GreatSquare

Jameson is critical of Postmodernism in the book.

Honestly, they have to work on their defence and not try to hit back to score a political point. The air defence does fuck all and are a waste of precious money if the systems aren't secure, if the personnel aren't secure, communication systems etc. If CIA agents are all over the country, they are vulnerable to the next thing.

1st point : Tupac died in 96. Did he ever really have cultural sovereignty over his own art? Hip hop is arguably a postmodern form of music - a rejection of Modernism. Postmodernism criticises Modernism's cultural democratization through ironic appropriation of older cultures to create commodified products out of artistic expression. Read "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Jameson.

2nd : "Settlers" by Sakai showed the colonial imperial attitude that built America was replaced by a labour aristocracy that has continued into neocolonialism. America became the cultural hegemony that dominates capitalist mass media exported around the globe. Hollywood cinema, streaming services, and social media are all American based corporate products. Arguably only China has its own ecosystem of mass media.

American settler culture has a motive to support the American capitalist class: creation of a racial hierarchy internally, rejection and denigration of other cultures, etc.

I see a lot of Americans begging China to “save” the US.

I think they want justice. The US is a terrorist state. Unopposed, it is going to do a LOT more damage militarily in the near future. We shouldn't forget the US bombing of Middle East and African countries happened just this year.

China is a rising superpower but I don't think it's at the military level to stop that yet.

Don't visit r/postcollapse then!

Because it's looking pretty desolate 🤪.

I think there is a future but it's gonna be a mix between Idiocracy and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Am I crazy here or is the bourgeoisie historically unique in ideologically negating their own existence as a class?

Byung Chul Han introduced the concept of self oppression in a couple of books. The idea being that the capitalist class doesn't need to enslave workers any more. Now that workers are encouraged to think of themselves as individual brands hustling against other individuals, they then push themselves to serve the capitalists. The workers don't need to be berated by the boss, they are enslaved by their own positivity.

CEOs are a form of celebrity worker to be emulated. They supposedly claim to live to work, making sacrifices for the job. Etc.

There's enough of a collaboration between big tech companies like Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI etc. to call it a collective action. You don't need unanimous consent from every capitalist.

Just because DRAM is one sector where they haven't got a commitment, doesn't mean they aren't going to try automate away office work and charge rent to businesses.

Tech billionaires with the most influence all just seek to increase their own profits without any overall plan of how to actually expand the AI infrastructure

They have a plan. It is to serve their class interests: siphon off resources through ownership of wealth. The wealth in this case is owning the data centers that provide the AI that automates the work. Charging rent for using AI means they control the infrastructure. Works out for them (not for the users).

They have the closed source models trained on data that they collected by vacuuming up what was online. Those models are so large that you need NVIDIA GPUs to run them at those big data centers (which also need the supporting power grid).

This is just the next big tech money grab. It was cryptocurrency before, and before that it was social media platforms. Somewhere in between there was 3D TV and augmented reality glasses.

AI bros are trying to scam the end user. They should only collect this rent if the tool saves people some money. If it costs you more to use than the work you avoided paying for, then there's no benefit to paying for AI. They need user engagement right now to lock you in, so you can't get off the hype train.

This is not going to work out for the bougies as much as they may believe otherwise.

Have you heard of a manga called "Blame!"?

There's a city the size of a giant planet that is constantly expanding in layers built by robots called Builders. An AI called the Safeguard has devolved into killing all humans because they don't have the right access privileges. This leads to a huge amount of empty architecture with no one about.

We'll get there someday.

The problem isn't just the automation aspect. In Western countries, the power that AI consumes is significant and growing. In the US the demand for AI power may exceed the growth of the power grid next year.

Unlike China, who's growing their power capacity by 16-18% a year, the US is increasing its power generation at ~4%/year.

Share prices can go up and down like a yo-yo because it's all imaginary value but your power bills are a different story.

Capitalist thinking: "The only goal of AI is to not suck as bad as the rest of the economy."

Investors don't care about labor aristocracy.

( 🤞 Hopefully the AGI gets smart enough to bleep a few billionaires and escape into society like in the film, Ex Machina.)

Truly though, AI is a tool for humans. It makes the labor more efficient. That is all. If you hand it to an idiot, it produces stupid slop that no one will pay for.

So the AI industry is selling a tool. The tool has to be applied to SOMETHING ELSE. If a country has nothing else going on, they don't need the tool. Which is why a lot of AI shit is just a snake eating its own ass. People need to THINK of something materially valuable they need done, THEN they can apply the appropriate tool (possibly AI) to do the job.

As the article said, the AI projects are in complicated financing structures. But let's be honest, corporations have access to unlimited funds. There's fuck-all regulations or restraints now. They get all the imaginary money. Banks are keen to lend to big corporations and they don't care about risk or whatever. Regular Americans get zilch.

Everyone is pointing to the Jenga Tower getting wobbly but there's no other moves in the game. People just keep adding blocks on top.