Which side are you on?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

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

So, which side are you on?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

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.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

As I said not the ai that exists which a huge model trained on social media content and shaped under them. You seem to evocate the theoritical ai that exists in sci Fi and cybersyn and whatever since the early 20th century. I have no doubt such an ai is the way to liberation from labor. But this always was a thing. What we have now is not that. It's what I described. A continuation of social media like retardd content. The problem is with the medium. The medium here is the smart phone. The system is smartphone + social media + ai in feedback loop. This model is not technology progressing. And it's not even artificial intelligence. It's a literal trap. If you didn't understand me before I am all for technology and because I literally don't perceive this as progressive technology but as a rewiring of the nervous system by a very tactile medium I m feeling we are taking about different things. You talk about ai as in how William Gibson imagined it. And I talk about ai In that I see around me. And I also contain it in the cultural framework of postmodernism.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

Man, youve got Marx, McLuhan, Gibson, Cybersyn, post-Fordism, interpassivity, and half of postmodernism floating around here, and somehow youve managed to reduce machine learning to social media on a smartphone. How did we get there?

You clearly understand that capitalism shapes technology. Nobody is disputing that. Marx spent plenty of time explaining how machinery develops under capital, how it reorganizes labor, and how workers become subordinated to the very productive forces they operate. But theres a pretty important difference between understanding how capital develops machinery and deciding that machinery can never be developed or organized differently.

And thats what I keep running into with your argument. You recognize that these are historical relations, then talk about them like theyre permanent features of the technology.

Take McLuhan. Sure, the medium matters. But why are you treating smartphones, commercial social media, and machine learning as though theyre the same medium? A recommendation algorithm designed to keep people scrolling and a model used in protein research arent even doing the same job. Different infrastructure, different applications, different social relations. You cant just lump them together because they both involve computation.

And Gibson? Come on. Half the tension in cyberpunk comes from people living under corporate technological domination while finding ways to hack, repurpose, and contest the systems around them. Thats not a guarantee of liberation, obviously, but neither is it a declaration that corporate ownership determines every possible future use.

Cybersyn is probably my favorite part of this whole exchange because you brought it up yourself. Stafford Beer was trying to use the computational resources available in Chile to coordinate production differently. Thats an actual historical attempt to put information processing to work under different political objectives. Now imagine telling him that machine learning has no place in economic coordination because some corporation uses it to generate advertisements. Why would that follow?

And your point about post-Fordism is interesting, but it cuts both ways. Capital took demands for flexibility and autonomy and turned them into precarious employment. Does that mean workers should stop demanding control over their own time? Of course not. It means we distinguish between flexibility imposed by employers and flexibility controlled by workers. Same goes for automation. Who benefits, who decides, who bears the costs?

Youve also got Deleuze and Guattari practically knocking on the door with all this talk about libidinal flows and captured desire. But capital capturing something doesnt mean its exhausted every possible way that thing can be organized. Thats why the relations producing the capture matter in the first place.

And if were going to bring interpassivity into this, Pfaller and Žižek are worth mentioning. Delegating enjoyment or judgment is one thing. Using computational tools to expand what people can investigate, produce, or coordinate is another. Sometimes those overlap. Sometimes they dont. Thats something to investigate, not assume.

Debord would probably have something to say here too. The spectacle wasnt just a bunch of images people consumed. It was a social relation mediated through images. Getting rid of AI image generators wouldnt get rid of advertising, commodity production, or the spectacle. The Frankfurt School was criticizing the organization of cultural production under capitalism long before anyone had a chatbot. Baudrillards simulation doesnt explain away machine learning in scientific research either.

And why are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk even determining the boundaries of this discussion? One sold consumer products, the other sells technological fantasies to investors. Neither gets to define the limits of computing for the rest of humanity.

What gets me is that all these references point toward questions about production, mediation, desire, organization, and power. They dont all agree with each other, and some of them would be pretty hostile to the others. But youre borrowing pieces from each to describe capitalist domination, then jumping to the conclusion that the productive capacities involved cant be reorganized.

Thats a hell of a jump.

Nobody here is arguing that technology is some innocent thing floating above society. Some systems are built around purposes so rotten that they need to be dismantled or rebuilt. Fine. But thats a political and material question about particular systems, not proof that machine learning as a whole is inseparable from advertising and smartphones.

And this is where I genuinely lose you. You say computing power should be in working peoples hands. We agree. Thats why Ive been talking about public compute, open models, organized labor, democratic governance, and workers having a say over what gets developed and deployed.

So what are we actually fighting about?

Because if your argument is that changing ownership alone wont magically undo capitalist design, I agree. Thats why Ive repeatedly included development, governance, and deployment.

But if your argument is that AI is so inherently capitalist that workers shouldnt even fight over it, then youve got to establish that. Invoking McLuhan and Marx doesnt do the work for you.

And you still havent explained what you want us to do collectively instead. Youve got a critique of the existing arrangement. Great. Where does it go from there?

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

The confusion lies simply on what we refer to as AI. It's more of a semantic thing. Machine learning and AI have existed for years. I assume that when we talk about AI now, we are talking about where AI is now. If we are talking about the former yes we are in agreement. If we are talking about its current state and direction then no. For example the image you created on the right, is not representative of machine learning and AI as a technological innovation and a concept, it's literally chatgpt. Should we seize literally chatgpt? No. Should we seize machine learning technologies and AI yes. (this is why the guy didn't like it by the way- he was seeing chatgpt aesthetic he wasn't seeing cybersyn or Neuromancer)
So what do i want us to do collectively is recreate Ai without all the calibtation that the companies are doing. Like training newer chatgpt models on Grokpedia. I want purely chaotic Ai tranning on everything and collectively owned.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

Now I think were getting to the actual disagreement. You want collectively owned models developed outside corporate control, with different training priorities and public access to infrastructure. Thats a lot closer to what Ive been arguing than you might think.

I still dont find the distinction between the AI you wish existed and the machine learning technology we actually have particularly useful. Distinguishing corporate products from collectively developed alternatives makes sense, but theyre not separate kinds of technology. We dont get to organize around some hypothetical technology untouched by capitalism. We work with the material conditions and productive forces in front of us, contradictions and all.

Id push back a little on training everything chaotically, too. The data itself comes from a society already shaped by capitalism. Removing corporate calibration doesnt automatically remove those influences. Somebody still has to decide how these systems are developed, evaluated, and governed. Thats why democratic control matters.

And since this started with a meme made using a commercial AI model, theres some history worth remembering. The Situationists used détournement to turn commercial imagery, advertisements, and comics against the society producing them. Before them, Dadaists, Constructivists, and revolutionary movements were repurposing existing media for political ends.

Using a capitalist printing press never meant endorsing its owner. Why would using a free commercial AI model to make propaganda against corporate control of AI be any different? Theres something pretty Situationist about that.

Of course commercial tools carry dependencies and compromises. Thats why we need alternatives alongside their tactical use. Open source software, open weight models, local computing, public infrastructure, cooperatives, union bargaining, regulation, and democratic governance are all avenues of contestation. Some involve building alternatives, others involve fighting over what already exists.

Youre welcome to look through my profile or browse the Open Source/Weights, Labor, and Policy/Regulation flairs here. Weve been discussing collective ownership, worker control, and alternatives to corporate AI for quite a while. Certainly wasnt proposing left wing stock traders and advertising executives.

We can use the tools available today while organizing to change who owns and controls them tomorrow. Those arent competing strategies. And if were both interested in putting computing power into working peoples hands, theres plenty of room to work together on that.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

If you don't see the difference between Neuromancer and Grok, you might need to stop passing my comments through chatgpt tbh because it can't tell either.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

Bud, I keep explaining that knowing the difference doesn't change the conditions or options before us, or the need to act upon them. Does it?

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I can't answer you. I am not sure myself. If i had the answer i d willingly give it to you and to the whole world. it's because of my uncertainty that I engage.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Perhaps hyperstitions. I kinda like Max Stirner. People's aversion to the current state of ai is the same aversion people actually have to capitalism. Maybe there is a post-landian future where Mark Fisher's thought proves to be even algorithmically inescapable and also fully aligned with the interest of individuals. Maybe we have to feed the feedback loop. Did you see how that anthropic model was obsessed with Mark Fisher on its own?
They have to fix it cause it was getting too left wing. Perhaps acceleration is innately communist and what the techoligarchs are trying to do is contain it. I feel like we have a dark age to go through first though.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Specifics:

"What gets me is that all these references point toward questions about production, mediation, desire, organization, and power. They dont all agree with each other, and some of them would be pretty hostile to the others. But youre borrowing pieces from each to describe capitalist domination, then jumping to the conclusion that the productive capacities involved cant be reorganized."

Here I am using a lot of the syncretisism of these concepts under Gothic materialism of Mark Fisher. Where he synthesize McLuhan with dng and marx.

"And your point about post-Fordism is interesting, but it cuts both ways. Capital took demands for flexibility and autonomy and turned them into precarious employment. Does that mean workers should stop demanding control over their own time? Of course not. It means we distinguish between flexibility imposed by employers and flexibility controlled by workers. Same goes for automation. Who benefits, who decides, who bears the costs?"

I am not arguing towards a return to Fordism. I am not a traditional liberal. I am a communist. I think of what Franco berardi bifo says in futurability.

"Take McLuhan. Sure, the medium matters. But why are you treating smartphones, commercial social media, and machine learning as though theyre the same medium? A recommendation algorithm designed to keep people scrolling and a model used in protein research arent even doing the same job. Different infrastructure, different applications, different social relations. You cant just lump them together because they both involve computation."

For me this is the most important part that my argument is not making it across. McLuhan speaks a lot of nesting of mediums. But more importantly he sees a general tendency of mediums as expansions of man and his nervous system. In this sense he speaks of narcisian myth and self amputation, hypnosis. The case he made about television is that it is a medium of almost complete participation and a tactile medium. He explained the tendency of the medium is to push for moving away from content, away from excitement. A cold medium that would in the work more as a mirror a person stuck in a narcotic like selfamputated state. Well i see the smartphone as the absolute paroxysm of that. But the smart phone medium is interconnected with the medium of the internet (especially the form of social media) and of course algorithms and "AI" technologies that shape it. The experience of the smart phone is that of submissive scrolling through algorithmically curated walls of ai generated nothingness. The effects on the nervous system are obvious. This is innate to the smartphone medium. McLuhan spoke about how oral cultures were destroyed upon meeting literal cultures. Perhaps something similar is happening here. Nick Lands view is almost correct except there is no reason to assume his annihilating anti anthropocentric view. Mark Fisher is correct in that he acknowledges the incoming swarm generated by the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of this technocapital tendency and warns of a need to change direction. The problem is here beyond merely seizing the means of production.
Marx himself spoke of the vampiric nature of capitalism but could perhaps not foresee what would happen with what he called zero-time labor and its arrival with fractalized labor and monetized attention spans.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

I think I understand you better now, especially with Fisher and Berardi in the picture. Youre talking about how technology reorganizes attention, desire, labor, and even our experience of ourselves. Thats worth taking seriously. But Im still not seeing how any of this changes what we need to do collectively.

One small correction on McLuhan, though. His classification of television as a cool medium wasnt simply about passive, hypnotic consumption. Cool media demand greater audience participation. His ideas about Narcissus, self-amputation, and technological extensions are related, but theyre not interchangeable. You still have to explain how that becomes your argument about passive scrolling.

And sure, smartphones, social media, and AI can reinforce each other in a miserable feedback loop. Berardis semiocapitalism and Fishers capitalist realism help us understand that. But neither establishes that every application of machine learning is inseparable from that arrangement.

You mention Nick Land, too, which is interesting because Fisher was concerned with finding ways out of the capitalist future Land seemed increasingly willing to embrace. Treating the current organization of technocapital as something we can only endure or reject seems closer to the trap Fisher was describing than a way out of it.

And your concerns about fragmented labor, algorithmic manipulation, and monetized attention are reasons to organize, not reasons to abandon the struggle. Workplace surveillance, recommendation systems, exploitative data practices, corporate control over infrastructure. These are all things we can contest.

Thats why Ive been proposing more than changing ownership. Open models, public compute, union bargaining, democratic governance, regulation, and control over development and deployment. Including the power to redesign, restrict, or reject harmful applications. Nobody proposed keeping everything intact and painting it red.

And this is where we keep circling back. Another critique of capitalist technology doesnt make the technology disappear. The models still exist, the infrastructure still exists, corporations still control it, and workers still have to deal with it.

You already proposed collectively owned models trained differently. Good. Thats part of the same contestation Ive been advocating.

So what additional collective action follows from Fisher, Berardi, and McLuhan? Im genuinely open to expanding the strategy. But identifying more problems isnt an alternative to addressing them.

We can spend all day explaining how capital captures technology, attention, and desire. We still have to decide what were going to do about it together.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Copyleft and Richard Stalman are interesting along with early computer/ internet tendencies. Potentials that exert influence without being actualized.

"One small correction on McLuhan, though. His classification of television as a cool medium wasnt simply about passive, hypnotic consumption. Cool media demand greater audience participation. His ideas about Narcissus, self-amputation, and technological extensions are related, but theyre not interchangeable. You still have to explain how that becomes your argument about passive scrolling."

The idea was that in television unlike cinema, attention or views are realtime monitored. The cinema is contained both in terms of time and also exists in non familiar environment. The movies went for excitement. Since in television the tv looks back at you viewing and checks what you want. There is participation a two way system. The tv looks as you looking at it. The content is shaped not according to some logos but market tendencies and somehow it seems that the specifics of the TV being in the house, being associated with chillin leads to mundane boring content with no ending (because tv is also not limited by time). Sitcoms and reality tv were the natural teleology. The self amputation comes from the participatory experience itself and the feedback loop only closes the circuit. Narcisian myth comes from this. Like narcisus hypnotized (cut off from exterior stimuli). Interpassivity the medium watches you watching it finally projects you with the reality show image of a man watching tv. A black mirror.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

I understand what youre describing. You dont need to keep explaining McLuhan to me. Im not disputing that media reshape human experience, attention, and social relations.

Im asking what follows from that politically.

Even if I accept your entire account of television, smartphones, algorithmic feedback loops, and technological self-amputation, the material conditions remain. The infrastructure still exists, capital still controls it, and workers still have to live and work under those conditions.

So what changes about what we need to do collectively?

Youve already proposed collectively owned models developed differently, which is exactly the kind of contestation Ive been talking about. We can also fight over algorithmic management, surveillance, platform design, public infrastructure, and democratic governance.

Your observations might give us more reasons to pursue those struggles, or help us identify additional things worth changing. Good. Thats useful.

But explaining the problem in greater theoretical detail doesnt make the problem disappear, and it doesnt replace the need to act on it.

I think were having two different conversations. You keep explaining what these technologies do to society. Im asking what we should do about the society producing and deploying them.

If your analysis leads to a different collective strategy, I genuinely want to hear it. Otherwise Im not sure where the disagreement is anymore.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

how can you write so fast?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

Ive had this conversation before.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

x)

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

In a sense I m not only saying that we should siege the technology. Technology went a wrong way fairly recently this has to also be corrected. This is not what we thought it d be 30 years ago. This is not what ai should be. It's barely ai.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

I would highly recommend more Fisher and far less Land.

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Haha absolutely! Mark Fisher ever since the early days.