despotism
Dear friends,
I have been thinking about the how the corporate class, the bootlickers, the “upper middle class” and others utterly slavish to the capitalist simultaneously dehumanise themselves and others. A phenomenal piece of mental trickery: contortion, gaslighting and betrayal. Those who fancy themselves stable and wealthy (an ever treacherous position to claim), and often profess it so by engaging in “high culture” activities (themselves equal parts immoral and despicable) which range incredibly broadly from horse racing, to stock market investing, or apparently lately cryptocurrency market gambling. This, to me, is a fundamentally interesting group of “people”. Let’s think on it.
In the imperial core — conceptually a useful imaginary space for us to consider in theorisation about “wealth” and culture — there are opportunities for multi-generational “middle classes” to establish themselves. However, there are no “middle classes” only capitalists and workers. So a false segregation has emerged similar to other divisions around identity. Except, differently to identity politics, the middle class often intentionally serves the capitalist class in their promotion of capital’s ideals. Indeed, we’ve seen recently post the CEO-killing (which Rupert Murdoch is very very unhappy about — lol) the clamouring of the middle class to attempt to protect and vanguard capital and its mistakes. And, almost as though it were natural, shift blame for the problems in society onto a perceived “lower class” (working class, but probably blue-collar and underemployed people).
So, within imperial core countries (majority white, western, largely european, and the “white” diaspora) there is a growing fat middle class that asserts to be different from those “lowly workers”. Beside the obvious snobbery, as mentioned, this is a false division. There is perhaps 1:10,000,000 chance that a member of the so called middle class could ever accumulate enough wealth that they be considered a capitalist. Particularly as the capitalist class currently hold so much wealth that they control more moneys than all the worlds governments combined. And often with a great deal more liquidity. The top 1% hold an absolutely unconscionable and utterly unrecognisable volume of capital such that their entire social organisation, purpose for being, and very existence is different to the 99%.
We might actually, to better understand this, consider that even if we combined all the wealth of people living on Kaurna Country (Adelaide, Australia) that this wealth would be less than Jeff Bezos pays himself in an hour. A. Single. Hour. Combine the wealth of Australia for ten financial years of extreme productivity and you might come close to the wealth of the empire that is Amazon, but it would be very close. Millionaires cosplaying that their wealth makes them a capitalist are a huge part of the problem of reinforcing this exploitative system. Even though they are still subject to a great many of the terrible conditions that the rest of us experience every day. Importantly, anyone whose accumulation overs $1m is highly unlikely to hold solidarity with the rest of the working class, but millionaires are no longer wealthy, and they experience class struggle (albeit at a deeply atrophied rate to the rest of us). But I promised some cultural exploration, we know we are being exploited and that these people have a very active role in it, so let’s get exploring what this does, culturally, to this group of people.
Guilt.
Just bucketloads of guilt. Deeply internalised, highly processed, and almost intangible. But there is palpable guilt, fear and a sense of anxiety that runs so deep amongst class traitors that they will be: recognised as imposers and thrown to the lower class “wolves”, seen for what they are as enabling deep and unhinged violence against the working class, or ousted as incompatible with those they admire — the capitalists — because their godheads reject them. Interestingly, to me, the last of these is not unlikely. Actual capitalists, the strategists behind the human and planetary torment that is our existence, are psychopaths in the clinical sense. They have no recognition of the value of humans, have very little connection with humanity, and feel, experience and engage with the world in a way utterly different to the rest of us. Compassion is not in the dictionary. And the middle classes see this is as the ultimate “sacrifice” to the altar of capital and seek to emulate the violent despotism of their masters upon anyone around them, including their so-called friends.
Grim assessment? Yes, but there’s no other way of thinking of this. Class ascendancy is a sociopolitical process that is tied to inequitable and deeply unethical behaviour. We can characterise two major features of ascendancy that enable the process of stripping the humanity from the ascendant: first, an economic accumulation which, at minimum, undermines and exploits the skilled labour of coal-face workers; second, a social process of utterly re conceptualising humanity as a workforce to be enslaved. This has deep implications for socialisation, culture, and participation in “high society” not least of which is Gatsbyesque political circus and backstabbing.
The capitalist class exists in what we might term a “parallel society”, one which operates with fundamentally different temporal, spatial, and social coordinates than the world inhabited by workers. Their leisure practices aren’t merely more expensive versions of working-class recreation, but rather constitute an entirely distinct mode of being-in-the-world that systematically reproduces their class position. Consider how their relationship to time itself differs fundamentally from wage labourers — they experience neither the tyranny of the clock nor the anxious relationship to future security that characterises working class existence. Their leisure isn’t carved out from work time but rather represents their primary mode of existence, with “work” (in the form of capital management) seamlessly integrated into social activities.
This manifests in spaces of exclusive socialisation — private clubs, invitation-only events, closed “philanthropic” circles — where the real work of class reproduction occurs through what C. Wright Mills termed the power elite network. Here, marriages are arranged (let’s not even get into how deeply sexist and misogynistic these people are), business deals are conceived, and perhaps most importantly, the psychological and cultural foundations of ruling class consciousness are maintained through constant reinforcement of shared values and perspectives. Their children are socialised from birth, at a distance, into this parallel world through private schools, exclusive summer camps, and carefully curated social circles that ensure they never meaningfully encounter or understand the lived reality of the working class. This creates what we might term an epistemic bubble that renders the violence of capitalism natural to its beneficiaries such that it “always was”, allowing them to conceptualise their position as natural and deserved rather than the product of systemic exploitation. The result is a form of class consciousness that is simultaneously highly developed in terms of protecting class interests and profoundly unconscious of its own conditions of possibility and exploitation.
The interplay between ruling class consciousness and middle-class aspiration creates a self-reinforcing system of social reproduction that extends far beyond mere economic relations into the very fabric of cultural and psychological existence. There is a deeply broken nature to this relation, not only naturalising violence, extraction, inequity, inhumanity, and exploitation, but making those suffering most feel worst about their own suffering. Understanding this through hegemony gives some hope. The system perpetuates itself not primarily through direct coercion but through the active participation of its subjects in their own domination — particularly the middle classes who, despite their material position as workers, function as the most zealous defenders of capitalist social relations, perhaps more than the capitalists themselves. Their desperate performance of ruling class values, combined with their anxious policing of class boundaries, serves to maintain an epistemological fortress of capital (it hurt me not to write solitude), where the violence of exploitation is rendered simultaneously invisible and natural.
This process of class reproduction operates through a tripartite of alienation: first, the fundamental alienation from labour that Marx identified; second, the alienation from class consciousness that results from the middle class’s false identification with capital; and third, the profound alienation from human solidarity that characterises the ruling class’s parallel society. Each level of this alienation reinforces the others, creating a totalising system where the very possibility of alternative social relations becomes utterly unthinkable. Hello, capitalist realism. The ruling class’s complete detachment from working class reality, maintained through their distinct temporal and spatial existence, isn’t a symptom of wealth inequality but rather a fundamentally necessary condition for the continuation of capitalist exploitation. One that the middle class desperately tries to emulate even as it ensures their own continued subordination.
The path forward requires more than recognition of these mechanisms - it demands a fundamental rupture in the reproduction of class relations at both material and ideological levels. See, I’m doing the hope thing from the last post. This rupture must begin with the recognition that the middle class’s position as capital’s loyal foot soldiers is fundamentally untenable, both materially and psychologically. Their guilt, their anxiety, their desperate performance of ruling class values — these are not individual psychological phenomena but rather structural features of a system that requires their active participation in their own exploitation. Only through the development of what Gramsci termed organic intellectual leadership, combined with practical solidarity across the working class (broadly defined), can we begin to imagine and construct alternative forms of social organisation that don’t require the systematic dehumanisation. The challenge, then, is not only to critique these mechanisms but to actively construct new forms of consciousness and solidarity that can break the cycle of class reproduction and create possibilities for genuine human emancipation.
The answer is quite literally compassion.
In solidarity,
Aidan.
Dear friends,
What the heck do I have in store for you today? Well naturally I have been enjoying pop music and thinking about the “climate” that the youth of today are experiencing. Okay, so, I can’t exactly claim to be vibin’ with the zeitgeist but I can give you a copy-paste of some song lyrics:
They say these are the golden years
But I wish I could disappear
Ego crush is so severe
God, it's brutal out here
Let’s go hard, or go home, straight out of the gate. The contradictions of youth culture under capitalism present themselves starkly in the simultaneous valorisation and exploitation of “youth rebellion”. Just think about popular (youth) culture. What begins as authentic resistance [1] – in music, art, fashion, or digital spaces – is rapidly co-opted by capital and transformed into commodified aesthetic facsimiles stripped of transformative potential. You only wanted to participate in consumption, right? The process is depressingly predictable: genuine expressions of alienation and resistance emerge from young people’s lived experience of capitalism’s brutality. As quickly as they are ideated, they are sanitised, packaged, and sold back by corporations that profit from the discontent. From punk to hip-hop to digital countercultures, capital demonstrates an remarkable ability to hollow out youth movements and render them safe for consumption. Amazing. This also dovetails with our previous discussions of mental health and wellbeing, where commodified versions of self-care leap into frame to obscure any authentic sense of wellness [2].
As we know, commodification of revolutionary thought serves a dual purpose for the capitalists. First, it neutralises genuine resistance by redirecting revolutionary energy into consumerist channels – indeed, why organise when you can buy a mass-produced sweat-shop t-shirt with a hot slogan on? Second, it creates new markets and opportunities for profit extraction from the very demographic most likely to challenge capitalist hegemony. Don’t you hate the built-in anti-revolutionary spirit our society has cultivated? With this spirit, young people’s natural inclination toward rebellion and reimagining social relations becomes nothing more than another vector for accumulation. Rebel, reintegrate, retain, reform, “you’ll vote for the Liberals when you get older and are sensible”. What a joke of a narrative. Except it’s worse, because as those who may have been rebellious reach stardom – and clusters of other characteristics come with the territory, here – they become the very oppressor and commodifier they sought to destroy with music, art, and restive communications. The marketing department works undertime, because the expropriation is being done by the counter-culture to itself. Capitalism’s predatory nature so infects our ontological perceptions that this predatory, vicious, and anti-human behaviour is completely rationalised. Even in those who believe they are “changing the world” – rather, lateral violence, peer-aggression and other treachery emerge. And yet, capitalism remains utterly indifferent, as it continues to grow like a cancer identifying movements, gutting them, and capitalising on each new expression of discontent. Forever forestalled from developing into something threatening to the hegemony [3].
From this twisted epistemology, a range of psychological (or, I suppose, epistemological) responses emerge. From the ruling class’s increased interest in employing bona fide psychopaths, to the role of social media in manufacturing vapid narcissists, there’s a capitalist benefit to personality disorders that make treating psychological issues much less interesting for the corporate bottom line. But this isn’t the only expression of despair and exhaustion at capital. Indeed, the psychological toll capitalism has manifest in an epidemic of anxiety and alienation. This is particularly acute among younger generations facing unprecedented precarity in their material conditions – and straight from the mouths of my 19-something-year-old students, this is a real fear. And it is far from accidental – the very mechanisms of capital depend upon maintaining a permanent state of insecurity and atomisation among the working class. In particular amongst younger people, to manufacture fear, division, distress and disengagement – this, again, forestalls revolutionary potential. And in answer to this, every aspect of life has become commodified and subject to market logic. Capitalist ontology strikes again. Even our most basic needs become sources of constant stress. Housing insecurity, crushing student debt, gig work, and the collapse of traditional career paths create a perfect storm of psychological warfare against (young) workers. I still, though my students laugh, consider myself one of those.
Importantly, the growing use of psychological warfare against the working class to continually manufacture divisions, social disorders, and anxiety and fatigue is relatively novel, at least in the historical materialist sense. Some recent psychological research demonstrates how precarity and exploitation create “the privatisation of stress” – where systemic issues manifest as individual mental health crises [4]. Studies consistently show rising rates of anxiety and depression among young people [5], with researchers highlighting how economic instability and the gig economy create persistent psychological strain [6].
Rodrigo’s lyrics (circling back, lol) capture this contradiction – the simultaneous pressure to be grateful for youth while that very youth is being commodified and exploited. The line “who am I if not exploited?” reflects a devastating awareness of how capitalism shapes identity formation itself. If we consider that capitalism so fundamentally shapes how we think, who we are, and what we are able to become (i.e., privilege) we start to see identity development as intrinsically connected to the conditions of the market (at least amongst the working class), where stable identity formation is systematically undermined by market demands for constant reinvention and “flexibility”. Theorisations about identity precarity abound [7], but ultimately these new economic challenges manufactured to ensure the working-class keeps fighting each other, rather than for liberation, trigger significant developmental difficulties in creating coherent self-narratives amid constant economic instability – this is both a good and bad thing. Identity tied to values rather than production – win. Identity tied to instability, grief, fear and doubt – loss. And that’s the chasm we stand over particularly as new generations enter the “workforce” and are exploited, fucked over, and manipulated by despots, sociopaths and narcissists top to bottom.
The commodification of youth mental health itself represents yet another dimension of this exploitation. The same system that creates mass anxiety and depression then profits from selling individualised “solutions”. As we’ve discussed previously on mind reader, therapy apps, wellness products, and self-help guides that frame structural violence as personal failing – all this delusionally peddled as “we can think ourselves out of materially-created distress”. Meanwhile, genuine collective responses to psychological suffering are undermined by the continued reinforcement of atomisation that creates the crisis. The isolation that Rodrigo captures: “I don't stick up for myself” becomes both symptom and perpetuating factor of capitalism’s psychological warfare. Maybe I’m giving Olivia’s words a little too much meaning. Okay, let’s zoom out a bit.
The neoliberal imperative to continually reinvent oneself as an entrepreneurial subject, to treat one’s identity as a product to be optimised and marketed, only deepens this alienation. How many times have you been told in a seminar by an over-paid under-qualified marketing “guru” that you need to “build your personal brand”? Yet any acknowledgement of privilege, cultural capital, disability, and so on – i.e., the material basis for any stable sense of self – is systematically undermined. The ever proliferating bullshit jobs, meaningless bureaucratic labour, and psychological torture exacted upon us only ever serves to further separate workers from any sense of genuine purpose or connection to our work. Meanwhile, the atomisation of society and erosion of collective institutions (publics) leaves us to face these struggles in isolation, each person expected to bootstrap their way out of systemic problems through individual effort and “resilience”. Sweet – but we haven’t even arrived at the gnarliest end of this.
Perhaps capital’s greatest ideological victory has been convincing us that systemic problems require individual solutions. The self-help industry, wellness culture, and various forms of “lifestyle activism” perpetuate the fantasy that we can individually optimise, mindset-shift, or purchase our way out of capitalism’s contradictions. And people vehemently believe this – to their very core, the fact they’ve never tried illustrates the contradictory nature of this bullshit. All this does is enable militant individualist thinking, particularly on the part of the middle manager – forever suggesting a “wellness retreat” to their burnt out staff, while they manipulate, psychologically torment, and otherwise screw over their employees all while ignoring their conditions – I don’t know any worker with the expendable capital to purchase a wellness package, let alone get approval to attend such a retreat. Naturally, psychopathic middle management are more than adequately remunerated for such farcical “healing”, but can’t recognise their own twisted psychological issues in the first place. Of course this then culminates in the redirection of potentially revolutionary energy into an endless cycle of personal development and consumption that poses no threat to existing power relations. Hegemony protects its own. The very notion of personal success under capitalism has been constructed in opposition to collective liberation – we are taught to view others’ advancement as competition rather than solidarity.
This individualist framework obscures the fundamental truth that no amount of personal optimisation can resolve contradictions deliberately foundational to the economic system itself. The economic system to which we are collectively, the 99% of us, literally slaves. A worker cannot mindfulness-meditate their way out of exploitation, nor can ethical consumption choices address the fundamental unsustainability of capitalist production. The promise of individual solutions serves as a pressure release valve, allowing people to feel they are “doing something” while leaving structural power relations untouched. Real transformation requires collective struggle and the development of class consciousness – precisely what individualist ideology works to prevent. The path to liberation cannot be walked alone – but they’ll happily tell you it can, because the “middle class’s” demented existence is just amplifying and redistributing their own pain onto others around them. What a cool group of people.
I honestly don’t even have solutions thinking today. I’m just constantly struck by how utterly demented and dehumanising “work” is in 2024. How have we not progressed past this, folks? Has everyone just been asleep at the wheel?
In real solidarity,
Aidan
Gramsci, A. (2007). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Trans.; Reprinted). Lawrence and Wishart. ↩︎
Fisher, M. (2011). The privatisation of stress. Soundings, 48(48), 123–133. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266211797146882 ↩︎
though this is often blamed on “technology” nebulously: Twenge, J. M. (2020). Why increases in adolescent depression may be linked to the technological environment. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32, 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.06.036 ↩︎
Petriglieri, G., Ashford, S. J., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2019). Agony and ecstasy in the gig economy: Cultivating holding environments for precarious and personalized work identities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 124–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839218759646 ↩︎
c.f. Hancock, P., & Tyler, M. (2025). Precarity, identity, and the meaning of cultural and creative work. In P. Hancock & M. Tyler (Eds.), Performing Artists and Precarity: Work in the Contemporary Entertainment Industries (pp. 83–95). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66119-8_7; Nelson, J. (2018). Identity performativity and precarity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1522–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1461395; Pichler, S., Kohli, C., & Granitz, N. (2021). DITTO for Gen Z: A framework for leveraging the uniqueness of the new generation. Business Horizons, 64(5), 599–610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2021.02.021 ↩︎
Dear friends,
Astute stalkers amongst you may remember some 14 years ago I made a YouTube video by the same title. Let’s not go there. I want to talk with you today about cognitive bias and attribute substitution, in, of course, our favourite context: politics. These are interesting tools of hegemonic enforcement at the nexus of human behaviour and psychology. This, you might suppose, is part of a series on “methods” for our collective toolbelt with which to understand how hegemony maintains its stranglehold on culture, and how capitalist realism (or capitalist fatalism as I’m now borrowing) comes to be the linga franca of the entire globalised capitalist state. Sheesh – heavy stuff for a Wednesday morning, but when isn’t it.
Let’s start, confusingly, in reverse order. Attribute substitution is an important part of the puzzle of understanding how our physical (and financial) realities are shaped. This is because it represents a key tool of capitalist hegemons in manipulating the status quo. Quite simply, attribute substitution is where complex systemic issues are replaced with simpler, more emotionally resonant but ultimately misleading “proxies”. Rather than grappling with the true nature of exploitation under capitalism - the extraction of surplus value, the alienation of workers from their labour, the devastating ecological costs - the ruling class encourages the substitution of these “difficult” (or, rather, deliberately obfuscated) analyses with more simplistic narratives about individual success, consumer choice, or technological salvation. This psychological sleight-of-hand serves to, as usual, maintain the status quo by redirecting analytical thinking away from structural critique and toward superficial explanations that pose no threat to capital. When workers substitute “hard work” for systemic advantage, “personal responsibility” for class warfare, or “innovation” for exploitation, we unconsciously reinforce the very systems that oppress us.
The deployment of attribute substitution, particularly in connection to identity politics, is perniciously effective in forestalling class consciousness – and it fits neatly with anti-(working-class)-intellectualism, as cultivated by the Dutton-mafia. By providing ready-made, easily digestible explanations for complex social phenomena, it prevents the development of more sophisticated analytical frameworks that might challenge capitalist relations. We see this clearly in how poverty is attributed to personal failings rather than systematic inequality, how climate change is reduced to individual consumption rather than corporate extraction, and how workplace exploitation is reframed as “culture fit” or “attitude problems”. Ohhhh boy. And let’s not forget the role of the Murdoch-Albanese alliance in ensuring a septic-tank seal of shit is forced down the public’s throats to ensure no challenges to this hegemony ever emerge. Manufactured consent says what? And what’s worse, many on the left fall prey to this tendency, substituting aesthetic markers of radicalism for genuine revolutionary praxis, or allowing hyper-focus on specific instances of oppression to obscure the broader machinery of capital. This is not about the left marginalising the marginalised, but rather the bourgeois essentialising the marginalised group to “a problem” for reintegration and inclusion in the capitalist system [1]. Naturally, though, we’re not done here…
Cognitive bias, then, serves as both tool for and manifestation of hegemonic control, working together with attribute substitution to maintain capitalist relations through the manipulation of human psychology. Anyone else dizzy at the psychological depths we’re plumbing here? Naturally, the ruling class has become adept at weaponising these inherent cognitive shortcuts – confirmation bias reinforces existing prejudices and prevents class solidarity, availability bias keeps workers focused on immediate personal concerns rather than systemic exploitation, and status quo bias creates resistance to radical change even among those most harmed by current conditions. What makes this particularly effective is that cognitive biases operate below the level of “conscious awareness”, creating what appears to (the person in question, at least) be “common sense” while reproducing capitalist ideology. The bourgeoisie need not actively conspire to maintain their position when they can rely on these psychological mechanisms to do the work of dividing and pacifying the working class. Enter Gramsci on the creation of good sense.
The relationship between “common sense” and “good sense” in Gramscian thought is useful to consider here. These two opposing “senses” (epistemologies, really) represent a battleground in the war of position, where hegemonic “common sense” – the uncritical, fragmentary, and often contradictory absorption of ruling class ideology – must be transformed through struggle into “good sense” – a coherent, analytical understanding of social relations that can support counter-hegemonic movements. This transformation doesn’t occur … spontaneously … but requires the development of organic intellectuals from within the working class who can articulate and advance revolutionary consciousness while remaining grounded in proletarian experience. What a challenge – and often, a contradiction where “peel off” sees them end up in traditional intellectual roles anyway. Unlike said traditional intellectuals, who often unconsciously reproduce ruling class ideology while claiming objectivity, organic intellectuals emerge from and maintain connection to their class origins, developing theoretical frameworks that speak to the bona fide experience of proletarian life while advancing systematic critique of capitalist relations for emancipatory futures. The struggle here is not academic, it is about developing ways of understanding that can challenge the “common sense” assumptions that keep workers consenting to their own exploitation – the cognitive biases and attribute substitutions leveraged by the ruling class to keep us fighting each other [2].
In the political sphere, cognitive biases manifest as powerful barriers to transformative change, functioning as part of what Gramsci identified as the apparatus of cultural hegemony. We see this clearly in how the “sunk cost fallacy” keeps workers defending capitalism despite its clear failures, how “in-group favouritism” is manipulated to prevent cross-racial class solidarity, and how “anchoring bias” limits political imagination to minor reforms rather than systemic transformation. The latter of these remains a real problem for the “left” (centre) faction of the ALP as the right continues its disconnect from unionism and its marriage with capitalist vanguardism. The political deployment of these biases is not accidental. Both purportedly “left” and right parties leverage them strategically both in campaigning and in political communication – and are adept at exploiting cognitive biases to maintain capitalism even if they appear to be proposing moderate liberal reforms. This gets most people on side but it is dangerous – it diminishes the fighting willpower of the left, and it erodes the genuine messaging of transformative thinkers. This leads to a self-reinforcing cycle where biased thinking leads to biased information seeking, which further entrenches the very cognitive patterns that prevent recognition of and resistance to exploitation. Let’s not even get started on what happens when we introduce computational algorithms that control the media and news we receive along digital lines which reinforce these same bourgeois patterns of behaviour and thinking. Breaking this cycle requires not just awareness of these biases, but active development of counter-hegemonic frameworks that can help overcome them – and a collective disengagement from Murdoch and Zuck [3].
Ultimately, the formation of organic intellectuals faces ongoing and deep challenges under capitalism, where the commodification of education, the precarity of academic labour, and the deliberate mystification of technology and knowledge work all serve to maintain separation between intellectual and manual labour. The continued and deliberate identity-based division of labour to enable division and distraction from the real enemy, a tale as old as time. Moreover, the bourgeois university system – an example dear to my heart (sorry, no, “gross to my heart”), far from supporting the development of organic intellectuals, actively works to co-opt and neutralise potential organic intellectual formation through various mechanisms – from the imposition of productivity metrics that prevent deep engagement with communities, to the enforcement of academic conventions that render theory inaccessible to workers, to the individualisation of intellectual work that prevents collective knowledge building. But – and let’s not get trapped in an “academia is important” loop because it’s not, well, not for the reasons that this might lead you to think. Academia, and to a lesser extent the school system, are only useful in that they are massive cultural institutions designed to reinforce the hegemony. This – the curriculum and pedagogy – is something we must work to capture and change in order to create a brighter future. Yet paradoxically, these very contradictions create opportunities for organic intellectual development, as workers increasingly recognise the gap between hegemonic “common sense” narratives about technology, progress, and merit, and their lived experience of exploitation, surveillance, and deskilling – all while being doubly, triply or more extracted from and burnt through by a deeply despotic higher education system. The challenge lies in building solidarity, affirmative, and collaborative “alternative” practices for intellectual development that can nurture this emergent good sense while resisting co-optation by capital, and throwing off the egoism, bullying, and rampant sociopathy of management of higher education. Another big task – what am I Hercules’s (incredibly physically weak) spotter?
Some concepts for our toolbelt, and another brick in the wall.
Have a wonderful day,
Aidan.
Further reading:
Mayo, P. (2014). Gramsci and the politics of education. Capital & Class, 38(2), 385-398. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816814533170
Stanley, M. L., Dougherty, A. M., Yang, B. W., Henne, P., & De Brigard, F. (2018). Reasons probably won’t change your mind: The role of reasons in revising moral decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(7), 962–987. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000368
Clark, N. (2016). Red intersectionality and violence-informed witnessing praxis with indigenous girls. Girlhood Studies, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2016.090205
https://mndrdr.org/2024/grim-realities-emancipatory-futures; Cornelius-Bell, A., & Bell, P. A. (2024). Educational Hegemony: Angloshperic Education Institutions and the Potential of Organic Intellectuals. Canadian Journal of Educational and Social Studies, 4(1), 49–62. https://doi.org/10.53103/cjess.v4i1.213 ↩︎
Make no mistake, Zuck’s deliberate “rebranding” as a human (rather than robot) and slow creep into household familiarity is a deliberate “friendly face” for the knife in your back that is Meta’s social media monopoly. ↩︎
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 [1], 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) [2]. 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