Old Tactics, Neo-Luddites: We're all the problem now...
This article from Wired is well worth a read as it outlines the increasing attempts in the US to problematise and criminalise AI resistance movements. Amongst the Trump administrations fevered politicisation of the intelligence services tech resistance is, seemingly, getting the full Luddite treatment with even peaceful, mundane opposition being highlighted as a threat.
This is, above all, an ideological move. The state is aligned with Big Tech, Big Tech detests resistance - the absence of credible reasons for targeting organising and protest movements as they currently stand is ultimately irrelevant. This isn't about keeping anyone (or anything) safe so much as finding cultural fault lines to present opposition as an abhorrent threat that can legitimately be subjected to invasive surveillance and harassment.
One interesting point of comparison with the original Luddites however, who were subject to all sorts of oppressive measures, including the death sentence, is that they were a force that could be overtly smashed. The Luddites as labourers and even the technonegative and sympathetic factory owners who weren't as eager to put people out of work represented a more traditional issue of automation. The workers could be fired and their resistance broken, there was no reason to much care how they felt about the technologies replacing them once it was decided that their political agency was irrelevant in the emergent economic system. They didn't need to like the machines.
AI companies are, for now, facing a very different problem I think. While we're increasingly seeing what I think is the shift of future profit focuses onto things like defence, education and general government contracts and backing there remains a retail element to how most platforms assume they'll function. They need a mass of customers, those customers need to like their product. Or at least feel sufficient apathy towards it to ignore the harms it does. We've already seen that issue spike with the recent QuitGPT movement over OpenAI's deals with the US military where Anthropic were, seemingly, the main beneficiaries.
This isn't something that necessarily taps into real resistance. Consumer choice doesn't challenge the socio-technical structures of AI, nor the power dynamics behind them, but from a business perspective it's certainly something.
Moving to criminalise or problematise AI criticisms, opening them up to even more invasive state surveillance and attention - it's a blunt weapon - one which works best when the subject group can safely be broken, their political and cultural capital deemed irrelevant. How that works when you're still trying to push your platforms as wondrous and liberatory for a mass audience is a different question.
The obvious answer, if this trend continues, is for tech companies to give up on the idea of winning people over and lean ever more heavily into state alliances and intervention to force the adoption of AI. We can already see that in defence, education, administration etc. Government contracts act not only ways to impose the use of AI but also as a perpetual money generator that is somewhat impervious to popular opinion. The zenith of which would be ideas like Altman's Universal Basic Compute, where the company becomes the state and participation is mandatory as an economic reality.
To do that though is to feed into the massive potential for everyday resistance. If the line becomes to abandon popularity in favour of imposition then far from removing the potential for more extremist resistance you're shrugging and accepting it as inevitable. Not something that offers great hope for enthusiastic popular adoption of technologies that you may increasingly be criminalised for questioning.
Of course that may have been the road map all along. Plenty would point to the inherent fascist tendencies in AI and its main players as proof that negotiation would never take precedence over imposition and I am, perhaps, being a little naïve in suggesting it ever would have. But then, given the venal idiocy of both the US state and the companies whose interests moves like this represent it's not always easy to delineate genuinely harmful intent from the less profound and always ubiquitous blind pursuit of self interest. Even if they do amount to the same thing.
How can we prepare for any of this? That's a good question. As state intelligence starts to flag non-violent opposition to AI and its infrastructural mobilisations there's no clear way to pull back from being targeted. When no critique is considered affable enough to be permissible we may just have to accept that we're stuck being the problem and in that position there are whole new debates to be had.
- Dylan
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Recommended reading for more Luddite resistance and technonegative background...
Blood in the Machine - Brian Merchant
Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine - Thomas Dekeyser
Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence - Dan McQuillan