AI: The machine intelligence of imperialism – The media of digital capital

Part 1 of this series discussed “Digital labor and material” (workers.org/2024/04/78192/), and Part 2 discussed “Surveillance labor” (workers.org/2024/05/78468/) This article takes up a discussion of how capitalists bias social media against the working class and our movements. 

The internet is a playground for capitalists, who treat workers like their playthings. Every day over five billion people around the world use internet-connected devices to browse some form of social media. (datareportal.com/social-media-users) The majority of social media are run by firms in the Global North, usually U.S. firms, such as X (formerly Twitter), Reddit and various Meta apps including Facebook and Instagram.

These forums claim to be a place for people around the world to have open discourse and to participate in a community of ideas. However, this is far from the truth. While it is true that the internet aggregates a wide and even sometimes disturbing variety of content, when the internet is dominated by capitalists it is not the social space working-class and oppressed people deserve.

What is digital media?

Before anyone can fully explore the current situation, versus what our class deserves, it is important to have a basic understanding of what “digital media” is and how social media in general operates.

Digital media, sometimes called “new media,” refers to a way of encoding some kind of content into a form that is represented by standardized formats of machine-readable digits. The standardized formats allow for the machines to understand and read a piece of digital media in the correct format: video, music, document, etc. Social media is a form of digital media which operates on a software “platform” for the purpose of facilitating communal activities and sharing content with a virtual community.

All major forms of media require something called a “signifier” and a “signified” in order to be useful. The signifier is the specific and universal thing our senses perceive — such as a rainbow flag, for example. The signified is the underlying meaning that was encoded in the signifier. In the context of a graphic with a rainbow flag in it, as a lesbian transgender woman I would be “signifying” some kind of LGBTQIA2S+ solidarity or identity.

The important thing to recognize here, which is a major component of the field of media study, is that the interpretation of signifiers is not universal. Someone from my grandparents’ generation may see the rainbow flag and think of the story of Noah’s Ark from the Christian Bible, and my father’s generation may see it and think of the rock band Pink Floyd. Whether or not a signifier has a “correct” signified depends on context and often is a subject of debate.

There is more than just the media and its interpretation; there is also the method of distribution and how that distribution operates psychologically. The dominant means of transmitting digital media is through the internet. The internet is a vast network of devices which communicate with each other through various forms of infrastructure using special sequences of numbers to guide communication to the correct destination.

A major part of this infrastructure is large and powerful computers called “servers” which store data, host special code and facilitate communication. These servers operate every single website or online app (application) someone visits, and the specific design of that code determines the interface that people see and interact with when we use that website or online app. These systems and infrastructure are, in the vast majority of cases, privately owned by Big Tech capitalists who use these systems to amass billions in stolen wealth.

The role of algorithms

The last component to dissect is “the algorithm.” Part 2 of this series mentioned algorithms as a piece of code or mathematical equation which is used to perform some kind of repeatable function, usually on a computer, along with the “mega algorithm,” described as “our networked and computerized systems [that] exist as a sort of massive digital ecosystem of machines that work in tandem with each other (hence ‘mega’ + ‘algorithm’).”

In the context of social media/digital media, “the algorithm,” with emphasis on the word “the,” refers to a certain mega algorithm that determines the behavior of a social media platform. Specifically, it extracts and processes data from users, categorizes and filters content and then spits out a “feed” of recommendations for the users to consume. It also facilitates capitalists using or buying user data for the purpose of targeting users with advertising, or manipulating them in a specific way. (More on this later.)

Some people reading this may be wondering why “the algorithm” matters to working-class and oppressed people. It is precisely because of the last part mentioned — manipulation and filtering. The issue of manipulation and filtering is not limited to one topic or one social media platform — it is a nearly universal issue. For example, referring to X, NBC news reported:

“In November, days after he became Twitter’s owner, [Elon] Musk boosted a false, anti-gay rumor about Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after an attack at the couple’s home. The same month, he reinstated numerous accounts that the previous Twitter management had suspended, often for anti-LGBTQ harassment, and he began to lay off employees who worked on reducing abuse, such as misinformation and harassment.

“In December, he mocked pronoun usage and then smeared a gay former Twitter employee with a false claim that he supported child abuse. He also dissolved Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, a group of outside advisers for fighting online abuse.

“In April, he quietly removed the site’s previous ban on intentionally using the incorrect pronouns or names for transgender people, practices known as misgendering and deadnaming that are offensive and are often used as tools of harassment online.

“Then, on June 2, the second day of Pride Month, Musk shared an anti-trans video, propelling it to more than 190 million views.” (nbcnews.com, Oct. 27, 2023)

Musk is also famous for posting his anti-union messages on Twitter before he bought the company, threatening Tesla workers if they unionized.

The Metaverse (Facebook and Instagram) also have a number of major issues that have been reported. These include the removal of communist pages in the Philippines, allowing and supporting U.S. imperialist-led propaganda campaigns, repeated censorship and hiding of pro-Palestinian content and open collaboration with the CIA in online based social and political campaigns.

This is just a sample of problematic events and behavior. The capitalists’ military intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, certainly have even more classified digital operations. Various capitalists and their private media and marketing firms have undoubtedly found ways to use the internet to manipulate stocks and legislation, steal more from their workers, repress union organizing and conceal crimes.

How the right wing manipulates content

Even the basic function of the algorithm, without this overt meddling, is problematic for the working class. The categories of content which workers are fed usually narrow their view of people’s struggles, distract from progressive movements or incite strong emotions using misinformation done for the purpose of profit. Conservative and fascist content creators especially rely on this to expand their reach, worm their way into new online spaces and force their hateful discourse into the mainstream.

While the exact specifics of the process are kept as trade secrets and are unknown to the public, one of the general patterns can be broken down in general with an example. Let’s say a disguised fascist makes a racist video attacking migrants or an anti-trans video about trans women in restrooms and posts it to a public page on Facebook. Every day millions of people scroll through public video reels looking for content to entertain them. After the bigoted video is uploaded, this video is categorized in some capacity and then is shown to a select audience that the algorithm thinks aligns with the keywords it has chosen to categorize with.

Then a whole bunch of bigots see the video and give it “like” or “love” reacts and share it on their Facebook pages. This then tells the algorithm that this video is “becoming popular.” The algorithm starts promoting the video to a wider audience which includes those it suspects are against the content of the video. This then kicks off a battle in the comments and a series of “anger” and “sad” reactions, which then marks the beginning of an ideological struggle over the rights of oppressed people.

At some point either the video itself or the surrounding content is monetized so that, as this battle expands, someone can profit from it. Eventually the video loses traction and people on both sides of the argument move on to the next pressing debate. This is one of many examples of the behaviors which are curated to release dopamine, a hormone that is a neurotransmitter that, among other things, is responsible for our pleasure response.

When it comes to progressive social movements, this release of dopamine and the learned behaviors can be dangerous, because activists will fight with someone online or shoot out a bunch of vague propaganda and then feel good about themselves. They’ll believe, falsely, that their response has helped the movement.

No doubt the internet has become a crucial component of people’s struggle and agitation towards revolution — specifically regarding propagandizing and educating en masse. Yet there are drawbacks. The lack of centralization under mass organizations and ultimately a worker’s party, combined with a popular feeling that this form of struggle in itself is enough, both lead to a situation where online-based agitation and propagandizing bear less fruit than the working class needs.

Furthermore, it does not threaten the capitalist ownership of tech firms, nor does it threaten the use of the internet by the capitalists’ military and intelligence agencies.

Actions in the fight against capitalism must be grounded in both theory and practice. Within the context of media study, there is a large amount of important discourse which, while it has Marxist roots, its narrative has been twisted to be anti-revolutionary. Those who study this discourse must be steadfast in ensuring that they properly filter the bourgeois propaganda from any gems of insight that can be taken and added to the education of fellow revolutionaries.

Working-class and oppressed people must learn to understand how the structure of social media can be used to trap and manipulate and must seek out and study content that was created for their benefit and by their labor.

Lastly, for our own sake, we must monitor our behaviors and ensure that our engagement with internet based propagandizing is grounded in the combination of lived experience and principled theory.

Specific examples and propaganda techniques our class can use to its advantage will be discussed in a future article.