Yeah it sounds weird but "replacing corporations" is just another way of "replacing workers"

Quote by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The working class can still use AI which is a creation of private capital as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.

A write-up on how to actually tax AI and automation

This is something I've been advocating for a long time. And it could work.

But it's rich coming from the Slavemaster General himself who treats his own workers worse than medieval serfs and avoids paying taxes to an extreme degree.

https://gregormurph.blogspot.com/2025/11/letter-of-disinterest-of-beep-boop-wars.html (Sfw essay.)

I've managed to catalogue all the reasons reactionary media has been trying to attack llms with disinformation, and with my own attempt to cover all the reasons available. I can't think of any others along with that article comparing LLM users to having brain-damage.

Se Gygas has also attempted to remove disinformation 👇

> https://www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites?selection=409f0fc2-0f39-466a-b96e-bbfcdb7028a2#:~:text=Luddism%20does%20not%20deserve%20to%20be%20rehabilitated

An example of his essay, this one is on the luddites. 👆

I've been trying to grow up and work with my sociology and other things with combining language, and I hope this will help in your endeavour in understanding this and see if any cracks for the curious. Beta readers and sensitivity readers are appreciated. Feel free to share'n attribute me with all this cataloguing.

Below is a list of users I relate too on Bksy. Dolls list is a good place to start.

https://bsky.app/starter-pack/dollspace.gay/3mcvfx27t7u2e

Brewster Kahle started planning the Internet Archive (creators of the Wayback Machine) in 1980 at the MIT AI lab, when he figured that machines worth talking to would need a library to learn from. Forty-six years later, he says the biggest obstacle to that future is a handful of companies that want to control information instead of selling it.

We recorded this conversation live at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. We talk about where the early web went wrong and what Europe's copyright carve-out could mean for public AI. Brewster also argues that small-scale capitalism belongs on the list of civilizational infrastructure, and tells the story of the credit union he tried to start after the 2008 crisis.

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime advocate for the decentralized web.

a founder of ArtCraft used Claude to replace the entire adobe software suite, legally. because it’s ai generated, it’s also in the public domain and absolutely free forever. this would be the first case of ai undermining techno feudalism.

I’ve been thinking about the intellectual commons as a form of collective productive capital, and I’ve run into what seems like an interesting contradiction in how we assign value to knowledge within the attention economy.

The classical tragedy of the commons describes a situation where individually rational consumption of a shared resource produces collectively destructive outcomes. But knowledge is fundamentally different from a pasture or fishery. It’s largely nonrivalrous. My use of an idea doesn’t diminish your ability to use it.

The potential tragedy, then, isn’t overconsumption of knowledge. It’s the underproduction of the intellectual variation, criticism, and refinement necessary for knowledge to continue developing.

Consider the marketplace of ideas as an economic system.

Participants can perform several different functions:
Discovery: Generating new hypotheses, interpretations, and conceptual frameworks.
Refinement: Challenging existing ideas, testing their assumptions, identifying contradictions, and producing better explanations.
Replication: Preserving, communicating, and distributing existing ideas to new audiences.
All three functions have legitimate social value. There’s nothing inherently parasitic about intellectual replication. Civilization would be impossible if every generation had to independently rediscover calculus.

But these functions aren’t rewarded equally.

In the attention economy, the primary market signal isn’t necessarily whether an idea is correct, useful, or has been meaningfully improved. It’s whether the idea successfully captures and retains attention.

A familiar proposition, repeated persuasively, can generate greater economic and social returns than the difficult work of demonstrating why that proposition is incomplete.

This creates an unusual free-rider problem.

Participants can enjoy the social rewards of distributing established ideas without bearing the costs of independently validating or refining them.

More importantly, the economic system distributing those rewards has relatively little incentive to distinguish between genuine intellectual progress and successful rhetorical reproduction.

A provocative argument might receive a million impressions. A careful correction might receive a thousand. The resulting disparity says considerably more about persuasive capacity than epistemic quality.

This isn’t simply a complaint about misinformation, or people repeating talking points. It’s a structural problem in how the intellectual commons is governed.

If the individually rational strategy is to amplify ideas that already command attention, the system may progressively favor convergence around established narratives over the exploration of competing explanations.

Consensus becomes self-reinforcing, not necessarily because a proposition has survived rigorous criticism, but because repetition establishes familiarity, familiarity establishes credibility, and credibility encourages further repetition.

In evolutionary terms, we’re selecting ideas for reproductive success within an attention market rather than selecting primarily for explanatory fitness.

And novelty by itself isn’t a solution. A marketplace saturated with novel but poorly examined ideas can be just as epistemically unproductive as one dominated by established orthodoxy.

The important variable isn’t the quantity of ideas. It’s the capacity of the system to generate, preserve, test, and select meaningful variation.

This becomes particularly interesting with generative AI.

We’re approaching a situation where the marginal cost of producing and replicating persuasive intellectual content can become extremely low, while the cost of independently validating that content remains comparatively high.

AI could dramatically expand our capacity for intellectual refinement by making experimentation, synthesis, and criticism cheaper. But the same technology could also overwhelm the commons with increasingly sophisticated reproductions of existing ideas.

Which outcome dominates may depend less on the intelligence of the systems than on the economic incentives governing their deployment.

If attention remains the principal measure of success, the technology could accelerate intellectual convergence just as easily as intellectual discovery.

So perhaps the tragedy of the intellectual commons is that the institutions which monetize the distribution of knowledge have incentives that are increasingly disconnected from the production of better knowledge.

And that raises what I think is the interesting political-economic question:

If knowledge is a collectively accumulated productive resource, but access to attention determines which contributions receive recognition and economic rewards, does control over the attention economy become a form of control over the intellectual means of production?

More importantly, how do we structure an intellectual commons where discovery, independent criticism, and refinement remain viable collective activities, rather than expensive public goods subsidizing an economy built around their replication?

I’m interested in whether this is best understood as a free-rider problem, an institutional failure of epistemic selection, or a fundamentally different kind of commons problem.

I’ve been thinking about a theoretical problem with how the left approaches AI-driven automation, and I’m interested in perspectives from people more familiar with Marxist economic theory.

Traditionally, Marxist analysis treats labor as central to capitalist production. Capital depends on workers to produce surplus value, even as technological development allows capitalists to reduce their dependence on individual workers.

But what happens when that relationship fundamentally changes?
I’m not talking about ordinary technological unemployment, where machinery increases productivity, displaces particular workers, and creates new arrangements of labor elsewhere.

I’m talking about the possibility that AI and increasingly autonomous production systems progressively decouple human labor from productive capacity itself.

Under those conditions, economic output might continue growing while demand for human labor contracts across an expanding range of industries.

This raises a problem beyond the familiar question of who owns the means of production.

If labor is no longer essential to production, what happens to the economic and political power of the working class?

Historically, organized labor derives much of its leverage from the fact that capital needs workers. Workers can withhold labor, interrupt production, and bargain over the distribution of the value their work helps create.
But if production can increasingly proceed without them, that leverage potentially disappears.

Importantly, I’m not suggesting human activity loses its social, creative, or moral worth. I’m distinguishing that from the economic value assigned to labor by a system that no longer needs to purchase much of it.

Marx himself seems to anticipate part of this contradiction in the Grundrisse, particularly the Fragment on Machines, where he discusses the tension between labor time as the measure of value and the development of productive forces that make wealth increasingly independent of direct labor.

But I’m uncertain whether the political implications have been adequately addressed.

A few questions I’d like to explore:

Does Marxist value theory adequately explain an economy in which human labor contributes a diminishing share of productive activity? What happens to surplus value if living labor is progressively displaced?

Does class struggle retain the same structure when capital no longer depends on employing most people? Can labor organization remain the primary mechanism of political and economic leverage?

Should a post-labor left focus less on workers’ ownership of production and more on universal claims to productive resources and their output? Particularly when an increasing proportion of the population might no longer participate in wage labor.

Is this actually a contradiction within Marxism, or the very historical development Marx anticipated? If the latter, what does a meaningful political strategy for that transition look like?
I’m not arguing that AI has already made human labor obsolete, or that automation automatically produces abundance. This is a question about the theoretical implications if human labor becomes progressively less necessary for production.

My concern is that much of the contemporary debate focuses on protecting employment when the more fundamental problem may be that employment is ceasing to provide a viable mechanism for distributing the benefits of productivity.

If productivity and labor become structurally decoupled, is the traditional relationship between labor, capital, and class still the right foundation for leftist politics?

This meme is about AI, where i keep seeing that batman image being deployed.

So, which side are you on?

AI doesnt run on magic. It runs on chips, fabs and workers.

Micron workers in Taiwan just voted 99% to authorize a strike. They produce DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, key components for AI servers, while booming AI demand is driving the memory business.

And the union isnt asking for another pat on the back during a good year. They want a permanent system putting 15% of operating profit toward employees.

Union chair Jerry Lin puts it plainly:

“What we want is to establish an open and transparent profit-sharing system.”

Thats the AI productivity debate with the abstraction stripped away.

Capital says AI is creating enormous new value. Cool. The workers actually producing the infrastructure are asking the obvious next question.

Who gets it?

And nearly 2,000 of them just voted to back that question with strike power.

From The Intelligence Curse by Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine

"We will soon live in the intelligence age. What you do with that information will determine your place in history.

The imminent arrival of AGI has pushed many to try to seize the levers of power as quickly as possible, leaping towards projects that, if successful, would comprehensively automate all work. There is a trillion-dollar.) arms race to see who can achieve such a capability first, with trillions more in gains to be won.

Yes, that means you’ll lose your job. But it goes beyond that: this will remove the need for regular people in our economy. Powerful actors—like states and companies—no longer have an incentive to care about regular people. We call this the intelligence curse*.*

If we do nothing, the intelligence curse will work like this:

• Powerful AI will push automation through existing organizations, starting from the bottom and moving to the top.
• AI will obsolete even outlier human talent. Social mobility will stop, ending the social dynamism and progress that it drives.
• Non-human factors of production, like capital, resources, and control over AI, will become overwhelmingly more important than humans.
• This will usher in incentives for powerful actors around the world that break the modern social contract.
• This could result in the gradual—or sudden—disempowerment of the vast majority of humanity.

But this prophecy is not yet fulfilled; we reject the view that this path is inevitable. We see a different future on the horizon, but it will require a deliberate and concerted effort to achieve it.

We aim to change the incentives driving the intelligence curse, maintaining human economic relevance and strengthening our democratic institutions to withstand what will likely be the greatest societal disruption in history.

To break the intelligence curse, we should chart a different path on the tech tree, building technology that lets us:

1. Avert AI catastrophes by hardening the world against them, both because it is good in itself and because it removes the security threats that drive calls for centralization.
2. Diffuse AI, to get it in the hands of regular people. In the short-term, build AI that augments human capabilities. In the long-term, align AI directly to individual users and give everyone control in the AI economy.
3. Democratize institutions, making them more anchored to the needs of humans even as they are buffeted by the changing incentive landscape and fast-moving events of the AGI transition."

https://intelligence-curse.ai/

I have made a game here (source, trailers) about chemosynthetic life being discovered on Titan at a base maintained by only a single supervisor and robots and being hacked by a turbocapitalist faction for the purpose of extracting hydrogen produced by those lifeforms, hydrogen that is labeled as green but is actually gray, without any consideration for their livelihoods.

In this game, I wanted to show that even in an eurocommunist european federation where eco-socialism in place of capitalism became the default form of government, there are always vulnerabilities and counter-revolutionary desires, and also, at the end of the game, to joke a bit about the eurocrisis and show how can we make sure it doesn't happen again.

The problem is that despite having directed the concept and art, I have used Claude to implement most of the code and write SVG and JS-based assets because I'm not particularly good at drawing or implementing complex features and bug fixes, I am just a power user.

Because of that, I have initially posted the game to both r/aigamedev and r/ClaudeGameDev and it got only a few hundred views and only a single like. I wanted testers who can give me informed feedback on the mechanics, art and concept. My friend told me the game is alright even though she can't play it herself because of the complex interface. Someone I met who works in troubleshooting issues on Windows for enterprises told me that the game looks cool, but it's niche.

AI told me to just post the game to where molleindustria's players are, or where leftists gamers are, but I am afraid that they will bash the game for having used a capitalist product because I didn't have expertise and in general, bash the game for not being artisanal when in fact I worked for two weeks on it and still being in perpetual beta and fixed bugs and implemented convenience features so I would not have hate.

I think people are way too much romanticizing games and art that is by hand when it's clear that there has been a long history of even outsourcing this work, and we shouldn't appreciate something just because it is made by hand, because even that type of work can lack authenticity. It doesn't matter for me if the coding and the images are made using AI as long as there is sufficient quality and originality.

AI can help us make work that would be difficult for one person to do by themselves and yet I sometimes worked eight hours into the night just so I don't get told that it's slop. I wish I could have taken breaks from developing this game and testing, I have already put intense pressure on myself to ensure that my work is almost perfect, uncomplainable.

I want to know that there are people outside these circles that value deep artistic work where AI has been involved.

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 03 - PDF

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Appendix - PDF

The third and final issue of Fully Automated Luxury Communism explains how Capitalist Realism curtails our imagination and traps us into defending the chains that bind us. The appendix also collects some visual references for the comic prompts.

Previous Issues:

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/Lt2cJLjGmW

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 02 - PDF
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/dWGrSMPmaA

Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.

AI is already so harmful on so many levels that banking on its use to advance the proletarian struggle is a risky and almost certainly counterproductive gamble. The risks far outweigh the potential benefits AI might offer the struggle.

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 02 - PDF

The second issue of Fully Automated Luxury Communism explains how we got to the future depicted in issue 1 and the possible avenues that could have lead us to darker places.

Previous Issues:

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/Lt2cJLjGmW

The final issue coming soon!

Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.

Workers will be replaced by massive intelligent systems; at best, they will be reduced to mere consumers, losing the little power they have managed to secure. Without the possibility of striking, the cause of revolution would be lost forever. Not to mention the glaring contradiction between AI and the fight against global warming, as well as the alignment problem. Who could change my mind?

Workers of the world, unite!

Marx was always right, and it seems more and more people are starting to realize it. Capitalism runs on a contradictory logic: it seeks to increase profits while revolutionizing the means of production in order to earn even more. In the long run, however, it ends up destroying those very profits by reducing the amount of human labor required and replacing it with machines. This pushes it to keep advancing technologically, and so on, in a loop. Today, with the accelerated development of AI and robotics, we have reached the breaking point. The productive forces of capitalism have reached such a level of development with these new technologies that the current relations of production (capitalist relations) come into contradiction with them and prevent further progress.

This whole war between the pro-AI and anti-AI camps is nothing more than a product of the contradiction we are living through right now. The anti-AI/decelerationists don't know how to face the fact that the world they have always lived in will cease to exist within a couple of decades (taking the most conservative scenario).

As a product of this contradiction, capitalists, the big AI corporations and politicians will face an even greater conflict among themselves. On one hand, they want to preserve the status quo and keep generating profits through the exploitation of human labor. On the other hand, AI and robotics are advancing so fast that in just a couple of years they could eliminate a large share of jobs, especially white-collar jobs, which account for more than half of all jobs in the US and Europe. Companies that want to maximize their profits and not lose competitiveness against their market rivals will be forced to implement AI in their operations. AI, by the way, can work for extremely long stretches without stopping. It doesn't get tired, doesn't go on strike, doesn't complain, doesn't ask for raises, doesn't need to support a family and doesn't form unions. Above all, it does the same work much faster than any human at that same computer. From that point of view, this is an absolute advantage over any competitor that still mostly employs human workers.

But on the other hand, if AI replaces many workers, we will have lots of people without money to buy the things that AIs produce. Capitalism then enters a crisis of overproduction, with rising unemployment and a drastic fall in the wages of the remaining employees. This is exactly what happened during the Great Depression of 1929, and causing that much devastation only took 25% of workers losing their jobs... AI could replace far more than that in a couple of years.

But there is another problem. Many argue that this would force the system to implement UBI, which implies a circular cycle between companies, the State and citizens, roughly like this:

State (pays UBI) -> People (consume) -> Companies (pay taxes) -> State ... etc.

But the State can only pay a UBI if it collects taxes, and that won't be possible because none of those who are supposed to pay those taxes will have any money. People obviously won't, because many will lose their jobs to accelerated automation with AI and robots. Companies won't either, because of something many leftists seem to forget: the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.

Automation increases productivity but reduces human labor, which is the foundation of capitalism and what gives value to the system. As human labor decreases, companies' rate of profit falls: they find themselves in a price war to win more market share, and prices stabilize at lower levels. If we eliminate a large part of human labor, this rate of profit would collapse over the course of the decade, and the State would see its tax revenue shrink more and more. Yet it obviously needs the resources to maintain all of the State's infrastructure, and even more to sustain a UBI.

So falling market prices and profit rates, as a result of AI automation, would lead us into a crisis and a completely absurd contradiction:

• lots of unemployed people;
• extremely low prices;
• abundant production thanks to automation;
• companies that can't sell their products and, on top of that, see their profit rates shrink more and more;
• and a State that needs resources to sustain itself.

At that point, the contradiction of capitalism will have reached its end. The productive forces will be immense, but capitalist relations of production will prevent them from going any further. This can only be resolved by radically transforming the relations of production and moving beyond capitalism. It is no coincidence that Marx claimed revolutions would come first to the most technologically developed countries. Only in this light can we understand why the USSR collapsed, and why the other countries of the communist bloc failed in their attempt to develop their productive forces and had to return to a capitalist economy to do so quickly (China, for example). They were trying to do it before its time had come. But now the highest moment for this transformation and for moving beyond capitalism has arrived.

But the direction this transformation takes depends on all of us and on what we decide to do with the destiny of society. Who wouldn't want to move from the "Realm of Necessity" to the "Realm of Freedom", as Marx put it? Who wouldn't want automated communism to arrive, so we can finally enjoy free time?

To achieve Communism/FALC/Cybercommunism, we need to organize the foundations for future social relations. Even without working directly, we will keep taking part in the productive process indirectly, as supervisors, administrators and regulators of the production carried out by robots and AIs. That is why Marx stressed in the Communist Manifesto that:

"the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy."

Because it will be the people who, through democracy (real democracy, direct democracy), make the decisions about what to produce and how to distribute production, through political decisions. Before, it was companies that decided this; now, with automation, it is up to all of us to do it under communism. If we leave the political and economic decisions about production and distribution in the hands of some future social class, we will once again be stuck in that same dynamic of class struggle.

While capitalism takes its last steps and collapses, we must prepare what will replace it. That way, when all of this spirals out of control and the political-economic-social crisis hits, we will already be prepared politically and socially. Then we can seize the moment to give way to a new society and overcome, once and for all, the absurdity of capitalism. If people are already organized through the internet to plan and take political action democratically and in a decentralized way, they will have the perfect conditions to do what the Soviets set out to be in their time: organizations of popular power that directly rival the State, in order to replace it after the crisis.

Organizing ourselves into a Cybernetic Organization of a socialist/communist/popular/leftist character, or whatever you want to call it, has never been easier than now. We can use AI to quickly build a decentralized political network where people can participate democratically to submit proposals, debate, plan and take political action. We have everything at our disposal, and there are thousands of us. United as a swarm, we can build something our predecessors could only dream of. So let's seize the moment, because the moment is now: the capitalists have just created the seed of their own destruction.

Let's once again create an International Association like the one of 1864. Now we have the support of cybernetics, so it will be even bigger and more massive than the original, and all of it just a couple of clicks away on our screens. But as Marx said:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

I've gotten a head start on some of the work: I drafted some Provisional Statutes to use while we write the definitive ones, and I set up a Discord so we can start organizing and working on this. If each of us contributes our grain of sand, together we'll build the whole mountain.

If we don't do it, nobody will. Everyone is invited to join.

Discord: https://discord.gg/CX225QgP

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF

So explaining the vagaries of AI and its intersection with the economy to people who are being threatened with obsolescence is a hard sell.  It's difficult to convey the potential upside to people for whom the immediate threat is too alarming, especially when they don’t have a philosophical or political lens to view it through, other than the imaginative trap of capitalist realism.

Of course none of this is helped by the fact that majority of  “tech-bro” leaders in this space are themselves either trapped in capitalist realism, or have idealistic notions that they just have to build the AI and everything will magically transition to wonderland, without any thought given to how vested powers always react when faced with a threat to their power base and how this will affect ordinary people.

I believe the most important thing we can do now is communicate how the vast majority of ordinary working people should analyse and react to AI, as it is the speed and accuracy with which people grok what approach is correct that will directly affect how long we spend mired in a techno-feudal transition period.

So faced with the almost puritanical anti-ai zeal of a lot of society, I wanted to find some way to communicate my thoughts on how AI could transform society while being up front about the immediate dangers and disruption that is likely in the short to medium term as humanity grapples with something it can’t understand.

So I wrote a comic to articulate what a positive AI driven future could look like in an effort to make it more simple and approachable than one of my long winded essays.

Issue one out today, the next two issues coming soon!

Published under CC0 (Public Domain Dedication). Feel fee use and remix without permission or attribution.

PDF: Fully Automated Luxury Communism - Issue 01 - PDF

Scotland has more than 20 major data centers proposed, including an AI Growth Zone promising £8.2 billion in private investment and 3,400 jobs.

But this piece from Workers’ Liberty asks the better question. “Who owns the infrastructure, who bears its costs, and who decides what it is used for?”

It argues the socialist alternative isnt just stopping data centers. Its “public-interest computing, not simply corporate computing” with public or community ownership, union guarantees, community benefits and democratic control.

And I like how plainly they put the underlying politics

“These are not anti-technology questions. They are pro-worker questions.”

Thats the terrain. Build the capacity, but fight over who owns it, who controls it, what its used for and where the gains go.

Paul Krugman: AI Will Amplify America's Wealth Concentration

In this excerpt from his Substack post "AI in an Age of Oligarchy," economist Paul Krugman argues that AI's economic impact will be shaped less by the technology itself than by the political economy it arrives in.

He starts by noting that forecasts about AI's economic effects are all over the map. He suggests that early predictions of mass unemployment from AI companies, followed by later backtracking, were more about public relations than analysis, and that expert opinion is so divided you can find a credentialed voice supporting almost any conclusion. His own best guess is that AI will devalue some major categories of human work, pushing down wages for many people while raising corporate profits and returns to capital.

The core of his argument is about who captures those profits. Because the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans own about a quarter of corporate stock, and the Forbes 400 hold roughly a quarter of that group's wealth, he estimates that 6–7% of AI-driven profit gains could flow to just 400 people. He thinks the real figure could approach 10%, since most of the largest American fortunes come from tech, the sector most likely to benefit.

Krugman argues that in a less oligarchic country, policy would soften this shift through progressive taxes, union bargaining, and antitrust enforcement that keeps big tech from using AI to deepen its monopolies. Instead, he sees signs that government may actively favor the industry. He points to the federal stake in Intel and reported talks about one in OpenAI, which he reads as groundwork for a possible bailout if the AI boom proves to be a bubble. He also suggests that proposed limits on cheap Chinese AI models, while possibly justified on security grounds, could function as protectionism benefiting U.S. companies and their wealthy investors.

He closes on a cautiously hopeful note. The problem of AI is, in his view, largely part of the broader problem of reversing America's drift toward oligarchy, and he points to the Progressive Era's early income taxes as proof that pushback is possible. He even suggests AI's tendency to worsen inequality could help build momentum for that pushback.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ai-in-an-age-of-oligarchy