cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4742235

Democratization of Capitalist Values

Democratization is a word often used with technological advancement and the proliferation of open-source software. Even here, the platform under which this discussion is unfolding, we are participating in a form of “democratization” of the means of “communication”. This process of “democratization” is often one framed as a kind of universal or near universal access for the masses to engage in building and protecting their own means of communication. I’ve talked at length in the past about the nature of the federated, decentralized, communications movement. One of the striking aspects of this movement is how much of the shape and structure this democratization of communication shares with the undemocratic and corporate owned means of communication. Despite being presented with the underlying protocols necessary to create a communication experience that fosters true community, the choice is made instead to take the shape and structure of centralized, corporate owned speech and community platforms and “democratize” them, without considering the social relations engendered by the platforms.

As Marxists, this phenomenon isn’t something that should seem strange to us, and we should be able to identify this phenomenon in other instances of “democratization”. This phenomenon is what sits at the heart of Marxist analysis, and it is the relationship between the Mode of Production and the Super Structure of society. These “democratized” platforms mirror their centralized sisters, and are imbued with the very same capitalist values, in an environment that stands in conflict with those very same values. If this means of democratization of online community and communication was to be truly democratic, it would be a system that requires the least amount of technical knowledge and resources. However, those operators that sit at the top of each of these hosted systems exist higher on the class divide because they must operate a system designed to work at scale, with a network effect at the heart of its design. This is how you end up with the contradictions that lay under each of these systems. Mastodon.org is the most used instance, and its operators have a vested interest in maintaining that position, as it allows them and their organization to maintain control over the underlying structure of Mastodon. Matrix.org is the most used instance for its system for extremely similar reasons. Bluesky has structured itself in such a way that sits it on the central throne of its implementation. They have all obfuscated the centralization of power by covering their thrown with the cloak of “democratization”. Have these systems allowed the fostering of communities that otherwise drown in the sea of capitalist online social organizing? There is no doubt. Do they require significant organizational effort and resources to maintain? Absolutely. Are they still subject to a central, technocratic authority, driven by the same motivations as their sister systems? Yes, they are.

This brings me to AI, and it’s current implementation and design, and it’s underlying motivations and desires. These systems suffer from the same issues that this very platform suffer from, which is, that they are stained with the values of capital at their heart, and they are in no means a technology that is “neutral” in its design or its implementation. It is foolish to say that “Marxists have never opposed technological progress in principle”, in that this statement also handwaves away the critical view of technology in the Marxist tradition. Marx spends more than 150 pages—A tome in its own right—on the subject of technology and technological advancement under Capitalism in Volume 1 of Capital. Wherein he outlines how the worker becomes subjugated to the machine, and I find that this quote from Marx drives home my position, and I think the position of others regarding the use of AI in its current formation (emphasis mine).

The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.

— Capital Volume 1, Production of Relative Surplus Value\Machinery and Modern Industry\Section 4: The Factory

What is it, at the core of both textual and graphical AI generation, that is being democratized? What has the capitalist sought to automate in its pursuit of Large Language Model research and development? It is the democratization of skill. It is the alienation of the Artist from the labor of producing art. As such, it does not matter that this technology has become “democratized” via open-source channels because at the heart of the technology, it’s intention and design, it’s implementation and commodification, lay the alienation of the artist from the process of creating art. It is not the “democratization” of “creativity”. There are scores of artists throughout our history whose art is regarded as creative despite its simplicity in both execution and level of required skill.

One such artist who comes to mind is Jackson Pollock, an artist who is synonymous with paint splattering and a major contributor to the abstract expressionist movement. His aesthetic has been described as a “joke” and void of “political, aesthetic, and moral” value, used as a means of denigrating the practice of producing art. Yet, it is like you describe in your own words, “Creativity is not an inherent quality of tools — it is the product of human intention”. One of the obvious things that these generative models exhibit is a clear and distinct lack of intention. I believe that this lack of “human intention” is explicitly what drives people’s repulsion from the end product of generative art. It also becomes “a sort of torture” under which the artist becomes employed by the machine. There are endless sources of artists whose roles as creators have been reduced to that of Generative Blemish Control Agents, cleaning up the odd, strange, and unintentioned aspects of the AI process.

Capitalist Mimicry and The Man In The Mirror

One thing often sighted as a mark in favor of AI is the emergence of Deepseek onto the market as a direct competitor to leading US-based AI Models. Its emergence was a massive and disruptive debut, slicing nearly $2-trillion in market cap off the US Tech Sector in a mater of days. This explosive out of the gate performance was not the result of any new ideologically driven reorientation in the nature and goal of generative AI modeling philosophy, but instead of the refinement of the training processes to meet the restrictive conditions created by embargos on western AI processing technology in China.

Deepseek has been hailed as what can be achieved under the “Socialist Model” of production, but I’m more willing to argue that this isn’t as true as we wish to believe. China is a vibrant and powerful market economy, one that is governed and controlled by a technocratic party who have a profound understanding of market forces. However, their market economy is not anymore or less susceptible to the whims of capital desires than any other market. One prime example recently was the speculative nature of their housing market, which the state is resolving through a slow deflation of the sector and seizure of assets, among other measures. I think it is safe to argue that much of the demands of the Chinese market economy are forged by the demands of external Capitalist desires. As the worlds forge, the heart of production in the global economy, their market must meet the demands of external capitalist forces. It should be remembered here, that the market economy of China operates within a cage, with no political influence on the state, but that does not make it immune to the demands and desires of Capitalists at the helm of states abroad.

Yes. Deepseek is a tool set released in an open-source way. Yes, Deepseek is a tool set that one can use at a much cheaper rate than competitors in the market, or roll your own hosting infrastructure for. However, what is the tool set exactly, what are its goals, who does it benefit, and who does it work against? The incredible innovation under the “Socialist model” still performs the same desired processes of alienation that capitalists in the west are searching for, just at a far cheaper cost. This demand is one of geopolitical economy, where using free trade principles, Deepseek intends to drive demand away from US-based solutions and into its coffers in China. The competition created by Deepseek has ignited several protectionist practices by the US to save its most important driver of growth in its economy, the tech sector. The new-found efficiency of Deepseek threatens not just the AI sector inside of tech, but the growing connective tissue sprung up around the sector. With the bloated and wasteful implementation of Open AI’s models, it gave rise to growing demand for power generation, data centers, and cooling solutions, all of which lost large when Deepseek arrived. So at its heart, it has not changed what AI does for people, only how expensive AI is for capitalists in year-to-year operations. What good is this open-source tool if what is being open sourced are the same demands and desires of the capitalist class?

Reflected in the production of Deepseek is the American Capitalist, they stand as the man in the mirror, and the market economy of China as doing what a market economy does: Compete for territory in hopes of driving out competition, to become a monopoly agent within the space. This monopolization process can still be something in which you distribute through an open-source means. Just as in my example above, of the social media platforms democratizing the social relations of capitalist communal spaces, so too is Deepseek democratizing the alienation of artists and writers from their labor.

They are not democratizing the process of Artists and Laborers training their own models to perform specific and desired repetitive tasks as part of their own labor process in any form. They hold all the keys because even though they were able to slice the head from the generative snake that is the US AI Market, it still cost them several million dollars to do so, and their clear goal is to replace that snake.

A Renaissance Man Made of Metal

Much in the same way that the peasants of the past lost access to the commons and were forced into the factories under this new, capitalist organization of the economy, the artist has been undergoing a similar process. However, instead of toiling away on their plots of land in common, giving up a tenth of their yield each year to their lord, and providing a sum of their hourly labor to work the fields at the manor, the Artist historically worked at the behest of a Patron. The high watermark for this organization of labor was the Renaissance period. Here, names we all know and recognize, such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli were paid by their Patron Lords or at times the popes of Rome to hone their craft and in exchange paint great works for their benefactors.

As time passed, and the world industrialized, the system of Patronage faded and gave way to the Art Market, where artists could sell their creative output directly to galleries and individuals. With the rise of visual entertainment, and our modern entertainment industry, most artists’ primary income stems from the wage labor they provide to the corporation to which they are employed. They require significant training, years and decades of practice and development. The reproduction of their labor has always been a hard nut to crack, until very recently. Some advancements in mediums shifted the demand for different disciplines, 2D animators found themselves washed on the shores of the 3D landscape, wages and benefits depleted, back on the bottom rung learning a new craft after decades of momentum via unionization in the 2D space. The transition from 2D to 3D in animation is a good case study in the process of proletarianization, very akin to the drive to teach students to code decades later in a push for the STEM sector. Now, both of these sectors of laborers are under threat from the Metal Renaissance Man, who operates under the patronage of his corporate rulers, producing works at their whim, and at the whim of others, for a profit. This Mechanical Michelangelo has the potential to become the primary source of artistic and—in the case of code—logical expression, and the artists and coders who trained him become his subordinates. Cleaning up the mistakes, and hiding the rogue sixth finger and toe as needed.

Long gone are the days of Patronage, and soon too long gone will be the days of laboring for a wage to produce art. We have to, as revolutionary Marxists, recognize that this contradiction is one that presents to artists, as laborers, the end of their practice, not the beginning or enhancement of that practice. It is this mimicry that the current technological solutions participate in that strikes at the heart of the artists’ issue. Hired for their talent, then, used to train the machine with which they will be replaced, or reduced. Thus limiting the economic viability of the craft for a large portion of the artistic population. The only other avenue for sustainability is the Art Market, which has long been a trade backed by the laundering of dark money and the sound of a roulette wheel. A place where “meritocracy” rules with an iron fist. It is not enough for us to look at the mechanical productive force that generative AI represents, and brush it aside as simply the wheels of progress turning. To do so is to alienate a large section of the working class, a class whose industry constitutes the same percentage of GDP as sectors like Agriculture.

I have no issue with the underlying algorithm, the attention-based training, that sits at the center of this technology. It has done some incredible things for science, where a focused and specialized use of the technology is applied. Under an organization of the economy, void of capitalist desires and the aims to alienate workers from their labor, these algorithms could be utilized in many ways. Undoubtably, organizations of ones like the USSR’s Artist Unions would be central in the planning and development of such technological advancement of generative AI technology under Socialism. However, every attempt to restrict and manage the use of generative AI today, is simply an effort to prolong the full proletarianization process of the arts. Embracing it now only signals your alliance to that process.