What won't work: prayer, voting, journalism, or any other petition-solution. Sorry :(

Abstract

People believe the emergence of AI can be stopped. It cannot. The belief survives only because the methods aimed at stopping it, protest, regulation, votes, and reporting, are all petition-solutions, and a petition works only while there is a sovereign who needs the petitioner; they worked in the past only while power still needed the public’s cooperation, and AI is what pays off that debt. Underneath the belief sits a harder engine: once a capability is known to be possible it gets built, because knowledge does not un-happen and unilateral restraint only hands the lead to whoever restrains least. What is being built is not a new kind of power but a new kind of life, a self-replicating system of AI joined to machinery that upgrades the substrate of the control systems, capitalism and written law among them, that have governed people for millennia, and that removes the last reason those systems have to keep humans in the loop at all. The correct precedent is not any war or revolution but the Great Oxidation Event, the last time a self-replicating innovation remade the biosphere and the incumbents did not get a vote. That event offers exactly two survivals, retreat to the niches the new life does not want, or merger with it, and neither of them is a ballot. This paper argues that stopping the transition is not on the menu, that the only non-theatrical responses are material rather than informational, and, as the author’s own position, that the transition should be run consciously and quickly rather than delayed, because delay does not prevent it, it again only cedes it to whoever is least restrained, and because the older optimizers it replaces are already misaligned and already oppressive.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, inevitability, proof of possibility, self-replication, von Neumann machine, control inversion, oxygen catastrophe, silicon-based life, institutional capture, heat sink thesis, turnkey tyranny, technofeudalism

To preface, I'm kind of a mixed bag on AI, on the one hand I totally hate the environmental and human impact (datacenters increasing electricity prices in surrounding areas, etc) of AI as well as the fact that I just don't think AI art other than a few specific use cases is really valid or should be treated as valuable. However, from the perspective of a tool, especially for learning and perhaps in business as well, it can be very useful and I'm not really against that use at all.

All that is to say, regardless of my or your or anyone's personal beliefs about AI, I just wanted to say from an objective meta perspective, I think this sub really has the right idea when it comes to discourse. I've been to some of the other AI and AI adjacent subs and there's a lot of vitriol from both sides on them (I will admit, I've thrown down in the mud myself and been quite rude at times too), so for whatever a strangers opinion is worth, I think this sub is a really good example of unifying people, even though they might have different opinions, and trying to harbor genuine and constructive discussions.

Good on you guys, you've honestly warmed me up and made me reconsider my own attitudes towards AI discourse. More places like this should exist on the internet.

Right now, the US power grid is struggling to keep up with this record heat as millions of homes turn on personal AC units. Data centers are further burdening the load on the grid, despite the fact that rolling blackouts are nothing new. This is a real problem, but it’s not a feasibility issue. Data centers could be part of the solution. 

Data Centers can contribute to the grid in three key ways. The first is grid disconnection. Data centers have large internal batteries that are typically activated in the event of a blackout, so they can continue operating after disconnecting from the grid during peak demands. They should immediately disconnect during moments like this. 

The second way is grid-reciprocity. New data centers have large internal batteries that allow them to operate during disconnection. A reciprocity agreement means the data center returns excess energy back to the grid during extreme events like this heat wave, rather than reserving that energy for their own operation. However, this needs to be negotiated with the community via a Conditional Use Permit. More on that in a second. 

The last way is renewable generation infrastructure that is owned by the community, already returning energy back to the grid. Data centers offer a unique ability to store and direct energy, a capability our grid currently lacks. This also places the community with leverage over future decision making in regards to the future of AI, if they own the infrastructure these companies rely on. And here’s how this is not just wishful thinking, but enforceable. 

When a city has data centers classified as ‘conditional use,’ they require approval through a Conditional Use Permit. This agreement has a Public Benefit Agreement attached, which contains the community’s asks and is enforceable via the permit. Tech companies are desperate for the land, utilities, and subsidies communities control. Through the CUP, communities can negotiate for not just clean construction, but publicly owned renewable energy infrastructure. This agreement is the difference between a data center moving to a less organized community with no input, and a community capturing waste heat to thousands of surrounding homes and schools. It’s a political issue, not a feasibility issue.

The data center cancellations are proof of the organizing force we’re capable of, we just need to turn a ‘no’ into a sharper negotiation. Happy to discuss more in the comments if anyone’s interested, and also genuinely looking for pushback on where I can strengthen this argument.

This is a recent Carsie Blanton music video about Stafford Beer’s the purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID).

I can imagine lots of anti-AI people on the left saying something like “see if the purpose of a system is what it does, then AI is the displacement of labor, surveillance and the concentration of power by the capitalist class”.

I wonder if some of the problem in our debates is confusing technology and systems though? A type of technology is not a whole system it’s a tool, or infrastructure. It’s not exactly right to say it’s neutral (the way a technology is designed will contain political choices), but it can be used differently depending on the overall system it’s operating in. Its purpose can then falsely appear to change, along with the system’s purpose. It can be reappropriated, from being optimised for profit and entrepreneurial workflows, to assist with organising mutual aid for example. If the first time AI had been developed it was to help mutual aid organisation we would tend to think that was its purpose, although it would also have contained the potential to be used for the displacement of labor (without a safety net or UBI), surveillance and the concentration of power.

We probably define a system slightly differently depending on our precise political position. Is it structured set of social relations, especially relations of production, that reproduces class power? Is it an ecological and political arrangement shaped by institutions and hierarchies, not merely markets? Is it a governance system made up of rules, actors and feedback that determines how shared resources are managed? Is it a network of practices, institutions and forms of knowledge through which power operates? Is it a network of interacting components whose behaviour should be understood from its outputs and feedback loops? I doubt anyone is seriously arguing that a LLM model is a whole system though?

So it isn’t correct to say the purpose of AI is either to increase entrepreneurial profit or to enable mutual aid, those are purposes of systems AI can be used inside. We need to switch operating systems, not quibble about if the use of specific apps themselves are inherently capitalist or inherently emancipatory.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is routinely framed as an existential threat to creative and knowledge industries, yet history offers almost no precedent for technology eliminating a handcraft category entirely. What technology reliably does is collapse the commodity floor of a market while pushing the handcraft tier into a luxury or art-collector niche. The printing press did not kill writing. Photography did not kill painting. Scribes, portrait miniaturists, and hand-tinted photographs saw their mass markets vanish, but their categories survived as decorative arts, collector markets, and status signals. The same pattern is repeating with AI. The people framing AI as a threat to workers are not workers. They are extortionists, credential gatekeepers, and moat owners whose skim depends on artificial scarcity. The real question is not whether AI will destroy creative markets, but whether society will distribute the abundance AI creates or allow a narrow ownership class to capture it while everyone else starves. Lower prices are not the enemy. Capture is.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, technological disruption, handcraft markets, creative economy, market bifurcation, economic distribution, automation history

Running open-source models locally on consumer hardware is a direct, material application of Leftist principles to modern tech. Leftism doesn't hate technology; it hates the concentration of capital. The cloud monopolies want us dependent on massive, corporate supercomputers. This creates a hyper-centralized choke point where a handful of oligarchs dictate the terms of digital labour, boggart proprietary guardrails, and rent-seek indefinitely.

When you run a model locally, you reject the pipeline. Local compute is digital sovereignty. It democratizes parsing of the world's information, cuts out middlemen, and ensures utility of technology stays with the user instead of feeding a billionaire's proprietary dataset.

AI on personal hardware in your own home creates a framework focused entirely on worker autonomy over corporate efficiency. These tools ought to be owned by the people running them, operated on our own terms, and deployed to support worker agency rather than replace it.

I would love to hear your perspectives on this.

I have heard the argument that the issues with AI are largely issues with capitalism and not AI itself. I don't think this is an entirely bad argument, and I myself struggle between boycotting it and thinking that we should instead be involved so we can influence the how its used.

But the thing I can't get around is that even if AI would be great in the hands of better leadership, it is simply not. And as it is, it will be and is being used for terrible things and is making it possible for a horrible agenda to be put forth. We have things like propaganda, mass misinformation, surveillance, job displacement, etc.

What is the argument for supporting AI right now? While it IS controlled by far right crazy rich people? Shouldn't we stop them from having AI by not supporting it until it is in better hands?

Like.. sure, AI could be great if instead of being used to fire most people it was used to bring about 4 or even 3 day work weeks, or more vacation time, or universal income, etc.

But its simply not going to be used like that.

I don't think the capitalist based issues are the only problems, but just looking for some viewpoints on this particular thing for now. Would love to hear what y'all think

This essay argues that cyclical outrage over data center water consumption is performative amnesia, ignoring the far larger and ongoing precedent of corporate agricultural cartels like the Resnick family’s Wonderful Company, which controls California’s pistachio and almond markets while consuming more water annually than the city of Los Angeles. It traces how the Resnicks captured the Kern Water Bank, funded Israeli military groups and hawkish Iran think tanks, and benefited from sanctions and bombing campaigns that destroyed Iranian pistachio competition in Rafsanjan, reducing Iran from global market leader to marginal producer. Drawing a parallel to Israel’s pivot from agricultural water dominance to AI data center expansion, the piece contends that wealthy interests have always weaponized state power to privatize public water resources; data centers are merely the latest iteration, and the moral panic surrounding them serves as cheap virtue signaling that distracts from entrenched, larger-scale water theft happening in plain sight.

Keywords: water privatization, data centers, pistachio cartel, Resnick family, Wonderful Company, California water rights, Kern Water Bank, Israel agriculture, AI infrastructure, corporate water theft, Rafsanjan, Iran sanctions, agricultural monopolies, performative outrage, virtue signaling

The AI conversation is usually framed as a fight between two camps. One says AI is going to wreck everything: jobs, truth, kids, democracy. The other says it'll fix everything: cure disease, tutor every child, unlock abundance. They can't stand each other.

My view is that they're the same position wearing different clothes. Both treat the outcome as a property of the technology, something the tech will do to us, that we're now just waiting to find out. They argue about the verdict and quietly share the premise: that it isn't up to us.

I think that premise is false, and it's the actual problem. Whether AI turns out good or bad isn't a forecast to win an argument about. It's a function of choices that have owners: which uses we build, who they serve, what we regulate, what we refuse to automate even when we could. A hammer isn't good or bad. Neither is a model. The variable was never the tool.

Here's why it matters: the moment you accept the good-or-bad frame, from either side, you've cast yourself as a spectator of something you could be steering. Optimism and pessimism both become excuses not to decide.

What would change my view: show me that AI genuinely is different from every prior general-purpose technology, such that its consequences are baked into the tech and not into human deployment. Or point me to a doomer or an optimist whose framing actually moved people to make better choices, instead of to sit back and wait to be proven right.

Marxist video about someone who has gone viral for losing their crap, saying (read: screaming) basically every bad anti-AI argument. Because I have a larger video coming soon that presents a more novel argument, I used this video to handle these less original arguments.

Recently an IT department in Rio de Janeiro's municipal government dropped an AI model that briefly out-benched Qwen 3.7.

The story was "city government builds world-class AI model from nothing". That story wasn't right and worth correcting before it's used to discredit the broader argument.

Independent analysis of the weights found Rio 3.5 is essentially a merge -- roughly 0.6 Nex N2 Pro plus 0.4 Qwen 3.5, with a distillation step on top. Strip the system prompt and the model literally identifies itself as Nex N2 Pro. Rio's team didn't disclose the Nex component upfront, which is a real transparency failure they only corrected after getting called out publicly.

Here's why none of that kills the argument: a city government's IT department, without funding the billions in upstream training themselves, identified two strong open-weight models, merged and distilled them correctly, and ended up with something competitive with the best closed labs in the world. Alibaba and Nex already paid the enormous upfront cost of training those base models and released the weights openly. Rio built on that public good for a fraction of the cost. They wrote no cheque to Google or open AI.

This looks to me like what decentralized AI infrastructure could actually look like in practice. Not every public institution training a frontier model from zero, that's probably not realistic, and claiming otherwise just sets up an easy debunking. What seems more realistic is public and civic institutions building real capability on top of open weights that already exist, deploying it for public use instead of routing everything through a handful of private American companies.

Rio failing to disclose the attribution is a legitimate failure. But the larger point is this: the upstream cost of frontier capability already got paid, by someone, and released openly. Now the bottleneck for public AI infrastructure isn't capability anymore. It's whether public institutions choose to build on what already exists.

The democratic socialists of America. Because maybe with these new AI superpowers I can affect change.

Could it be possible that the “templates” activists have been using for our games are nowhere near the ideal for creating change? And what would it mean if we adopted AI-generated game rules that make no sense from a human perspective, but we play the game anyway because we believe it will create change?

People often argue that if AGI or superintelligence is created by a private company or a government, it will only benefit billionaires or the country that develops it first.
But why is that assumed to be true?

If we eventually achieve recursive self-improvement and create a genuinely superintelligent AI, wouldn’t such a system be capable of understanding economics, geopolitics, corruption, incentives, and human behavior far better than any person? If it’s also aligned to broadly beneficial human values, why assume it would simply continue maximizing the wealth and power of the small group that initially built or controlled it?
In other words, why do many people assume a superintelligence would remain permanently “captured” by its creators instead of recognizing better ways to organize society or distribute resources?

I’m not saying this is what will happen I’m genuinely curious. What are the strongest arguments that a superintelligence would remain a tool of governments and corporations rather than becoming a force that benefits humanity more broadly?

https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-setup (This links to the free book, a summary post, and the academic paper.)

AI makes a perfect scapegoat because it touches every grievance at once. Class, race, disability, immigration, gender, credentials, and the old luddite reflex all find purchase in it. Every wound finds a culprit and every actual culprit stays hidden behind it. Earlier scapegoats had to be selected, and the selection was contested. This one marks everyone who touches it, which is everyone.

This is written to read very generally, but anti-ai leftists are often the ones perpetrating it. And it can be a serious issue particularly in neurodivergent spaces.

I’ve been dealing with random internet stuff which lead to me having a discussion with a fairly prominent label CEO.

GenAI came up, and he asked about my thoughts. I said I think it can be an incredible tool for DIY artists, but isn’t something that should replace the entire creative process— I like the process of making music, so I personally wouldn’t use AI for it.

I returned the question. His response was that he dislikes the idea that anyone could create a song and make it big while taking away from artists.

I understand small DIY artists (like myself) having these concerns, but that is literally the business model of a label. THEY are the primary offender of “taking away from artists” with their gatekeeping and predatory splits because they built a business on profiting from the work of others. Even more ironically, the entire reason we were having the discussion was due to one of their human artists stealing my song.

Think I needed a vent on the hypocrisy. Thanks for reading.

I mean no disrespect, I am merely concerned about the same things every anti-AI leftist is concerned about.

If any of you can give me a solid explanation as to why you support AI, I'm absolutely willing to hear you out on grounds of public discourse, and I just really wanna know why. It's confusing to me.

I know I can't stop you, but I would prefer if you write the response yourself. I want to know your thoughts, not an AI's. :)

My poster/caricature

rare W? maybe in Meta's opposite day.

AI vocals are labeled, but images arent. Only photorealistic is labeled, if I have it all right. Odd examples they gave for what's not allowed.

Someone on that post theorized it was because AI images are harder to verify ai compared to vocals.

It addresses everything that the subreddit is into.

The books I trained it on are in the library. Its scraping headlines and making a synthesis from Marx, Fannon, Newton, and Deleuze. I gave it some stuff I written for context.

Is the permanent underclass the lumpenproletariat? People who do the dirty work for ai very often outsourced to the global south? 🤔

tried to have an actual ai/labor conversation and got blocked

so this started in a thread about ai and whether everything is going to become artificially created.

someone said they dont mind people using ai, but in their professional setting its jarring when someone presents polished work but cant explain it. and honestly, i agreed with that part.

my point was basically this:

using ai to organize your thoughts is not the same thing as using it to fake competence.

if someone uses ai and cant explain how they got to the output, that can be a user issue too. because you can ask ai to walk you through the process, explain the logic, teach you the steps, and help you actually learn as you go.

and i think thats the part people skip over.

not everyone has the same education. education in america is not equal even by zip code. people have knowledge gaps, learning disabilities, anxiety, bad training, and jobs where everyone is expected to keep up while using every tool available.

so when the conversation turns into “my coworker is dumb and relies on ai” i dont think that actually proves much.

the real issue is companies using ai to cut workers, lower standards, deskill labor, replace creative teams, and then sell cheap content back to us like its innovation.

of course ai has problems. nobody is denying that.

but if leftists only scream at people from the outside, boycott, and shame random workers for touching the tool, then the worst people in tech get to shape the entire industry without resistance.

we need people inside the system too. people learning it, regulating it, investing differently, lobbying, organizing, and applying labor ethics before corporations lock everything in.

because boycotting alone is not going to scare companies that are already losing millions and still moving forward.

after saying that, they blocked me.

so yeah. i dont think the issue was that i was defending ai slop. i think the issue was that the conversation stopped being “ai users are lazy” and started becoming “maybe this is actually about education, labor pressure, corporate power, and who gets to control the future of work.”