Political Solutionism

Bratton's mirror term for techno-solutionism, from After Alignment: the worry that "exhaustion with tech solutionism gives way to self-congratulatory parades of political solutionism, that is now overflowing op-ed columns, trade books and yes, schools and universities" — the presumption that anything can be "politicized," forced into the cycle of current events and subordinated to available or imaginary political decisions, even when it is not amenable to that cycle. On the Continent it becomes regulatory solutionism: "AI Laws that address yesterday's problems, the EU forever running to where the ball no longer is, trying to shoehorn planetary dynamics into citizen scale policies." The Noema grief essay files it under Bargaining: governing AI through rights, liabilities and "alignment" as if it were a tool whose bad outcomes stem from identifiable actors' intentions. Recursive Governance is the same critique with a constructive answer.