Dictatorshit of Capital

A.I., Silicon Valley and the Nature of Work

Afternoon Comrades.

Without wanting to get “too deep”, and you know we will, I wanted to, initially, share a few thoughts about a few articles I have recently read about A.I., Chatbots etc. - and of course I went off tangent and it turned into a much bigger picture. Of course it did. Whilst it would be fun, I guess, to shit on chatgtp etc. and you know, we will, of course, the root problems are much much bigger than the surface criticism of this unwanted and frankly unnecessary tech.

In any case, it all started with this article in the Washington Post, i know, but I do read what the enemy is trying to say only to increase my own effectiveness against them so spare me the outrage.

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So, no surprises here, well, actually, some. I genuinely wasn’t aware how big of an energy problem this nonsense cause and to save you the trouble:

“Tech companies had promised “clean energy would be this magical, infinite resource,” said Tamara Kneese, a project director at the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the effect of AI and accuses the tech industry of using “fuzzy math” in its climate claims.

“Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom,” Kneese said. “This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment.” …

As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.

Data centers, the nondescript warehouses packed with racks of servers that power the modern internet, have been around for decades. But the amount of electricity they need now is soaring because of AI. Training artificial intelligence models and using AI to execute even simple tasks involves ever more complicated, faster and voluminous computations that are straining the electricity system.

A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company.

Let that sink in for one second and take a few steps back, so that we can genuinely shit on this nonsense and make think about what to do with all these public names and addresses.

One of the most, and correct, criticisms of all this self-titled A.I. gadgetry is that, no matter if you are using an image, music, text or a combination thereof platform, they do not “create”, but rather scour the entirety of the internet to piece together something it considers usable.

Now, all of the results are beyond parody, it’s in shape or form passable as art- which is not to say that this will not become better, in combination with the continued numbing down of art as a consumable. No, the fact is that it is theft, plagiarism if you like, of existing work. There is no point in getting into the legal side of this, as law exist ONLY to protect the ruling class and not the creators of all wealth, but the criticism stands - it’s theft, not original and thus useless.

Going back even further, and this is getting to the core of the problems mentioned at the beginning, who actually asked for all this bullshit? Don’t mistake my stance against this tech as a luddite reality, on the contrary, we need tech, but as always it is a question of ownership and intent - and currently, neither of those realities are on the table. Again, who actually wanted and needed this bullshit?

Capital did.

Now, a few of the ideas & thoughts that follow are due to Ed Zitron’s newsletter - whose work in criticism of Silicon Valley & Big Tech at large is most excellent and I highly recommend signing up to his newsletter. In an ideal post-capital world, supportive A.I. would exist, IF the power question is solved, to, I would wager, only free up time from workers whose work & energy could be diverted to more important tasks ( such as care work ) instead of writing code scripts to scam your grandmother out of their retirement chash. We are not here, clearly, so, we have this reality, where a small number of highly unstable men, psychopaths, incels, accelerationists and worse- or rather the worse that capitalism can create out of a human being - who not only believe they are capable and desired to morally “lead” humanity - and this is the dangerous part - who are entirely under the sway of money, capital and have access to tools to have a world changing impact.

To be utterly clear, I consider what reality Silicon Valley and Wall St- have created as one of the most dangerous and most loathsome realities I exist under. Brownshirts I can deal with, quite effectively, a machine, powdered by a nuclear reactor, under a mountain, that fucks the planet, hmm. Not sure how far I will get with my baseball equipment.

Back to the point, no one other than capital asked for this bullshit because these “companies” have to continously “invent” something they can sell to their investors. No one asks what we as s species need, let alone want, and this is so crystal clear in regards to this A.I. nonsense. Obviously, as a person who previously worked a “creative” it has always been clear to me that the people with money genuinely despise having to rely on people such as I to get what they want. Ignore all the wining and dining, part of their investment reasoning stems from the fact that all their money cannot buy them a soul. But that’s getting too metaphysical for this. At its core, capital doesn’t create, it steals, labour and resources and since it is in the hands of even bigger psychopaths we end up in a reality, where massive amounts of unwanted and unneeded “products” exists that pose a threat to our existence as a species as well as the ability for this floating rock to sustain the conditions for all species. For money. Nothing else.

Of course, there is the reality that capitalists only know one way to generate wealth and that is violence, and all of this AI gadgetry is of course, part of this reality - not the bullshit facebook memes it generates for copaganda, but military applications.

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In other words, a small dictatorship of capitalists have materialized a reality where machines steal work of all shapes to create awful reproductions of propaganda for picket fence fascists to jack off on or even worse hentai for the likes of Elon Musk to jack off to, whilst demanding and wasting more energy than google, which, itself has become unusable. Even worse, and even more sinister, as the two articles above illustrate, SkyNet ala Terminator was a warning unheeded. In the end it comes down how capital has organized, through violence, the nature of work and reasons of why. More importantly, however, all that is man-made can be undone.

Technology is what can help us solve the problem of capitalists and capitalism, after, we have finalized the question of ownership and demand.

Names and Addresses, Comrades.

We serve the Revolution,

Yours,

V.