AI as the new avatar of American capitalism

AI Populism: Capitalism's New Avatar — Stigmergic

Brian Merchant argues that "AI populism" is not a new political force but 21st-century populism responding to unrestrained capitalism. The term, coined by Jasmine Sun and amplified by David Wallace-We

AI Populism's Warning Shots

the battles over AI are no longer just about the tech

Anti-AI Populism is Reshaping American Politics

Democrats are winning on data center opposition. So are Republicans.

The AI bubble isn’t new — Karl Marx explained the mechanisms behind it nearly 150 years ago

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s warning of an AI bubble highlights a deeper economic problem: capitalism is producing more capital than it can profitably invest.

Building Political Superintelligence

Amidst fears of dystopia, a blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves

‘Think Everybody Dead’: How the Threat of AI Is Fueling a New Political Alliance

A billionaire-backed movement from Silicon Valley and populists like Bernie Sanders are eager to stop an AI disaster — but can they overcome their mutual distrust and work together?

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite

Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms

AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No.

Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then: Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, …

3: Consulting the Record: AI Consistently Fails the Public - AI Now Institute

Amid the excitement over AI’s (speculative, hypothetical) potential, we have lost sight of the sobering reality of its present and recent past. AI is already intermediating critical social infrastructures, materially reshaping our institutions in ways that ratchet up inequality and concentrate power in the hands of the already powerful. It is consistently deployed in ways […]

What does it mean for AI to be democratic?

Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications

AI is probably not a bubble

AI companies have revenue, demand, and paths to immense value

AI is probably not a bubble

AI companies have revenue, demand, and paths to immense value

From the Platform Society to the AI Society: Towards Critical Studies of Generative AI

The era of AI has begun. Generative AI is rapidly reshaping knowledge production, culture, and political authority, giving rise to an emerging AI society. Yet this transformation did not emerge ex nihilo. This paper argues that the AI society can only be understood in relation to the platform society from which it arises. Tracing the transition from platforms to AI, we identify interlinked economic, epistemic, and political shifts. Economically, AI emerges within platform-based rentier capitalism but reconfigures the monopoly mechanisms on which its accumulation depends. Epistemically, LLMs mark a shift from predictive to generative epistemics, entangling theory formation and knowledge production with private research-as-a-service infrastructures. Politically, governance shifts from data politics to alignment politics: from shaping visibility to shaping what can be said, thought, and imagined. Together, these transformations signal a qualitative shift in mediation—from governing interaction to governing cognition itself—and call for a Critical AI Studies.

AI as a Fascist Artifact

(Christian Tieber hat eine deutsche Übersetzung des Textes angefertigt: “KI” als faschistisches Artefakt. Vielen Dank Christian!) (This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. […]