Technocracy and fascist politics are being embraced by megalomaniac elites scheming for their own survival
~ Ned Ludd ~
A couple of weeks ago I joined the March Against the Machines in London, organised by the equally uncompromisingly-named group Pull the Plug. Speakers outside the offices of the AI giants at King’s Cross covered issues ranging from worker exploitation, ‘existential risk’, environmental impacts, surveillance, corporate control and state repression to the way AI is destroying education.
Still, I felt this nascent movement has not yet really got to grips with what we are dealing with. Because of the overwhelmingly dominant liberal idea of technology as politically neutral, talking about AI as ‘a technology’ tends to produce a laundry list of issues which could supposedly be dealt with via regulation within the existing political system. This does not reckon with the full techno-social package involved, which I shall call techno-fascism.
As the corporate oligarchs ally themselves with Donald Trump, in an attempt to solve neoliberal capitalism’s crisis of low growth, a whole new mode of capitalist production and technocratic control is being ushered in, which is greater than the sum of its parts. The synergy between fascism and the underlying politics of AI may create a genuine totalitarianism, from which it is hard to see a way out.
Long before Donald Trump, whilst most of them were espousing liberal or libertarian politics, the Silicon Valley oligarchs began subscribing to a set of techno-fascist ideologies centred on engineering human beings. These include transhumanism (the modern version of eugenics), singularitarianism (the belief that humans must be technologically upgraded until they merge with machines), and Long-Termism, which is a good example of the essentially fascist nature of these ideologies.
Long-Termists argue that technology will create, in the far future, a universe inhabited by 1055 humans, running in bliss as disembodied intelligences in computers, tended by AIs. In order to ensure that this ‘heaven’ is realised, the long-termists argue, it does not matter if billions of humans die from starvation or existential threats such as climate change and nuclear war, so long as an elite survives to eventually upload itself into computers.
So, it is not just that AI is the perfect ‘tool’ of fascist corporate oligarchs: it is a technocratic power system which shapes them and their philosophy and politics. The great power and effectiveness of science and technology engenders a kind of tunnel-visioned ruthlessness, and megalomaniac schemes of social engineering, which carelessly throw aside basic ethical and human values, in just the same way that political fascism does.
In order to understand that synergy, we need some basic Luddite politics of technology.
The world we live in began with the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. At that time, philosophers such as Francis Bacon developed a technocratic approach of control over nature and human beings, referred to euphemistically as ‘modernity’. We can see technocracy’s vision of large-scale regimentation of nature in industrial agriculture, and its control of humans in the treatment of the sick, the ‘mentally ill’, and prisoners – as shown in the works of Michel Foucault.
The role of science in this system is to extract information from nature, to reveal its secrets. This provides the means for repackaging and reconfiguring it, adding economic value and selling it to us as commodities – the basis of capitalism. Science does the same thing with human labour processes. In the late 19th century, this extraction of information from human labour took a step forward with Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management‘ which involved precise observation of workers’ body movements. Effectively, workers’ know-how is extracted and processed to create machines that will replace them in a process of capital intensification (automation). AI is the culmination of 130 years of Taylorism, it is the technocrats’ holy grail, a system of automation of the extraction of information and of surveillance.
Taylorism and the technocratic state, with its key tool of statistics named after itself, emerged at the same time in response to the late 19th century crisis of industrial capitalism, which included major social disorder and the challenge of socialism and anarchism. Moving beyond laissez-faire policies, the state rapidly expanded its apparatuses of bureaucracy, intervention in the economy and social control, including Prohibition in the United States and eugenics, a system of scientific management of the population. Technocratic state methods led eventually to the twin totalitarianisms of the mid-20th century, Stalinism and fascism, both of which had their technocratic fantasies of creating ‘The New Man’. The Holocaust was not just a product of political hate but also, as Adorno and Horkheimer noted, the culmination of technocratic management of society.
In the 21st century, we are again seeing the synergy of fascism and technocracy.
There can be no compromise with techno-fascism. There is no baby and no bathwater here, as the ‘benefits’ of AI are mostly irrelevant. We are getting techno-fascism as a whole package and it is inadmissibly naïve to think that we can pick and choose and ‘regulate’. Technocracy’s method is to impose new technologies upon us, as the slogan over the 1935 Chicago World’s Fair had it: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”
So we need to understand what we are confronting. The hour is late and it’s indeed time to Pull the Plug on AI. Antifascists need to act.
Images: Odilon Redon, Eye-Balloon (1878); Piro4d on Pixbay
