As I referred in the previous article, we are facing a flurry of AI deployment. It is doubtful that there was ever such a fast and widespread diffusion of a “tool” across society and the economy. Of course, this is only possible because of the previous diffusion of the internet, steadily settled into our lives over the past four decades or so, and the digitalisation of society, politics and economy. The intent with AI is to go much further. It is deliberately constructed to extend not only into our computers and phones, but into most of the machines, as well as into new arenas such as our bodies.

AI is a political project of the greatest scope, it is the deliberate development of a new “historical bloc”, the union of an economic base and a superstructure to impose long lasting hegemony of capitalism during the collapse of its physical infrastructure brought on by climate change. It is also an historical bloc deployed together with a far-right political program based on repression of migration, the full on return of colonialism, the establishment of an authoritarian hierarchical cultural hegemony with the suppression of social advances and political liberties achieved in the last century.

Going back to Antonio Gramsci and the notions I’ve just skimmed through, it is important to remind key concepts:

• Economic base are the means of production, the tools, skills, factories that allow for the transformation of raw materials into products and commodities;
• Superstructure is culture, law, politics and all the institutions and actors that enforce them.

A historical bloc is the combination of the Economic Base with the Superstructure. These are key scenarios and sites in which political struggles have developed all across history. The novelty with AI is that it’s both a means of production, a tool, a enormous set of skills, a factory site and an hegemony machine. It is pointed out at becoming a key determinant of culture, law and politics, acting as actor and agent. Staying on Gramsci and hegemony, its important to also remind that hegemony is imposed by the upper classes on society in general, creating a process whereby the dominant class forces their own values, norms and worldviews into the subordinate classes both by violence and by the creation of consent. It operates via two locus:

• Political Society (violence and repression, the coercive apparatus of police, military, courts)
• Civil Society (communication and culture, the ideological apparatus of schools, media, churches, mainstream culture).

AI operates in the entire board of Gramsci’s Political and Civil Society. It is in that sense that we need to look at it not through exclusively via the prism of a “new tool”, but as a new complete political project by the echelons of the capitalist class. We can look at AI as many things:

• A means of production;
• A tool of communicational hegemony;
• A tool of cultural hegemony;
• A tool of mass surveillance and political persecution;
• A tool of execution of violence;
• A site of struggles;
• A combination of physical sites, infrastructures and connections.

As I posited in the previous article, there are two main direct ways to interact with AI available for non-hegemonical groups: completely abandon the realms in which AI operates (which is, by what I’ve said a few lines before, extremely difficult), or acquire capacities in the deployment of our own tools of automation and even AI. I propose and intervention of the second type, that is, that radical social movements that are dedicated to preventing the collapse of society and the planet, the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a viable, democratic and ecosocially just future need to acquire and deploy counter-hegemonical tools of automation and AI. That means that we develop our own applications, programs or even LLMs, that we use them to defend ourselves, communities and the political projects of prevention of collapse, emancipation and revolution. What our tools are depend on context, but they certainly need to be developed in the areas of communication (both internal and external), where we are being squashed under the weight of corporate algorithms and a shrinking and elite-controlled mainstream media, in the areas of surveillance (prevention of vigilance at the very least), where automated tools of online and offline recognition, pattern establishment and preemptive repression and suppression are becoming mainstream, and in the area of general information, as there is a clear an concerted effort to make information now available disappear, as we can see in the examples of suppression of climate data gathered by satellites or the attacks on Wikipedia. There is a deliberate attempt at preventing the general public and we ourselves from understanding the world and its dynamics to be able to intervene. We must develop our own means to prevent ourselves from becoming blind to a complex reality that is constantly and erratically changing.

There are many challenges in doing this. We must find and develop tools quickly and with alternative means, while having little access to the great computational capacity currently used by companies and governments against us. We must therefore acquire growing technical capacity to operate and understand different ways to develop and protect our own systems. We must also make clear that this isn’t a support of the AI and automation model developed by the billionaires, but its most acute critic. We know that the deployment of AI is happening and will continue to be done undemocratically, exactly because it is a project to totally submit and dominate the peoples, their labour, their power and knowledge to the elites. We must use all available tools to prevent this and to disrupt capitalism’s march towards collapse. A movement intervention in this area (with different approaches locally and adaptation at the movement level) and in articulation with struggles focusing on AI democracy and the limitation of deployment is at this moment a clear necessity for all movements who mean to keep on struggling and plan on winning.

On the 1st of March, we will launch the book “Algorithms of Collapse – What to do about AI and Automation”, written by myself and Sascha Brandsma. There we will approach this and other issues. Please join us. Sign up here.