Best of noemamag.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
11 stories from noemamag.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 21 June 2023, with 42 upvotes and 2 comments in total. The latest was shared on 7 October 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- We Need To Rewild The Internet
Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon argue that the internet has become concentrated and controlled much like the monoculture forests of 18th-century Prussia and Saxony, and that it should be "rewilded" rather than repaired. They say a handful of firms now hold near-monopolies over browsers, search, mobile operating systems and cloud computing, with Google and Apple's browsers capturing almost 85% of the world market as of April 2024. Citing internet engineer Leslie Daigle's 2019 policy brief, they note that consolidation is ossifying the internet's layered architecture and making incumbents harder to dislodge. Rewilding, drawn from ecology, is presented as a whole-systems framework for restoring diversity and competition.
- Reclaiming Europe’s Digital Sovereignty
Francesca Bria argues that Europe's dependence on foreign digital infrastructure is a political failure rather than a cultural one, and that building sovereign technological capacity is necessary. She writes that just 4% of global cloud infrastructure is European-owned, and that European governments, businesses and citizens depend on systems run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which are subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act. Bria also disputes Benjamin Bratton's charges that Europe's regulation-first approach and critical intellectuals cause its paralysis, arguing that the problems are weak enforcement, no industrial policy at scale and decades of market fundamentalism.
- The Myth Of The Noble Savage | NOEMA
The article argues that the "noble savage" idea is largely a myth, and that the modern "ecologically noble savage" image, which links Indigenous peoples with environmental stewardship, is a product of conflating prehistory with contemporary "primitive" peoples. It traces the phrase to Marc Lescarbot rather than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citing anthropologist Ter Ellingson's book The Myth of the Noble Savage. It also says the rise of deep time in the 19th century, and the decline of American wildlife, shaped the link between Indigenous peoples and conservation. The text then turns to whether early humans contributed to prehistoric extinctions, such as that of the woolly mammoth.
- The World Is Assuming A Pre-War Posture
Nathan Gardels argues that the post-war order is ending and the world risks entering a pre-war era in which battle lines harden globally. He points to Iran's drone and missile attack on Israel, Israel's return strike, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as examples of red lines being crossed, with the danger that actions in these conflicts could draw hardening alliance systems into a world-scale conflict. He cites the Biden administration's trilateral military coordination with Japan and South Korea, China's economic support for Russia, and a Baltic Sea now surrounded by NATO members. He also notes that Germany, Japan, South Korea and Australia remain economically entangled with China, which he sees as a possible moderating factor.
- AI Signals The Death Of The Author
David J. Gunkel argues that large language models may signal the end of the author, and that this is liberating rather than a loss. He traces the modern author to the mid-16th century Protestant Reformation, Descartes, and the printing press, which led to copyright law in 18th-century England and North America. Citing Roland Barthes's 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," Gunkel contends that meaning arises in the reader's interpretation rather than in the author's intention. He adds that text generated by LLMs is literally unauthorized, a point he says was emphasized by a U.S. Court of Appeals decision denying authorship to AI, and that LLM output can be meaningful through the reader's interpretation.
- Overthrowing Our Tech Overlords
Yanis Varoufakis argues that technofeudalism, in which cloud capital and its platform owners hold power over users, can only be overcome by collective action and a reconfiguration of property rights over cloud-based production, not by individual withdrawal or traditional regulation. He contrasts the 2000 Movatar performance, in which an artist's arms were controlled by an online crowd, with today's identity curation pressures on young people. He also says social democrats traded regulation for financial concessions after power shifted to finance following the death of Bretton Woods in 1971, and that breaking up firms like Amazon or Meta is far harder than breaking up Standard Oil. He sketches democratized companies as a possible alternative, where each employee holds one vote.
- Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem
The essay argues that social media should be redesigned to bridge divides, adapting the 1947 Hutchins Commission's press principles to today's platforms. Its authors, including Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang, propose three strategies: providing social context through community annotation, ranking content to surface what relevant communities share, and using data to foster cross-cutting communities. They point to Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower-era civic tech work and X's Community Notes as proof of concept. The authors contend that the core problem is that platforms hide the social context of viral content, not that it is too plentiful, so content removal is not the solution.
- The Coming Second Copernican Revolution
The article argues that a new "planetary" worldview is emerging from astrobiology and Earth-system science, offering an alternative to the current path toward disaster in the Anthropocene. It frames this as a second Copernican revolution, comparable to the one that reshaped European politics and culture after Copernicus. It traces the idea to Vladimir Vernadsky's 1926 concept of the biosphere as an active geophysical force and to James Lovelock's work with NASA in the early 1960s. It notes that the first planet around a sun-like star was found in 1995, orbiting 51 Pegasi about 50 light years away.
- The Climate Is Changing Faster Than Culture Can Cope | NOEMA
Nathan Gardels argues that climate change is outpacing any cultural transformation capable of addressing it, so technology must help fill the gap while its own direction is reset. He contrasts this with the earlier deep ecology view, associated with Rudolf Bahro, that only a cultural revolution could save the biosphere. Vaclav Smil is cited as doubting humanity will act on what it already knows, and as saying that no single fix can cut the emissions problem. The article concludes that technology must be paired with reduced upstream overconsumption rather than relied on alone.
- What Tech Futurists Get Wrong About Human Autonomy
Divya Siddarth and Kelsie Nabben argue that both AI and blockchain visions of autonomy rest on abstracting away human fallibility, which misunderstands autonomy as something circumscribed by community and existing only through interdependence. AGI narratives seek autonomy of outcome and call for centralized control of data, computing and capital, while blockchain seeks autonomy of process, yet decentralized systems often re-centralize in practice because of commercial forces and high capital entry requirements for on-chain governance. Technical decentralization can easily be confused with democratic decision-making, and frictionless coordination runs counter to the deliberation that political and social concerns require.
- What is AI doing to art?
Lois Rosson argues that the history of photography offers a useful guide to the current debate over AI-generated images, since both raised questions about whether machine-made images can be art and who holds authorship. Rosson notes that Fox Talbot in 1835 described his calotype as eliminating human intervention, yet in April 1862 Mayer et Pierson successfully argued that darkroom development was part of a photographer's creative process. Rosson suggests the AI debate, including a lawsuit against Stability AI, will not be settled quickly or by traditional cultural gatekeepers.