I don’t see how it’s any different than other technology tbh. Most discussions of ethics in this context are committing some sort of scope error, where the implication is that any one individual’s choices in this regard have a meaningful impact. Either that or we’re talking about some fantasy where the working class has any amount of class consciousness and is able to act as an entity in its own class interest. I won’t fault anyone for avoiding unpleasant vibes, but on an individual level none of that is particularly Marxist.

Wrt the analysis, in addition to the great points already mentioned in this thread:

The explosion of the internet created a new sort of frontier with untapped resources and unenclosed commons. Billions of people passively and actively creating art and information and data points for decades, most of which freely given or taken by tech corporations. Part of the trick is that this stuff wasn’t really a resource at the time, not in the sense that it is now. The question “how can someone own my conversations, my habits, my preferences and tendencies and opinions and thoughts” mirrors “how can someone own land?”. A social transformation, a dialectical development, a de- and reterritorialization.

AI models require a tremendous amount of data to train. One of the LLM models, for example, needs about 70 years of input in order to learn a new language (as an aside, compare that to the ~1500 hours it might take a human). The end result is an incredibly useful and valuable machine, capital, imbued with a tremendous amount of dead labor.

The high barrier for entry means a further concentration of capital in every industry where AI can effectively be utilized (and isn’t just a gimmick). The AI-owning bourgeoisie are incentivized to heighten this barrier for entry, and this will happen in lockstep with how much doing so decreases their flow of cheap data compared to how much data they need. But the energy and tech cost is already high.

This abstract notion of “data value” is transforming into a concrete one, and with that comes the enclosure that’s characteristic of a property economy.

Now, this could be a lot more impactful than many online leftists seem willing to admit, but it’s still taking place in a highly abstracted place with tenuous ties to the material mechanisms and primary contradictions of society. Part of the difficulty in analyzing it comes from the spectacle nature of these abstract realms; they can replicate or imitate similar processes that happen in the material world, like enclosure and exploitation, but that doesn’t reveal what their mechanism in the actual material world is. Does the existence of an AI that can speak French change the flow of resources from Africa to Europe?

I think its impacts will closely align with the scopes it exists in, so more impactful within the abstractions it operates in, like the internet and media, than base material flows, where it’s mostly just a resource sink. From an international perspective, it’s more like a reorganization of the lord’s manor than an actual restructuring of the system at large. A change in how spoils of empire get divvied up is largely immaterial, in this scope.

As it consumes its abstract frontier, though, many people that subsist there might find themselves proletarianized (or “materialized”, forced out of the digital proletariat into the manual proletariat, echoing the historic flow from countryside to city). That’s where I find myself personally, with the work I’ve done for 10 years quickly disappearing.

Word around the office is you’ve got a little guy

That’s how libs feel about capitalism

Wouldn’t want to dilute their mediocrity with good writing

This reeks of volcel psyop

Any book recs on Vietnam?

The tweet is saying the same thing you are with a different framing.

From most people’s perspectives, things are not working as intended. A working class person might be inclined to say things are upside down or they live in a backwards world (I’ve heard this a lot).

A hundred people lose their jobs while their CEO gets a bonus, ten thousand people lose their homes while the banks get bailed out, ten million people starve while the world produces an overabundance of food. No normal empathetic person would call this rational.

The tweet effectively explains that while the world is irrational from any reasonable perspective, it’s not chaotic or unorganized, it’s this way for a reason, and that reason is to protect the institution of private property. This logic, this subjective valuation of property above all else, makes sense only from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, a minute fraction of people.

The state suppressing class war is one of many ways bourgeois subjectivity gets reproduced and enforced at the expense of working class subjectivity (a subjectivity so broad compared to the statistically miniscule bourgeoisie that it arguably verges on objective truth).

Yeah tbh. After all he did and at his age, let him rest.

Plus he could still be an advisor to oversee a smoother transition period.

Yeah that’s fair, my knowledge post WWII gets really fuzzy so I can’t confidently critique what followed.

It’s easy to claim things should have been done differently, in retrospect after the fall of the USSR. But it’s not very useful without careful examination.

Also given his age it seems like there should have been a better succession plan

Damn I never realized he lived to be 74.

Still died too soon but that’s a long life for his time/place/experiences.

Okilly Dokilly and Babymetal maybe?

Is that the instance filtering that out? Thats removed lol

What are you trying to say?

Lmao

I’ve heard it with varying degrees of the R sound. There’s a common shorthand “bougie” (BOO-zhee) that people often hear before learning the original term, so they’ll maintain the pronunciation into BOO-zhwa.

Sometimes the R is slightly swallowed so it sounds more like BOH-zhwa, maybe very light throat vocalization. Or people skip over it and it’s buh-ZHWA. Some commit fully for BOR-zhwa.

Universally seems to maintain (my non-native understanding of) the French “oi” and silent S.

I have yet to hear anyone pronounce it correctly: bor-gee-oice.

It’s late and I’m about to head to bed, but to quickly reply: this is ultimately just a categorical discussion, so if you feel ltv is a necessary quality to the essence of Marxism that’s fine, I just think the label can be used in plenty of ltv-agnostic ways. To me the useful essence of a label like that is to describe an intensity of associations that can be directed or used to direct energy effectively, rather than a strict categorical structure. There’s simply no context where I’ll dismiss or disassociate from a person or idea that doesn’t claim one facet of Marxism, in theory or in practise, due to a categorical claim.

You bring up some good points which I’ll engage with later if I remember.

Eh ltv isn’t really Marx’s and if it were it would be one of his many significant contributions to various fields. It’d still be reasonable to call yourself a Marxist if you ascribe to other parts of his framework, especially in specific academic contexts. And in revolutionary contexts I doubt most non-academic revolutionaries fully understand the mechanisms laid out in Capital, so it seems inconsequential really. Class analysis doesn’t inherently require ltv either.

I do think ltv makes more sense than modern models, but Marx was basically using bourgeois theory to critique itself, and arguably the same can be done using the more abstract modern models.

Lmao

Fireball 😈😈😈

Tankie is an empty signifier

That is to say, it’s a label that can be used to describe an array of different and conflicting ideas, values, and identities. Because of this it serves as an obfuscatory device rather than a communicative one. The sub-logic becomes tankie = bad, so if someone I don’t like = tankie, then person I don’t like = bad.

Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary. Most MLs aren’t particularly fond of Khrushchev.

It’s made a resurgence in this new, weird context because most of the terms used during the previous red scares lost their power through similar misuse. It’s become unfashionable to hate on leftism in progressive spaces, doing so using old terminology makes you sound like a fox news conservative. But you can do the same thing by calling it this instead.