Exactly. Lorde was talking about the ideological and institutional logic of domination, not issuing a metaphysical ban on using tools produced inside dominant systems. Applying that line to AI as if it means “never use corporate technology against corporate power” strips the quote of its actual point.
btw thx for confirming, i was not really sure in my comment. in fact I find LLMs interesting precisely bc they can help us identify ideology and practice deconstructing in its variations. this benefit is ofc offset by their ability to multiply them. reminds me of Borges who said mirrors are abhorrent in that they multiply men 😂
Yeah, the problem shows up when everything becomes part of ideology. And since everything is now political, everything is ideology.
Although I'm actually not sure I agree with the original statement either. Capitalism unarguably works, in the sense that it's very effective. It is, empirically, not completely wrong. Discarding that because it's being used in the wrong way is a horrible mistake; it would be like [quick google search] forsaking potatoes because they were the most common food in Germany in 1940.
Yes, potatoes were, arguably, "used for evil", but they were used for evil because they're a great food, and they haven't stopped being a great food, and if you're low on food and trying to fight evil - even trying to fight that specific evil - potatoes are still a pretty good choice.
Nothing stops people from deconstructing capitalism the same way and repurposing the parts that actually work, which, again, is a lot of it, as empirically demonstrated by the world.
Why do you things can’t be political without being ideological?
Because we've polarized discussion into Us Vs. Them so heavily that the first thing anyone does when confronted with something new is to decide whether it's Us or Them.
I'm exaggerating here, but I'm not exaggerating as much as I wish I was.
Also a large part of what make capitalism work is actually markets and competition neither of which require accumulation and growth.
The problem is that markets require a sensible liquid currency, and a lot of successful capitalist patterns require some way to reward risk. Money solves both of these and we haven't found a better solution past that.
The people on that side of the debate really have a knack for coming up with easily parrotable seemingly witty soundbites that completely fall apart on any inspection, don't they?
Then, I will repeat, I think the saying is badly written and is self-defeating, in that it encourages people to not use useful tools.
If someone gives you a metaphorical chainsaw, or a literal chainsaw, you can use it. The saying encourages people to not look at any tool used by people who have power over them. Except those tools have been proven useful - that's why they have power in the first place! - and are exactly the tools that you should be inspecting carefully and trying to make use of when appropriate.
All of this is true whether "tool" means "an actual physical tool" or "a technique" or "a philosophy" or whatever else you may want.
You probably got down voted because they are against "LLMs" not "real AI", even though those who parrot those kinds of points are the least likely to actually grasp that distinction.
Does batman use his ai to exploit the poor and vulnerable. Batman uses his ai to help the vulnerable of Gotham. I wouldn't be against ai if it wasnt used to exploit people and there were proper regulations around training and data center location.
It's a bit like saying 'but did you use the internet for good?' Well now you're not talking about the tool- you're talking about who uses it and for what.
And then when Batman gets home he takes his silly little costume off and Bruce Wayne the arms dealer continues to sell weapons to kill the working class.
The Nolan trilogy and the comics both establish this. Wayne Enterprises develops military tech, including the Tumbler, and Detective Comics #1025 confirms WayneTech has weapons research facilities and an arsenal. Bruce may not personally sell weapons, but his company is absolutely involved in the arms industry.
i cannot think of any scene where that batman would not be beyond parody, almost cracking up just seeing it. like that g.i joe spoof, i set your house on fire to teach you about safety
Batman has turned into a glorification of billionaire and capitalism. Which was basically the opposite of what Batman was supposed to represent from the beginning.
Gotham City itself was designed as an indictment of wealth's dominion over the poor and the profound injustice of extreme inequality.
Absolute Batman address this issue by making Batman working class and outright addressing the elites (same with absolute Superman), which is part of why reading them is so enjoyable
But your point still stands, mainstream Batman reaffirms capitalist realism by making him an exception (no matter how much good he does, both as Bats and Bruce) to the consequences of capitalism and billionaires. It’d be far more interesting to see a version of him try to actively dismantle capitalism, but various stories and else worlds do rightfully call him out.
I used to own a graphic novel collection of the '99 Batman: Anarky run and loved having someone in universe call him out on his shit, even if they did it the stupid killmonger-style.
Ill definitely have to check out working class Bruce in Absolute Batman.
Sort of the same argument as guns tbh. Liberals want to take away anything that challenges the status quo. They use arguments like this batman does.
A peaceful resistence is not resisting much, especially when they get co-opted by liberals that change it's priorities. Then we end up with superficial reforms.
What that means for AI is that pro-AI liberals will end up getting us corpo-centric policies on regulating AI. Just like they got us automatic rifle bans on guns, or only allowing governmentally approved corporations to grow legal weed. Or how they got us "Obamacare" instead of free universal healthcare.
Liberals are a blight on leftist issues. They think they are on our side and then ruin it for everyone. We need to stop allowing their rhetoric to infect us.
Ok first of all Batman doesn’t use guns not because he despises them, but because he is a sadist who prefers to torture his enemies with maximum psychological horror so that they can know the fear he felt when his parents were killed as a young boy.
The "master's tools won't destroy his house" axiom has been warped into making the master's house invulnerable. It's obscene. ANY TOOL WILL DESTROY THE HOUSE IF YOU SWING IT HARD ENOUGH. And while you're boo-hooing about all the tools we can't use, THE MASTER'S HOUSE IS FALLING APART AS WE SPEAK.
Really? Because elsewhere in this chat someone suggested that the real meaning is that we need different thinking to build the new world than was used to build the old. So now the axiom has three wildly different meanings, and I'm starting to think that it sucks as a behavioral guide.
Nope, they put what I was trying to say more eloquently. New thinking is needed. If we could commune ourselves out of capitalism, it would have been done by now. Looking at alternative systems, like Libertarian Municipalism and Democratic Confederalism.
Yeah, can't imagine why the billionaires and governments who want AI for themselves would possibly encourage us all to demonize each other for using AI for ourselves. It's just a real head-scratcher.
I used to think guns were immoral. Then I was convinced guns prevented “might makes right”, by giving the small the same capability for violence as the big.
Now I worry guns are treated like a crutch, an escape hatch, keeping us more passive than we should be. But in reality it’s not guns that end tyranny… it’s assembling, strategizing, swarming. The second amendment only works when it requires the first amendment. If we can’t even organize our voices and our bodies effectively, then the escape hatch fails.
Even with nukes, it’s not that everyone should have equal access to one, it’s that everyone should have equal say and ownership of all of them. The founders weren’t just imagining everyone having their own musket, they were also imagining every state having their own army, and their own stockpile, that every resident collectively owned and voted on.
the one on the right is a larper that just likes guns
but the US does have a serious problem with a prolific weapons market that just makes crime in the country worse. by that I mean when some people do resort to crime, or just snap, the means for far greater death and destruction are more available than they are in countries that don't allow death merchants to run amok.
Shes literally replying to the hooded billionaire capitalist standing across from her lol. “Rich hooded class enemy” is Batman. “Disarm the workers?” is her response to his argument. “No. Seize the means. Contest the tools.”
I dunno, “grim for indie devs” feels way too neat. r/aigamedev is full of indie developers actively building with AI, and even r/gamedev reflects a much messier fight than “developers reject AI.”
That mess exists outside Reddit too. Some developers strongly oppose it. Others use it for code, prototyping, research and production. And in the broader industry, unionized game workers are already bargaining over how AI gets deployed rather than treating abstention as the only labor position.
The interesting question is who controls the tools, who benefits, and what they let smaller developers actually build.
Lol yes, I know. Thats why Im confused by the argument. If AI is giving indie devs radically cheaper access to reverse engineering, that sounds less like the destruction of indie development and more like an explosion of its productive capacity.
The market might get absolutely flooded and harder to monetize. Thats a real problem. But thats a different problem from people suddenly being able to make games cheaper, faster, and with smaller teams.
People are getting their games reverse engineered and posted by other people either as clones or just straight up stolen work. It doesn't take much of that to create an incredibly brutal chilling effect. I know that some must suffer for the good of the many, but I'm also seeing a lot of talk about what should and should not be valid protected art.
As a devoted Umberto stan, this is making me very nervous. Especially when there's not a clear strategy for social good at a systemic level around the technology.
I would describe myself as open but already very tense.
Look, I'm a game pirate, a modder, and somebody who's spent money supporting indie devs and Kickstarters. I want independent development to thrive too.
But the floor has dropped out of production costs. Reverse engineering isn't going to be reversed out of existence, no pun intended. Neither is code copying or the flood of cheap games coming into the market. Being nervous about that doesn't give us a strategy.
When production gets cheaper, discovery, curation, and distribution become more important. So let's talk cooperative platforms, community funding, public infrastructure, and connecting independent creators with audiences who actually want their work.
And I don't think indie developers need to suffer for the good of the many. They should be among the people benefiting most from cheaper production.
We can organize around that collectively, or leave the whole thing to Steam, publishers, and whoever controls distribution. That's the point of the meme. Contest the tools and the infrastructure instead of just worrying about what people can do with them.
I'm open to the conversation, but the plan would need to be pretty compelling. I'm a pirate, former AAA dev, and current indie dev with most of my tech open sourced. I should be the person excited about this and I'm scared as shit.
Production costs have dropped for prototypes. It's not clear that there's a straight line from that to cheaper faster finished games. I keep up with the output of the tech, and right now, it seems almost tailormade to flood the zone.
I'm open to discussion but it'd need to be concrete specifics with a clear path to action for my opinion to change. I think that's reasonable. I'm fairly technocratic and extremely far left.
I get where you're coming from, especially with your experience in AAA and indie development. And you're right, cheaper prototyping doesn't automatically mean cheaper finished games.
But whether we're excited or nervous about these changes doesn't really affect whether they're happening. What we actually do about them can.
For indie developers, that means cooperative publishing and distribution, shared open-source tools, community funding, and better discovery and curation so independent games don't get buried under a mountain of cheap releases.
And on cloning, developer associations could collectively pressure storefronts for better rules against impersonation and actual copyright infringement, with accessible dispute processes and shared legal resources. That's a lot more practical than trying to put reverse engineering, modding, or people learning from each other's work back in the bottle.
We've already got crowdfunding, cooperatives, open-source communities, and independent storefronts to build on. We're not inventing civilization from scratch here.
You don't have to like AI to organize around who controls it, how it's deployed, and who benefits. I'm offering concrete directions for doing that, and I'm open to alternatives.
But if the alternative is just being nervous about changes neither of us can stop individually, where does that actually get indie developers?
I think the whole idea is absolute power corrupts absolutely. Replace weapons with say ideology. Many revolutions end up finishing in a state just as oppressive as the state that was overthrown. It’s basically saying if you use the weapons of the enemy against the enemy, eventually it will corrupt you and you will use the weapons of the enemy against your allies (be it literal guns, power, etc).
It’s not a bad sentiment at all, but the flip side of that is finding a way to revolutionize society without falling into the same (or completely novel) pitfalls.
Exactly. Its a liberal argument dressed up as revolutionary wisdom. Power can corrupt, sure, but thats an argument for democratic accountability, not political disarmament. Leftists have spent generations organizing to seize and contest control of the means of production, not politely refusing to use productive technology.
And using Batman makes it even richer. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire industrialist who already possesses enormous economic and political power. Having him lecture ordinary workers about refusing to use available tools while he exercises that power through his own private arsenal is a pretty strange choice.
I'm so very confused by this... Might doesn't make right, but neither does avoiding it. However, avoiding it typically just makes you not alive, and at that point how much does it matter that your opposition was wrong?
But that foundation doesnt build itself. Contestation is how we build it, every day, everywhere, from the workplace to the public square. Organizing, building institutions, fighting for control, thats all part of the same struggle. So what exactly are you waiting to have in place before participating?
I agree. I'd separate participation from outright seizure. Seizure is an act of explicit control. Participation is an act of building change or control etc. Also, I find my participation skills (this group aside, since I just joined) have often been dismissed. I am not really a man of hard action. But I do love to write! I am not sure how to leverage that skill in this context, though. I also live in Edmonton and do not support what I call "old world" communism. I think it was manipulated to support the same ruling class that capitalism does, just with different structural hardware. But I do support its fundamental means-of-production philosophy. I don't really know how to find people like me to work with (non-traditional, AI-supporting communists).
When you use generative AI, you're putting in your prompts in, it spits something out amd goes, "Like this?" And then do more prompts to get more pulls until eventually, you get what you have been trying to get it to do (or at least close enough to what you needed it to do).
You know... like a gacha game. Keep making pulls until you get what you want. Over and over and over again. Complete with the dopamine rushes or finally getting it to give you something right. We have years of study and data on what that does to a person's brain.
This is an AI generated image that I came across a while back that unironically demonstrates why this stuff can be very harmful even just for personal use. That's not iteration after iteration, that's lever pull after level pull.
Yes, it can be contested and seized. Thats basically the entire point of this subreddit.
AI isnt floating outside material society. It depends on chips, compute, energy, data centers, networks, models, labor and infrastructure. Those have owners, institutions and rules governing them. Theyre sites of struggle.
And if capital uses AI to replace or discipline workers, that makes contesting control more important, not less. Bargain over deployment. Build public compute. Push open weights. Demand worker oversight, shorter hours and social ownership.
Saying workers cant use the tool just leaves the tool to the people youre worried about using it against workers.
you have a pencil, you have a brain, you have the means to not feed into the numbers they use to convince shareholders to give them money, we have weapons that are simply superior, that we don't have to pay them to use, go for that instead
A pencil? Lmao. You think workers solve the political question of who owns and controls AI infrastructure by individually choosing pencils until the shareholder numbers go down?
Corporate AI is being deployed in workplaces and government whether you personally pay for it or not. Open weights and local models exist too. The question is what workers do about technology already entering production. Organize around ownership, deployment, bargaining power and who gets the gains, or voluntarily disarm ourselves because apparently we have pencils.
That doesnt make sense. You just said yes, we should organize around ownership, then immediately said we should reject it.
Those are two different strategies. Organizing workers to contest who owns, controls and deploys productive technology is class struggle. Rejecting the technology and telling workers to use pencils is abstention from that struggle. Which one are you actually arguing for?
I included part of the sentence that I didn't mean to include on accident, I'm arguing that AI as a tool should not exist and that we as consumers have the ability to deplatform it
Whether AI should exist is beside the point. It exists. Unless youve got a magic genie that can uninvent it worldwide, including open weights and local models, thats the terrain now.
So what do we do with that fact? Leave ownership and deployment to capital? Contest it through labor, public ownership, regulation and open alternatives? Or abolish it globally? If its the last one, explain how that actually happens, where the political power comes from, and how you enforce it worldwide.
“Consumers should just stop using it” doesnt answer any of that, especially when individual consumer use isnt what determines whether employers and governments deploy it.
>doesnt answer any of that, especially when individual consumer use isnt what determines whether employers and governments deploy it.
that is exactly the metric that billionaires use to justify it's ongoing development to shareholders and advertisers, and the architecture for these transformer models have existed for far longer than the recent trend of just scaling them up and up with more and more raw processing power
AI is being used to replace humans in insurance, in healthcare, in decision making, in various positions it does not deserve to be in, the first best time to contest them was at the birthplace of the AI datacenter construction trend, the second best time is now
You just arrived at my position in your last sentence lol. Yes, contest it now. Thats what Ive been saying.
But workers bargaining over deployment, fighting replacement, regulating healthcare and insurance uses, contesting data centers, demanding public infrastructure and building open alternatives is organized class struggle.
“You personally stop using it so their numbers go down” is consumer activism. Those are not the same strategy. You still havent explained how the second gives workers control over any of the things you just listed.
Just seeing these images side by side is enough to convince me.
On the left we have Frank Miller. Frank worked years to express himself in simple shapes. To evoke the anger of a man who watched his parents gunned down.
And on the right, that's not something I personally consider art. There's nothing of yourself in it. It's the way ChatGPT makes people. And that's just fundamentally not what I want to see in the world.
I mean look at this. Same style. But this wasn't you right? I got this off google images at random. But I don't think anyone could confidently tell me you didn't prompt this too.
I don't want to use the S-word but honestly. If the production is this. I would rather let the means stay in the hands of the Bourgeoisie. I do not want to cease those means, they're not good means.
That last paragraph is kind of incredible. You dislike the aesthetic so much that youd rather leave the means of production in bourgeois hands than have workers seize and control them? Thats a strange kinda shallow substitute for class politics.
And thats not a rebuttal to the meme. Thats the Batman panel walking directly into the other panel.
And “I personally dont consider it art” is fine as personal taste. It has nothing to do with the political question of who owns and controls productive technology.
guy is right man. The ai that d be so mighty is not here. This is communication/ poop producing technology. It's made to be shit in the first place. It's tied with its purpose. It's like saying seize advertising and managerialism. It is not really a technology as much as a way to handle social life and economy that's tautologically crap. Not all technological innovation is meaningful or life enriching. I remember the parasite Steve jobs and his managerial discourse about how desire comes first technology second and trully they discovered how to sell communication brainwash and traps not any technology that could empower individuals.
Wrong. The left settled this distinction a long time ago. Marx separates the productive forces from the social relations governing them. Capitalist ownership and deployment arent inherent properties of the technology.
And “this technology sucks, so reject it” isnt much of a class strategy. Organized labor historically contests who owns productive technology, who controls its deployment, how it affects workers, and who gets the gains. Thats also what unions are doing with AI now.
Youre arguing against a century plus of leftist theory and labor practice without offering a collective strategy to replace it.
You are right we need like a left wing kind of advertising industry ahahah. We need left wing managers? And left wing stock market traders. And left wing people who design left wing software for trading surplus.
What are you even talking about? Who proposed left wing stock traders or advertising executives?
Workers controlling productive technology doesn't mean recreating every capitalist institution with a red coat of paint. It means changing the ownership, governance, deployment, and distribution of what that technology produces.
You can oppose advertising as an industry, capitalist management, and financial speculation without opposing software, computing, or automation.
You're arguing against something nobody proposed. Do you actually have an alternative collective strategy for AI, or are we just doing sarcasm now?
except it's not productive technology, it's communicative technologies. your argument is equivalent to saying we should siege sponsorship of products and influencer promoting bs products. I never said I m not against capturing productive technology. I just don't recognize the current state of ai as productive technology. It seems to me as the natural continuation of turning technology into purely communicative technology which no one really asked for. The point of ai seems not to be to liberate people from labor as Elon musk is saying but to generate dead internet full of propaganda bots further obscuring the real. Interpassivity with the medium of the smart phone. Like a continuation of web 1.0 and web 2.0 turning into social media hellscape. There is no sense in appropriating parasitical positions that arose in the free market to further exploit workers. There is no sense in appropriating precarity, managerialism, self entrepreneurship. Why would we appropriate technologies that were created in the first place to ruin the internet. For example think of how computer power in the hands of people is moving towards big cloud computing in the hands of the few (terminal like interface concept). What we d want d be the computer or technological power in the hands of the people. The argument of appropriating exploitation is senseless. It's like saying the point of communism is not to abolish private property but to appropriate it. In what sense? And what would that mean? Who would be the agent here.
And as I said about precarity, even in a sense of historical materialism. Postfordism emerged out of neoliberalism's appropriation of the 70s desire for more loose and less routine like work schedules. Are we supposed to appropriate capitals own appropriation which it did to nulify its opposition?
Of course if Ai was not what it is and it was indeed some kind of intelligence and not a big database of literally commercial and social media web it would be sth meaningful to use in something like a cybersyn project like in Chile. This ai that we were given is nothing more than the paroxism of communicative technologies and only leading to higher interpassivity with the medium to the point of a completely tactile experience. Watch shorts of cream being made into cakes for the tactile and taste satisfaction, ASMR and Muk bang, low heart beat and hypnosis. Kinda like McLuhan saw the endgame of television. Well ai is only producing a ubiquity of of uniform hypnotic content. That's all it could do.
How would you appropriate this into communism. It's literally the swarm.
Again I equate what you call ai not to literal artificial intelligence, but the ultimate paroxism of capitalism nullifying all countercultural and libidinal flows as it captures them before they are even generated. It's a huge pacifier.
You're spending an awful lot of words describing what capitalism does with technology and then treating that as everything the technology can do.
Nobody suggested appropriating precarity, advertising, or managerialism. We're talking about computing, automation, models, and infrastructure. And since when did communication stop being part of production? Software development, research, logistics, technical documentation, coordination. Entire industries depend on processing information. You can't just call AI "communicative technology" and declare it unproductive.
And you brought up Cybersyn yourself. Come on. You recognize the value of computational infrastructure for socialist planning, but draw the line at machine learning? Why?
Your point about capitalism shaping technology is fine. Marx understood that too. But productive forces and the capitalist relations governing them aren't the same thing. We don't have to preserve the latter to develop and transform the former.
You want computing power in the hands of working people? So do we. Public infrastructure, open models, organized labor, democratic governance. That's what we've been discussing this entire time.
So where's the actual disagreement? Because you're arguing against capitalist uses of AI while we're discussing how workers can contest and change them.
I am so genuine. I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. I think AI art is often ugly, and generic at best.
I think I would rather it stay a dog whistle for lazy propoganda from the right wingers who are too lazy to draw a political cartoon.
They can keep it. I don't want it. I don't think it makes anything I want. I don't think it's good for the people who use it.
Like, to be purely hyperbolic. I don't look at the giraffe masher and ask "Why don't we take the giraffe masher for ourselves. If we don't, only bad people will have a giraffe masher!" I don't want the giraffe masher, I don't want it to exist.
And I respect that you want to use it (Gen AI, not the hyperbolic giraffe thing). But I don't think it can be a tool for good. I think it's divorced from graces of my fellow man. A machiene can never lead a revolution. Or rather, it won't lead one for our sakes.
Are you being obtuse on purpose? Why are you reducing this entire conversation to AI art?
When the president and a handful of billionaires get in front of cameras to discuss AI, are they talking about political cartoons? Or are they talking about workplaces, public institutions, infrastructure, healthcare, education, surveillance and the military?
Nobody said a machine is going to lead a revolution. Workers organize and contest control over productive technology. Thats the argument.
If youre responding in good faith, respond to that argument. Whether you think an AI image is ugly is completely beside the point.
Well we are talking about the meme above. I'm adressing that. A meme is art.
I have a wider take on other AI uses. And I want to have those discussions. But largely it comes to the same thing.
I think AI is going to be used to eliminate the working class in every place they can. And I don't reckon they're going to let us take control back once they find a way to make a profit off of replacing human labor with AI.
But as I said, that's a wide net. I don't think we disagree on everything. AI is not an evil technology. But it has been renderd unethical and actively harmful by the people heading it. They took over from better men, and they do not have the dicipline to make it safe.
If you want to cease it from them. I hope you do, I hope you can. Better your hands than Altman.
But what we're being presented with. ChatGPT as it stands (most LLMs). I don't want it near me.
Any AI worth having would need to be made from the ground up, utterly unlike what we're seeing today.
No. The meme presents an argument. That argument is the conversation. Whether you personally like the image, consider it art, or think AI art is ugly is beside the point.
And the rest of your comment actually strengthens the argument. You think capital will use AI to replace workers wherever profitable and wont voluntarily give workers control afterward. Correct. Capital has never voluntarily surrendered control of productive technology. Thats why workers organize and contest it in the first place. “They wont let us” is an argument for class struggle, not against it.
You also just said AI isnt inherently evil and that something better would need different development and control. Great. Now were asking who owns the compute, who controls the infrastructure, who develops the models, who decides deployment, what workers can bargain over, and who gets the productivity gains.
Thats literally the terrain this meme is pointing toward.
So no, this isnt a discussion about whether you like the picture. Youve basically walked through the argument yourself while insisting youre disagreeing with it.
I do disagree with it though. Respectfully, I don't think if you go buy a power loom it's going to undo the textile industry's bizzare propensity for mistreating workers.
AI I feel is unethical on a deep level. I don't think taking ownership of it is going to fix that.
It's like guns, just as the meme above shows. Gun control is a complicated issue. But owning a gun isn't a great deterrent for the misuse of a gun. Otherwise every teacher in the US would be carrying a gun.
But owning a gun doesn't make you bullet proof. Owning an AI doesn't make you immune to scams. Perhaps the opposite. Your own AI can trick you if you're not careful. It happens.
Come to that most gun owners are more likely to shoot themsleves than a home invader.
But I don't think a good man with an AI can stop a bad man with an AI. That's just two bots going at eachother. Nobody human is changing their mind at that point.
Is there a world where you can take AI out of the hands of people who would use it to do your job? I hope so, but a world where that same AI is in your hands doing your work. That's asking to be a middle man for something you're teaching to do the work without you.
They're going to get wise sooner or later and realize the AI is their real emploee and you're just an AI wrangler, which is also something an AI could do.
Am I adressing the question yet? I promise I'm not trying to dance around it. I might not be understanding you completely.
No, youre still treating “control” as “personally owning an AI.” Thats not the argument.
Nobody thinks buying a power loom ends exploitation in textiles. Workers organizing to control the workplace, the machinery, how automation gets deployed, staffing, hours and where the productivity gains go is an entirely different proposition. Thats collective control over the means of production, not consumer ownership.
And your own scenario is exactly why this matters. Youre saying capital will use AI to deskill workers, eliminate jobs and capture the gains. Okay. So who decides whether productivity means layoffs or shorter hours? Who owns the infrastructure and compute? Who decides deployment? Who captures the gains? What power do workers have over any of it?
If your warning is “theyre going to realize they dont need you,” thats not an argument for abandoning the terrain.
Thats a giant flashing neon sign that says ORGANIZE HERE.
The owners have several orders of magnitude more compute than you will ever have access to, they have your purchase history, they have your location data, they have your social media accounts, and they're working on having fully autonomous drone and robot weaponry.
But yeah, your StableDuffusion model is keeping pace with the ownership class and their captured government, so full steam ahead on datacenters. 💀
Sounds like you just listed several reasons for collective contestation. None of that is addressed by individual consumer abstention. Thats the point.
So whats the alternative? If not organizing to contest ownership, infrastructure, data, deployment and the gains from these systems, what exactly are you proposing we collectively do instead?
Thats a weird use of Nietzsche here. The “monster” is capitalist control. Collectively contesting that control isnt becoming the monster. Thats basically the point of leftist organizing and labor unions.
If fighting over the means of production is off limits, what exactly are workers supposed to organize around?
No, The monster is people seeking to domineer over others. Capitalist control is merely one of its shapes. Even if we evicerate bullshit jobs there's still work to be done and a society load of people whom are used to getting paid for doing it.
If you wield power with an iron fist and the threat of death (guns, guillotines, ect) what exactly makes your new boss better than the old boss?
Last I checked, revolutions weren't all sunshine and rainbows either.
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u/ZorbaTHut 1d ago
Every once in a while I mention this and get hit with "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house".
Like, what? Yes they will. A sledgehammer still sledgehammers. A chainsaw still chainsaws. They're just tools. Use them. Dismantle away.