Autothoughts

HAL in ‘2001’ was a scary robot because he was sweetly-spoken and seemed passive-aggressive — and he had total control of the ship. Dystopic sci-fi loves robots with personality; especially baddie robots.

But robots without personality may be worse. It seems that Zarah Sultana MP just got blocked by an algorithm from raising her issues, with only a bland all-purpose message saying why.

Cèdric Durand points out in Techno-féudalisme (2020) that Marx believed untrammelled capitalism would release our personalities. What if it doesn’t?

What the accelerationists latched onto was Marx’s huge enthusiasm for the revolutionising achievements of the bourgeoisie. As very strict classical Marxists, they ended up by looking like neoliberals, who believed any reformist party could only grunge up the gears that would grind out the future if only we let the gears alone. Capitalism would destroy itself and with the superabundance of resources it had created, we could enjoy a non-growth, green, future communist society. Loads of stuff, and, bags of personality. Yay.

But do people during COVID and lockdown and the march on Capitol Hill look like a proletariat who achieve that? Do they seem like people who know what to do with freedom once they get it? Are they not in fact quite happy with the predicted consumer outcomes which algorithms carve out for them? Are they thinking for themselves about how to ‘disrupt’? They seem a world away from Trotskyite print workers clued up on diamat. Durand describes some of ‘Das Digital’ in his book and draws attention to the fact that this ultra-automatisation is obliterating the need for, and the habit of, human decision.

We can take it as read, once we go down the road of this kind of theory, that any cabinet of politicians will be ‘managing committee for the affairs of the bourgeoisie’, and that all value will be concentrated in the hands of a few who live quite outside politics, beyond political reach. Even if they do not take the decisions, all decisions will be taken by reference to these few. Delight greeted Trump’s de-Twittering but all the same, a private company now dictates what is said because ‘public’ space is not commons: so far, so Marxist. The problem for the Marxist theory is different.

That any take-over class has also been trained out of judgments is the problem for the Marxist theory; it’s not just their elected politicians who do not know how to act. Systems in companies are so integrated that the tiny number of employees who are expensive because they have real skill are employed only to make software that automates everyone else; then robotics can surpass humans in almost any task which it makes routine. Either people do not work, or they work by the book. They get on their bikes to look for work, but they check what everyone else is doing before they can act. They are better than that, but everything is against them — and the second-guessing and back-covering gets to be a habit. They are deratiocinated as well as deracinated.

Are those the people whom Engels and Marx jokingly told one another would write in the morning and fish in the afternoon, once all their material wants were supplied? Smart-demand warehouses and smart shops through an internet of things can arrange purchases for them, responding to the footfall they sense. Algorithms can nudge their choices and blockchain can guarantee promptitude. It means that consumer choice, which should be driving change, is satisfied in its wants, because its wants are for things. UBI will fill in any gaps. It means that people have forgotten the difference between getting a few things and retaining control of the ways things are done.

The idea in Marx was that the proletariat would be next in line up the revolutionary escalator. They would achieve class integrity as the bourgeoisie had done. Syndicalist Marxists believed that trade unions would be that training ground; they would prove themselves the workers’ medial vehicle for change as the freemasons’ lodge or the salon had been the lawyers’. The very notion that digital innovation would hollow out the human element so completely in the vanguard class too did not and possibly could not have occurred to Marx. Digital underemployed the masses and made them lumpen before they had their chance to shine and really, Marx could not have seen that coming.

So even if overcapacity means that the whole thing does come tumbling down, there may be no movement which rebuilds in the chaos; and if the whole thing does not fall in, it will be because the few in real, non-political power have maintained their legal right to the bits of knowledge that now form a ‘closed ecosystem’ containing everyone else. Durand argues that ‘creative destruction’ doesn’t work anymore, when every new company set up fails to be unique, and uses the same systems from which tech giants draw rent. It may be that public sector employment and service industries cannot provide enough consumer fuel to keep the wheels turning this time but, collapse or no collapse: decades of training instead of education in schools have not got us ready. The disappointment of ‘online learning’ has revealed the true character of what is on offer inside the classroom as well, but that offer has also stopped us wondering about what this might mean.

That is why the question is being raised, so far without any answer, how Leftists could harness the ‘precariat’ into one group; but it is also why we do not want HAL in ‘2001’ to end up having more personality than we do.

Zarah Sultana link here.