I hope she realizes the whole “IF it’s implemented correctly” part of her statement involves her boyfriend getting [REDACTED].
what the fuck is going on here how is she being funneled millions of dollars
also idk why people are saying enhanced automation wont bring about communism, thats idealistic not materialist. the way i see it there are two paths forward for a stateless classless society assuming tech continues to advance:
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the billionaires kill us all and have their own stateless classless society when the workers are automated
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we oppose them killing us all and we just do a stateless classless society ourselves with all work automated
what the fuck is going on here how is she being funneled millions of dollars
Professional singer with a decently sized fanbase who is also married to one of the richest men in the world.
also idk why people are saying enhanced automation wont bring about communism
The big argument is that without land/capital ownership reform, automation just means further enclosure, ghettoization, and imprisonment/extermination of “surplus labor”. It’s the same shit the Luddites were freaking out about. Rather than a Guild of Textile Workers all plying their high skill trades, you get one big textile mill on the river and a bunch of ex-craftsmen who either work for pennies-on-the-dollar in the mill or get told to fuck off and die.
A turn-key agricultural sector would be a nightmare for both agricultural consumers and workers, so long as the key was held by an oligarch.
the way i see it there are two paths forward for a stateless classless society assuming tech continues to advance:
I think the theory of tech advancement absent labor really puts a lot of chips on maintenance-free technology, and I’ve seen absolutely nothing to support this theory of future business operation.
That said, the nature of modern technology tends to revolve around securing large physical installations with incredibly low-cost and labor-light security. What we are seeing more and more is the modernization of security forces, such that a handful of insiders wield the power to harm/kill vastly larger numbers of proletariat residents. Individuals are thus forced to choose between a high-risk / low-yield resistance to security or a low-risk / low-yield surrender.
? i mean we’re talking about a hypothetical future, im not saying our current abilities in automation are sufficient for a no-work society. maintenance will always be the biggest hurdle at scale, especially with current tech. you can make parts last for a long time but at scale stuff will break down enough that youll need 100-200 people per large industrial plant to fix things. this will necessarily create a class of people regardless of your societal disposition for capitalism vs socialism, so communism will not be a thing until the maintenance automation problem is solved. our current tech just isnt good enough to have self repairing factories yet, or self fixing code. we’re only just starting to dabble in that sort of tech.
and yes, automation will necessarily create terrible living conditions, but that in itself will make a socialist society more likely, or at least a society in which the capitalist class is more managed.
communism will not be a thing until the maintenance automation problem is solved
So long as the technology frontier continues to advance, it will never be solved. But communism isn’t a workless society, it’s prefaced on a classless society. In that sense, what really matters is the political control of capital. Is capital democratized or is it under the thumb of an oligarchy?
As we advance our understanding and implementation of security technology, the latter becomes more and more easy to realize. By contrast, a security state is difficult to democratize, as there are an increasing number of choke points through which any opportunistic individual can disenfranchise folks on the wrong side of the gate. Once you give someone a push-button system for maintaining food or potable water or traffic, it becomes that much easier to collect rents in exchange for access and deny service to your political opponents. That’s not even considering a push-button flying army of kill-bots.
and yes, automation will necessarily create terrible living conditions, but that in itself will make a socialist society more likely, or at least a society in which the capitalist class is more managed.
Concentration camps and refugee camps are about as miserable a state of living as you can create. And yet, these are not historically places from which socialist resistance movements emerge. The tighter the security, the less capable people are to resist. Just look at Palestine (or neighboring Jordan and Egypt, for that matter). Incredibly tight security allows for more and more deplorable standards of living. And if you want to see the relative success of an insurgency, consider Yemen. Not exactly on the path to glorious revolution, given the struggles they continue to have with even an incompetently implemented first generation military.
This is just her desperately trying to reconcile her relationship with Elon and her lifestyle with her previous more radical beliefs. Same as when she defended union busting/worker conditions at Tesla. She sounds so out of touch.
This is the same person who had a Stalin quote in her yearbook and “anti-imperialist” in her twitter bio.
What stalin quote did she have? How do you even defend union busting and pretend to be a leftist? She clearly does not understand the buzzwords she is using.
It’s more like her class position changed so now her interests align with the bourgeois that she used to hate
Definitely sold out, her political beliefs are utterly deranged but on her tiktok she called herself a technocrat but I dont think she understands what that means.
her previous more radical beliefs
Meh. She does not strike me as the kind of person who read theory. She strikes me as the kind of person who picked up some jingoisms that made her look edgy and flounced around with them to get attention.
This is the same person who had a Stalin quote in her yearbook
Not exactly the most controversial thing Stalin ever said.
Yeah I don’t disagree with any of that, I just don’t think she wants to give up on whatever idea she had of herself as a radical, as shallow as it was. I also think a lot of her fanbase are left leaning and she’s prob getting a lot of pushback on that front.
Undoubtedly. But that’s the nature of parasocial relationships. Her material conditions incentivize behaviors in contradiction with her personal beliefs. She doesn’t really know or care about any of the online hangers-on she interacts with. She just works to maximize the number of interactions that establish her revenue stream.
Well in a Non-Hellworld world yes AI and automation would mean a relatively post scarcity society
But, and I cannot stress this enough, we do in fact live in Hellworld
I have thoughts on this, because while she’s wrong, she’s not entirely wrong, and it’s actually worth engaging with people who think this way.
The first thought has to do with the necessity of a post-scarcity economy for communism. Murray Bookchin dealt with this in “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” in 1971. His answer is basically that yes, you do need a post-scarcity economy for a stateless, classless society to be feasible. But what Bookchin meant by post-scarcity didn’t require full automation, just the ability to produce at a level where a high standard of living didn’t have to be rationed, which he thought was first achievable with mid-1960s technology. As one of the other posters here said, classless doesn’t imply “workless”. We could have a post-scarcity society today, but the way we allocate resources prevents us from doing so, and creates artificial scarcity.
My second thought has to do with the book “Four Futures”, by Peter Frase. He describes the society that Silicon Valley wants as Rentism: hierarchy and abundance. It is the attempt to create total automation, while maintaining the power and wealth of economic elites which is so far largely enforced by the system of wage labor. Rentism is a world where most consumer goods can be copied by a consumer-grade 3-D printer, but you’re not allowed to because of intellectual property law, and enforcement built into your printer. It’s a world where your toaster will only toast bread sold by the toaster vendor (unless you illegally jailbreak it). Intellectual property law and the extraction of rents it allows becomes the basis for elite wealth and control. Such a society would have a problem of effective demand, which would be addressed with a combination of violent enforcement/guard labor, and UBI – here you can see why UBI is popular with techbros. That said, the long-term trajectory of Rentism probably tends towards Communism; ultimately the only thing keeping the masses from post-scarcity abundance is ideology.
But what Bookchin meant by post-scarcity didn’t require full automation, just the ability to produce at a level where a high standard of living didn’t have to be rationed, which he thought was first achievable with mid-1960s technology
Sure. And Krompkin thought it was possible with 1890s technologies. A lot hinges on your anticipated standard of living. Do you want planes? Do you want MRI machines? Do you want a Space Program? Etc.
Post-Scarcity is here, if all you care about is a 19th century serf’s quality of life. But that doesn’t cover things like literacy or security or any kind of social life.
We could have a post-scarcity society today, but the way we allocate resources prevents us from doing so, and creates artificial scarcity.
We allocate resources towards the security state, which explicitly enables the class hierarchy. Keep building new kinds of gate, and you’ll always have gatekeepers and rent seekers.
Intellectual property law and the extraction of rents it allows becomes the basis for elite wealth and control. Such a society would have a problem of effective demand, which would be addressed with a combination of violent enforcement/guard labor, and UBI – here you can see why UBI is popular with techbros. That said, the long-term trajectory of Rentism probably tends towards Communism;
Again, I think the big hiccup in this expectation is in the advancement of security technology. As securing both physical and intellectual property becomes cheaper, the Capitalist State becomes more secure.
What is the upper bound on efficient security state? What’s the political and economic limit of a Renter society? I don’t know. But I think Americans are focusing their time and energy on finding out.
