Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.
seed the habitat that attracts protected native species. In my seed bombs I always include our protected state wildflower and whatever the most productive pollinator plants for that setting are. The more bird species you support, the closer that space comes to being designated a bird sanctuary.
Sure but I’ve read the original post and it you don’t make a Marxist case for it. Here’s what I take as the core of your case for AI:
Open-source AI models, when decoupled from profit motives, democratize creativity in unprecedented ways. They enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster, a factory worker to draft a union newsletter, or a tenant to simulate rent-strike scenarios.
The real anxiety over AI art is about the balance of power. When institutions equate skill with specific tools such as oil paint, Python, DSLR cameras, they privilege those with the time and resources to master them. Generative AI, for all its flaws, democratizes access. A factory worker can now illustrate their memoir and a teenager in Lagos can prototype a comic. Does this mean every output is “art”? No more than every Instagram snapshot is a Cartier-Bresson. But gatekeepers have always weaponized “authenticity” to exclude newcomers. The camera did not kill art. Assembly lines did not kill craftsmanship. And AI will not kill creativity. What it exposes is that much of what we associate with production of art is rooted in specific technical skills.
Part of creativity is what you don’t put on the canvas or write in the final draft. It’s a skill you refine through mistakes, self-reflection, and thinking really hard about the thing you’re making over the course of however many hours. The novella I’m writing now is nothing like its first draft because I’ve had to painstakingly go through it considering everything from the flow of the language to the nuances of the messaging to all the sources of that message. There’s a dialectic of hand and eye to it which has always and will always be centrally important. If you don’t want to judge art’s value by a monetary standard, that’s absolutely fine but whether you’re describing cave art or Star Trek replicator tech the art they value is based on humanistic craftsmanship.
That nurse makes a protest poster based on a prompt. They aren’t happy with its composition or imagery. They feed ten more prompts into the plagiarism machine until one looks right. That’s still a time investment of an hour at most even if they manually edit the 6th finger out of the raised fist. You can’t spend an hour on an idea in any medium and make something worthwhile. That’s your short-term impression of your own work in the same headspace, offloading all of the mental effort of really critiquing what you’re making. The factory worker who drafts their union newsletter with an LLM might be able to do so faster, but even CommunismGPT is going to regurgitate a database of averaged opinions it doesn’t actually understand. Theory is based on observation and AI doesn’t observe. The factory worker who illustrates their memoir is someone who is already capable of creative expression but who can’t afford an art class or nice paint. They won’t learn illustration from using AI for the same reason I haven’t learned physics from cheating with it, and their memoir is cheapened by weird hallucinations of what a machine looks like rather than their impression of it or a photo. The teenager in Lagos could be provided paper or image editing software to do the necessary work of thinking about each element of every frame. None of them are better off for using it.
If any of these use-cases were actually valid, they’d be observable in already communistic spaces like the fediverse. Hexbear doesn’t even give you karma points for posting so the only incentive is creative expression for its own sake and sociocultural roles. Most of us are stressed for time and would benefit from saving it. You should see our organisers, agitators, and creators celebrating deepseek and the other opensource models at least. You should see us using it in our posts and agitating for it in our subcommunities, but there isn’t a post in /c/labour calling for union stewards to download an LLM. There isn’t an AI-generated image being celebrated in reddit’s /r/nursing despite every other post being those same nurses organising while working 12 hour shifts. Our /c/art bans all AI images outright even from the most defensible models because that comic wouldn’t be worth reading and I don’t think you would read it either. Can you actually point to one AI-generated book you’d recommend? That music video would certainly distract my dog but one single creative product of length worth putting on your wall or spending time reading. It can be fiction, non-fiction, an article or a scientific study or political theory or an image of any kind. If the thing that separates theory from utopianism is observation, which of those use cases have you actually observed and would unironically recommend?
Because if you mean the intrinsic value of art then that’s refuted by the essay I originally linked. What other value do you think this would give communists? What about that music video you’re so impressed by couldn’t be done by animators who make a living from a creative product? And if that’s your standard for artistic quality, boy howdy. That’s absolute slop which I’d be embarrassed to show someone.
It could be the most sophisticated plagiarism machine possible, requiring the most amount of effort to make a coherent image of any of the models, but I challenge you to make the absolute best image on the absolute best model out there. Really pour your heart and soul into it for a sincere amount of time. Make a prompt 10,000 words long with every parameter precisely dialed in. It will take me 30 seconds and an acre of rainforest to make all of that for nothing in a way I can’t do if you snap a photograph out of your window. You sculpt a shitty cup and I can’t replicate it, you paint the most meaningless abstract expressionist piece and I can’t replicate it, you record a cover of Happy Birthday and I can’t replicate it. Not at the level you did without a technical background, not better than you did without significant capital investment or unique talent. If I can do that with AI images using a library computer or cheap smartphone, your investment in making the image is way more than its worth as an instantly genericised jpeg. I can’t feed your cup into a kiln and effortlessly make a better cup, but I’m four clicks away from making a better version of your AI image.
Even if we develop it as open source and community driven, that doesn’t make it gain value it doesn’t intrinsically have. It devalues human art by flooding the space with slop, like it did with Clarkesworld and Spotify. It would still be ideologically futurist and alienating to the artists whose skill comes from years of practice. There’s no communist future where plagiarism is meaningful art when communists now and in the 1930s already saw through it. Would you buy an AI image I make as a Marxist who knows a lot about art theory? Would you buy it for the same price as a napkin doodle I make? This one’s pretty good, reflects my communist values with two decades of studying art nouveau behind it, and I’ll sell it to you for the right price:
My critique of AI is rooted in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, something it’s fundamentally incapable of overcoming. A photograph can be reproduced, but the print is worth the paper it’s on unless you do the actual labour of adding a signature. Like you said to produce the original takes actual skill and capital and creative intent. Coding a nice-looking website is artistic even though they’re just tappity-tapping at a keyboard. I could not replicate a good website without knowing multiple programming languages and all the fields web design draws from.
Fundamentally that is not there with AI. It is all slop no matter how much tech demons try to inflate their salary by calling themselves prompt engineers instead of someone who does a lower level of data entry than I did working in tech support for an ISP. No amount of precision refinement of the plagiarism machine will overcome the fundamental valuelessness of it. The moment you upload that AI image you spent 40 hours engineering to the web, I’m going to feed it into another image generator with a prompt that tailors it to my tastes. I can say “make this in the style of Van Gogh” and produce something much better than your original image without any of the time you wasted trying to make a coherent picture, and my energy cost is much lower to produce the better version of the same product. I can’t do that with any actual commodity, only something like an NFT which also insists on its own value. Both NFTs and AI images are standard fictitious capital which can be replicated by their own means of production even easier than the “original” product. You right click>save the NFT and suddenly their $1m monkey jpeg is any other jpeg.
Of course capitalists don’t care about it and just see it as a chance to turbocharge the primary contradiction of capitalism, but the closest historical parallel for me isn’t an artistic commodity so much as it is ersatz bread. They’re doing creative shrinkflation and the core limitation of the technology devalues their product to the point that people stop wanting it. There are Disney Adults who will pathologically seek out any slop with a face they recognise from childhood, but the same thing driving capitalists toward AI to save on labour costs is also driving them toward increasing the costs of the shittier product. People only bought into NFTs when the speculative value turned it into gambling just as they currently support AI because it represents a tech bubble. When that bursts, the energy costs of making an AI image will outweigh any amount of value you could get in the short term at the cost of your long-term reputation. Businesses who ratfuck their marketing departments to use it will cause a brain drain that hurts their ability to advertise, artists who use it will be lumped in with slop, and only niche applications like worse VFX in a product with greater actual capital investment will make economic sense.
The neo-luddite position is the only one that makes sense to me because it’s building on two subsequent centuries of Marxist art/tech/cultural theory. We’re not seizing the mechanised looms because they don’t make actual cloth. Pushing a coherent humanistic idea of what art means, universalising its production and consumption with an economic focus on supporting artisans and artistic co-ops, is the way for people to see value in leftist art. The modernists understood this until that future was stolen from us and only building off what they started will create art that’s something other than a spectacle or commodity. AI “art” is purely within the ideological framework of fascist futurism with no place for us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Woman
Deer Woman, sometimes known as the Deer Lady, is a spirit in Native American mythology whose associations and qualities vary, depending on situation and relationships. Generally, however, to men who have harmed women and children, she is vengeful and murderous and known to lure these men to their deaths. She appears as either a beautiful young woman with deer feet or as a deer.
Do NOT trust the flavourdeer. The flavourdeer LIES.
Does the new ARMA have a more intuitive UI and control scheme than ARMA 2/3? That’s what keeps me from recommending it instead. Squad is much more streamlined in that regard without losing the depth, like comparing Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/393380/Squad/
This is my favourite shooter, based on the Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality. Everything feels, looks, and sounds realistic. Matches take several hours and have a lot of coordination between specialised squads. The maps are huge and detailed. I’ve played rounds where I only fire a couple bullets and like PUBG it’s so much more thrilling than an arcade shooter with nonstop action.
I was a 9/11 truther because there were so many weird coincidences that day, but ultimately had to accept the accident theory. Shit happens.
I like Twain’s work a lot. He became really radical in his later years: https://socialistworker.org/2010/04/21/the-twain-they-didnt-teach
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
That’s a pretty generic closure. They sent similar messages during the moderator protests as they went public. Protesting subreddits were temporarily closed and the mods were swapped out for controlled ones.
Cargo ships are your cheapest paid option. I’ve yet to do it, but contact the shipping companies and see what their passenger policies are. There are also shipping agents who coordinate with those companies as intermediates.
There’s also the potential of crewing a small boat if you have any skills or show them you want to learn fast. I did a lot of sailing around Panama just by sitting in a marina at either side of the canal and chatting with people who are about to sail somewhere. The work was either poorly paid ($50-100 per day) or free in exchange for a bed and food. For transatlantic/transpacific sailing though, I don’t know if you’re going to find as many yachters as I did who were just sailing in the Caribbean. That’s also a fun option if you want to build those skills since they need a certain number of crew to even transit the canal and they’re all going somewhere after.
edit: And for the latter you’ll also have luck on boater forums. I can’t remember which I used, but there was a designated subforum where people would post if they have or want crew work specifically for linehandling.
“But you didn’t” is such a powerful idea in art. The only reason European artists aren’t stuck in strict biblical representation with church-approved colours is that people pushed boundaries. The modernists rejected boundaries altogether and embraced pure creativity to such a degree that their own audience couldn’t recognise it as art. I’ve seen that same Malevich painting in the MoMA and that’s revolution. That’s a communist rebelling against centuries of only realistic paintings of idyllic landscapes and aristocratic portraits being taken seriously. He’s saying a red square is art for the sake of creative expression, an idea that would mature into “common people are alienated from art which is restrained to a professional class. Everyone should be entitled to its production and consumption” with proletarian art. He destroyed the idea of subject as a model of patronage as much as he did as a creative restraint.
Art should do that. It shouldn’t just have a message, but a call to some greater action that enables better art. We wouldn’t have modern music without Wagner violating the tonic as the most sacred principle of European music. Modern music, and especially classical music, is fucking beautiful in completely new ways because someone had the courage to reject centuries of what Serious Adults said was beautiful.
I use two definitions for the two broad intellectual trends in art over the past century:
Robert Hughes on modernism- “the shock of the new”
David Harvey on postmodernism- “The reduction of experience to a series of pure and unrelated presents”
AI fundamentally can’t create modernist art because it recombines what already exists into a crude 3rd stage simulacrum. You’ll never see genuine brilliance from how we understand AI. It’s incapable of creating a new perspective, new consonance out of dissonance, or a societal transformation through art. If the world is a shared historical trajectory where we’re discovering the same common thing, AI doesn’t participate in that. It has no investment in the nature worship of art nouveau or the class politics of constructivism or the physics of cubism. It can’t overcome the 1936 standard of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he was only describing crude printing presses.
AI can create postmodern art but only because postmodernism is ideologically, historically, and financially flattened into artists as bourgeois bloggers. If the world is nothing but commodified individual commentary in a marketplace of ideas with the most valuable commentary coming from wealthy failchildren, AI is a wealthy failchild that can also regurgitate what it learned from scraping art school data while still staying tailored to market preferences.
I don’t personally value the latter or see it as anything more than a counterrevolution against the future we lost in the mid-20th century. There’s no reason I’d ever pay for an AI image if I can generate a more personally-tailored version instantly for free using the same IP it recombined to shit out. It’s inherently Thomas Kinkade kitsch but somehow less valuable because they don’t even pretend to involve creative labour in it.
The only good work environment I’ve had was a municipal parks department. Not even unionised, paid $17/hour for the same work I could get $25-35/hour for at a private landscaper, no benefits for seasonal workers and few super-competitive permanent roles. But in decoupling from the profit motive, production became based on need rather than financial goals. I worked so much harder than I would at a private company because building a public pollinator garden is ecologically critical work that educates people on important things. Clearing snow at 4am in -10c weather was something I did until the point of exhaustion because I use those same bike trails and sidewalks the moment I get off work and each bike is one less car that might kill my neighbours. I got to do eco-Marxism without having to use any of the vocabulary alongside a mixed bag of liberals and radicals who intuitively understood those ideas through observation.
With strong unions and outright syndicalism, that kind of nuance returns to the incentive structure. Its productivity based on socio-ecological need instead of production for profit. We cared about getting people their 40 hours per week and if you came up 5 hours short you’d get paid to study and design sustainable landscapes used by your neighbours. If you needed time off you got it, if you needed a break you took it. You got to spend all day making beautiful de-alienating things for your coworkers, wildlife, and community. When my neighbours hold the power instead of owners and shareholders, it’s so much easier to convince them that doing A instead of B will improve our shared conditions.
The largest arboriculture company here is employee-owned but not unionised at a national level. Their stock isn’t publicly traded and each year the permanent employees get to buy shares with a certain percentage of their income. That access to stock options increases with your rank. While they’re the only arborists I’d want to work for and set the industry standards for safety, I don’t like two things about that:
Seasonal employees don’t get stock options, nor do new employees without like a year under their belt. This concentrates the internal wealth of the company in upper management and senior employees, making the incentive structure represent them instead of Joe Schmuckatelli risking their life 30m up with a chainsaw.
The incentive structure is the same as a public company as a result of that. Make number go up so you get dividends at the end of the year. The only way to make number go up is to do more with less. Productivity is in direct contrast to the welfare of workers because they don’t have a union to represent their safety or rights. If I get a small bonus every year from dividends but I spent that year risking my life unnecessarily to boost the stock price, it’s just gambling on Russian roulette.
Tesla having an oligarchical stranglehold over US EVs is why I can’t affordably own a better brand like BYD. If you want to be idealistic about Tesla’s supposed climate change role, explain it to me in the context of The Purpose of a System is What it Does. Tesla uses public funds to make luxury cars while suppressing the EV industry through its proprietary infrastructure, obsession with private transit, and government influence. The Boring Company is a direct response to California trying to implement high speed rail so that the wealthy don’t have to share space with workers.
Of course I negatively judge someone for owning one. If it’s a cybertruck, they’re feral and I write them off as a member of society. Electrification is dead on arrival as long as they exist.
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cpdxzjw9p47o
Elon Musk’s appearance at a Trump rally this afternoon is garnering significant attention online over a one-armed gesture.
He made the gesture while thanking supporters for contributing to Trump’s victory. Musk thanked the crowd for “making it happen”, before placing his right hand over his heart and then thrusting the same arm out into air straight ahead of him.
“My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured,” he said.
Several users on X, the social medial platform he owns, have likened the gesture to a Nazi salute.
Musk has since responded, posting on his social media site X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
I wish western journalists would have opted to become compost instead. Compost is useful.