A call to arms

Against the inexorable march of technology, against the invasion of slop, against the digital Leviathan

Everything and everyone, tainted by the regurgitated AI output. Every medium, every mode of human intentional activity, is taking on a certain uncanny, sickly pallor --

It’s a disease. Like gangrene of the social body. A pernicious infection corrupting everything and everyone it touches. And the slow-burning impact on culture is now starting to become manifest. The words, even the very thoughts of people are taking on an unreal character, like they’d been reduced to communicating by quoting ad copy and late-night infomercials.

The sense and meanings of words and symbols are not really our own anymore.

We don’t know them from within, never really get to properly taste them. Not lying in the grass of parks, reading Dostoyevsky and smoking secret cigarettes, trying to piece together the world from the fragmentary notions left behind from the struggles of forgotten generations.

The words, piling up like dry leaves, and burned for warmth and simple utility, do not as such resonate within the hearts of this generation. Searle’s Chinese room, the thought experiment illustrating how genuine understanding cannot be reduced to carrying out a rule-based function is somehow turned back on itself here. Everyone now a language box, simulating knowledge, mechanically translating incomprehensible signs into different ones, equally opaque to the understanding.

“I asked AI about psyllium husk cholesterol absorption, and it told me not to worry because the liver can just magically upregulate its sourcing of taurine from animal protein, so we should all shop at WalMart.”

Cookie-cutter thinking crowding out every ounce of human originality, stale insipid proprietary copies of insipid copies, world without end, suffocating everything resembling life and spirit.

Alienation, in other words.

In classical Marxism, the concept of alienation originally develops from the observation that workers in industrial societies are divorced, separated, from the fruits of their labor. That what we produce in complex and regimented industrial societies is not immediately for our own use, or for the use of our friends and families. Our work is rather translated into abstract currency that we in turn use to purchase goods and services from others, who also are similarly estranged from the fruits of their labor.

One key aspect of this transaction, when labor is transformed into money that we then use to purchase goods and services, is that whoever pays the worker for his or her labor is always able to skim a profit off the top of this exchange – and according to Marxist theory, this is how alienation, inherent in the abstracting relations of production, immediately translates into exploitation.

So instead of producing goods or services for myself and my immediate circle of living human beings and which are immediately used among ourselves, I receive an indirect compensation in the form of money for my work, but this compensation is always going to be less than the actual value of my productive work so that whoever pays me can make a profit.

The LLM is a technology for reproducing this alienated mode of production throughout the very substructure of human relationships.

Instead of typing out and sending me an e-mail, people now increasingly just prompt the AI to simulate an output, and pay for the “service” through advertising exposure or by providing surveillance data. The value of the generated message is significantly less than an actual, genuine communication and all of the complex relational benefits this could in principle entail for the parties involved. The approach is clearly also detrimental to the extent that such intangible goods are eroded in the long-term. And yet we pay for it.

This commandeering of surplus value is an inevitable aspect of the transaction. If I didn’t receive less compensation than the actual value of my work, or if I paid less than the value of the product, it would make no sense for the owner of capital to pay me for my labor or to sell me a product. And this exploitation is made possible precisely by divorcing or separating workers and their product by translating the output into money. You’re placing a medium of exchange between the worker and the actual product, which enables whoever owns the capital or the means of production to skim value off of the top, which is what Marxism considers exploitation.

Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and The Modern World, called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is Leviathan’s end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the cadences of a long-forgotten music or to the eternal silence of death without a morrow.

It will be said of the Europeans who carry the beast to the world’s last places of refuge and who thereby put a term on the beast’s existence that they know not what they do. Their ignorance of themselves, of others and of Earth is proverbial, but it does not altogether account for their behavior. The Europeans are zeks, administrative zeks and menial zeks, children and grandchildren of zeks. If some of them remember ancestors who were no zeks, none of them can imagine the world of those ancestors, a world that was not a labor camp, and what they cannot imagine they cannot see, even while looking at it. In this sense they are ignorant. But they know that they are incomplete, that something inside them is stunted or dead, and they resent the slightest suggestion that others possess what they lack. The resentment makes them strike fiercely at any who pretend to be more, for Europeans are great equalizers — Democrats thay will call themselves — and they are determined to universalize their own condition. In this sense they are not ignorant for they know perfectly well what they do and also why.

(Perlman. F (1983). Against His-Story. Against Leviathan.)

Alienation is a bit broader as a concept than this, however. It’s not only about the separation of the workers from the products of our labor, it’s also about the severing of the many complex human relationships that we need to function and thrive – and in developing this more nuanced notion of alienation, Marxism starts distancing itself from Thomas Hobbes’ more pessimistic view of the ancestral human society that was predominant in the culture of the mid 1800s, that life in the natural state is “nasty, poor, brutish and short”. This tacit reappraisal of organic (or deeply relationally situated) human societies is clearly seen in the more mature works of Marx, negatively in the analysis of commodity fetishism as a usurpation or perversion of their characteristic holistic goods (Das Kapital vol 3), and positively in how the end-state of communism conceptually develops as emphasizing complexly situated human needs (Critique of the Gotha Programme).

So alienation, in the Marxist analysis, referred not only to estrangement from the output of our labor that gets transformed into abstract money instead of being enjoyed among friends and family directly – alienation also occurred among human beings, in interpersonal relations, when these abstract and indirect relations of production replaced those of actual human communities, and displaced the existentially meaningful rootedness of traditional societies.

But the immediate economic alienation, that of the workers from the fruits of their labor, was the most obvious example, and one that could be clearly and empirically verified in the conditions of industrial production at the time.

When Marx and Engels were developing their theories in London in the mid-1800s, the working conditions provided ample evidence that the relations of production were inherently exploitative. So you had 10-year old kids working in factories for 12 hours per day, and they would take home maybe $300 monthly in terms of today’s purchasing power. And this of course meant that they could barely survive on this salary – try to live off of three hundred dollars per month in the US today, and you’ll be pretty hard pressed to make it work.

And what really was provocative in the eyes of the early Marxists was that the value generated by this child’s labour would actually be around ten times higher than what they were paid. Their productive output would amount to something like $3000 per month, almost all of which was pocketed by whoever owned the factory, in other words, by the owner of capital and the means of production.

A friend of mine recently wrote a post noting the radical “sloppification” of public discourse, of all of the information that populates our “digital feeds”, and how the inherently irrational simulations of inferential conclusions that inhere in the style of LLM output likely will impact the modes, forms and very capacity of thought of the general public habitually exposed to them.

This is affected by a now-emerging separation between human beings and symbolic language. This separation is analogical to the separation of the worker from the productive output of their labor in the analysis of classical Marxism, but significantly more radical. Much more pernicious.

Mind you, Marxism’s diagnosis was severe enough – alienation was tantamount to estrangement from one’s own community, creative potential, and even considered to diminish the human being’s complex nature as such. But there’s now a digital wedge being driven in between human beings and reflexive symbolic thought itself, between ourselves and our rational consciousness, that threatens to blunt or even nullify the single-most crucial distinguishing feature of humanity.

“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thought crime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’”

(Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Sapir-Whorf. We don’t have to buy into the more radical variants of the reconstructed hypothesis to see that the basic observations on which it rests are sound. Experience is structured in and through language; experience of the uniquely human sort subsists in symbolic reflection and expression. And this is precisely where our current historical moment has produced a break which is widening at an increasingly rapid pace.

We can’t trust the digital infosphere. At least since covid and its infected mediatized polarization, everyone knows on some primal level, that the spectacle, the media environment, is essentially unreal. The process of displacing rational discourse with the mediatic manipulation of sub-rational drives obviously began about a century earlier, but now, in a significant sense, the spell has been broken, and a sense of profound unreliability is now part and parcel of the popular experience of “media consumption”.

This enters into the manufactured process of political polarization, and gets projected onto the opposite team as a coping response to the massive cognitive dissonance this produced, so that we rationalize the situation as the out-group being responsible for the systemic unreliability. But this in turn erodes inter-group trust even further, reproducing a kind of epistemic uncanniness as a baseline condition of the information flow.

This uncanniness gets between ourselves and language-meaning. Before we can assess the content, the meaning of what is being communicated to us, it now has to be mediated by the abstract currency of social power. The meaning of propositions are translated into a medium of exchange that is used to determine their social legitimacy, and so statements are first and foremost evaluated in terms of their status-signaling.

Again, this makes perfect sense due to the eroding effects of a radical sense of unreliability – if communications cannot be trusted as meaningful truth-claims about the world, the most obvious fallback is to evaluate them in terms of how they associate with the status hierarchy of our societies. While this dimension was always an aspect of human discourse, it’s now being inflated to the exclusion of coherent propositional meaning.

“‘The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.”

(Nineteen Eighty-Four)

The proliferation of AI-generated output radically deepens this sense of uncanniness, of the unreality of the distributed information. The pernicious slop normalizes symbols, imagery and language that are inherently false, that are several steps removed from the real world around us.

So it’s now not just that we can’t trust the statements of online talking heads and the biased editorials of the mainstream newspapers – in this situation, we’re not even dealing with actual propositional statements anymore. The material we’re exposed to increasingly consists of content that convincingly simulates meaning, yet which is actually devoid of it.

Like the smile of a corpse.

This is the character of the machinery to which we’re outsourcing our ability to imagine, reflect, create and communicate. Everything convenient, easy, weakening, swamp-like, invading your orifices with stagnant digital slop. Exploitation running rampant, inherent in this novel, end-stage separation of human beings from their very thoughts, from their command of language, allowing hitherto unimaginable depths of the extraction of surplus value, but crucially also an entirely different level of cognitive control, predictive programming and the manufacturing of consent.

Experience structured in and through language. Experience subsisting in language.

(My students now, almost unanimously, find poetry to be nonsense.)

It will not just be diminished. It will finally cease to be human.

The Last Love Poem

would have in it
a mother, a child
in a cellar,
hiding as the sky began its falling.

(Look what’s left
of the place where they were hiding:
a diary, a scrap of bread, a toy.)

And then, very softly, as the bootsteps came,
a mother lifting water
to the child’s lips

saying your father was like soft rain in my orange trees.
Never forget you were made in wild joy.

(Joseph Fasano)

From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself. Being above all else a war engine, the beast is most likely to perish once and for all in a cataclysmic suicidal war, in which case Ahriman would permanently extinguish the light of Ahura Mazda.

People waste their lives when they plead with Ahriman to desist from extinguishing the light, for such a deed would be Ahriman’s final triumph over Ahura Mazda, and the pleaders might learn too late that they are the ones who put the idea into the monster’s head.

Leviathan is turning into Narcissus, admiring its own synthetic image in its own synthetic pond, enraptured by its spectacle of itself.

It is a good time for people to let go of its sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, for they are already being ejected from its pretty polis.

In ancient Anatolia people danced on the earth-covered ruins of the Hittite Leviathan and built their lodges with stones which contained the records of the vanished empire’s great deeds.

The cycle has come round again.

(Perlman. F (1983). Against His-Story. Against Leviathan.)