Rotting empires

Much has been written about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence, especially the heavy tolls and costs of manufacturing, building, running, and maintaining the industry’s data infrastructure. Data centres are key to the artificial intelligence industry, as are their energy suppliers. This has meant ongoing reliance on fossil fuels and other extractive energy regimes, renewables, and even a reanimation of coal and nuclear sites to meet the growing demand of artificial intelligence to run operations at ever-expanding scales. Despite the lofty promises of tech CEOs that feed these investments, the world at large is worse off in 2026. Artificial intelligence profoundly enshittifies our existence and further entrenches it into fascistic and military fantasies. The artificial intelligence industry generates and draws from their own (economic, political, aesthetic) slop to justify the path forward. Arguably, then, brain rot is not only the ideological and affective result of artificial intelligence slop and systems, but also a main driver of it. To address this moment of generalised political and emotional turmoil, my short contribution to this Cultural Commons explores an alternative: instead of thinking of ‘green’ or sustainable sources of energy to power artificial intelligence in more ‘environmentally-friendly’ ways, I consider how a turn to solar (and wind) would dismantle rotting empires that prop up both the logics of Big Tech and Big Oil, and require new affective regimes that pull us out of the even shittier futures.