His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
Universities have been doing this since forever.
Consider that generative AI is a “thing”. That thing can be sold as a product to accrue capital, but that thing can also be given away freely. A socialist government may redistribute land so that every citizen has a plot, but that doesn’t erase history or the fact that the land was originally stolen from native inhabitants when it was colonized.
Capitalism’s backbone is theft. The middle-class is having a hissy-fit now that the forces of capitalism are turning inwards. My critique of Shoshana Zuboff’s book on surveillance-capitalism has been that it’s not a new form of capitalism at all. It’s just capitalism. Only those mechanisms are now being turned towards a previously ‘protected’ class and they really don’t like it when the leopards eat their faces.