The Smartness Trap

A. C. Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Abstract

In 2022, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell coined the term "smartness mandate" — the imperative embedded in every AI narrative that demands we "become smart or else go extinct as a species." This paper argues that the smartness mandate is not a description of technological necessity but a mechanism of social control — the latest iteration of a pattern that includes the Church's monopoly on literacy, the Stationers' Company's monopoly on printing, and the broadcast era's monopoly on information. The mandate operates through four mechanisms: surveillance disguised as service (Pasquinelli, 2023), data extraction disguised as convenience (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), algorithmic reification that replaces lived experience with computable categories (Negueruela del Castillo & Neri, 2024), and the invisibility of infrastructure that renders power unaccountable (Kaeser, 2018). We demonstrate that the OMXUS ecosystem — passphrase-derived identity, BLE mesh networking, physical co-presence verification, and sovereign AI hardware — constitutes a systematic refusal of the smartness mandate without abandoning technological sophistication. The distinction is between technology deployed for governance ("become smart or else") and technology deployed for sovereignty ("become free, period"). Every paper in this series is a counter-practice to the mandate. This paper names the pattern.

Keywords: smartness mandate, data colonialism, algorithmic reification, surveillance capitalism, counter-practices, sovereign technology, digital pluriversality

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1. The Mandate

In the introduction to The Smartness Mandate, Halpern and Mitchell describe an imperative that accompanies every AI narrative:

"become smart or else go extinct as a species" (Halpern & Mitchell, 2022, p. 220)

Smartness — as in smartphones,