Obsolescence or Resistance?

Could the mass loss of jobs to AI lead to a cognitarian insurrection?

In this newsletter, I sometimes rush through a constellation of ideas which I intend to develop fully at a future date. Certain ideas keep resurfacing, via an internal pulse or cyclical rotation. Each time they come back, I feel the same anxious impulse: To share and make something out of them. But I don’t know how to move forward from the ideas into a tangible project. I have this eerie feeling we are running out of time to evade catastrophe.

Capitalism was always innately unstable. As we have entered late or final stage Capitalism, or perhaps post-Capitalist “Technofeudalism,” the system is increasingly out of control. Back in the 19th Century, Karl Marx described what’s happening now:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Marx, back then, saw the central division in modern society between those who own property, collect rents, and control the means of production from everybody else: The proletariat or working class. Although he predicted the ecological crisis to some extent (he wrote about the “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature), I doubt he imagined it would become so severe, so quickly.

Marx hopefully anticipated a worldwide Communist revolution to unite the workers and emancipate humanity from Capitalism with its “false consciousness.” But this never happened. Communist revolutions in Russia and China were, in retrospect, ways for these innately despotic mass societies to make a brutal transition from Medieval feudalism to modern industrialization. The belief that Neoliberal Capitalism and despotism/authoritarianism were antithetical to each other has been proven false.

In fact, consumerism and corporate control mesh perfectly well with dictatorships, as China shows. You can have a modern, technological society with a totally disempowered, thought-controlled middle class, under near-complete surveillance — just as George Orwell predicted in 1984. Orwell wrote: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

Different sectors in the US fear two different pathways toward deepening totalitarian control: One is the Right Wing, Christian Nationalist path, which will be attempted if Trump wins the election. The Koch-funded Heritage Foundation has developed a 1,000 page action plan for Trump’s presidency that is absolutely harrowing — of course, we don’t know to what extent Americans will acquiesce to this. The other is the “progressive”/WEF / liberal technocratic path, which many people fear will become more pronounced (that is already here, to some extent, with “surveillance Capitalism”) if Biden wins the election.

Personally, I fear the first option to a much greater extent. But I understand why people fear and detest the second option. I am also deeply uncomfortable with it.