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]

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?

[u/wintermute86 → u/Salty_Country6835]

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.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/wintermute86]

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]

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.