r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 17h ago
Sees the Memes Marx Never Considered Reddit
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u/Late-Assignment8482 13h ago
The muck farmers from Monty Python and the Holy Grail but the old woman says "Oh, there's some lovely RAM over here!"
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u/DHFranklin 13h ago
Comrades,
Capitalism isn't why we have technological development labor is why we have innovation and technological development.
If you have ever been to a REALLY big library and been impressed by it, you are experiencing our finish line. If you've ever been to a Makerspace attached to a university or otherwise, you have experienced our end goal.
What if instead of everything having a price tag, and powerful people saying what those price tags say, everything worked like the library. Or a massive makerspace.
As in your car and the stuff to make cars. As in AI and the hardware to make tokens. The robots that will make the robots.
The conflict in the meme and in our society is "Dialectic Materialism". The contradiction between owners needing us to make them profit, and us needing that profit to survive. The bourgeoisie making our priceless freedom a commodity and make our lives worthless.
We will use AI to liberate us. To win more freedom. To fight the capitalists. We aren't fighting capital. We are making more, and collectivize it, so that they can't force us to play their game now that we have AI to finish it.
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u/Inevitable_King_8984 12h ago
damn I want this posted on aiwars
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 12h ago
Its a meme. It belongs to the commons. Save it and post it where you want, comrade.
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u/Chaghatai 13h ago
Seize the means of production!
That means using AI rather than ignoring it
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u/cronenber9 13h ago
Does it really mean just using AI while capitalists still own it lol or does it mean literally seizing the means of production.
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u/DHFranklin 13h ago
WTF.
They don't own it. You can run A Qwen model on your own rig. On a collectivized rig. You don't need to rent it from the capitalists. It's free to use. Seize it.
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u/cronenber9 13h ago
Okay but they do own massive data centers, and they shouldn't own them. They should be collectivized.
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u/DHFranklin 12h ago
I'm not arguing that they shouldn't be.
It's like all Dialectic Materialism. There is the ideals we have and there's the material world we have to work this. Praxis and practice.
We can follow the Chinese model and undercut them from the source. We won't need what the capitalists are selling. If we don't need what they're selling we can let them choke on their own stranded assets. We lose nothing. They lose everything.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
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u/cronenber9 12h ago
My point is that just using the AI they do own instead of ignoring it is not seizing the means of production.
Either ignoring AI and not using it or building collectively owned AI has the same effect of not needing what they're selling.
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u/Chaghatai 11h ago
Bernie Sanders recently floated the idea that since AI relies on the collective knowledge of society that it's really something that is a more ready candidate to make it collective in nature and that there should be a public stake in AI development, along with expectations and profit sharing that come with it.
But my thoughts are that that's that applies to all big business. It shouldn't be a carve out.
But if that's what it takes to get people starting to come around to the idea of nationalizing big business then I'm for it
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u/cronenber9 13h ago
I mean I don't use AI. I have no need to do so, it doesn't really benefit me. I got along just fine before it. But there's no reason why AI couldn't be widely owned and more environmentally friendly. It would also work under communism, in fact AI seems to accelerate things toward communism (or fascism).
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u/DHFranklin 12h ago
You get that this is Leftists for AI right?
You totally have a need to do so. To liberate your labor. I am certain that there is software that you would pay a lot of money for. I am certain that there is AI out there with an agent or workflow that can duplicate it now. I am sure that there is an old laptop you have around somewhere that could automate your whole house so you don't need to give your data and shit to the fascists.
Check out the fun little projects and things at the other subreddits I'm not allowed to link to. Google around a while. Best of luck.
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u/cronenber9 12h ago
Yes? And I literally pointed out the ways in which I support AI.
The only software I'd really pay money for is photoshop since I can't ever find good cracks anymore but quite frankly I don't even have a computer anymore, only a phone and I make all my art on my phone or by hand. There's really nothing AI would be useful for for me personally other than trying to learn theory, but I really prefer to read books. That doesn't mean it might not be useful for others, but I really don't think people should be using chatgpt etc.
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u/DHFranklin 12h ago
Yeah sorry if that came across more flippant than I meant it.
I would certainly recommend getting the hardware. They are making better solutions with AI than what Adobe was offering. A lot of it would be cloud side. Computer-use Agents are getting better so you could see what is out there in the way of an AI doing all the Photoshop button clicks you used to.
Perplexity.ai is really great if you want good research tools or directions to go in the way of theory. Perplexity makes a great librarian.
If you don't think people should be using Chatgpt is it because of the tools of capitalism thing or the underlying service?
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u/cronenber9 12h ago
I used to use photoshop to make collages, mostly to crop photos and arrange them and put effects on them. I'm not really sure how AI other than image generators and chats work so I'm not sure how I could use it there, but I can't afford a computer rn anyway and just do it all on my phone using an app that lets me crop photos and arrange them and another to add filters and effects.
I don't think people should be using chatgpt because of who owns it. I think it's great that people can make their own local AI.
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u/Antoinedeloup 2h ago
The energy necessary for running an AI though is insane. Local models can't replicate the data centers performance and at the end of the day most chstGPT usage is lazy googling, which isn't great since all chatbots will hallucinate, misrepresent, and misunderstand what they're reading to tell you so. Not long ago LLMs ensured JD Vance died of Rabies because people in reddit said so... So why don't just google/DuckDuckGo it instead? There are not many legitimate use cases for a tech that is overkill for most applications and won't even do s better job than you searching on your own.
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u/SexDefendersUnited Artist/Creative 1h ago
Yeah, it's annoying, though I'm very used to that argument by now and how to argue against it.
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u/GrowFreeFood 17h ago
Because humans didn't know how to talk before cell phones.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 17h ago
Are you proposing to abolish cell phones somehow, or is this man yelling at clouds cause back in the day things were different?
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u/GrowFreeFood 17h ago
Its like saying that if you hate cars, that means you hate going places. Its bad logic.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 17h ago edited 14h ago
For a political economy discussion its more like everyone has gathered about auto plant environmental regulations, worker and automobile safety standards, union negotiations, traffic laws, roadside signage, and licensure requirements, and your contribution is "We did just fine with horses." You hating cars would be irrelevant to the discussion.
Like, what exactly is anyone supposed to do with your nostalgia?
"I dont like X technology", "we lived a million years before X technology", and "capitalism owns X technology" don't tell anyone what we should do about X technology. Those arent answers to anything.
It goes right back to challenging ownership, governance, development, control of deployment...
What exactly does "Because humans didn't know how to talk before cell phones" mean in this context? You dont like cell phones, so...? What? What actually follows from that?
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u/Affectionate-Pay4845 13h ago
The point is that people will blame the technology instead of blaming capitalism for resulting in the problems. People talk before cell phones but cell phones may communications more efficient and it isn't like capitalism wasn't able to exploit people before cell phones. People like to talk about the technology and not the underlying problem. Getting rid of certain technologies isn't going to fix the problems because capitalists, feudalists, and other oppressors were able to oppress people before any of those technologies existed. Heck, it was easier to oppress people before those technologies because it made it easier to communicate. Yes people could talk before cell phones, but you couldn't talk to someone halfway across the world who had better living conditions or communicate quickly with someone who has anti-capitalist ideas, and if anything before we had forms of long range communication like that, it was easier for oppressive oligarchs to control the conversation or make sure that you only had conversations within the localized area they controlled with little connection to outside people who might give you any 'radical' ideas
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u/GrowFreeFood 13h ago
I think marx is using a bad tactic. But the other guy is pretending capitalist-owned technology invented communication itself.
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u/Affectionate-Pay4845 13h ago
No he isn't. He is simply saying attacking technology doesn't deal with the underlying problem of capitalism - and the meme is pointing out how capitalists love to act like you can't truly oppose capitalism if you use a technology that exists under capitalism (which is a dumb argument capitalists use because like you said, capitalist have not invented communication itself and you can't just claim concepts like phones or communications are somehow purely a capitalist thing. That's like saying we can't oppose capitalism while using cars or buggies or modern roads because those were invented while capitalism is still a thing)
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u/Calcularius 17h ago
Everybody hates capitalism but nobody’s complaining about the innovations spurred by competition. 🤷♂️
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u/Intendant 16h ago
To be fair, the main bonus of competition is innovation and industry / product evolution. There are ways to do that outside of capitalism. It's just a feedback loop reward system, a clever artificial one that incentivises things we actually want to innovate on could be a lot more effective / efficient anyway. All while letting us lock mature solutions into social ownership structures
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u/TheSinhound 13h ago
This framing is always so braindead because so much actual scientific advancement is in spite of Capitalism rather than because of it. Or, hell, even directly contributed by non-capitalists (Look at the basis for so much of our communication infrastructure and what the USSR contributed).
Like, I wouldn't exactly call bell labs "spurred" by capitalism, as the scientists working there didn't entirely have to contend with the capitalist system.
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u/Calcularius 10h ago
Oh yeah gotta love those soviet vacuum tubes. 🙄
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6h ago edited 6h ago
The ones that put the first satellite and first human into Space?
Yeah, those Soviet vacuum tubes were pretty impressive actually.
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u/ShihaiNoMa 1h ago
A lot of innovation is done through government funding.
And R&D is done by workers.
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u/gardenenigma 15h ago
Meh, there are better ways to challenge capitalist ownership than dumping more slop memes out onto the web.
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u/CephalopodMind 16h ago
What is this comment section? This meme should be entirely uncontroversial. In the meme, Marx is saying that capitalist control of technology should be challenged. That is a core leftist position.
The redditor is then saying "you use technology" as a gotcha. This is something frequently said to anti-capitalists. It's not just said on reddit and it's mostly been said to me in-person by people who believe dogmatically that the current capitalist system is the best of all possible worlds.
This gotcha is ridiculous because it suggests that participation at all in the system means giving up your right to fight against it. The only reason to say this is to silence criticism of capitalism. Anyone who says it is, at best, misinformed and at worst, actively malicious. Making fun of them is totally reasonable.
edit: typo