> “AI” is a political project – I have also sometimes called it a narrative – whose purpose is the shifting of power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures.
Why is this necessarily a bad thing from the author's POV? I'm going to argue from the author's frame, as a self-described communist [1] and believer in Stafford Beer's views on purpose of systems.
Take Project Cybersyn [2], Stafford Beer's cybernetics engine for orchestrating socialist Chile's entire economy. An example of an equally a "political project" that did "shift power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures". The same system that was used to organise Chilean economy could've been easily repurposed to strip labour rights, quash strikes before they even happen or "squeeze the working class". This is at odds with the author's thesis that technological artifacts are inherently political, not that politics is applied to technological artifacts. A simpler argument can be made for cars and urban planning before and after the introduction of jaywalking laws.
> Democracy is not just about voting but about ensuring that all power – especially by the state – is used in accordance with the law and in a fair way. Stochastic “AI” systems break that promise. The “AI” just says that you do not get the support you need. No idea why, might be a bug or a deeply racist training data set or something else. Nobody knows.
Looking back at Project Cybersyn, which I assume the author, a self described communist, considers a system that would improve democratic participation in society, the central modelling function that Cybersyn used was based on Bayesian filtering, another stochastic method in the Generative model family.
In believe the author isn't actually at odds with LLMs or AI, but with who controls the technology, since he seems to appreciate stochastic centrally planned socialist systems created by the people he admires.
This makes me think that the article is written from a visceral response to deployment of AI, and a rationalisation of that visceral reaction, rather than from the author's principled views, again, as a self-declared communist and appreciator of Stafford Beer.
This particular set of incoherent sentence fragments in the article don't really make the point the title implies. Or any point. But I'll reply to where it's coming from.
This is one of those "blind monks touching different parts of the elephant and arguing over what shape it is" things. Facist leaning corporations are basically the only interaction with machine learning that most people have these days. Like how corporate scams are the only interaction with cryptocurrency 99% people have. They're not wrong about their experiences. But they're also not talking about the technology. They're talking about the corporate users of that technology.
Just to be clear, this is the full and complete text of the article on that URL. It makes me wonder what others are responding to because this is just incoherent word spam:
>This “country-wide *book-keeping,* country-wide *accounting* of the rate of interest above the soviets. Before seizing power, the dangers “if the liberty of those letters seem to concern about history, about how little weight the costs outweigh the costs. Therefore, for a massive rebirth of the party in his belief that, for the political evolution.
>Was defeated.”* [Max Anger, “The Spartacist School of Falsification”, *Anarchy: A Graphic Guide*, Camden Press, London, 1974. *The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in France during the Russian Civil War did break out, to crush.
>“turn this into a higher infant mortality is 7 per cent of the social order.’” The interest rate is, in part, because if the SWP fail to highlight mass examples of what Trotskyists like Harman do when they had introduced a petition.
> They're not wrong about their experiences. But they're also not talking about the technology. They're talking about the corporate users of that technology.
i think that's the point they're trying to make: the users and purveyors of the technology are inextricable from the technology itself; and given who the purveyors are, we can safely/rightly assume that their profit motives (at best) or cultural motives (more sinister) will be at the forefront of their push to expand the uses of these technologies.
i don't think it's a particulary well-fleshed out point (as another commenter said, what do we actually do with this besides burn down datacenters?) but it's still worth making clear that we are allowed to be as cynical about this technology as the purveyors are about their target users.
I don't follow your logic. 99% of people only interact with cryptocurrency because of a scam but you think that we should be discussing the technology instead? Why? The technology itself seems to be much less important than the widespread fraud it enables... And even then, people were discussing the effect of the technology on the environment, and on energy and component prices... They were also discussing the actual underlying technology below cryptocurrencies - the blockchain, and how it is yet to find its killer app, even as of this day...
I think that gen AI has profound negative externalities. I also think that all the other uses of this tech aside, natural language comprehension alone is cool and useful enough that I don't see us ever going back.
So I guess my question for the author is what they're trying to achieve in this essay. Some of the big players in tech may have beliefs that align with some of the tenets of fascism. But the label is so well-worn that it's meaningless. Buying books on Amazon is fascism, writing on Medium or Substack is fascism, having pets is fascism, etc. So, this day and age, not much is accomplished by uttering the word.
With this in mind, what's the prescription the author actually has to offer? That's where it really gets dicey, because the only takeaway from this writing seems to be "geez, someone ought to set some datacenters on fire".
"You best start believing in ghost stories... youre in one"
Executive Summary (not ai, its from the pdf above from Sweden)
1. Democracy in the World, 2025
Democracy for the average global citizen has declined to 1978 levels. The gains of the “third wave of democratization,” which began in Portugal in 1974, have been almost entirely erased.
The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is now at its lowest point in more than 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the United States.
The United States has lost its long-standing status as a liberal democracy for the first time in over five decades.
Autocracies and Democracies
By the end of 2025, the world had 92 autocracies and 87 democracies.
Approximately 74% of the world’s population, or 6 billion people, now live in autocracies. Only 7%, or 0.6 billion people, live in liberal democracies.
The “Great Reversal”: 2000 vs. 2025
Nearly all aspects of democracy have declined significantly over the past decade, marking a dramatic reversal from conditions 25 years ago.
Freedom of expression has been the hardest hit, with declines recorded in 44 countries in 2025.
Torture is increasingly being used to suppress political opposition, with 33 countries experiencing substantial deterioration in 2025.
2. Trends in Regime Transformation
The world has never seen as many countries autocratizing at the same time as it has during the recent years of the “third wave of autocratization.”
A record 41% of the world’s population, or 3.4 billion people, currently live in autocratizing countries.
The European Union has been significantly affected. Autocratization now affects seven EU member states as well as two of the EU’s key allies: the United Kingdom and the United States.
3. Autocratizing Countries
Nearly a quarter of the world’s countries are now classified as autocratizers, totaling 44 countries.
These 44 autocratizers include 24 stand-alone autocratizers and 20 bell-turns.
In 2025, 10 new autocratizers were identified. Among them are five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
Media censorship remains the most common tactic among autocratizing governments, used in 32 countries, or 73% of autocratizers.
Repression of civil society has also surged, affecting 30 autocratizing countries, or 68% of the total.
> “AI” is a political project – I have also sometimes called it a narrative – whose purpose is the shifting of power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures.
Why is this necessarily a bad thing from the author's POV? I'm going to argue from the author's frame, as a self-described communist [1] and believer in Stafford Beer's views on purpose of systems.
Take Project Cybersyn [2], Stafford Beer's cybernetics engine for orchestrating socialist Chile's entire economy. An example of an equally a "political project" that did "shift power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures". The same system that was used to organise Chilean economy could've been easily repurposed to strip labour rights, quash strikes before they even happen or "squeeze the working class". This is at odds with the author's thesis that technological artifacts are inherently political, not that politics is applied to technological artifacts. A simpler argument can be made for cars and urban planning before and after the introduction of jaywalking laws.
> Democracy is not just about voting but about ensuring that all power – especially by the state – is used in accordance with the law and in a fair way. Stochastic “AI” systems break that promise. The “AI” just says that you do not get the support you need. No idea why, might be a bug or a deeply racist training data set or something else. Nobody knows.
Looking back at Project Cybersyn, which I assume the author, a self described communist, considers a system that would improve democratic participation in society, the central modelling function that Cybersyn used was based on Bayesian filtering, another stochastic method in the Generative model family.
In believe the author isn't actually at odds with LLMs or AI, but with who controls the technology, since he seems to appreciate stochastic centrally planned socialist systems created by the people he admires.
This makes me think that the article is written from a visceral response to deployment of AI, and a rationalisation of that visceral reaction, rather than from the author's principled views, again, as a self-declared communist and appreciator of Stafford Beer.
[1] https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
towards the end of the article, the section "AI is fascy technology" and the one after seem to address your points, to some extent
This particular set of incoherent sentence fragments in the article don't really make the point the title implies. Or any point. But I'll reply to where it's coming from.
This is one of those "blind monks touching different parts of the elephant and arguing over what shape it is" things. Facist leaning corporations are basically the only interaction with machine learning that most people have these days. Like how corporate scams are the only interaction with cryptocurrency 99% people have. They're not wrong about their experiences. But they're also not talking about the technology. They're talking about the corporate users of that technology.
Just to be clear, this is the full and complete text of the article on that URL. It makes me wonder what others are responding to because this is just incoherent word spam:
>This “country-wide *book-keeping,* country-wide *accounting* of the rate of interest above the soviets. Before seizing power, the dangers “if the liberty of those letters seem to concern about history, about how little weight the costs outweigh the costs. Therefore, for a massive rebirth of the party in his belief that, for the political evolution.
>Was defeated.”* [Max Anger, “The Spartacist School of Falsification”, *Anarchy: A Graphic Guide*, Camden Press, London, 1974. *The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in France during the Russian Civil War did break out, to crush.
>“turn this into a higher infant mortality is 7 per cent of the social order.’” The interest rate is, in part, because if the SWP fail to highlight mass examples of what Trotskyists like Harman do when they had introduced a petition.
> They're not wrong about their experiences. But they're also not talking about the technology. They're talking about the corporate users of that technology.
i think that's the point they're trying to make: the users and purveyors of the technology are inextricable from the technology itself; and given who the purveyors are, we can safely/rightly assume that their profit motives (at best) or cultural motives (more sinister) will be at the forefront of their push to expand the uses of these technologies.
i don't think it's a particulary well-fleshed out point (as another commenter said, what do we actually do with this besides burn down datacenters?) but it's still worth making clear that we are allowed to be as cynical about this technology as the purveyors are about their target users.
I don't follow your logic. 99% of people only interact with cryptocurrency because of a scam but you think that we should be discussing the technology instead? Why? The technology itself seems to be much less important than the widespread fraud it enables... And even then, people were discussing the effect of the technology on the environment, and on energy and component prices... They were also discussing the actual underlying technology below cryptocurrencies - the blockchain, and how it is yet to find its killer app, even as of this day...
[dead]
I think that gen AI has profound negative externalities. I also think that all the other uses of this tech aside, natural language comprehension alone is cool and useful enough that I don't see us ever going back.
So I guess my question for the author is what they're trying to achieve in this essay. Some of the big players in tech may have beliefs that align with some of the tenets of fascism. But the label is so well-worn that it's meaningless. Buying books on Amazon is fascism, writing on Medium or Substack is fascism, having pets is fascism, etc. So, this day and age, not much is accomplished by uttering the word.
With this in mind, what's the prescription the author actually has to offer? That's where it really gets dicey, because the only takeaway from this writing seems to be "geez, someone ought to set some datacenters on fire".
> Some of the big players in tech may have beliefs that align with some of the tenets of fascism. But the label is so well-worn that it's meaningless.
the article you're responding consists of a very long list of very specific criteria for fascism and how they directly apply to AI
> what they're trying to achieve in this essay.
the closing sections make pretty clear what the intentions (or aspirations) are
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy...
"You best start believing in ghost stories... youre in one"
Executive Summary (not ai, its from the pdf above from Sweden)
1. Democracy in the World, 2025
Democracy for the average global citizen has declined to 1978 levels. The gains of the “third wave of democratization,” which began in Portugal in 1974, have been almost entirely erased.
The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is now at its lowest point in more than 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the United States.
The United States has lost its long-standing status as a liberal democracy for the first time in over five decades.
Autocracies and Democracies
By the end of 2025, the world had 92 autocracies and 87 democracies.
Approximately 74% of the world’s population, or 6 billion people, now live in autocracies. Only 7%, or 0.6 billion people, live in liberal democracies.
The “Great Reversal”: 2000 vs. 2025
Nearly all aspects of democracy have declined significantly over the past decade, marking a dramatic reversal from conditions 25 years ago.
Freedom of expression has been the hardest hit, with declines recorded in 44 countries in 2025.
Torture is increasingly being used to suppress political opposition, with 33 countries experiencing substantial deterioration in 2025.
2. Trends in Regime Transformation
The world has never seen as many countries autocratizing at the same time as it has during the recent years of the “third wave of autocratization.”
A record 41% of the world’s population, or 3.4 billion people, currently live in autocratizing countries.
The European Union has been significantly affected. Autocratization now affects seven EU member states as well as two of the EU’s key allies: the United Kingdom and the United States.
3. Autocratizing Countries
Nearly a quarter of the world’s countries are now classified as autocratizers, totaling 44 countries.
These 44 autocratizers include 24 stand-alone autocratizers and 20 bell-turns.
In 2025, 10 new autocratizers were identified. Among them are five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
Media censorship remains the most common tactic among autocratizing governments, used in 32 countries, or 73% of autocratizers.
Repression of civil society has also surged, affecting 30 autocratizing countries, or 68% of the total.