a soft glow.

The wall of glass blocks separates the reception from the main studio space (a second room appointed with Pilates reformers is found at the back); composed of elongated rectangles, the glass blocks are “slimmer and a little more elegant” than the more commonly expected square format. “I feel they have a slightly more contemporary feel,” says Matt Hepburn of the choice.

Fronted by full-height frosted glass, the main practice room is the epitome of serenity – daylight floods the space, but the glazing treatment soflty filters it and also provides a privacy screen from those passing by outside and mutes the visual distraction from within. Linen curtains can be used to close off the space entirely for workshops or other events, with the natural material contributing a softening effect that is complemented by warm birch plywood storage shelving.

Throughout the studio, the flooring is a uniform polished concrete with exposed aggregate that reads like a high-end terrazzo and is at once hardwearing and grounding underfoot. Matt Hepburn opted to not install a drop ceiling, instead allowing the visible industrial elements to play a role in the overall design.

The material-driven approach taken by Matt Hepburn for Basic Space has successfully created a yoga and Pilates studio that is inherently textural and honest – and one that gives the community an open and inviting place to return to time and time again.

To see this and other works by the firm, visit haat.studio.

Photography by French+Tye.

There’s a certain clarity to Aesop’s visual identity. The Australian skincare brand’s approach to developing clean, luminous products for hands and hair often translates into the warm, minimalist, yet lustrous design of its stores. Aesop’s boutiques—designed by the likes of Snøhetta, Sabine Marcelis, and Jo Nagasaka—are always clad in sober yet enticing earth tones but also carefully deployed reflective metals.

Inspired by the aluminum tubes used to test and produce Aesop formulations, the just-launched Aposē luminaire also reflects this aesthetic. Now sold in a limited run of 500, the table lamp emanates a soft glow of yellowish-brown light from its frosted glass crown. Blown in the Murano style, its formal and refractive qualities are not unlike that of an Aesop handsoap bottle.

To unveil the product during this year’s Milan Design Week, long-time Aesop collaborator Rodney Eggleston—founder of Sydney architecture firm March Studio—positioned one-off variants of the design on an undulating field of meticulously anchored, repurposed 50 ml fragrance vials. Without any other illumination, the three fixtures—imagined in three height variations—rise above the landscape and diffuse their light through the glistening elements below.

Situated in the 15th century-built, Baroque-style Santa Maria del Carmine church, the “Factory of Light” installation makes for a striking juxtaposition. “The bottles act as mediators between the lamps and the space,” Eggleston said. In the courtyard outside, the exhibit is wrapped with a printed scaffolding structure; celebrating the European practice of covering these necessary exoskeletons in replicated images—trompe l’oeil tarpaulins—of the new or restored facades to come.

In a series of recessed alcoves, videos explicate the actual manufacturing process involved: Aposē’s brass plinth meticulously forged by hand in Germany; the glass halo hand-lathed near Venice. The correlation between laborious handwork and handcare quickly becomes clear. A scent diffused between both components of the installation hints at a degree of cohesion; the lamp fully assembled and brought from an industrial facility into one’s home.

To learn more about the Aposē Table Lamp by Aesop, visit aesop.com.

Photography by Ludovic Balay, courtesy of Aesop.

In sunny Los Cabos, shade is a much-needed amenity. So, when designing Casa en Palmilla in the Mexican city, the firm ESTUDIO Ignacio Urquiza Ana Paula de Alba crafted an architectural form that integrates shade into the very DNA of the home.

To wit: the pair of lightweight, L-shaped roofs give that this project its extraordinary character. With almost seven-foot-deep overhangs, they cast generous shadows on the walls and around the 6,450-square-foot home’s perimeter that provide respite from the sun. Beneath this clay-tiled canopy, Casa en Palmilla’s four dwelling volumes are configured in such a non-orthogonal way that the courtyard at their center is trapezoidal and they all benefit from cross ventilation.

This gravel garden — with its view of the mountains beyond — is contoured around the home’s main spaces, providing privacy while filtering in sunlight. But only the main social area opens onto completely the outdoor haven.

Each of the home’s four volumes has its distinct program. The first is the “service” volume, with its parking, storage, mechanical and laundry spaces. Sharing the same roof is the guest bedroom volume. “Within it,” the architects explain, “a freestanding wooden element — detached from the roof plane — defines the guest bathroom and dressing area, reinforcing a sense of continuity and spatial openness.”

Beneath the second L-shaped roof, the third volume houses the main bedroom and its walk-in closets and study area. And the adjacent fourth volume, featuring a living room, dining area and open kitchen, constitutes the central social area that continues onto the courtyard. By opening its 40-foot-long glazed doors on both longitudinal facades, the occupants transform the space into a covered terrace that’s connected on one side to the central courtyard and on the opposite to a swimming pool with a view of the Sea of San José.

Inside, the planes of the L-shaped roofs overlap to dramatic effect, the laminated oak ceiling beams conjuring a bold interior geometry complemented by a soothing neutral palette. All the furnishings were designed by Alejandra Usobiaga, who created major moments with the kitchen millwork and a sculptural concrete fireplace tower that delineates the dining and living areas. It doesn’t get more serene than this.

To see this and other works by the firm, visit estudioiuapda.com.

Photography by Ana Paula Álvarez.

With the backlash against AI escalating dramatically, I can’t imagine a better time to consider the history of what the scholar Thomas Dekeyser terms the “techno-negative.” Dekeyser has just published a new book on the subject, titled, fittingly, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, with the University of Minnesota Press. It’s an academic work, but it’s sharply and compellingly written, already garnering great reviews from mainstream outlets. It’s a hard recommend for readers of BITM.

I met Dekeyser, a lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton in the UK, around the time his 2022 film “Machines in Flames” debuted, and have followed his work ever since. Now, with the book out, I asked if he’d be interested in writing a piece exploring its themes for BITM. He was kind enough to share this whirlwind look at how people and communities have rejected, shunned, or refused technology through history, and why their techno-negativity matters more than you think.

Before we get to that, a little housekeeping. First: I’m looking for a podcast producer to help make a weekly show about AI, labor, and the rising resistance to Silicon Valley. If that sounds interesting to you or someone you know, here’s a link to the job description. This is a paid, part-time gig, and I would love to work with someone familiar with the BITM project. Second: As always, this work—the writing, reporting, editing—is made possible by paid subscribers who chip in each month. If you find value in BITM, please consider becoming a paid supporter, too. OK! Enough of that, and onwards to the techno-negative.

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The history of the techno-negative

By Thomas Dekeyser

Technological progress is not just driven by innovations in technical abilities: explosive growths in compute power, processing speed, predictive algorithms, and so on. It is also, deeply, about discourse. AI-promoters and other Big Tech evangelists have long aimed to push their technological agendas by way of normalizing it through discourse, telling us that their tech futures are not simply desirable, but inevitable.

In this story, technological progress is a big, clean wave that carries everything forward, and cannot be halted. What we are presented with is a natural process that takes societies away from a presumably savage past and into a civilized present or future, one invention at a time. Because it is natural, attempts at pausing or slowing current forms of technological progress down are not simply naïve; they are futile. This story is omnipresent. We hear, again and again, from the mouths of Big Tech CEOs, AI grifters, national governments, and greedy employers around much of the world. “Whether you like it or not, it’s coming,” they tell us. “There’s no point in resisting.”

The problem: the inevitability narrative is a fantasy. It relies on a logical fallacy; just because something is emerging does not mean it will stay. More than that, it is historically incorrect. Technological advancement has never been a linear process. There is no clean wave; there are messy currents, vortexes, tides, rocks. When we pay close attention, what we find is that rather than a smooth, natural progression, the history of technology is in fact a political battlefield, with numerous actors fighting over the paths of technological innovation. Recognizing this allows us to free ourselves from the idea that the technological world we find ourselves in is somehow an immovable fact.

In my new book, Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, I show how whenever technological advancements took place, they encountered deep pockets of refusal. In my book, I dig into the archives to reveal the oft-perplexing and stubborn existence of a fierce urge to negate life’s technologization, of what I call ‘techno-negativity’. From early machine breakers in ancient Greece and medieval Christian monasteries banning technologies to revolutionaries smashing street lanterns in 19th century France and ultra-leftist armed assaults on capitalist computation, the book explores techno-negativity as a deep—but persistently condemned—current in history. I would like to briefly spotlight five specific historical episodes in techno-negativity that may be of interest to readers of Blood in the Machine.

Ancient Greek machine-breakers

For as long as there has been what today we would consider innovation in the development and use of technological tools, there has been a desire to undermine it. In Ancient Greece, the very promise of ‘techne’, that is, of both the crafts and craft-knowledge, was intimately bound up, from its very beginnings, by its refusal and delay. As historians have shown, the expansion of scientific knowledge at the time failed to translate into a corresponding burst of technological invention. The era was overwhelmed by a deep suspicion in the face of techne.

To give just one example, the philosopher Archimedes, a crucial inventor of various technical devices and machines, was also the world’s first machine breaker, destroying his own machines in the hope of staving off future use. Even an influential Greek origin story of technology, in which Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave them to humanity, came with a dark warning. Zeus clung Prometheus to a cliff high up in the mountains, where he was exposed to the elements and an eagle hungry for his organs. To the Greeks, techne had brought something dark and possibly sinister into the world, and thus, needed to be kept at bay.

The Luddite workers attacking looms

Fast-forward 18 centuries and we come across that most infamous of machine-breakers: the Luddites. They were framework knitters who, in early 19^th Century England, saw their livelihoods and craft under threat by the arrival of automated looms. As Brian Merchant’s book Blood in the Machine shows, rather than simply accepting their fate, they fought back, burning machines and factories.

While worker attacks on mechanic tools of labor took place since at least the 17^th century, what set the Luddites apart was their size, intensity, and level of organization. Techno-negativity became an insurrectionary tool that swept up a not insignificant portion of the wider population into an unprecedented assault on the increasingly tight link between technological innovation and the expansion of capitalism. With the emergence of the industrial revolution, technology had become a weapon wielded by the capitalist classes. Against this emergent capitalism, the Luddites developed a spirit of collectivism, fighting for themselves, for their fellow workers, and for a future beyond self-interest and profit.

Early anti-tech governments

In the centuries preceding the Luddite Revolts, it was commonly not workers, but governments who dismantled machines by literally attacking them, or by prohibiting them. In Hamburg in the late 17^th Century, to give just one example, it was common for the local government to do public burnings of newly invented machines. This was not a German craze, however. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the King of England Edward VI banned gigmills, the Dutch Council of Leyden prohibited weaving machines, a Dutch decree forbade ribbon-looms, an English Imperial decree was announced against ribbon-looms, and the Council of Vienna signed a generalized prohibition of new machinery. Far removed from our contemporary governments’ large-scale embrace of the latest technological innovations, these techno-negative states provided worker protection in the face of looming displacement.

The 20th century communes that withdrew from technology

In the twentieth century, new forms of techno-negativity took hold. Prominent amongst these were anti-technology communes in the US (MOVE), UK (Kibbo Kift), Israel (Degania Alef) and South Africa (Tolstoy Farm). Unlike the Luddites, who directly attacked technology, these communes embraced an ethos of withdrawal and disconnection. Neither accepting nor rebelling against technological life, they fled.

As one of many anti-tech communes, a commune called MOVE asked: what might it mean to disconnect from Western, capitalist technology? Founded in 1970s Philadelphia, MOVE aimed to live in line with what its founder John Africa called ‘Natural Law’, banishing electricity, machinery, running water, processed food, and products of inorganic origins. We may not personally consider it desirable or viable to live this way, but anti-technology communes showcase the possible diversity of resistance tactics in the face of a technological world that, increasingly, feels hostile to our collective well-being.

The 1980s computer arsonists

Moving away again from a politics of disconnection, the 1980s proved to be perhaps the fieriest decade in the history of technological refusal. Militant groups around the European continent—including the Italian Red Brigades, German Red Army Faction, and Belgian Communist Combatant Cells—set fire to the companies and infrastructures fueling the arrival of computers. A French group with the fantastic name Committee for the Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (C.L.O.D.O. in French) is amongst the most prominent of that era.

Between 1980 and 1983, they set arson to or bombed at least 12 computer companies. Late at night, they would sneak into offices of firms like Philips Data Centre and Honeywell, gather computers and magnetic tapes, set fire to them in the toilets, and flee before the police arrived. Their target was less tech’s displacement of labor (Luddites) or its general impoverization of life (MOVE), and instead computation’s enrollment into the state apparatus as a war machine and a technology of surveillance. Computers, they argued before the arrival of the ‘personal computer’, would bring dominance as much as emancipation.

Across its many actors and practices, techno-negativity has varied as widely in its justifications and ideologies as in its practices and successes. Whatever we make of any individual approach to resisting tech, techno-negative actors prove the absurdity of any linear narrative of technological advancement. With every leap in technological advancement, we witness a fierce urge to undo it. Technologies are invented, attacked, delayed, dropped, delayed, re-emerge, vanish again. Some gain momentum, only to disappear within a matter of months. Others fail to latch on, and then, decades earlier, suddenly rise to the fore.

The messiness of technological advancement shows those of us keen on altering our current technological predicament that there are gaps everywhere that can be cracked open further. The current path of technologization is neither inevitable nor natural. Evangelists in corporations or governments may like to tell us it is as a way of undermining our sense of collective agency, but together with the infinite cast who make up the history of techno-negativity, we know better. At a time when Big Tech is becoming enamored with authoritarian politics, the stakes are higher than ever. What are the vulnerabilities or cracks in our AI-obsessed moment that can be exploited? We can turn to radical movements from the past not for blueprints, but for initial inspiration. The point is not to try and turn back the time, but to realize a technological refusal adequate to our increasingly dark present.

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