Ambivalent Affect in the AI Revolution

The cultural production of AI futures at the end of the 2010’s spawned an abundance of socio-technical disruptions which promised everything and were doomed to fail. The promethean storytelling which works as the cultural undertone of this progressivism is affectively charged. Government strategy texts painting AI futures are aspirational, reaching for the sublime (Bareis & Katzenbach 2021). Not least, actors draw from affective facts (Massumi 2010) of excitement and hype as resources for making sense of it all. According to technologists, it is specifically the fact that AI technology /excites/ that enrols allies, especially non-expert ones, into projects of socio-technical disruption.

Contrary to these emic understandings, I argue that the affective regimes of socio-technical disruption are much more ambivalent. Drawing from Ngai’s concept of ugly feelings (2005) and Virno’s sentiments of disenchantment (1996), I approach the weak, negative and disparate affects which bubble under the building of the Finnish National Artificial Intelligence Programme (2017-2023). The analysis reveals an affective breakage of objectless opportunism and disenchanted cynicism in an ironic play between high-mimetic and profane registers of a totalising and totally banal AI revolution. This breakage qualitatively scales with the experienced agency of actors, from the techno-acolytes setting societal agendas, to the executive civil servants for whom the narrative of disruption is imposed upon form above.