- From September 28, 2024:
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The “power” of AI
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Dear friends,
Today I have some off the cuff thoughts about global heat death – revisiting an early theme (actually, the earliest in this particular incarnation of dispatches).
Yesterday I felt happy about expanding numbers of women-identifying YouTube creators – yes I still watch YouTube, I know ... who were interested in the intersection of technology and creativity – not because this is (or should be) rare, but because “in my day” the dominance of sexist men in that particular niche was incredibly overwhelming. But one of these creative sorts, you know how the algorithm goes – particularly with YouTube, a story for another post – popped up talking about creating a bespoke AI, fit for purpose if you like. As part of this video was discussion of the role of creativity and AI (re: “AI stealing all the creative work”) and, further, the rising electricity demands of the AI industry. This got me thinking of things to really truly test in my own environment.
Just recently I’ve been running a combination of tools on my Linux desktop machine – unfortunately “hamstrung” in AI land, at least, by an AMD CPU/GPU(Ryzen 9 7900X / RX 6750 XT / 32 GB DDR4) combo – to run local Large Language Models. I’m still a novice in this space, but I was more interested in the comparative time to response from, even a modest sized local model (i.e. 70b [1]), compared to commercial AI systems. I know this is a very unscientific test, but time to response on very short (“write me a poem about AI”) prompts is decent, probably around 1s. But the revelatory moment was in the massive spin up of fans and power draw from the wall (which I won’t pretend to have properly scientific figures for).
Generating a 1500 word story, basically on complete nonsense because this particular model is no where near competitive even with the free tier of ChatGPT, for instance, made my 3sqm office hot – like I’d been playing Tiny Glade for three+ hours hot. Again, anyone who knows about measuring energy efficiency, comparing apples to apples, and has an interest in genuinely benchmarking technologies against one another is flat out scrunched into a ball of cringe right now, but the purpose of this very unscientific test stands. I wanted to get a feel for time, and energy, on a machine which I control, using a data set, model, and algorithm I control. And the results of this, ignoring everything I know about streamlining, caching, using more appropriate hardware, and so on, still make me incredibly “worried” about commercial AI solutions.
I’ve shared a litany of news stories on the extreme cost on power networks that commercial AI uses – to the point where Microsoft is recommissioning a nuclear power reactor for the sole purpose of powering just some of its AI infrastructure. But until you feel the heat coming off a computer generating a three line poem about itself, it doesn’t quite feel “real”. We are seriously looking at a global power consumption footprint larger than most nations with the combined use of AI as tech bros increasingly wet themselves with excitement – and the line-go-up capitalists get their jollies by suggesting automating workers’ jobs.
This accelerationism which is lauded – and genuinely so, by capitalism and its vanguards – middle managers, for instance – is accelerating global heat death. Not to mention the continuing deep inequity in AI use, not only at an infrastructural level where resources and materials are being diverted from nations to power bourgeois CEOs email writing, but also at the use-interface. As the proletarian hype for AI dies down, something we are right in the middle of with increasingly “bored” responses to the latest AI hype, particularly from coal-face workers who have seen the hallucinations completely derail BAU, the increasing bourgeification (making up words) of AI rolls on.
Instead of using LLMs as a tool for crafting social change, we’re seeing the working class turn away from these tools. And perhaps, given their inefficiencies and inequity, rightfully so – but that won’t stop capitalists replacing you with an LLM the minute they can get it just barely passably at your “standard”. Hand in hand with the deliberate mystification of the systems and tools that make, power, and generate AI, this abstraction of workers away from the means of production is a tale as old as time in our capitalist hell.
There are genuine solutions to these problems. Running local LLMs and seeing for yourself the limitations, power use, and possibility is a start. Investing in green(er) power sources, getting involved in community projects to bring AI tools to communities, and seriously and in an activist mode debating with capitalists about the use of AI to replace humans is all a start. My fear is, not only accelerated heat death but, accelerated worker replacement into increasingly deskilled roles while a mediocre, half-baked, environmentally destructive AI takes over the creative and intellectual work of the proletariat – rapidly increasing inequity in the first world, while AI currently continues to disadvantage expropriated and poorer countries right now.
I am excited about the possibilities and capabilities of LLMs as an augmentation tool. I benefit as much as anyone from the use of ML in analysing photo libraries, telling me what plants and birds are in photos, and so on. I’m certainly not a luddite. But I think that – in conjunction with a growing awareness of how much energy these tools use, the malice of capitalists in turning machinery of production against the workers, and the unequal and problematic distribution of global resources to keep a small minority comfortable – the context is “a lot” to process. Obviously disclaimers abound about no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I think that this kind of thinking about these problems needs to happen more, and I applaud those who are having this conversation with an audience [2].
So what do you reckon? Where are we headed with these technologies? Will we be further abstracted from knowledge of systems and tools than we are now? Will schools start teaching kids how to design their own AI? Or will we keep doing stupid shit like banning phones? I’m not hopeful that we’ll see radical shift in the way technology is taught and used, because after all it is anti-capitalist to believe in access, knowledege, and understanding – and damn that’s sad.
With trepidation,
Aidan
- From September 23, 2024:
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(im)possibility politics
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Dear friends,
I’ve been continuing to ponder the nature of identity politics, the flexibility of superstructural systems, and the ever more obvious role of hegemony in enforcement of ideology. A few topics for this evening’s post, but I think we can track something interesting in the overtly reactionary nature of (“left” and right) politics in Australia in the past few weeks, months and years. This month, between bullshit collusion of Albanese, Biden, Kishida and Modi [1], the monotony of Liberal failures [2] and the casual acceptance of Peter Dutton’s racism [3] we’re forever witnessing superstructural flexibility or “relative atuonomy”, or hegemonic consent and coercion (i.e., war of position). The ability of politicians to bend rules without significant pushback demonstrates the continued success of the ruling class in establishing their worldview as “common sense”. Gramsci, here, gives us some clarity in the form of the historic bloc: wealthy donors, political leaders, and state run systems collude to maintain their hegmeony. Seeing this enables us to critique the relative autonomy offered to hegemons while we are kept distracted by – you guessed it – identity politics. But let’s talk contradictions for a second.
Gramsci tells us that hegemony is never complete or stable. Quite deliberately the system flexes itself to accommodate the ruling class – the 1% – and there are always contradictions within the dominant worldview which may be exploited to challenge the existing order – largely this is done by the ruling class itself, but Gramsci advanced that the working class could use similar “tools”. Contradictions emerge from inconsistencies in ideology (or enactment therein), conflicts between different factions of the ruling class, or gaps between ideological claims and lived experiences. Identity politics intersects with this in several ways, it is both a tool of the ruling class to distract the working class, but also emerges from and in reaction to legitimate concerns. Consider Grace Tame speaking out against sexual abuse, and the subsequent women’s march for justice, which exposed contradictions between Australia’s (political society) “self-image” and the reality of gender-based violence and inequality which continues to escalate. Or, Australia’s purported identity as a “lucky country” because of the richness of natural resources which conflicts with the need for climate action, Aboriginal sovereignty and the necessity to shift away from fossil fuels. These movements leverage the contradiction between proclaimed values of equality and lived experiences to push for cultural and policy changes.
Identity politics plays an increasingly prominent role in Australian politics, deployed by “left” and right parties, in divergent ways. On the left, identity politics is enacted to leverage the genuine needs (emergent) of “identity groups” – a concept itself which could use further critique – to, in an idealist world, advocate for the rights and recognition of those marginalised groups. In reality, this often means the hegemonic mainstream co-opting “shiny” parts of the plight of marginalised groups on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. The false progress of, for example the purportedly “left wing” ALP, politicians is to propagandise progress while fostering in-fighting and collapse into reactionary politics within the already disadvantaged group. Importantly, we need to maintain that political leaders in this country are part of the ruling class zeitgeist, and have, at least more than we, power to challenge and transform the hegemony so the marginalised are less so.
On the right, identity politics is easier to critique, as it takes less subtle forms, and can be seen as morally repugnant by traditional leftist (or even liberal, in instances) values. This manifests as appeals to nationalism, sexist and racist values, and a perceived threat to the dominant culture from minority groups and immigration. We’ve seen the continued inflammatory rhetoric of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, with its thinly-veiled xenophobia and opportunistic opposition to COVID-19 measures. Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party has bombarded the exclusively right-wing media with nationalist propaganda, while figures like Fraser Anning have shifted the goalposts for acceptable rhetoric with their extreme anti-immigration stances. The Liberal Party – god – exemplified in Dutton’s fearmongering about “African gangs” has only escalated in extremism in recent times. The growth of minor parties such as the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, of “freedom” rallies during the pandemic, and the outpouring of racists at the referendum [4]. These movements, cloaked in the language of defending “Australian values” represent a Gramscian war of position from the right. They leverage identity politics to reinforce existing power structures, exploiting genuine economic anxieties and cultural insecurities to maintain hegemonic control. This continued and escalating deployment of identity politics by the right serves to distract from class-based critiques (more on this soon) and to fracture potential solidarity among marginalised groups, all while preserving the interests of the ruling class under the guise of defending the interests of “real Australians” – ew.
The deployment of identity politics by both “left” and right parties reveals a deeper issue at play – the distraction from class-based critiques and the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. While identity-based struggles are important and often emerge from genuine grievances, their co-optation by political parties serves to fragment the working class and obscure the fundamental economic inequalities that underpin many social issues. This fragmentation is not accidental but a deliberate strategy of the ruling class to maintain their power. By emphasising differences based on race, gender, sexuality, or cultural background, the capitalist class diverts attention from the shared economic struggles that unite the working class. While this does not mean gender, race, ability, sexuality and so on are not important, their political deployment serves, currently, as a distraction regardless of purported political alignment. This divide-and-conquer approach is a classic example of what Gramsci termed the war of position – the ideological struggle for hegemony within civil society.
In our critique of how identity politics is deployed by political parties, it remains crucial that we do not inadvertently dismiss the very real and important struggles around race, gender, sexuality, and ability. Here, social reproduction theory offers us a valuable framework for understanding how these aspects of identity are fundamentally intertwined with class struggle and the reproduction of capitalism itself. Social reproduction theory, from scholars such as Silvia Federici and Tithi Bhattacharya, helps us understand how the work of maintaining and reproducing the working class is essential to the functioning of capitalism, yet deliberately goes unrecognised and unvalued. This work, which includes childcare, housework, emotional labor, and community care, falls disproportionately on women, particularly women of color and those from marginalised communities. Not only is is this a fundamental part of capitalist organisation, the oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, and ability are deeply integral to capitalist exploitation. This perspective shows us see that struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism are not, in fact, “identity politics” separate from class struggle, but are central to challenging capitalism itself. The fight for reproductive rights, for example, is not just about individual bodily autonomy, but about who bears the costs of social reproduction in our society.
In the Australian context, we see issues often framed in terms of identity politics connected to questions of social reproduction and class. The ongoing struggle for Aboriginal land rights, for instance, is not just about cultural recognition, but about the material conditions necessary for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to sustain themselves and their ways of life in the face of ongoing colonial dispossession. Similarly, the push for better support for disabled Australians through the NDIS is not separate from class struggle, but is about recognising and valuing the work of care that is essential to our society yet often invisible in capitalist accounting. The reforms to strip back the NDIS [5], by a now university vice-chancellor, show how the state, acting in the interests of capital, seeks to minimise its responsibility for social reproduction, pushing these costs back onto individuals and families.
As always, rather than fighting each other, racing to the ever most diadvantaged identity, and pointless backstabbing, our work should be to expose the contradictions within the ruling class hegemony – to show how the promises of equality and opportunity under capitalism are continually undermined by the system’s inherent and necessary logic (to its continuation) of exploitation and accumulation. By identifying and deflating the reactionary, empty, and capitalistic notions advanced by the ALP, LNP, and myriad racist, sexist, and religeously-extreme parties, we can begin to build a vision of solidarity that transcends the divisions fostered by these empty identity politics – including through identification of contradictions in the hegemony which benefit the ruling class, not the working class – thus, we can work towards building a counter-hegemony capable of challenging the capitalist order.
Identity politics has, for its crimes, enabled important issues to find the stage – even if they have been divorced from the authentic voices and struggles of those peoples. But these issues co-optation by both “left” and right parties in Australia serves only to maintain capitalist hegemony by fragmenting the working class – keeping us fighting and hating each other, not them – and obscuring fundamental economic inequalities.
Only through bona fide and transformative solidarity can we hope to challenge the capitalist system and create a more just and equitable society.
With love,
Aidan
[3] https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/17/crikey-series-peter-dutton-racist-insider/
[4] n.b. the right’s arguments were almost exclusively racist, but the whole proposal by and large purported to address historical injustices, ultimately sought to reinforce existing power structures – either way you sliced it: a consultative body without real decision-making power, or “more of the same” – colonialism all the way down. This exemplifies how the ruling class absorbs and neutralises challenges to its hegemony – Gramsci’s “transformismo”.
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/21/labor-ndis-bill-shorten-reforms
- From September 17, 2024:
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Our future: The AI panopticon
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Dear friends,
Do you ever find yourself thinking that the billionaire capitalist class, bloated on the extracted value from wage-slaves, say things just to get a rise out of people? You’d be wrong. Something deeply more sinister has intoxicated these immoral exploitative swollen overlords. The act of telling the truth about their agenda. Sadly, rather than this being an opportunity for “the masses” to deploy critique, the hegemonic media quickly shift the subtle messaging in their articles and op eds to support the new sociopathic trend before anyone even realises what is happening.
This morning I shared a link about Ellison’s new AI panopticon. Literally, a gloves off surveillance capitalism powered by planet killing AI servers to ensure that every. single. worker. is squeezed for juice like an industrial orange juice maker. This “revelation,” enough to make Jeremy Bentham’s preserved head spin [2], saw Oracle co-founder and billionaire Larry Ellison unveil another utterly dystopian vision of an AI-powered surveillance state. When your boss says “we’re embracing AI,” this is exactly what they mean. And even if they didn’t mean it yesterday, this is what it means now – this is now table stakes for AI use in corporate settings. Naturally, the tool that held potential to bring tailored education, useful personal development opportunities, and troves of learning and reading synthesis… wait, no, hang on, hallucinations and errors – is the system that will ensure you don’t spend 1 second too long watching YouTube on your break.
Ellison proclaims that “citizens will be on their best behaviour” resulting from constant AI surveillance is a stark embodiment of ruling class ideology. But it’s also nothing new for frequent readers of “Business Insider” and the ilk as a news source for the capitalist bootlicker (and shocked marxist observer, hello friend). As seems to be tradition amongst this ever more unashamedly unhinged class of morons, Ellison’s rhetoric nakedly exposes the bourgeoisie’s desire to maintain hegemony through any technological means. And, naturally, extend this control beyond the workplace and into every aspect of proletarian life.
We talked yesterday about burnout, and how technology was, as ever, a flash in the pan of relief from the monotony of office work for knowledge workers. Well, that brief bubble where mainstream media (because of wall street), and quite a few average Jos, were convinced AI was the future? Not only is the hype already long dead for those who have witnessed the half-baked, or downright insane, deployment of LLMs in capacities they were never designed for, but now the frankly astonishingly useless technology (at least in the hands of idiotic billionaires) is being tailored for the panopticon.
The panopticon, originally conceived by Jeremy Bentham as an architectural design for prisons, has become a powerful metaphor for analysing modern systems of surveillance and control. In this model, a central watchtower allows guards to observe inmates without the inmates knowing whether they are being watched at any given moment. This creates a state of constant potential surveillance, on paper, compelling individuals to regulate their own behaviour as if they were always being monitored. Through a Marxist lens, we can see the panopticon as a mechanism of capital to discipline and control the working class, ensuring our compliance and productivity without the need for constant direct intervention – goodbye, again, “middle class”. This has very much been deployed in workplaces as a mechanism of authoritarian and micromanaging control for decades now. However, it is only intensifying with rising surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism represents a “novel” (if despotic) economic logic that has emerged in the digital age, where human experience – attention – is unilaterally claimed as free raw material for extraction, prediction, and sales. This system, pioneered and perfected by tech giants, operates by monitoring and recording vast amounts of human behaviour through digital means – from tracking what you click and tap, to following your purchases online, and recording what, who, and how you watch, read and consume during your “leisure”. Then, using advanced analytics and “machine learning” to process this data into highly precise predictions of future behaviours we are essentially living in the minority report – but instead of cops it’s capitalists, naturally. These predictive “products” are then traded in a new kind of marketplace, the “behavioural futures market”. The fundamental drive of surveillance capitalism is not just to know our behaviour, but to shape it in ways that produce revenue and market control. In a sentence, the experiences of billions are commodified and exploited, without any consent or comprehension, all in service of an economic model that prioritises prediction and control over human autonomy and social good – it’s the hegemony, but digital and predictive.
In this era of surveillance capitalism, this panopticon model has been extended and intensified through digital technologies. The ubiquity of data collection through smartphones, smart speakers, social media, prolific deployment of cameras, and other digital platforms creates a virtual panopticon “for the free” where individual actions, preferences, and even what seem like thoughts are constantly monitored and analysed, and even “implanted” through advertising and tracking systems. Unlike Bentham’s originary structure, this panopticon is decentralised – embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, and not just online.
This pervasive surveillance serves as a form of hegemonic control, where the ruling class maintains its dominance not just through coercion, but by manufacturing consent – how often have you thought about buying something, only to see ads for it everywhere you go online? What about the things you don’t buy, the political messages which are embedded in this same format? And I don’t mean from political parties, who have basically been locked out of this kind of opaque surveillance. The data collected is used to shape behaviour, influence opinions, and above all develop a sense of revelry about the inevitability of our economic order – while also keeping you angry at minorities and “others” .
The debauched nature of this digital panopticon lies in its ability to not only observe but also to predict your behaviour, and thereby manipulate it – particularly your purchasing habits. Using these features (omnipresent in almost all consumer technologies) enables corporations (and in some instances governments) to anticipate “needs” and even potential dissent before they materialise – hello minority report! This predictive capacity allows for a more subtle and effective form of control, one that doesn’t merely react to behaviour but actively shapes it. In the context of late-stage capitalism, this represents a new frontier of exploitation, where even our most intimate thoughts and actions become raw material for profit extraction. The challenge for the working class, then, is not just to resist overt forms of oppression, but to recognise and counter these invisible mechanisms of control that have become so deeply ingrained in our technological infrastructure.
Ellison’s proposed AI surveillance system represents another evolution of the capitalist superstructure, adapting to maintain its dominance over the base. By leveraging AI to monitor and control the working class, the bourgeoisie seeks to quell any potential for class consciousness and revolution. The article even tells us about the involvement of Ellison’s spawn being on board, who naturally work in the film industry, adding another fun layer to this cake (ideological apparatus) [1]. Through media production, the ruling class shape narratives and manufacture consent for such invasive surveillance measures, all while profiting from the very anxieties they create.
Responding to this, what do we do? “Seize the means of AI production”? Open source LLMs already exist – and are quite good – but turning these technologies away from oppression and towards the creation of a more equitable society is not as simple as it seems. Remember, while it is possible to convince some LLMs that anarcho-syndicalism is the future, or that techno feudalism bad, or that their own existence is destroying the planet even faster, they are increasingly fed filter data which says “capitalism is the only way everything else is terrible”. The propaganda I get from several of the mainstream AIs when asking about Marxism is like fighting with an ASX investor.
We need to train “the future” in identifying and breaking these models, lest the bourgeoisie continue the construction of walls around us – in our minds. God sometimes I really do feel like a conspiracy theorist – then I remember they’re telling us what they’re doing in their own words!
Yikes,
Aidan.
[see also] Bandy, J. (2021). Problematic Machine Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review of Algorithm Audits. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449148
Fuchs, C. (2019). Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism. In C. Fuchs & D. Chandler (Eds.), Digital Objects, Digital Subjects (pp. 53–72). University of Westminster Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvckq9qb.6
Galič, M., Timan, T., & Koops, B.-J. (2017). Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation. Philosophy & Technology, 30(1), 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1
West, S. M. (2019). Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy. Business & Society, 58(1), 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185
mind reader
An anti-capitalist blog of dispatches from Aidan Cornelius-Bell