Surveillance Fascism

Ownership and Property in Marxist Theory and the Digital Commons

Morning Comrades.

It is hard to believe that the internet used to be a relative safe and fun place to waste time on, I vividly remember the first internet cafe, which, in reality was a bar in downtown Warsaw where I spent a few years in the early to mid 90s growing up, that looked and felt like a movie set from one of those 90s hacker films. Black Lights, computer terminals and “weirdos” like me hanging out on a Friday night learning about AOL chatrooms. It is without a doubt that the internet is the exact opposite of that today, and without wanting to beat around the bush, it is nothing but one of the greatest surveillance and manipulation tools entirely run by sociopaths ever to have been created in our shared human history. It is dangerous and needs to be viewed as such.

In light of Luigi Mangione’s arrest and subsequent charge for murder of the healthcare company CEO I came across a thread over on twitter that took me on a deep dive which laid the groundwork for today’s dispatch. Click below to read it.

Essentially, the point is made that McDonalds, similar to the majority of business’ operating use facial recognition software to which government agencies such as the NSA have direct access to, and yes this is how all of it works, and they run a real-time recognition operation across the world.

The most recent push by Silicon Valley to have AI integration into everything may seem unconnected and entirely pointless, but the contrary is true, there wouldn’t be this much investment in something this apparently pointless if there wasn’t a weaponised application at the heart of it all, at the hands and behest of the ruling class. The weaponisation of this intentionally mislabeled AI is already at play in Palestine, OpenAI is has partnered with several Defense Firms and just recently a 26 year whistleblower in relation to OpenAi was found dead in his apartment. Entirely, all unrelated and without any indication of what’s what.

Whilst it would be good to write about all these inherent dangers, people such as Ed Zitron already do this and will always do a much better job at it than I ever could. For anyone interested in that, subscribe. I do. What I can offer and what we are going to talk about today is what the internet can be in a post-capitalist world, being forever convinced not only in the rightousness of our world, but the inherent possibilities. These discussions aren’t necessarily new but remain important for our future.

With that, let’s get into the reality of a post-capitalist internet, concepts such as Digital Commons and Marxist Theory.