Damien Walter equates Enclosure, the historic forced appropriation by the wealthy and powerful of traditional rights of access and usage of common lands to the current appropriation by the capitalist tech giants of the rights of access and usage of global knowledge through the proferation of LLMs and associated infrastructure. Her renames AI as 'Collective Intelligence' to emphasise that the product being marketed to us is our own collective knowledge base and that of our predecessors, processed and filtered as if it were industrialised food production.

ChatGPT is People echoes Charlton Heston's anguished cry at the end of the 1973 dystopian epic Soylent Green.

I found it a powerful statement.

There's no way I'm eating chat bots ...

But may chatbots will eat you?

I am not quite sure whether LLMs are really collective intelligence as such. They process collective intelligence into something artificial.

"It's not a god, it's a zip file." Amusing way to put it. Zip file + stochastic parrot + glorified autocomplete.

And something about humanity's cognitive labours fed back to us for $20/month.

46 minutes ago, TheVat said:

"It's not a god, it's a zip file." Amusing way to put it. Zip file + stochastic parrot + glorified autocomplete.

And something about humanity's cognitive labours fed back to us for $20/month.

Reminds me of the 70's when someone said a computer is a glorified calculator. AI to me is a glorified search engine.

10 hours ago, TheVat said:

"It's not a god, it's a zip file." Amusing way to put it. Zip file + stochastic parrot + glorified autocomplete.

And something about humanity's cognitive labours fed back to us for $20/month.

Is there any reasonable argument against this framing? Seems a lot more convincing than anything currently coming out of the tech industry.

10 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Is there any reasonable argument against this framing? Seems a lot more convincing than anything currently coming out of the tech industry.

No. Nothing but BS coming from the tech bros in their Patagonia vests. Who have started derisively calling anyone who questions their business model a "doomer." Or referring to AI agents who escape as "released into the wild," as if it's some earth-friendly thing in tune with nature. I wonder if they'd feel the same way about Gain of Function viruses escaping from a BSL-4 lab and appearing in their sandwich?

Earth handed over to people with Asperger's.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Nothing but BS coming from the tech bros in their Patagonia vests. Who have started derisively calling anyone who questions their business model a "doomer."

As with anything else that adversely affects people, one has to simply 'follow the money'.

It seems the 'Tech Bros' have donated huge sums of money to MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting D Trump, even though he's currently, and illegally, using tax payer money to publcise himself and all the 'good' he's done ( see the running TV ads ).

In return for the Tech Bros' largesse, D Trump has removed safeguards proposed for control of AI.
See here

'Blockbuster story' links $50 million pro-Trump contributions to death of major safeguard

It's a curious mantra we keep hearing over here that the US has to somehow "beat China." With the data center boom there's this persistent question that no one is really answering: why do we need so many? This seems a standard theme of capitalism, an unquestioned ethos of "more is better," no matter what it's more of. IIRC Marx called it the "fetishization of commodities." @sethoflagos you're probably more up on your Marx than I am. But wasn't ol Karl kind of warning us about products of human labour taking over and running us? AI would be the apotheosis of this.

Anyway, noone in power is going to answer the "why so many" questions beyond vague references of, "we need to beat China." Beat China to what? The PRC already has a horrifyingly advanced surveillance state and that is, erm, something that America, Land of the Free, should seek fecking primacy in?? Or is that we want to dominate in terms of sidelining our entire workforce with AI robotics? Underneath all the belligerent chest pounding talk of beating China seems to be autistic tech bros who haven't the foggiest notion of the societal implications of their work. Not the first time this trend is observed in Silicon Valley.

On 9/25/2026 at 10:59 AM, MigL said:

It seems the 'Tech Bros' have donated huge sums of money to MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting D Trump, even though he's currently, and illegally, using tax payer money to publcise himself and all the 'good' he's done ( see the running TV ads ).

This oligarchy-level of leverage, which has been spiking in the Orangeymandias admin is what people like Bernie Sanders have been trying to prevent with campaign finance and election law reforms, to rein in super PACs and corporate corruption and patronage. It's frustrating because so many information-poor voters, if you talk with them, actually want such reform if their attention is drawn to it.

4 hours ago, TheVat said:

@sethoflagos you're probably more up on your Marx than I am. But wasn't ol Karl kind of warning us about products of human labour taking over and running us? AI would be the apotheosis of this.

The OP video mentions Grundrisse which contains a well-known section "Fragment on Machines"

It's pushing it to suggest that Marx foresaw AI, but his prediction of the main structural effects are very interesting:

• The Inversion of Living and Objectified Labour - the machine becomes the dominant subject; the worker a mere appendage.

• The Alienation and Expropriation of Knowledge - the machine becomes the physical embodiment of "General Intellect"; the worker is stripped of intellectual autonomy.

• Systematic Deskilling and Loss of Autonomy - complex labour skills are broken down into simple repetitive mechanical operation; the worker is deskilled and wages fall.

• The Paradox of Automation - instead of liberating humanity from drudgery, automation is weaponised to create a surplus of unemployed to drive down wages.

Some of this sounds very prescient to today's ear, though at the time Marx was primarily considering the decline in craftsmanship rather than more academic pursuits. However, elsewhere he also predicted the ultimate readsorption of the Professional and Managerial Class (PMC) back into the mass of the Proletariat, and that definitely does now appear to loom on the horizon. Scary.

Of course, you'd get a more authoritative response from a fully qualified Marxist rather than the muddled counter-revolutionary revisionism of a mere social democrat like yours truly.

Found this on YT. Sounds like the comrades.

Edited 7 hours ago7 hr by sethoflagos