AI and Fascism… it’s more sinister than you think
It’s no coincidence that the ascendance of the Tech Bros in determining our political future coincides with tech that erodes our forms of expression — and of dissent.
It’s no coincidence — and how incredibly stupid, how excruciatingly ironic — that AI is let in, allowed to infect our society while the West does all it can to block vulnerable human beings from finding safe harbor.
A friend in a creative field is looking for a remote job — they hate coming into the office, and who can blame them? After the Covid pandemic amply demonstrated we don’t need to be in glass and cement boxes for eight hours straight, the barons of capitalism panicked and insisted, Yes, you do, get back here or else. Because when it comes down to it, clock-watching and surveilling you is still more important to them than actual productivity. Doesn’t matter if you as a worker — especially a worker who has some creative input to a product — genuinely produces better with flexible hours and less restraints, the Company prefers you not be an aberration — even a positive one. And so my friend has had enough…
…And sent me this job ad for a Senior Content Marketing Creator and Editor with the quick line, “This is why I despair.”
Again, who can blame them? This is easily one of the stupidest job requirements I’ve seen in my life.
It comes from a marketing firm right in my backyard, Toronto, called Tecsys, which tells potential candidates with no sense of irony: “You’re a wordsmith with a razor-sharp editorial eye and a passion for turning complex ideas into compelling marketing content. You thrive on polishing copy until it’s clear, concise, and impactful. Whether it’s a whitepaper, case study, email campaign, or website copy, you ensure every word serves a purpose.”
And without missing a beat, it goes immediately on to say, “You love AI and technology, and you’re excited to apply them to enhance marketing content. You have an exceptional grasp of grammar, style, and structure, and you know how to fine-tune content to resonate with B2B audiences.”
Note all the typical job ad clichés: You have a passion for… you thrive on… you’ve got a razor-sharp editorial eye… Sorry, but eyes don’t cut anything, and the metaphor would have been more plausible with laser-sharp, but hey, I’m sure ChatGPT can help you with that. Whoever you are wrote this, you’re clearly lazy, but lucky for you, nobody minds too much that job ads can be products of a hack.
And judging by this, at Tecsys, someone is definitely a hack, whether it’s in Human Resources or in management.
But what I find really offensive both as a professional and a creative is that Tecsys demands you be subservient to the machine.
Never mind the fact that any substantially useful program of AI has only been around for little more than two years, it demands you have two years of “solid” work experience in a field, whatever that is. Your suitability for the job is now measured by how well you let a machine do what you’re supposed to do.
It’s not asking you if you know how to use Excel or Photoshop or Adobe Premiere Pro, it’s asking how well you conform to a program that in five-years-time could have an update to replace you.
A program can’t be held accountable for its use — that would be absurd. Tecsys, as the employer, takes the position that it wants to use it and is indeed entitled to use such programs, so tough, this is a fact of life: “Suck it up, we’re compromises individual creativity.” And ignoring one of the key facts of the current AI landscape in that programs are accused of outright plagiarizing work online, resulting in high-profile lawsuits. “So, hey, candidate, prove to us that you can be an obedient little cog and use the programs.”
There is a reason Hollywood writers dug in their heels and pushed back hard over the creeping influence of AI at the studios. Out of their 2023 strike, they fortunately got a contractual ban on studios using AI to write or edit scripts and are blocked from “treating AI-generated content as ‘source material,’ like a novel or a stage play, that screenwriters could be assigned to adapt for a lower fee and less credit than a fully original script.”
The writers got these guarantees thanks to a strong union, but don’t hold your breath on corporate writers, designers, etc. rallying together any time soon to gain similar protections. They simply can’t, given the nature and logistics of the field. Having worked several years in the trenches of the B2B world, I can assure you it is the hinterland of publishing where the nastiest forms of cynicism prevail. It’s the vast wasteland where Taxidermists Monthly and Louisiana Pharmacists Forum are often ground out by sleazy little publishing operations that are cruelly — but not always wrongly — viewed with contempt by the mainstream journalism profession.
I edited banking magazines for two different operations in London that routinely lied to potential advertisers and claimed their print run was the equivalent of their subscriptions. Big banks and corporations like Porsche bought sycophantic promotional articles with a full-page ad and an expensive lunch around Poultry Lane for an editor.
Why this matters is that in such environments, your boss or creative director can laugh in your face if you get too precious over a cover idea or an angle on a story. Want to do a great investigative feature on how oil companies uses mercenaries in Africa? Forget that, we might need those corporations to buy space. “We’re not putting out the New Yorker here!”
So. Of course, they want to use AI.
But once upon a time when you were a creative, you could leave your shitty job and take your portfolio across the street to a competitor and say, “See? This is what I’ve done! This is what I’ve accomplished!” And the competitor’s management could recognize your individual skill, what you did well while meeting the needs of an industry’s own language and the magazine’s style requirements. Your work surpassed expectations and showed individual merit.
Not anymore. Such AI programs reduce you to a mere technician, soon to be expendable. With the imminent pervasiveness of these programs, it will hardly matter soon if you can demonstrate you are different, that you are a creative wonder, because such individual value is no longer a requirement. Working at one firm will be the same as clicking the program at another.
What a pathetic joke Tecsys’s job ad is. It wants, indeed needs, some level of human competence and quality… for now. Because for the moment, AI is far from perfect. When it’s good enough, you can bet the human will be kicked to the curb.
There wasn’t much dignity in this fringe publishing field before, but there will be even less now, and of course, it will inevitably infect mainstream journalism if it hasn’t already.
Consider that USAID was already outed by Wikileaks for buying cookie-cutter, pro-U.S. media messages. It “transferred nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6 million) through Internews Network, a global media non-governmental organization (NGO) suspected of promoting covert censorship and media control.”
Only a hack could have the mentality to think that successful messaging can come off an assembly line or be made-to-order for audiences around the world.
So, sure. Tell me the idea of AI-generated bullshit sprinkled through pet news proxies doesn’t appeal to the rich and powerful.
“Why, mine, of course!”
Which brings us to fascism. And I realize I took you a long way around the garden, but it was necessary. Because mainstream media, which infuriatingly keeps trying to pose climate change as a debatable issue, is happy to embrace AI as technologically neutral. A boon to humanity.
The problem is that very flawed and indeed sometimes despicable humans are helping determine how AI is developed and used.
We have let this happen because we still passively accept the fascism of the workplace, hardly better than the poor factory shmucks of the first Gilded Age who had to strike to get decent wages and safety regulations. Thanks to union power declining in North America since at least the 1970s, next to no one outside Hollywood can ring the alarms over AI in workplaces. We have no collective will to fight back because institutions already treat the imposition of AI as status quo.
Consider that I’m drafting this article on Microsoft Word, which now opens every blank page with this idiocy:
I can’t find a way to shut it off, and I suspect there is none, or certainly won’t be in the near future. As writer Martin Calladine put it well on Bluesky, “No, I don’t need a bloody copilot for this document, thank you. Writing is, in no small part, a tool for thinking. If you outsource that element to a machine that cannot think, you shouldn’t be surprised if, at the end of the process, neither you nor your reader are any the wiser.”
But that seems to be the whole point. Even as you type a document, the stupid thing keeps pestering you whether you want to rewrite it with Copilot. Go on LinkedIn and try to post — it instantly offers to “Rewrite with AI.” Human composition is now automatically inferior by default.
As I’ve written elsewhere, how long before this is no longer optional but obligatory, with the “wrong” words no longer allowed?
It’s no coincidence that the ascendance of the Tech Bros in determining our political future coincides with tech that erodes our forms of expression — and of dissent.
It’s no coincidence — and how incredibly stupid, how excruciatingly ironic — that AI is let in, allowed to infect our society while the West does all it can to block vulnerable human beings from finding safe harbor.
The Tech Bros knew what they were doing. ChatGPT and OpenAI needed legitimacy in the Western workspace first — the high priests peddling AI knew that law and government inevitably would have to play catch-up in understanding what was going on, let alone questioning it. Thanks a bunch, Capitalism.
Before ChatGPT was on every newscast, Dan McQuillan put out a book in 2022 titled Resisting AI, an Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. McQuillan astutely pointed out that the program was only as intelligent as its programmers, with some “reinforcing bias and discriminatory practices in areas such as law enforcement, healthcare and access to money and employment.” AI systems, as one reviewer for the Orwell Society pointed out, are already capable of producing “precarious labor markets, and to prevent certain categories of people from accessing loans, benefits, work, pain relief, whole countries or even hotel stays based on data that feeds crude, prejudiced and opaque predictive models.”
Such anecdotes of horror make it online, but what’s being done about them? The unspoken assumption is that the program can be rewritten. But these flaws grow out of human character, and so far, we haven’t found a way to correct our worst assumptions, our most venal ambitions, and ugly prejudices, and when we try, it often ends in disaster.
It’s somewhat comical to discover that the original Star Trek, with its sterile set design of plastic swivel chairs and its utopian blandness, turned out to be right after all. In the episode titled “The Ultimate Computer,” the brilliant scientist Richard Daystrom creates an AI called M5 to run the whole Enterprise starship — and of course, as in so many Trek episodes, a computer with limitless power soon runs amuck and starts killing people. Where the episode, written by D.C. Fontana, rises to greatness comes at a moment when Spock prods Daystrom over the great innovative key he used to make his AI work: the human memory engrams.
“Dr. Daystrom,” says Spock, “you impressed human engrams on the M5 circuits.”
Kirk, catching his meaning, gets in Daystrom’s face and demands, “Whose engrams?”
“Why… mine of course!” replies the scientist.
The computer goes merrily on, killing people with photon torpedoes and phasers because it sees everything as a threat and wants to survive. Because deep down, Daystrom as an ordinary human being naturally wants to survive. The program wasn’t evil in itself; it acted repeatedly on a built-in misinterpretation of contexts. But now that you come to think of it, funny how fascists like to bang on about “our survival being in peril” to gather followers. Hmm…
I’m kind of surprised more nerds aren’t dragging this episode out for reference.
D.C. Fontana had underscored that you don’t even need an evil intent to screw up. But hey, just imagine if you have one. Oh, wait, we don’t have to anymore.
Kyle Chayka over at the New Yorker gets it and has pointed out that Elon Musk is trying to dismantle the U.S. federal government to replace it with his preposterous vision of AI. With AI now being used to analyze General Services Administration contracts, cut deep into the U.S. Department of Education and assess Treasury Department grant proposals, Chayka is right that Trump’s government has essentially become an AI startup, and he is correct in pointing out the gaffes that AI is still capable of. He notes as well how the parameters set for Musk’s ruthless programs are thoroughly anti-Woke, using filters to block any grants that discuss “climate change” and “gender identity.”
Whose engrams? Why… mine, of course!
My personal dread, however, is that once again, the solution to this will be political instead of a systemic one. Yes, Musk is the white supremacist, sieg-heil-waving rich boy’s brat we should all fear. But students of fascism know that the one constant of such a perverted doctrine is that the ambitious in the ranks invariably eat each other. In a room full of egomaniacs, the Tech Bro who claims he’s smarter than everybody else will inevitably discover that the idiot heirs of Trump don’t give a shit about intelligence, don’t respect it, and never did — monarchy likes a succession, not an interloper. Donny Junior probably thinks he’ll get his turn in the White House. It’s a story far older than the simplest technology of a fulcrum or wheel.
But yes, Trump’s monarchy will eventually collapse because its idiots don’t recognize they’re idiots. Unfortunately, they will do a lot of damage before they fall, which American voters have inflicted not only themselves but on the world.
Our lasting problem is that just as other countries have slid into fascism in Europe and elsewhere, there will be those nations who still want to impose AI indiscriminately on others, without restrictions. They will keep bleating that “it’s only a tool.” And for now, yes, it is. It was, as Chayka’s article points out, used by the U.S. government well before Musk opened DOGE. It’s capable of genuine marvels for which we can be appropriately grateful, especially in terms of medical advances.
Why, however, must we raise respect for the technology above human achievement and even ordinary human effort?
We can’t get this conversation started because in the West, we can barely get practical discussions started on how to dismantle the real underlying system that brought us to this threshold: monopolistic capitalism. Conservatives have done a bang-up job of persuading the working class and much of the middle class in North America to act against their own interests, to think that universal healthcare is somehow “Communism” and unions are their enemy.
And so, we don’t respect any more the dignity of employees, legal or migrant, and we now casually dismiss any urgent discussion over rights and rule of law — any such debate lasts all of a news cycle. AI didn’t start such erosions, but they’re helping to accelerate them.
Such developments are no accidents either. Trump had the Department of Justice dismiss the corruption case against New York’s mayor Eric Adams, who immediately rushed to kiss the president’s ass.
What does that have to do with AI? A lot, actually.
Because many people are not stupid, and they can recognize the breakdown and devaluation of the justice system and their government institutions. A dark hole opens up, and the old bumper sticker values won’t fill it in — there are still many folks who can see through them. So, instead, we will be handed the ersatz certainty of AI, the Great Machine Savior that is treated as if it is smarter than us… only it’s the mirror image of your favorite bigoted oligarchs.
Ironically, the egomaniacs in the White House will rush to take a bow for relying on the “efficiency” of the machine. It won’t solve their PR problem, but they’ll try it anyway… because their own programming is deeply flawed.
It is in their venal, corrupt nature to want to control people, most of all creative individuals. After all, if you’re a demented, power-hungry narcissist, it is much easier to whip up and direct a mob than to write or paint a masterpiece. This is why the Nazis, the Italian and Spanish Fascists, all made special efforts to vilify and destroy artistic treasures and persecute artists.
But now they hardly have to. While AI is ridiculously celebrated by some and already embraced as status quo by the dumber journalists, the point is naturally lost. The goal was never to have the machine create beautiful art or churn out heart-wrenching novels. (As I’ve pointed out before, who the hell wants to read a novel pretty much written by your toaster?)
The goal was to make art and human creativity irrelevant, to constantly remind you that you’re not special — a machine can do what you do. You can be replaced any time we like, so get back in line and do as you’re told.
And now we are running out of time because there has never been a greater urgency for human rights to be reinforced in international laws and for meaningful protections for them to get put in place. Not because of any Skynet Terminator on the horizon but because the threat is still from corrupt, vicious bigots with delusions of grandeur — only this time their weapon of choice is a program instead of summoning an army.
But for human dignity, human creativity and human safety, an AI program might as well be a nuke.
