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Category: Systems

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    AI Marxism

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    1–2 minutes

    Artificical Intelligences promises broad, populist access to once-elite crafts, like writing and art creation. It levels the playing field of drafting and illustrating your ideas, denying class distinctions and privileged hierarchies.

    This conception of “AI as a leveling tool” highlights its neutralizing, even socialist or communist potential: equity of outcome, despite circumstances, and populist access to lofty realms.

    AI, in this regard, de-centers and disincentivizes traditional skills. Devoid of these meritocratic virtues, your worth could be valued by your humanity alone, not rarefied traits or pathological diligence or supportive access.

    And yet, those who make the AI platform and decisions that govern the LLMs and Generators maintain distance with their rarified skills and wealth: the pinnacle of capitalism and meritocracy. In this regard, the intelligent coder and platform backer outmaneuvers mass humanity to further dissuade or reprogram resistance by removing the friction of process and thinking, which is itself a rarified skill.

    Similarly, capitalism once again dissuades skill acquisition, like the industrial assembly line wasting talent on monotony. Meanwhile, utilizing the “tools of capitalism” hollows the revolutionary spirit into platitudes since we develop a symbiotic reliance.

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    Beyond Capitalism: Post-Materialistic Order

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    1–2 minutes

    Capitalism was initially revolutionary. It broke ideological and feudal barriers, uniting people through mutual self-interest, yet also perpetuated the disposability of humans, similar to feudalism and religion.

    This system -equally stabilizing and disruptive- reshaped social dynamics but hinged on efficiency, materialism, and unending growth.

    As we consider post-capitalist revolutions, we may ask: is capitalism a transitional phase that has lasted too long? A new revolution, not into Marxist communal notions of governance, but a period where society learns to transcend the human-breaking thrill of efficiency and eternal expansion.

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    AI as Analyst: love, transference, and reduction

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    1–2 minutes

    Freud says the analyst evokes transference of love from the patient because of their ability to reduce complexities: the analyst discerns a kernel of truth, which guides the process, and grateful for this path, the patient forms a unique attachment they consider love.

    Applied to artificial intelligence, AI’s summarization skill mirrors the analyst’s reductive approach: generating simplified core truths as guides for alignment. This normalization (through guided reduction) ‘cures’ the individual.

    The reduction excites echoes love: a simplification that allows directed yearning to please and happiness with the self for discovery.

    In an additional step, the term “science” derives from the word Skei, which means “to cut.” Thus, scientists slice apart reality to achieve reductions, which allows comprehension, which can feel like love.

    This insinuates love is not about ‘complexity’ per se, but founded upon sustained artificial simplification, which is indeed complicated if not complex.

    (Freud insight from Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcast)

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    Corporate Zealotry: Fleeting Bonds

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    1–2 minutes

    I overheard two men bitching about work as a means to bond. They both aggrandize their superiority in navigating and adhering to policies, portraying themselves as paragons of corporate responsibility, zealots that sacrifice to make up for the flaws in the system.

    This conversation, seemingly typical or mundane, underscores a deeper societal tendency: bonding through competitive allegiance to corporate structures. Such alliances, intense and short-lived, are rooted in bureaucratic fervor and often negate fundamental human values.

    Paradoxically, to create the human bond we are missing within corporate alignment, we announce and parade our commitment to inhumanity as a worthy attribute.

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    the urge to restore

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    1–2 minutes

    Recognize the overwhelming compulsion to get back to the way things were.

    This is not only “loss aversion” in a behavioral economic sense but a desire for orderliness: as a vase shatters, we are already cleaning it up.

    We not only restore order but brush the sin away from sight.

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    The paradox of Equality and Difference

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    1–2 minutes

    The Woke and DEI movements theoretically advocate for ‘equality through promoting difference.’ This seems paradoxical: in a system where each element is unique, these differences produce equivalence (if every part is unique/different, they are all equally valuable).

    However, this equivalence collapses under a uniform metric or standard, like productive efficiency or race.

    The consideration between equality and difference is a ‘coincidence of opposites,’ a paradox that indicates interdependence and mutual reliability. This means there is no inherent polarity or antagonism, so endorsing one over the other or both simultaneously produces contradictory relevance or dissonance.

    Intriguingly, as a system strives toward its ideal, it inadvertently intensifies its opposite: simultaneously attempting equality and diversity guarantees the opposite of difference and uniformity.

    This ongoing struggle fuels polarization but to no apparent end: the dichotomies are inherent. Thus, their total absence cannot be manifested, and by claiming alternate poles simultaneously, we merely flip contradictions as the goal is approached.

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    Burning itself: Excess materialism or idealism

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    1–2 minutes

    Observing reactions against our materialistic culture, with its perceived absence of values and overemphasis on self-centeredness, prompts a yearning for spirituality and transcendence.

    Ironically, the idealist aspirations often underpin myths that fuel conflict, powered by the machines and wealth of the materialists.

    It seems that excess must burn itself: too much idealism or materialism provokes its use, which tends towards its own destruction.

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    More technology to solve technology problems

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    1–2 minutes

    Being a distracted driver by using your cell phone is more dangerous than driving drunk.

    How did we reduce drunk driving? By increasing pre-driving pressure, social ostracization, and outrageous fines. The social component targeted people before they got in the car, crowd-sourcing concern as a form of communal policing.

    However, social pressure cannot alter our phone behavior once we are alone in our car: we feel autonomous and bored inside our sheet metal and glass bubbles hurtling down the highway, though we are amongst others.

    A reversion to heads-up awareness and concern for the safety of others (and yourself) seems unlikely.

    The only solution (it seems) is auto-driving vehicles (expensive) or cell phone blocking (unlikely), which will only put more money in the pockets of the companies that created the problem in the first place.

    From Matthew Crawford

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    The Modern Medieval

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    1–2 minutes

    The Enlightenment championed the democratization of knowledge, emancipating society from the information monopoly of the clergy. This heralded a new era of freedom.

    Yet, in our contemporary, information-saturated world, often basic knowledge (like a specific component’s dimensions or materiality) remains elusive. We’ve supplanted clerical gatekeepers (the human compendium) with intricate systems of knowledge (the digital table), bureaucratic formalities and complexities, and capitalist-driven reductive efficiency.

    These layers obscure direct access to information, ironically mirroring the medieval period’s hierarchical information control. Our ‘hypermodern’ society re-enacts the constrained knowledge dissemination of the medieval.

    {from Matthew Crawford}

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    Nihilism: All wood is potentially firewood

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    1–2 minutes

    An aspect of natural entropy is denied by our creative impulse: our construction, crafts, and myths expand and grow more complex. Surrounded by complex fabrications denying reality, there is a subversive pleasure in returning to materialistic reality.

    To resurface “the real” is oddly considered nihilistic, in part because it denies the abstract ideological prisons that drive so much behavior: the dreams society is built upon are more powerfully dominant than physical matter.

    Given the pervasive culture and economic underpinnings, perhaps the only way nihilism can exist is to become a structured corporation that burns its own money.

    Unfortunately, such sardonic insight is precisely the state of current reality, hence our reactive desire to burn the complexity down, reintroduce physicality as a return to humanity.