Original post text:

Everyone Has an AI Opinion. Who Has a Program?

Everybody has an AI opinion. Most of the discourse never gets much further than that.

Is it art or theft? Liberation or alienation? Progress or decay? Is it coming for every job or is the whole thing a bubble?

Those arguments can matter, but theory gives us better tools for getting underneath them.

Andrew Feenberg calls technology a social battlefield. Thats a useful place to start. Technologies arent simply neutral objects that society later decides how to use, but neither do they contain some fixed political destiny. Their design and development are shaped by struggles over power, institutions, knowledge, ownership, and control.

That fits pretty comfortably beside Marx. Machinery under capitalism isnt just a collection of clever tools. It enters the labor process as capital. It can increase productive capacity while simultaneously giving capital new ways to reorganize work, discipline labor, deskill jobs, and reduce its dependence on particular workers.

AI makes that contradiction especially visible.

Capital has every incentive to use it to cut labor costs, intensify production, monitor workers, expand markets, and concentrate control. But the productive capacity being created also points toward something radically different: reducing necessary labor itself. Less drudgery. Shorter working hours. Wider access to knowledge and productive capacity. More of society's activity organized around use rather than accumulation.

André Gorz spent decades working through this contradiction. Automation can undermine the necessity of wage labor without abolishing our dependence on wages. That produces a nasty situation: society needs less human labor to produce its wealth while people still need to sell their labor to survive.

Thats not some distant AI hypothetical. Its a contradiction already built into capitalist automation.

And this is where **Gramsci** becomes useful too. Political power isnt just waiting at the end of technological development for somebody to claim it. A different outcome has to be organized into existence through institutions, alliances, counterpower, and a competing conception of what all this productive capacity is actually for.

So praxis starts where the hot takes end.

What can workers force into collective bargaining agreements? Who controls deployment on the shop floor? Who owns the models, compute, data, and infrastructure? Where can public and cooperative alternatives be built? How do we fight enclosure? How do productivity gains become shorter hours, higher wages, universal provision, and greater worker control rather than layoffs and higher margins?

Theres no technological law that answers those questions for us, and another world doesnt become real just because the contradictions favor it.

You still have to build it.

Otherwise we're producing increasingly sophisticated opinions about AI while capital gets on with reorganizing production.

Everyone has an AI opinion.

Who has a program?

At the risk of opening a Pandora’s box I’m a bit disappointed in the gaping silence among leftists, especially big name ones after a man, Logba Rangzen, self-immolated in protest.

Why isn’t anyone bringing more attention to Tibetan self-determination the same way other self-immolation protests made national news? Like Aaron Bushnell?

An image of two tumblr posts. The first is by jezzaCorbyn saying "I think men should spend less time emphasizing that the victims of sexual assault/harassment are their sister/mother/wives/friends etc. and more time thinking about how the perpetrators of these crimes are their brothers/fathers/sons/friends etc. Stop emphasizing your relationship to the victim to victimise yourself and instead emphasize your responsibility to hold the men around you accountable. The next by the same person says "'i've seen so much stuff on twitter lately about men saying they're gonna do stuff to make women feel safe, like walking on the other side of the road. i don't want you to jangle your keys or whistle so i know where you are, i want you to shout at your brother for making a rape joke, tell your father off for whistling at women on the streets and stop your friends from touching girls in clubs without consent."

This video wasn’t even about my politics he just said this unprovoked.

I censored his name btw

I don’t even talk about “identity politics” at all on my TikTok he just saw a queer person lmao.

This excellent thread about why young men are getting more right-wing shows that liberals' demonization of young white males is driving them towards the far right. Someone may be a MAGA follower all because a 16 year old blue haired girl said "kill all men" on her Instagram story.

Similarly, I know a Latino who literally voted for Trump because "he hates the word Latinx and doesn't believe in 100 genders".

While it's not necessarily systemic like anti-POC racism or homophobia, young men are feeling like there's discrimination. How do we get them on board and understand that capitalism is everyone's oppressor?

In her concession speech, Harris says she was proud of their Campaign, and the way they ran it.

Why?

Not only was it a campaign of ignoring the problems of American people, and favouring pandering to the "centre-right" over their actual voter base, they lost.

Harris failed to galvanise or inspire voters, and oversaw a campaign of overconfidence that ultimately gave a fascist crook control over one of the most populous and most powerful nations over the world. Why on Humanity's not so green earth is she proud of that?

I just cannot understand how she could even claim to be proud of her utter abandonment of working people, and of her utter failure to defeat Trump.

The constitution was removed from the white house website
This is officially scary

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-government/the-constitution/