Friday, July 14, 2023

The spiral

Nothing tastes as good as it did 50 years ago. Nothing.  Not corn chips, not chocolate chip cookies, not cola, not m&m's, not coffee, not milk, not bread, not cheese, not orange juice. Not oranges!  Not tomatoes!  Not greens!  Not eggs!  Not beef!   Not apples!  Unless you grow your own food and are careful to use methods that are designed around food, the food you eat is shit.  You just don't know it is because you have been slowly accustomed to it by the monopolies that bring it to your table via the supermarkets where you procure it.  Those monopolies are not in the business of pleasing your palate while providing the maximum nutrition with every bite, they are about pleasing the accountants of their stockholders.  In the interest of this, they have invested years and dollars on developing ways to cut every corner on the production of your food that they can find.  If it's not manufactured but grown, they have developed technologies to alter the genetics of it to serve not dinner but commerce, flavor and quality and nutrition to the consumer be damned.

The reason you don't know what you eat is shit is that you don't have the good stuff to compare it to. Neither do I, but I have been paying attention to the trajectory of quality of goods and services in my lifetime.  There is an arc to it.  A product is introduced and advertised as an improvement on whatever already exists, and for its brief moment in the sun, it may appear to be.  But as soon as the edge it has managed to carve for itself in the market of like products has dulled, the process of minimizing its quality while maximizing its profitability begins and in its next and each subsequent iteration, it becomes more and more profitable and less and less good.  The curves of these 2 properties of any product in the capitalist marketplace are inverse, and since the pressure is for an upswing of profitability the entire arc of quality for every product in the marketplace is on the downslope.

We have nothing to compare it to.  We can't buy from the primeval forest collective.  Our coops and communes and kibbutzim do the best they can to buck this trend but they do not even try to compete with the marketplace.  And the marketplace cheats for the sake of its shareholders' profit.   So for the vast majority of us shit is what we eat because shit is what we can buy in the marketplace.

This goes for more than food of course.  This also goes for our homes, our clothes, our electronics, our cars.   Every now and then, we learn of a revolution.  When talk of electric cars threatened to dampen the future of petroleum extraction, treasuries were spent on killing the electric car.  But as the effects of decades of  petrobusiness as usual and the ubiquity of gasoline powered transportation on our planet, our environment, our climate have been exposed in a way that fewer can ignore, electric transportation has been allowed a niche.  But the cycle of capitalism in this financialized, computerized world has shrunk to the point that barely a decade into the electric car explosion the counterpart ravages of electric car production have already been exposed and already cry for mitigation (that is already being ignored).  It's not transportation that's the problem it's commodification.

To this point, labor has played a major part in the ability of capitalists to create wealth from nothing of their own.  It did come at the cost of worker wages-- the barest minimum that the capitalist's have to pay in order to keep their workforce alive and productive and reproductive.  The final frontier for capital is the downgrading of labor via the incalculably cheaper "Artificial Intelligence".  Until now, AI has been merely a threat used to wring the last remnants of compliance from humans in accession to their own exploitation for the profit of their bosses.  If labor could be programmed to be performed by machines the only expense to capital would be the replacement cost of the artificial workforce.    The dirty secret that capital did not want us to know is that if this were remotely possible it would have already been done.  In truth, the force behind what capital has wished us to think of as artificial intelligence has been the genuine human intelligence that has filled in the gaping gaps in machine learning, the human intelligence of unseen workers exploited, preyed upon, plagiarized and presented as the product of AI.  

It's not that AI technology has been idle all this while.   Everywhere are loud stirrings of an immanent revolution in AI evident in spectacular demonstrations of advances in AI generated art, computer generated deep fakes that are increasingly (but not yet completely) undetectable by humans, and the debut of freakily capable-esque  AI programs like ChatGPT in  creating instant human-like reports and art-like output in reponse to verbal input. The pace has been so furious that for 15 minutes a while back we were enticed to contemplate dire warnings about the impending AI future uttered by the very names we  associate with AI.  A moment of guerilla PR for the very projects they are all working so hard to bring to fruition masquerading as concern for what their own technology has in store for us.

It's instructive to contemplate the possibility of actual threat to workers from AI in light of the current struggle now on of  the writers and actors behind our favorite entertainment  as they join forces with each other for the first time since 1960 in strike against producers.  Along with demands to restructure residuals from streaming platforms and shorter seasons which have eroded the ability of the vast majority of writers and actors to make a living from their work, the strikers are demanding -- reasonably in spite of the poormouthing of obscenely overpaid studio executives-- to place limits on the ability of producers to create footage generated via AI from the images of non-compensated actors in the production of motion pictures and television.  In confronting the issue head-on in their current strike, actors and writers are taking a stand for all workers.  

Is there cause for alarm?  Will robots replace us?  Will AI art replace human art?  Without limits in place it is hard to see how capital could resist taking AI as far as it can in cutting the human costs of producing entertainment  product for television, theaters and streaming services.  Left to their own devices, this would be the future of entertainment we would be certain to face.  The tragedy of it would be even deeper than we know.  Producers and the big tech companies developing the "AI" that would enable it would like us to believe that artificial intelligence might as well be intelligence.  But it is no more intelligence than the plastic that has replaced the materials that formerly built the world our parents used to know is the same as what it substitutes for or than GMO food is food. You can see it in the shoddy eye pollution of CGI already disfiguring our entertainment.  Not content to merely trim production costs from movies and television, you can be sure that producers' ultimate goal is development of ersatz creativity to all but eliminate the burdensome costs of human creativity as practiced by writers and actors-- and eventually all of us.  It will be good enough for the producers and for the stockholders of the studios and streaming services.  For the rest of us, it will be GMO Spaghettios.

As the "new and improved" Rice Krispies are the downgraded version of our paltry menu of available breakfast foodstuffs, AI is the degeneration of human creativity that the owners want to cram down our throats.  They  think they will succeed.  But let's stand with the workers and be ready for them this time.

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