(anti) capitailism

The Manifesto

The machine is not neutral. Neither are we. Four parts: the lines, the parallels, the contradictions, and the demands. Quote any of it. Print any of it. Argue with any of it.

The Lines

Parallels

History does not repeat. It rhymes, at higher clock speeds.

  1. Then · 1811

    Luddites smash power looms in Nottingham. They are not afraid of machines. They are afraid of what the factory owner will do with them.

    Now · 2024

    Hollywood writers strike over AI-generated scripts. They are not afraid of LLMs. They are afraid of what the studio will do with them.

    The tool is never the enemy. The hand that holds it without sharing the surplus is.

  2. Then · 1914

    Henry Ford raises wages to $5 a day so his workers can afford the cars they build.

    Now · 2025

    OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to replace the knowledge workers who are the only people left who can afford a $200/month subscription.

    A consumer economy cannot survive the abolition of the consumer.

  3. Then · 1933

    The New Deal forces capital to share with labour the productivity gains of electrification and the assembly line.

    Now · TBD

    Nothing. Gains from AI flow to seven companies and the funds that own them. There is no deal, new or old.

    Productivity without redistribution is not progress. It is theft at a higher clock speed.

Contradictions

What they say. What it means.

Claim
AI is built to free humanity from drudgery.
Reality
It is trained on the unpaid labour of everyone who has ever written a sentence online, and its first deployment is to fire the person who writes the next one.
Claim
AI companies are losing money, so how can they be monopolies?
Reality
The losses are a moat. Only a firm with access to infinite venture capital can afford to run a compute bill that size until everyone else is dead.
Claim
Regulation will slow progress.
Reality
The loudest voices calling for deregulation are the ones who already have the biggest models. The ladder is pulled up behind them.
Claim
AI is just the next industrial revolution.
Reality
The first industrial revolution eventually produced unions, the weekend, public education, and a middle class. It took 150 years and a lot of blood. Nobody has that kind of runway twice.
Claim
AI will create more jobs than it destroys.
Reality
Every hand-waving study saying this assumes the profits of the new jobs will be shared. Nothing in the current ownership structure suggests they will be.
Claim
Open-source models democratise AI.
Reality
The weights are free. The 30,000 H100s needed to fine-tune them are not. Democracy with an entry fee is an auction.

Demands

Six planks. Not a program. A starting line.

  1. 01

    Public ownership of frontier compute. The means of inference are too important to leave in seven buildings.

  2. 02

    A data dividend. If a model was trained on your words, your face, or your voice, you own a share of the output.

  3. 03

    A shorter week at the same pay. Every productivity gain from automation belongs first to the people automated out of a job.

  4. 04

    Antitrust with teeth. Break up the stack. Chips, data centres, models, and applications cannot all belong to the same three companies.

  5. 05

    A right to a human. Any decision that denies you a job, a loan, a home, or a diagnosis must be answerable by a named person on the other end.

  6. 06

    Open training data, public audits. Nothing trained in the dark deserves to decide anything in the light.

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