Morning Comrades and welcome back to your patreon-only dispatch of the week. As always, thank you ever so kindly for supporting this project and a warm welcome to every new patreon also!
Initially, I had planed to write about the Communist Manifesto today, after all, it was published on this day, 175 years ago and irrespective of its age, any and all re-examinations of this most powerful pamphlet are at the very least, justified. Of course, life happens, something I am increasingly grateful for the older I get, and this morning was no different. My business partner and I had a pre-work coffee away from our kitchen to bounce a few plans off one another when he excitedly showed me a few texts generated by ChatGPT - something I had vaguely read about it but really had not been interested in enough to dedicate any time to. Truly, our conversations were extremely focused on optimizing our work time in regards to social media, a bane to the entire team, yet, and I am sure every one that has to use social media for work knows the oppressive feeling of having to use it - with the net result being that this program basically created our IG copy for the next few weeks in a matter of seconds.
Truthfully, for the first half an hour, I was excited. Less time spent doing that bullshit means more free time for us, or rather more time doing work that is more important, making food. It didn’t take all that long for a plethora of ramifications, questions and more questions to craw themselves into my consciousness, especially the part that deals with ethics rather than efficiency and profits.
Now, a few disclaimers and heads up. I am not well-read, nor interested in the mechanics of this program, A.I. - I know it exists, and more importantly I know how limited my understanding of the matter is. There are a number of wonderfully smart and engaging Marxists out there that I lean heavily on such as Aaron Bastani (Fully Automated Luxury Communism), Paul Mason ( PostCapitalism) and Williams/ Srnicek (Demand Full Automation) for example- their works, as a number of others generally deal with a optimistic tech-outlook of our future, one that often counters my own, I would say, more materialistic outlook. By all means, do not expect a technical analysis of what A.I. / ChatGPT etc is and what it means, that is way above my understanding never mind interests and that’s not happening here. However, I am leaning on a number of lectures I co-authored with Michael Sandel who teaches political philosophy at Harvard University in regards to A.I. and Ethics a few years ago, as well as an additional Marxist approach to this subject, because, fuck yeah, it’s the Communist Manifesto’s 175th birthday today.
Strap in for Class War, The Means of Production and the ultimate Bullshit Generator to-date. It’s a three part story focusing on the philosophical background, Class War and Marxism all wrapped up in one dispatch, today.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Black Lodges to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.