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Perhaps the dependency of AI on extractive labour practices should come as no surprise, given the much vaunted ancestry of computing in the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, those mechanical creations of Charles Babbage. Babbage was not only a theorist of early computing but of the early factory system – the unifying factor in both cases being the division of labour. He hailed the advance of ‘manufacture’ over mere making based on the division and analytical regulation of the work process in the factory (Babbage, 2010).
Resisting AI
Dan McQuillan
Over the centuries, anti-Jewish conspiracy has played a very specific purpose for elite power: it acts as a buffer, a shock absorber. Before popular rage could reach the kings, queens, tsars, and old landed money, the conspiracies absorbed it, directing anger to the middle managers—to the court Jew, to the scheming Jew, possibly with horns hidden under his skullcap. To Shylock.
Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversatu-ration of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
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