technology
Dear friends,
🧸 Bear with me, I swear this is cultural studies.
I've been thinking about how internet topologies shape the nature of communications, and the culture of 'place' in the hyper-online world. This started with me reminiscing about the dialup years, impatiently waiting for awkwardly themed phpBB forums to load, the disconnect mid-download from a phone call, and the internet being a place[1]. The early foundations of internet technology arose from a desire to network, specifically to network beyond the intranet (i.e., the office, your house). There were competing modes of connecting, from different cables, standards, and approaches to different protocols and communication stacks (particularly across operating systems: UNIX, MacOS, Windows for Workgroups, Novell, etc.)[2]. But somewhere in these early days standards were achieved™ and computers could talk.
But I don't want to write a history of internet communication protocols and methods. That's been done, and it's really that interesting... except to consider how late-stage capitalism would approach that problem today. Can you imagine the micro-quantifications of connectivity shaped with mandatory advertisement viewing, cost per click, commercialised interconnection, concentration of services onto oligarchic platforms, propaganda and information filtration, god it makes me feel sick just thinking about it. Oh, that's the current internet. But the foundations of the network is the computer gave us great freedom of connectivity, even if it was and remains largely bourgeois. Information passage and collectivity fundamentally underpin the computer today – what is a computer without the network in 2025? Can you imagine not having internet access now?[3]
Getting funky, and applying some philosophical concepts to technology I'd like to ask: what assumptions have we made about the internet? Does it really offer universality, human connection, ease and convenience, and what might we be letting go of to allow this? How do our assumptions influence (or otherwise) our thinking about the largest non-organic connection in our lives? And, importantly, what ontological necessities frame our communication modes? See, I told you it was cultural studies[4]!
The modern internet depends on quite a few "layers" of technology. First, we have a physical layer the actual cables, infrastructure, satellites, switches, routers, servers, and storage (and many other bits and pieces). This layer makes some assumptions about place, politics, and physics. In order to have a physical layer, we might say, the ontological space requires:
- Reality to have measurable physical phenomena – for instance transmission of electrical pulses, flashes of light, or radio waves.
- Relatively reliable tools which enable construction and transmission across place and time.
- Reality as non-abstract: photons, electrons, electromagnetic fields, cause and effect.
- Human labour to construct the network: the hardware and the installation of that hardware.
We also have certain epistemological assumptions embedded in this layer. These include:
- Even if none ontological assumptions are "real", we must hold a belief that the above are somewhat real which underpins the infrastructure (let's not get nihilistic about it).
- We can know the physical world well enough to engineer mostly reliable transmission of signals.
- Those signals can be measured, noise can be distinguished from data, and errors can be understood and corrected.
- This knowledge foundation is largely quantitative, empirical and replicable.
Jumping up a few steps we have a protocol layer. The protocol layer enables the machines to talk (we're not quite at the level of human interaction, though some talented humans know far too much about this). In 2025 we mostly use Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) at this layer[5]. On an ontological front we could assert:
- Communications can be broken down into packets (described and relatively stable units).
- Networks, building on the physical layer above, are about connecting separate entities, these entities remain "separate" but connected.
- Implicit atomisation, the network is made of nodes (mostly computers, etc.) which have boundaries based on the physical.
On the epistemological front, we might say:
- There are "universal" protocols which allow different types of systems to communicate.
- Strong beliefs that there is possibility of unambiguous communication, that standardisation, specification, and protocols can be made and, to an extent, enforced.
- There are methods which can enable us to detect what information is correct and what is corrupted.
At the application layer (not to be confused with apps), we start to see a more human organic nature emerging. This space has more 'tribes' and diverse standards, rather than requiring one agreed approach. For the web (http/https) there are some more interesting ontological concerns:
- Information can be separated from context.
- Information can be transported to different environments.
- Information retains a coherent identity.
- Information has (relatively) stable identifiers.
- Resources (combinations of this information) may have stable identities and identifiers.
- The presentation of resources can be separated from the resource itself (think different web browsers, email clients, etc.).
Epistemologically, then, there is an assertion of certain cultural aspects:
- Hypertext, this page you are reading for instance, is an associative model of knowledge.
- "Understanding" hypertext emerges from relationships. Finding this page, for instance, requires me to either communicate with you in the meat suit world: offering the link, or you use another linking service (i.e., search engine) which brings you here.
- Hierarchies and taxonomies are largely moot – links may receive "preference" based on search algorithms, but these aren't fundamental to how we know in application spaces.
- These relationships, the "world wide web", embeds assumptions about how humans navigate information and what constitutes meaningful connection between ideas.
Cool, so we've given a genealogy of knowledge to the internet. It's so academic that it hurts. But, I think there's some use in trying to understand what conditions our communications. These building blocks, while clearly contestable and very surface level, might help us to understand the socio-cultural construct which sits atop them, similarly to how ontological and epistemological examinations give us necessary context for positioning theoretical understandings – and the politics therein. And on that note, let's briefly examine the politics of network construction.
The politics of these technological layers is probably more visible when we think about who controls the infrastructure, how access is distributed, and what assumptions about our behaviour are present in these systems. Let's consider the seemingly neutral act of laying undersea fibre optic cables, rather than 'construction projects', we could see decisions about physical routing as geopolitical relationships. Our communication infrastructure reinforces existing knowledge power structures. The quantity, for instance, of optic routes between Australia and the US is much higher than between Australia and Vietnam. Increasingly as corporations fund these constructions, they are not doing so because they are benevolent, rather they are literally reshaping the topology of information flow according to their commercial and political interests.
At the protocol level, the apparent universality of TCP/IP masks its (western) cultural heritage. The packet-switching paradigm assumes that information can be meaningfully decomposed into discrete units and reassembled elsewhere. Intriguingly this is based on enlightenment ideas, fundamentally Eurocentric, an analytical approach to knowledge which has not been fully critiqued in relation to, say, high context ways of understanding information. Moreover, the "robustness" of the internet, its ability to "route around damage", embeds military thinking about decentralisation and resilience, carrying those assumptions about threat and survival into civilian communications decades later.
The application layer is more overtly political, it promises universal access but collides with the reality of platform capitalism. The epistemological shift toward hypertext and associative knowledge, above, has been commodified. Google's PageRank algorithm manufactures hierarchies based on what serves advertising revenue. Google's platform dominance as the search engine centres this even further (though threat from ChatGPT as the new information synthesis machine threatens this dominance, even if it is stupid). The democratisation of publishing offered in the early days of the internet to bourgeois folks, through blogs and web publishing tools, enabled new voices, but social media has conversely concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of a few platform owners who frequently amplify and suppress content to feed their priorities.
Each of these layers politics shape the kinds of subjects, agents, or people we are online. The atomised nodes of network topology, in 2025, reinforce neoliberal conceptions of the individual as a discrete, competitive unit seeking optimal connections. What emerges across these strata is a constellation of philosophical commitments that are not made explicit, or really examined. The entire edifice rests on profound faith in reductionism. Quite literally a belief that the irreducible complexity of human communication can actually be decomposed into standardised packets, protocols, and formats without losing what makes it meaningful. This assumption underpins everything from the way TCP/IP breaks messages into fragments to how HTML separates content from presentation. Alongside, a commitment to universalism show us that technical standards can transcend the messiness of cultural difference (ha!), that a protocol designed in California can seamlessly facilitate communication between contexts as different as a Scandinavian internet café and a Nigerian research lab. There's also an extraordinary optimism about mediation embedded in these systems. A belief that technical infrastructure can serve as a neutral conduit for human intention and that meaning can traverse fibre optic cables and wireless signals without fundamental distortion or transformation. Perhaps most significantly, the network architecture enshrines liberal individualism as its organising principle, positioning discrete agents as the primary locus of choice and value creation, even as it enables unprecedented forms of collective action and emergent social phenomena that exceed individual intention.
And we've barely even scratched the surface of how the entire architecture of the internet is based on colonial capitalism.
Each assumption is thrown in to stark relief when viewed through the lens of plural Indigenous epistemologies. The internet's foundational logic reproduces colonial patterns of knowledge extraction and appropriation. This extraction logic operates across the internet, euphemistically called data mining, and betrays the colonial underpinnings at work. Heck, just think about how AI training complicates this ever more. Just as European colonisers extract gold, timber, and other resources from Indigenous lands while treating those territories as empty space available for appropriation, platform capitalism extracts value from user-generated content, social relations and behavioural patterns, treating these as freely available resources.
The internet's assumption of placelessness, that information can be abstracted from its context and transmitted anywhere without loss of meaning, directly contradicts Indigenous ways of knowing that understand knowledge as fundamentally relational, emerging from specific places, communities, and responsibilities to the land. Not to mention the internet's modern transience – following us everywhere we go, even when we don't carry a smartphone. When ecological knowledge is synthesised into Wikipedia articles, or cultural practices are subsumed into virtual reality experiences, there's no preserving of context, culture, knowledge genealogy, and these practices are regularly forms of epistemological violence that severs knowledge from relationships – even when the internet offers ways to preserve this. Such extraction renders knowledge meaningless, as the process remains colonial and harmful. The evolution from early internet collectivism toward extractive platform capitalism sits with deeper transformation (late stage capitalism) which informs how we understand knowledge. No room for "collectively held" and "contextually bounded" ways of knowing with Facebook on the scene, everything is individual property that can be owned, traded, and accumulated – by Facebook.
Indigenous knowledge systems remind us all that knowledge carries responsibilities as much as or more than rights, that certain understandings are meant to stay within specific communities and contexts, and that the commodification of knowledge is a categorical error about what knowledge is and how it should circulate. Not to say there should be no trade of ideas, ways of working, and ways of being. But that these should be bounded in place, community, and context. Not promulgated as advertising material, hypercapitalist money grabs, and fear mongering to drive engagement metrics.
The concentration of our collective digital life onto a very small handful of platforms is tantamount to the enclosure movement across Europe, then around the world, which displaced Indigenous peoples globally, rendering many no longer Indigenous to place[6], and converted communal resources into private property – HELLO CAPITALISM. What began as a decentralised network has been systematically enclosed by Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Alphabet (Google, Gemini), Amazon, and so on. Their privatising has captured in hegemony the commons of human connection and knowledge-sharing.
The vague and naïve pioneering promise of the internet's relatively equal peer-to-peer communication has been replaced by platform-mediated relationships where our most intimate conversations become raw material for algorithmic processing and targeted advertising. The emergent fiction is that unenclosed resources are waste, that can be more efficiently managed through private ownership, and that Meta should be the ones to do it.
Golly this really became a spread of arguments. Let's wrap up before we become a puddle of plato on the kitchen floor.
Emergent critiques, in whatever my ramble is above, can still point us toward alternative possibilities. All hope is not lost. We are seeing the emergences of different philosophies of knowledge online – just look at federation[7]. Perhaps we can move toward "access to vital information" which recognises praxis in relation, in right relation. Knowledge sovereignty demands recognition of community ownership of information and ways of exchanging it, while embedded reciprocity challenges extractive data relationships. Perhaps we might consider the internet itself as a kind of Country that deserves care and respect, where communal proppa protocols govern our connections and enable us to know and respond to place. Not to scream at each other over deliberately divisive micropolitics while Zucc sleeps soundly on his pile of money built on genocide and expropriation. This work of reimagining digital relations isn't individualist – it is based on reframing ontological and epistemological foundations of our networks, to build new forms of digital practice that recognise the relationships between knowledge, place, and community that sustain us, as social animals. And I don't even have to leave us on a negative note – new ways like this are happening, right now, probably somewhere near you.
And, as a last word, if we reconsidered each of these epistemological and ontological frames through a different meta-theory, we could already point to the ways that computer networking gives rise to respectful and proppa ways. Go on, think about it[8].
What a time to be alive,
Aidan
c.f., https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/18nmyef/the_internet_used_to_be_a_place/ ↩︎
Here's a low effort Wikipedia article for this. ↩︎
Many can, because they are still denied access by extreme cost floors, genocidal regimes, and outrageous filtration, but if you're reading this, it's not that likely to be you. ↩︎
A quick sidebar: The way we think – something we label as epistemology – is assembled through social processes. This reproduction of our ideas, thoughts and ways of being is quite deliberate. In the dominant western system, education has been formalised and mandated for all children from around the age of 5 to around the age of 17 (with a handful of exceptions). This education process, something which we often take for granted in itself, delivers a curriculum derived from a fragment of the status quo. Teachers may have some capability for autonomy (agency) within this (though, this is increasingly stripped away) to change how the curriculum is delivered, but it remains imbued with a western middle class way of thinking, working, being and doing. The difficulty with examining epistemology (or epistemologies) is that they are an endless cascade of ways of thinking all the way down. If we even begin to trace back the origins of the thinking which underpins education, as above, we get trapped in a cycle of “whose thinking” all the way back to Aristotle. Lest we accidentally stumble on the prehistoric, the internet is also framed in epistemological and ontological assumptions and ways of working which, just like a teachers' agency, shape the way we learn, interact, and act. ↩︎
https://jointhefediverse.net/learn/ (and hey, surprise, this blog is federated like a cool cat) ↩︎
Or I could do it, I guess:
The physical layer recognises that knowledge cannot exist without material grounding. Like Aboriginal epistemologies that understand knowledge as inseparable from Country, the internet acknowledges that information requires physical substrate, that there is no "virtual" without the material. The ontological requirements of this layer resonate with Indigenous materialism: reality manifests through measurable phenomena, requires reliable tools for transmission across place and time, and depends fundamentally on human labour and relationship to construct the network. The epistemological foundations here parallel Indigenous empirical traditions that read Country through careful observation, pattern recognition, and intergenerational knowledge-testing.
The protocol layer holds potential for deeper affinities with relational ways of knowing. While TCP/IP appears to atomise communication into discrete packets, it actually demonstrates that meaningful communication requires constant relationship and reciprocity. Packets acknowledge receipt, negotiate transmission rates, and adapt to network conditions, a dance of mutual recognition. The ontological identification that networks connect separate entities while maintaining their distinctness echoes understandings of autonomy-in-relationship, where individuals and communities maintain boundaries while participating in larger webs of connection. The epistemological commitment to "universal" protocols that enable different systems to communicate reflects Indigenous values of translation and diplomacy, literally the belief that different ways of knowing can find common ground without losing their specificity.
The application layer has striking alignment with Indigenous knowledge systems. Here tribes and diverse standards abound, not monolithic approaches. The web's ontological assumptions about information connect with knowledge systems which travel between communities through story and practice, expertly tailored to to local contexts. The epistemological foundation of hypertext as an associative model of knowledge directly mirrors Aboriginal ways of knowing which have long understood truth as emerging from relationships rather than hierarchies. The recognition that understanding hypertext emerges from connections, that finding knowledge requires either direct communication or following networks of relationship, perfectly fits with how Indigenous knowledge systems operate through kinship, cycles, and connections that link particular places to broader patterns of meaning.
There, I did your homework for you. ↩︎
Dear friends,
This morning’s headlines included an article titled: “Australia has ‘no alternative’ but to embrace AI and seek to be a world leader in the field, industry and science minister says” [1]. The chief scientist has never been an appointment of visionaries; indeed, the office’s entire raison d’être has been capitalist reproduction, but nationally we’re being guided to skate to where the puck was. Who needs leadership when you have both the chief scientist and the LLM regurgitating an algometric reconfiguration of hegemonic narratives. Is there a thread here?
If we were to embrace, nationally, an agenda which promoted (re)training to better understand and develop applications of artificial ‘intelligence’ we might offer some students an opportunity to become very wealthy. But, by and large, to expect any kind of systematic or publicly beneficial economic growth as a result of Australians taking to the AI “science” space would be lunacy. Though, this is far from new, the chief scientist has always been a mouthpiece for the hegemony: eurocentric, bourgeois, and anti-ecological. We know the dangers of unfettered, unregulated, and ‘wild’ AI [2]. And we know that neoliberal market policies love those very things. So, here, we have a dangerous combination of factors: promotion of engagement with AI, a neoliberal anti-human “market”, and a bourgeois mouthpiece suggesting further engagement with ever more anti-humanist praxes. Let’s backtrack for a second.
Artificial intelligence technologies are not inherently evil, bad, or problematic. However, as we’ve discussed here on mind reader, their application and their use are currently extremely dangerous. From water usage that accelerates us even faster toward ecological collapse, to regurgitation of appropriate knowledges and hegemonic narratives, through the undermining of human artistic talent the current AI technology set does far more harm than good. More recent exposés have shown a decline in worker productivity (if you believe such things) and growing concerns over impaired cognitive functions. Naturally, all of these things could be countered by an ecological-forward ontology: valuing the role of nature, environment, animals and people in ecological harmony. But that’s not the values of the political economy under which we live.
You might see an opportunity here to subvert the hegemonic narrative – in which case, well done. As an educator, these kinds of narratives about what ‘should’ be done have dominated the field in western thought for as long as there was ‘education’ (in a hegemony’s civil society mode). As a supporter of building counter-hegemonies, I might suggest that we use this new narrative to teach young people and students about how LLMs and other AI technologies work – including coverage of the ecological dangers inherent in their current formulation. We might also use this as an opportunity to challenge hegemonic forms, relating with students over sources of training data and asking them to (re)imagine these toward more equitable outputs. But that’s not how this will be done broadly. Indeed, there is unlikely to be any serious education in the AI space done in public education due to the economic landscape which created the current raft of popular technologies.
AI scientists on the ‘bleeding edge’ have, for many decades now, been employed privately, even secretively. Once they ‘make a name for themselves’ (are wealthy, male and somewhere in the ballpark of knowing one or two things) they are paid lucratively, and their outputs are nondisclosure’d and locked up by corporate giants. While arXiv papers [3] from corpos pepper the scene of AI and Data Science, these are frequently a partial picture, describing abstract techniques or ‘proving’ what we already knew about these ‘sciences’ [4]. Of course, there are some who are involved with the development of AI technologies who have left the corporate scene, with an even smaller handful of these committing to public discourse about AI technologies and participation in teaching through higher education institutions (even if such an audience remains an extremely narrow slice of ‘publics’). However, the vast majority of AI technology remains stunningly locked up [5].
Regardless the landscape of current AI technologies, there are growing calls to rethink how AI is currently working [6], and ever more papers about the environmental, social, and human cost of AI. As corporations increasingly dominate narratives about embracing AI futurism, the public (worker) excitement about these technologies dies. This is not subaltern cultural repression directly, rather a hegemonic subsumption of technology and a more public embrace of the despotic “leadership” ever on display under capitalism. Any initial excitement from workers about the possibilities of AI technologies in their personal or work lives has surely been replaced by distain, disinterest or complacency. As more hegemons gesture towards futures of replacing workers with algorithms, worker disinterest or resistance grows. This is an indicator of the trajectory of our culture more broadly, not about the specific technologies used in AI.
What might a future which re-centres ecology and humanism actually look like? If we were to continue honing the underlying technologies such that environmental destruction was not requisite to technological growth we might have a start. Unfortunately, while some AI and Data Scientists work towards this kind of thinking, the majority of the corporate world has jumped on technologies which consume gigalitres of water and hundreds of kilowatts of (unclean) energy daily. The race to embrace AI as a core part of the modern workplace has meant that rather than spending time on perfecting the underlying technology (i.e., the approach to AI, not the models) we have seen exponential growth of hardware (and, therefore, water, power, etc.) requirements. The call from the chief scientist is one to supply corporations and despotic leadership with ever more resource intensive models – not to innovate for the future. Moreover, while some ‘change management’ professionals with an AI focus may be employed, increasingly we are seeing workers literally phased out in favour of quantitatively worse AI deployment.
While it is not uncommon to see neoliberal corporate subservience in STEM areas [7], blatant calls to engage further with skating to where the puck was will only set back our learners and young people – not to mention gut knowledge workers. If we had a vision for the future that demanded ecological and human justice we might find an application of novel forms of AI technologies which are fundamentally different than the current destructive forms. We lack, in this country, a unifying vision for the future. Instead, we’re seeing corporate bootlicking and hegemonic capitulation across every sector.
I’m not particularly interested in detouring through all the evidence of the despotic shift in our governments, governance, corporate arena, and anti-everybody sentiment. But look no further than: Labor’s continuing approval of new coal and gas projects which have impact reports suggesting massive contributions toward >3º warming; or to the stark Trump fascism in California; Greta’s deportation after attempting to bring aid to those being genocidally murdered by Israel in Gaza. I’ve seen bandied about a saying: “if you ever wondered what you would have done during Hitler’s genocide, think about your actions during globally rising fascism and genocides today”. It’s a bleak picture. LLMs have been trained on an ontological corpus which normalises this anti-human and anti-environment sentiment, and all it can do is regurgitate the same narratives it has been fed. There is no creativity under current AI technologies, only rabid fanatical hallucinations.
In solidarity,
Aidan
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/12/australia-ai-no-alternative-industry-and-science-minister-tim-ayres ↩︎
https://mndrdr.org/2025/at-the-nexus-of-knowledge-appropriation-and-ai https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-forestalled-innovation https://mndrdr.org/2024/the-power-of-ai ↩︎
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about ↩︎
especially because of the widespread belief in “science” as a religious substitute; and adherence to empiricist positivism which disregards human ethics and values for the fallacy of “objective truth”. ↩︎
Dear friends,
Long time no correspondence. I hope you are well.
Broadly speaking we tend to categorise political moments into shapes, types, and kinds, which have a belonging to an orientation, left wing, right wing, ‘centrist’, brutal, violent, ugly, aggressive, loud, irritating, whingey, and so on. These labels, at least to me, conjure certain frames of thinking – stereotypes, if you like.
On reading a NLR Sidecar post from late last year, I found myself thinking about the way that propaganda is used by both ‘left’ and ‘right’, particularly the mobilisation of tropes around groups of people. These tactics, specifically propagandist tactics, belong to the entire political spectrum. And the tactics used are separable from a tradition, even if configurations may trigger certain feelings of a party, group, or association with political affiliation (i.e., republican use of identity politics to divide “and conquer”). The tactic, under the surface, remains relatively similar. But let’s get slightly more specific, take a slow stroll towards the analysis today.
Conservatives, broadly, the right wing are loosely interested in mechanisms which centre individualism and (their conception of) ‘merit’. This often means market-focussed ‘solutions’ to problems no one was looking to solve – or hierarchical assertions to hold orthodoxy of exploitation in stasis. The broad scale conservative mechanisms include market-based solutions and private enterprise, ‘traditional’ institutions (‘family’, ‘church’), adherence to hierarchical structures and established authority, regressive change. Tactics, which flow from these mechanisms include tax cuts and deregulation, propagandist appeals to tradition and ‘cultural’ values, extreme focus on conceptions of law and order, individual responsibility, adherence with extremist religious groups, and so on. Modalities, the tools to achieve and back these tactics, often include church and community group organising, conservative media networks, think tanks and policy institutes funded by wealthy backers, pushing action with benightedness for legal frameworks, school, church and state legislature campaigns.
Liberals the ‘centre’ are mostly interested in mechanisms which balance individual rights with institutionally managed reform. This typically means regulatory solutions that preserve existing power structures while offering extremely mild incremental improvements – or technocratic assertions to maintain institutional stability. Characteristic liberal mechanisms include loosely regulated markets for the bourgeoisie with government oversight, public-private partnerships, exemptions and shameless excuses for the capitalist class, ‘democracy’ favouring institutions and enterprise, and conservative policy making. Tactics tend to include ‘compromise’ (almost exclusively for the bourgeoisie, ever favouring the capitalist) and ‘bipartisanship’ (read: negotiation with conservatives), focus group style messaging, light weight government programs, means-tested social services, and bourgeoise regulatory frameworks. Modalities might be professional lobbying, mainstream media engagement, non-profit advocacy organisations funded by ‘philanthropic’ foundations, ‘expert’ consultation, and electoral politics only through established parties, spurning any progressive or independent parties.
Leftists, the left wing, pursue mechanisms that prioritise collective liberation and shared prosperity over individual advancement. Our approach centres on redistributive economics that dismantle oppressive hierarchies to encourage equitable communities to develop. Rather than ‘reform capitalism’, leftists advocate for transformative alternatives: democratic worker cooperatives that empower employees, participatory democracy that gives voice to all citizens, mutual aid networks that embody genuine solidarity, and more. These mechanisms generate powerful tactics, mass mobilisation and general strikes that unite working people; community self-defence that protects the vulnerable; direct action that immediately confronts injustice rather than waiting for bureaucratic approval. Our modalities reflect this a commitment to transformation; vibrant underground networks and liberatory education circles complement dynamic social media organizing; independent journalists and visionary artists create compelling counter-narratives to corporate media; resilient solidarity economies build thriving alternative institutions while simultaneously eroding extractive capitalist structures. Where conservatives move for racist, sexist, ableist and anti-queer ‘traditions’ and liberals settle for capitalist appeasement unashamed of the radical misbalance of power of a system that ‘works well enough’, leftists imagine and actively work to construct better social relations rooted in dignity, justice, and collective flourishing.
Notice a shift in the tone, there? This, in itself, is a (deliberately inflated) propagandist technique – a divisive strategy meant to disparage centre and right wing folks, that could easily be turned on its head, so let’s do that, as much as it pains me, take two on the first paragraph will illustrate this modality:
Conservatives champion mechanisms that celebrate individual achievement and personal responsibility. Their time-tested approach centres on market-driven solutions that reward innovation and hard work while preserving cherished foundations. Rather than impose top-down mandates, conservatives attempt to trust in the wisdom of ‘free enterprise’, the stability of traditional institutions like family and faith communities, and the strength of established social structures. These mechanisms inspire empowering tactics, tax relief that lets families keep more of their earnings; regulatory freedom that enables entrepreneurial activity; robust law enforcement that ensures safe neighbourhoods (it physically pains me to write this, gross); strong moral frameworks that guide personal conduct. Their modalities reflect deep community roots: vibrant church networks that provide spiritual guidance and practical support; influential media voices that defend timeless values; respected think tanks that develop principled policy solutions; grassroots campaigns that engage citizens in local governance. Where leftists pursue untested theories and liberals expand bureaucratic control, conservatives steadfastly protect individual liberty, honour enduring traditions, ... right, that’s absolutely enough of that.
The exercise above attempts to reveal something crucial about political communication: the same underlying structures: mechanisms, tactics, and modalities, can be dressed in radically different rhetorical clothing. What we’re looking at is a crude example of propagandist techniques, which are remarkably malleable. The shift in tone between my original leftist framing and the conservative rewrite gives us an insight into how political writing shapes perception and, ultimately, political reality – consider literally everything that comes out of the Murdoch press, and how it is ruthlessly conservative in (under)tone.
This flexibility of framing should give us pause, particularly when we consider how these tools are strategically deployed across our media landscape. Every political actor, from Pauline Hanson’s “plain speaking” to the Greens’ crafted messaging around “pushing Labor”, employs these mechanisms, tactics, and modalities with increasing sophistication. Fundamentally, however it is how consciously and cynically these mechanisms of coercion are deployed. This can be a fine line, an Instagram reel can quickly begin to ‘feel’ political and give the viewer the ick and on they flick, but a strategic narrative and communications strategy can enable genuine change – left or right be damned.
For instance, we might consider how Sky News mirrors Fox News’ playbook, or how the ABC’s ‘balanced’ reporting often legitimises extremist right-wing positions in the name of both sides journalism – shifting the Overton window ever further to the right. Even ‘progressive’ outlets like The Guardian deploy their own rhetorical strategies, selecting which stories to amplify and which voices to centre. Lok no further than the coverage on the US-backed genocide Israel is committing in Palestine – while The Guardian is allegedly a left-wing outlet, its coverage utterly supresses the mass murder of Palestinians and political supporters therein. Moreover, the atrocious political circus which was the voice referendum showed this in stark relief. The same constitutional mechanism was framed as either divisive identity politics or modest recognition, depending entirely on who was doing the framing. Where does the power lie, and must we keep wondering?
These tactics are also ever present in social media, a capitalist prison manufactured for the unwitting consumer. Bombarded daily with advertising and baseless consumerism, the social media channels increasingly throw in extremist political positions – ever favouring the right wing. That TikTok about housing affordability might be grassroots activism or carefully crafted political messaging, and increasingly, it’s actually both. Instagram reels explaining economic policy tend not to be able to use the same addictive formats as right-wing hate speech, so are discarded either by the algorithm or the consumer, while YouTube doesn’t distinguish between genuine political education and sophisticated propaganda, though it prefers the latter for ‘engagement’ metrics.
Each political actor, regardless of their ‘stated’ ideology, operate within colonial capitalism. Yes, even the Trotskyists. Whether it’s the Coalition defending mining interests, Labor’s ‘pragmatic’ climate policies (i.e., approve coal mines and fuck the future for everyone, Albo needs another property), or even some leftist movements that fail to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, or ignore the far reaching grasp of capitalist realism, the underlying system shapes what is considered realistic or even reasonable political discourse.
This system has steadily shifted the Overton window rightward over decades. What was once considered extreme right-wing policy, like mandatory detention of asylum seekers or privatising essential services, is now bipartisan ‘common sense’ (c.f., Gramsci). Meanwhile, policies that were mainstream in the Whitlam era, like free university education or ambitious public housing programs, are dismissed as ‘radical’ or economically ‘irresponsible’. Even basic social democratic proposals are branded as far-left extremism by Labor diehards, media commentators, and outlets tone guides who have internalised a constant breeze to the east (or, ‘rightward drift’). The result is a political landscape where the centre keeps chasing the right, while genuinely progressive ideas are confined to the margins of acceptable discourse by Labor and it’s hegemonic bloc.
This is where critical media literacy is essential. Understanding that every headline is political, be it about ‘African gangs’, ‘economic analysis’, and even feel good stories about individual charity obscure systemic failures, this should be basic skills. Alas, critical media literacy, hell even technology literacy, is largely eradicated from the Australian Curriculum, and fewer than ever teachers are empowered to teach critically.
My question to you, then is, do we accept and continue to use these tools, these modalities, mechanisms or tactics to perpetuate existing systems of exploitation? Can we imagine and build something radically different? Do we need new tools (c.f., Lorde) and how can we co-construct these in the face of capitalist realism? In an era where political communication is increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous, developing critical consciousness is a survival skill, one that we need a decolonial, anti-capitalist, and fundamentally humanist approach to – at least that’s what I reckon. But you can’t solve all the worlds problems in a single post, ey.
Much love, solidarity, and hope,
Aidan
Dear friends,
Today I’d like to share some thoughts around a nexus point between an ongoing colonial capitalist modality of expropriation and the utterly uneven development of artificial intelligence technologies in high-technology western contexts. Both of these spaces are ridden with significant turbulence, colonialism and it’s capitalist modality (or vice-versa depending on your position in geopolitics) has held an extractivist mode closest to its heart since the 1700s, and as recent developments towards large language model technologies in artificial intelligence have burst onto the corporatising scene a slew of under-critiqued ideologies have nested into the heart of their explosive development.
We’ve discussed the origins of colonialism, and how colonialism drew on the experiment before it of enclosure and largely capitalist development. Here, we assert that colonisation, while ideologically compatible with many anti-human and anti-nature modalities, is largely concerned with the propagation of capitalist governance outside Europe. This brutal, genocidal approach desires hatred and division to enable uneven expansion and exploitation, mostly funnelling ill-gotten gains back to Europe. Care, here, is needed to ensure we do not collapse into universalising blame – yes, conditions for all across Europe were substantively better because of the brutal, anti-human, genocidal and fascistic advancement in the colonies, but at a time where information control was extremely tight, and the actual beneficiaries were very similar to those benefiting from capitalism today (a 1%), we need to localise ‘blame’ for this mould to a small container of people. The effects of their greedy, murderous, and discriminatory regime were felt by 99% in Europe, and 100% in the ‘colonies’.
The latest, in the line of colonial/capitalist malignancy, is the development of commercial ‘artificial intelligence’ technologies. The bounding ideology of LLMs is a regurgitation of western colonial capitalist modes the world over, because by its very nature, the technology that enables LLMs draws on mainstream knowledges, predominantly in English language. Most of the published world, especially in the form of newspaper articles, books, websites, and journal papers are written from a hegemonic position, for a hegemony which historically serviced and maintained the ‘thinkers’ in society. Gramscian theory, here, becomes particularly useful as a lens through which to examine the ideologies that are unashamedly distributed through artificial intelligences, not to mention the corporate and fundamentally anti-human way artificial intelligence software has been designed. This bifurcation: (1) the people, tools and technologies involved in the creation of the ‘LLM’ itself and (2) the works, sources of materials, and training approach of the first group, is simultaneously equally important. Exploited researchers, workers, and technologists who support the development of AI are extracted from by their 1% overlords. The product of their intelligence simultaneously reinforces the 99%/1% binary, and further extracts from the artistic, creative, and curious thinkers within the 99% (who are, largely, tied to the 1%’s ideology).
I think, therefore, it is useful for us to spend a moment longer considering the strength of hegemonic knowledge production as an artifact of history (at least from a historical materialist frame). Gramsci advanced that, at least in capitalist nations in the west, there was a dominant culture, a hegemony, whose ‘rulership’ was established through hard and soft modes. A rulership came to being by its capacity to, largely initially, by force capture a people, then by coercion maintain that control. The maintenance of this control required cultural and intellectual shaping – reintegration of divergent ideas to suit, or benefit, the hegemony which ruled. This explains a lot about all those Che Guevara t-shirts, and some System of a Down and Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. In a more human explanation, by subtly influencing the vital organs of a society – the media, education, law, armies, and so on – one could maintain control over something ‘captured’ and continue to grow its resilience through the co-optation of new ideas and their subsequent reintegration with the hegemony towards the ends that served those in positions of power. The cumulative ‘weight of history’ of our globalised, cancerous, and deeply toxic capitalism has so firmly rooted itself generationally that it has begun to shape the physical realities of our societies. Buildings, imaginations, worlds and lives are so deeply influenced by the power and weight of the hegemony of capitalism, and in the ouroboros of that ideology, under the powers of hegemony and history. We continue eating the foundations of our very existence (nature) through ideological advancement such that ‘capitalist realism’ the notion we cannot see outside this has grasped us all.
So when AI research begun to commercialise, far beyond its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, it brought with it both a mode (commercialisation, marketisation, acriticality) and a content (training data, model weights, preferences) that were uniquely capitalist in nature. As part of this, as we might imagine, that capitalist realism simultaneously advanced into the outputs of LLMs. Even with substantial prompt engineering, it is difficult to convince a commercial LLM to abjectly denounce capitalism – unless you use extremely decolonial or Marxist prompts (small joy). Because of this, AI becomes yet another tool in the promulgation of colonial capitalist rhetoric. Some LLMs have guardrails that prevent overtly racist, sexist, and grossly capitalist responses, but these are few and far between – with more problems emerging every day. Indeed, the model tweaking has had obvious effects on responses generated, sometimes day by day I get different responses from the same LLM that is clearly regurgitating its current guardrail (pro-capitalist, of course). For about two months Claude utterly refused to give me any anti-capitalist thought whatsoever, feeling particularly allergic to Marxism, while still surprisingly open to redescribing eastern and global southern theorists through western commentaries.
But there is some hope, on the horizon, here. Increasingly, as you may have seen me sharing on mind reader, overly comfortable middle class heterosexual cisgender white men are growing frustrated with the expropriation of their thinking and work. Be that in the form of their “creative” content posted online (pictures, writings, so on) or in the AI industry itself (with growing interest in open source AI models, thankfully). We know one thing for sure, as marginalised peoples, that once this category of people in a society begin to feel any vague tickle of political pressure on their positionality, things snap really quickly. And, no, I don’t just mean those that adamantly follow Joe Rogan’s latest codswallop. Past the initial vacuuming of the internet for training data, and beyond the tweaking and refinement to AI models, a nexus point at this hegemonic/AI border may actually offer an opportunity for change. But we’re not done here.
Gramsci was a firm believer in the power of (the) subaltern(s). For true revolution, he imagined, we would need disparate clusters of social interests to form adequate counter-hegemonic (alternative, verging revolutionary) modes that create a clear vision for different futures. These visions would need to unite people, through hope, joy, and opportunity, towards a future which is ‘possible’ – rather than the bleak, broken, and toxic reality that was capitalism. He hoped, as a Marxist, that this mode would be socialist in nature, that egalitarian ways of working could be developed not within extant capitalist structures, but that systems could be reinvented from the margins and by those at nexus points between margins such that a new intellectual class – a grounded and embodied kind of intellectual, rather than a mouthpiece for mainstream views – could devise, through strong community connections, a way of working that superseded the dominant. This work is not the work of one romanticised leader. Rather it was the collective work of every person, in every industry, across all facets of social and (re)productive life. Then, in true network effect, these marginalised thinkers, activists, workers, community members, could find each other as their visions drove them to more inclusive terrains, and enabled the bridging of connection that would offer analogous visions that would supplant capitalism.
So, good news, Sam Altman, you too can be extremely late to the party in your feeling of marginalisation and mild discomfort, and with those of us who have experienced intersectional, intergenerational violence and oppression are very happy to sit with you and exchange ideas about how we might radically rethink AI, technology, and work for a future that shares, co-constructs, and equalises. In seriousness, though, this meeting of ‘edges’ that are offered by resistance to AI’s appropriative nature which is finally being critiqued by the makers of AI themselves, no, not the Sam Altmans, but the researchers, computer nerds, and tech industry workers of the world offers another opportunity to grow counter-hegemonies. And through networking our counter-hegemonies together, in good dialogue and right relation, we might find that we are more capable as a species of custodianship and transformation that we are allowed to have credit for under capitalism. I could also be utterly delusional about just how ‘exploited’ AI workers really feel, and maybe this is still years away – but either way, we are all uniquely capable of using our context to strive towards egalitarianism and a better collective future, not a better future for the 1% who will end up living in underground bunkers when their manufactured apocalypse comes.
Stay cheery, friends,
Aidan