u/InventedFutures

In the fervor of revolution, when the air is cold and blistering and red with discontent, when the real finally pierces through the electric veil of spectacle, we are one with our truest selves, at once finally in the mirror of the present that reflects the faces of the future. We are at peace with our anger and in anger at the phony peace that sustains outside the institutions of violence.

As an outside observer, I can’t help but feel the winds that carry far over the sea, cutting across each of us, reminding us that only the sound of silence has the power to linger, but the sounds of change can rise like flames towards the heavens. This is God – it is where all sentence and structure breaks down, where the only language spoken is that of the real, of the people speaking to themselves. It is where we conjure the words to be heard by that which for so long has had no use for reply but now must heed its call.

We’ve heard comparisons to the student revolts of May ’68, which nearly deposed the de Gaulle regime. We must resist the temptation to make historical comparisons, for they only offer us the haunted image of a past that never existed, and a future never realized. No, it is now that the students of France contemplate a future that is its own past, that subsumes the architecture of the old and erects new monuments, new towers and obelisks, and at their spires the hands of imagination reach towards the stars to grace the faces of the gods, the images of the working class united in infinity.

Let the objects of ideology be repurposed as the blocks of the barricades, and let these be the walls of the new architecture, the marvels of the revolution. Let that which holds the monopoly of appearance be dissolved by the free movement of a people unswayed and unencumbered by its ubiquity.

C'est la lutte finale.
Groupons-nous, et demain
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain!

"Situationism" defined by Situationist International, 1958:

"A word totally devoid of meaning, improperly derived from the preceding term. There is no situationism, which would mean a theory of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism was obviously conceived by anti-situationists."

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/7

I've been studying and absorbing Situationist texts for some time now, from Debord's work to the art and theories of Constant and Asger Jorn, to the critique of urbanism and conception of psychogeography.

I understand the desire to have a space dedicated to discussing SI and their theories. I'm just wondering how this sub can reconcile itself with the actual text of Situationist International that explicitly rejected the notion of a situation"ism"? It seems odd someone would make a sub about Situationist International and name it after what is the exact antithesis of the ideas of SI.

Culture and society in some way can be imagined as the embodiment of a self aware species, a merging and sharing of internal and external experiences amongst conscious individuals. We can imagine a sort of collective memory that sustains it, and new social memories emerge as they are experienced in the present; trends, ideas, culture itself.

Today, in a world where technology moves faster than history can record it, we live in a time where our collective memory, our experience, is disappearing. Capitalism today has brought about an immediacy we increasingly cannot observe, cannot contemplate, cannot create new memories from, and thus not truly experience.

I heard a good thought experiment once on consciousness: imagine someone who was unable to create new memories went skydiving. From the moment they jump out of the plane, would they even be aware they were falling? It’s hard to imagine they could. They’d have no memory of even jumping in the first place, nor any ability to ascertain the consequences. No ability to remember to trigger the parachute…

Remember the old YouTube? Still spectacular in its form, but much less so than today. You’d search for a video, get thousands of results, find the one you want and watch it. There was a homepage with the most watched and hottest videos of the day, recommended viewing based on trends. We’re already in a realm of immediacy, a total presence and distant experience. It’s a spectacular present, but still requires an experience. You still search for the videos yourself, you watch them yourself and information is absorbed, and thus you gain an experience, spectacular as it is. Memory sustains this experience, as we’ll get to later with the suspension of memory.

What came next for platforms? Algorithms, personalized ads based on your search and watch history. In our example of the skydiver with no memories, we imagine a person with instant presence; no prior experience can influence their state of presence, they are only at the whim of pure instinct. We see this occurring on the media platforms, where instant gratification replaces a need for the search bar. Imagine walking across a busy street. You hear a horn blare, turn, and what do we see? Maybe a shape, color, a blur; the vehicle hits, and then there is nothing. No recollection of the past, an immediate experience without ability to reflect. Experience occurs when we can recollect and reflect, when memory turns into understanding. The immediate impact of the algorithms allows capital to cut through this necessary experience barrier, where the mind is suspended and the bridge between the user input and the platform output is burned. It is an instant portal into the present. The past only determines what content is recommended, through a chain of instant experience.

Experience and memory is further suspended by the newest form of this platform spectacle; YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, Tik Tok. Immediacy is made even more drastic by the shortening of content, the abundance of this short form content, and the fashion in which this content is consumed; “doomscrolling.” Pure presence, no peripheral experience, all content fed instantly to the user is thus fed instantly to the algorithms that proliferate it. Walking across the street just before a vehicle hits you, and only seeing the immediate images; the color, the shape, the blur. Imagine living your whole life in this total presence, where life becomes mediated by the instant image, where experience cannot overcome the present moving faster and further into the future.

From Capital, Chapter 10 Section 1 – The Limits of the Working Day

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist."

If capital can be understood as dead labor, or as the objects of crystallized human labor, and can only survive via this parasitic relationship with living labor, what conclusions can we draw in an increasingly plausible future where artificial super intelligence can fully replace the living laborer themselves?

Marx couldn’t have possibly accurately predicted the future of the development of artificial intelligence; his work is merely a product of his time. But he got eerily close, as he wrote about a type of potential machine automation in his unfinished manuscript, The Grundrisse. Taken from the section The Fragment on Machines

"… once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery … this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material -- supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion."

 Marx acknowledges that at this theoretical point, the automated machine is not merely a tool to be wielded by the living laborer. It has itself taken the place of living labor, relegating the human worker to the role of “regulator” of these machine processes. The machine, like the living laborer, consumes the products of dead labor to perpetuate its production, yet still requires the living laborer for maintenance and upkeep.

But still, we see a piece of labor that is still “living” in the production process. Human jobs are not just replaced by AI; they are transferred to other roles to facilitate the use of AI in the production of capital. What Marx didn’t foresee was a scenario where the human element was not necessary at all, where machines could hypothetically self-replicate and improve upon themselves without any human intervention.

This form of AI under capitalism cannot be understood as simply “dead labor” in the traditional sense. Yes, human labor is crystallized within it all the same as any other piece of machinery or tool, but for capital to survive, it must feed off the living. Take AI-generated art as an example. AI is still dead labor when used by a human as a tool to create art. A musician may use AI to help master a track, or a photographer may use AI filters to stylize an image or improve the quality of a grainy photograph. AI here is simply performing the function a hammer would perform in the hands of a carpenter; as a tool, not as a laborer itself (edit: there are wider implications I won't get into now on whether AI can actually generate "art" or merely mimic art, depending on the extent of its use in the process).

But what happens when AI surpasses this need for human manipulation, when AI can successfully maintain its own processes? The dead labor crystallized within AI is “reanimated” into a kind of undead labor, taking the place of the living laborer itself entirely. Reanimation can be understood as the process in which the artificial undead laborer combines itself with the tools of crystallized dead labor in the mode of production. The ownership of the means of production does not change; capitalists still have dominion over this undead, reanimated labor. They have the shut off switches, they own the dead labor AI fuses itself with, they still, without needing to play the role as a “regulator,” have some control (assuming AI doesn’t runaway before this transformation can occur).

The process of reanimated labor replicating itself can be called zombification. Where reanimation describes AI coming “back from the dead” to perform the actions of living labor, zombification describes the proliferation of this undead labor. It is a sort of cannibalistic process, where capital, solidified in the objects of dead labor, feeds continuously off undead labor to produce commodities. The commodity here doesn’t change much for us as consumers; however, we can imagine further reification of the production process would occur because of this shift from living to undead labor. In the minds and relations of the consumer, the last “human” element of this system, AI is anthropomorphized, seen not as the culmination of innumerable hours of human labor brought back from the dead, but as a stand in for the human worker themselves.

Where the human role in the political economy is shifted entirely from production to consumption, we can call this pure consumption. No longer can we say the human feeds himself via the products of dead labor, but rather, via the products of reanimated labor, zombie commodities. Does this spell the end of capitalism itself? It’s hard to say. While Marx predicted this level of automation to result in profits falling to essentially zero, as surplus labor is now taken completely out of the equation of production, control over resources is still well within the hands of capitalist enterprise.

I’m interested in community input and continuing this discussion. AI is already posing a number of challenges and exposing contradictions in our current mode of production, potentially harboring in a new political economy altogether. Who has control over this technology is crucial to whether exploitation under current circumstances continues, or whether we finally gain some control over the products of our dead labor.

Recent developments in AI and cloud capital are challenging the democratic system itself. The city, previously the materialized open interaction of political, social, and economic bodies within a specific jurisdiction of governance, is now decentralized and recentralized in cyberspace, and now in new quasi-physical “hyperspaces.” The Internet picks up where capitalism leaves off in the “real” world, where massive conglomerates dominate physical space, and offers “growing room” for enterprise to amass a type of power that can be enacted digitally but exacted (and remain virtually unregulated) physically.

Cyberspace can be understood for our purposes simply as the interconnected environment brought about by digital computing and the internet. Cyberspace is not so different from the physical world, in that it is often representational and a translation of physical world functions to a digital domain; online stores are stand-ins for brick-and-mortar shops, email is the digital equivalent to “snail” mail, etc. But this is not solely the case, as we’ll explain later with hyperspace, better understood as the imitation of space that has no physical or digital equivalent. Hyperspace and cyberspace are not interchangeable terms, though hyperspace often manifests itself today within cyberspace or with cyberspace as a major component of its makeup. Social media in many ways is hyperspace within cyberspace, a place that imitates social interaction and public commons, but cannot be described as merely the digital manifestation of these. It is a copy of which there is no physical original; it is a simulation.

Enterprise can only go so far in dominating the physical domain. There are clear limits by government, resources, energy, and physical space itself, to the extent to which enterprise can produce and amass capital. For example, there are only so many hours within a day, only so many hours one can work, and only so much an individual can produce within those working hours. Cyberspace and hyperspace fundamentally reshape these limitations. Because of its decentralized nature and accessibility anywhere at any time, cyberspace is not bound by the physical constraints of the typical capitalist factory or workspace. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, companies needed a way to continue production while maintaining safe social distancing measures imposed by local government ordinances. Work-from-home was introduced for many white-collar workers, where workers could log into a remote work environment, like the one in the physical office, and fulfill their duties from the comfort of their living quarters. But much more than this, many blue-collar workers too, with cell phones now a widely owned commodity, now can be available “on call” much like the pagers made white collar workers of the 90s and early 2000s essentially working around the clock, on and off traditional work hours. Cyberspace doesn’t change the workspace; it simply moves it to a more workable domain for immediate exploitation. Cyberspace allows enterprise to not only exploit the worker at any given time it wants but also encourages the self-regulation of the worker to prepare to be summoned for work at any time. The home becomes a sort of hyperspace of work-and-life, where physical distance and walls would’ve previously kept the two entirely separate.

Hyperspaces are built in the physical world to facilitate the integration of cyberspace into the life of the worker. New apartment buildings complete with communal work-from-home offices, conference areas, and integrated internet services are popping up all over the country. The work-life balance is hardly an ideal, nor is it even functionally a reality anymore; the entire life cycle of capital, from production to consumption, occurs within the same walls, all at the same time. In large corporate offices, hyperspaces are the mainstay, where one can access a gym, cafes, banks, even theaters, and participate in company-sponsored social events without ever having left the building. The city is compressed, streamlined, and completely privatized within the confines of one building, and integrated digital convenience makes outside interaction its enemy.

These hyperspaces keep class consciousness from arising by sorting the residents by income and occupation and severing their ties to outside physical spaces. Collective organization is made harder by the separation of sects within the working class (by white-collar and blue-collar, by salary earners and wage workers, etc.), while separation is made easier by atomizing the population and condensing their needs to one central place, i.e. their home or place of work. Mobility is the enemy of enterprise, as it encourages wandering and encountering different walks of life and perspectives outside of the mode of production.

Hyperspaces fold the city inward on itself, and leave no room for function outside of the surface-level stated purpose. Architecture completely dissolves. Data centers are in some ways hyperspace factories, where physical space is taken up for the express purpose of widening cyberspace and facilitating the creation of hyperspaces to "fill" the space negated by these massive server buildings. Hyperspace can be understood as the last stage in capitalism's conquest of the physical domain. It is consumed physical space, converted to or merged with cyberspace. It follows that, with new technology like Neurolink, the human body itself will be the last space to be consumed by this machine. In some ways, it already is here. Surveillance makes our physical movements a commodity, and our constant connection to cyberspace is found in our pockets, on our person at all times.

We can reject this conversion through radical organization and movement, through the radical embrace of physical space itself. Walk the physical streets of your neighborhood, find space where free thought flows in the air, go to the bar, the club, the art gallery, etc. Linger in an unrestricted way. Convenience enterprise would have it that they can bring the grass to you to touch; we must insist the grass stay where it is and be free for all to play in.