AI Anxiety as a Symptom: How Market-Driven Hype Obscures Structural Exclusion from Technological Power
Original framing: “AI FOMO: everyone is mastering AI except me — or are they?” — Nature
The AI FOMO narrative echoes colonial-era 'civilising missions' where technological superiority justified domination, now repackaged as 'inevitable progress.' Historical parallels include the 19th-century telegraph hysteria, which promised universal connectivity but deepened imperial control over information flows. The current AI boom mirrors the 1960s cybernetics fad, where elite institutions monopolised computational power while marginalising alternative knowledge systems.
The AI FOMO narrative is a symptom of a deeper crisis: a technological ecosystem designed to concentrate power in the hands of a global elite while framing exclusion as personal failure.
This dynamic is not new—it mirrors historical patterns of colonial data extraction, Cold War-era cybernetics, and the digital divide—yet it is repackaged in 2026 as an individual's inability to 'keep up.' The solution lies not in accelerating adoption but in dismantling the extractive structures that make AI a tool of domination rather than liberation. Indigenous epistemologies, Global South co-operatives, and regulatory sandboxes offer concrete pathways to reclaim AI as a commons, but they require challenging the vested interests of *Nature*'s corporate and institutional allies. The trickster's role is to expose this absurdity: the more we chase AI mastery, the more we become its servants. True progress demands we ask not 'How do I master AI?' but 'How do we master the conditions that make AI mastery a privilege?