Nate Bear Do Not Panic
It can be difficult to drag oneself away from the events of the day, step back, take stock and wonder: where is this all heading and what’s going to be left?
The regional government of the rural area where I live has just greenlit the construction of dozens of massive data centres. The justifications are the same old tired justifications beloved of capitalists that we hear endlessly: jobs and growth.
The imaginative capacity of neoliberal politicians is truly an embarrassment to the species. The lack of vision, the dull and dystopic imaginary they must hold in their heads as the ideal outcome for human society. It must take effort. It must take effort to see nothing but line go up as the primary cultural goal.
It can be difficult to take stock and wonder what’s going to be left.
Of the rivers, of the forests, all of which are being sacrificed for AI data centres.
Of our selves.
These data centres are needed, apparently, for compute. For AI. An AI which is trashing the ability of people to think and write for themselves. An AI which is infantilising people. The amount of AI videos that get liked and shared on social media is a joke. The amount of obvious AI-speak that people are churning out for likes, or passing off as their own inspirational or insightful thought, is toe-curling.
But AI for the masses will be a marginal application. The real AI compute will be used, as Palantir is using it in Ukraine, to create perfectly surveilled societies. To engineer fully-realised security states. While we’re sharing AI slop videos and writing cringey AI wisdom-posts to impress our AI-brained followers, the algorithm will be doing the real work of assessing our fitness for front-line warfighting.
That is if it’s not taking our jobs.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lover of jobs. I don’t fetishise work as some kind of essential component of a life well-lived. But the reality is that vast swathes of white-collar jobs are about to be wiped out, and there is no plan for what comes next. Everyone I know works with AI, or is instructed by their bosses to utilise AI for their job in some way. Perhaps this is where you roll your eyes and point to one of the deluge of articles in recent months, like this one in The Guardian, about the lack of an AI impact on the job market. Ignore them. They are all, in my view, part of the AI propaganda network, designed to make us relaxed and love the AI bomb. They are also too early. The AI bomb hasn’t hit, but the impact is coming. Why? Because a capitalist NEVER saw a tool that could help reduce the “cost burden” of employing a human and failed to find a way to use it.
A Goldman Sachs report from two days ago agreed with me, arguing that the “AI impact is now spreading beyond the technology sector.” The report showed that industries with a greater share of businesses using AI are experiencing slower employment growth and higher unemployment. Crucially, these AI-dependent businesses are also experiencing modest profit growth at the same time.
It doesn’t take Karl Marx to figure out where this one is going.
And neoliberal politicians, being neoliberals not Marxists, are manically expanding AI without any plan whatsoever for the social consequences it will wreak. Utter negligence, but not surprising, given that the aforementioned neoliberalism has been the rule of the day for decades now.
Young people are well aware of this. And it is this sense of a hopeless, jobless, militarised future which has helped spur the protests and riots that have sprung up across Europe in the last couple of months, from France to Spain to Germany to Switzerland.
Nearly two hundred years of industrial-powered growth, yet all this unrest. The kids aren’t stupid. They know that if the economic growth we’ve conjured to date hasn’t been enough to solve our problems, no amount of further growth will do the trick. They understand the problem is not the lack of growth or material wealth, the problem is the lack of a system for distributing it fairly. And then when the elites tell the kids that not only is endless growth in an unchanged system still the plan, but that war is going to be the new mechanism to deliver this growth. Well, the kids have some complaints about that, to put it mildly.
It can be difficult to reckon, as the kids are doing, with the reality that the machine will not be denied. It can be especially difficult to reckon with it when the frontier necessary for capitalist expansion appears in your neighbourhood. But as the classical frontiers shrink, this stage of capitalism was always inevitable. Frontiers create expansion through the delivery into the system of new inputs. And these new inputs equal fresh growth. In the past these inputs were, broadly, fossil fuels and metals. But extraction in the literal sense, stuff pulled up from the earth, is no longer enough to satisfy the appetite of the machine. Rates of extraction are slowing for some minerals, like oil and gas, and for almost all minerals, extraction is getting more and more expensive. Capitalists are also reckoning with an emerging multipolar order which is putting a premium on extraction from the global south.
Enter compute as the new fronter.
Compute doesn’t need to lay thousands of miles of pipelines or carve out mines in remote landscapes. All compute needs is space, and that space can be anywhere. Anywhere that a flat pad of concrete can be laid can now be a frontier. It doesn’t matter what’s under the ground in any particular place, like it did before. The only thing that matters is the creation of the concrete box (and having the semiconductors to put in the box to power the compute).
Frontiers have been the fuel upon which the machine has feasted since the dawn of empire, and now, through a combination of greed, scarcity, expense and shifting geopolitics, the frontiers are coming home. Because the machine must feed. Because growth is all.
And it is no surprise that this rabid hunt for new growth is going hand-in-hand with the rise of a far-right international. Capitalism tends towards fascism because capitalists care only about extraction and economic expansion, not people. So in an era of hyper-exploitation, expect hyper-politics.
Expect that the clash between the politics of those who would sacrifice humanity for growth, and the politics of those who resist, will only grow more intense.
I plan, as I’m sure you all do, to stay in the latter camp.