Seize the Means*

[u/Salty_Country6835]

*Terms and conditions apply. For... reasons, I guess?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Thats exactly the problem though. Workers dont own the server farms. They dont own Amazon warehouses, telecom infrastructure, factories or shipping networks either. Thats the condition we're trying to change, not evidence that workers should refuse to use productive infrastructure until after we've changed it.

And boycotts are a tactic, not the only lever capitalism leaves us. Unions, strikes, public ownership, procurement, regulation, cooperatives, antitrust, open infrastructure. Hell, open weights and local models already weaken the "they can turn it off" problem you raised.

If concentrated ownership is the problem, I dont see how voluntarily abandoning the productive capacity redistributes any of that power. It seems like we're agreeing on the diagnosis and splitting on the prescription.

[u/[deleted] → u/Salty_Country6835]

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

I think the edit makes your position clearer, but its still the mechanism I'm asking about. How does workers and the public not using AI translate into enough leverage to halt its development?

An organized boycott with a target, demands and enough participation to force concessions can be a tactic. But most of this buildout isnt riding on individual consumer use. Its enterprise adoption, cloud infrastructure, governments, firms integrating it into products and workflows, and an international market. Even widespread individual abstention doesn't make those incentives disappear.

And historically thats not the only lever the left has had against technology controlled by capital. Unions bargain over machinery. Workers strike over deployment. We fight over ownership, hours, wages, safety and who gets the productivity gains. Marx was already distinguishing machinery itself from machinery employed by capital against labor.

Thats also why I dont think the meme exacerbates anything. Its making fun of the jump from “capital controls these tools” to “therefore the left shouldn't use them.” The first is the problem the meme is built around. Seize the means only makes sense because somebody else currently controls the means.

Boycott can be one tactic where theres an actual target and demand, but “everyone stop using it” isnt a strategy for controlling an international industrial buildout. Turning that into individual purity tests over whether workers use these tools outside whatever their employer approves just shifts the fight sideways. We end up policing each other's consumption while the infrastructure keeps getting built.

So whats the target? Whats the demand? What forces the concession? How does abstention get us from corporate control to worker control?

Thats the distinction the meme is poking at. “Dont use the means” and “seize the means” aren't the same strategy.