AI: The machine intelligence of imperialism

Part 1 discussed “Digital labor and material.” (workers.org/2024/04/78192/) Part 2 discussed “Labor under surveillance.” (workers.org/2024/05/78468/) Part 3 discussed “The media of digital capital.” (workers.org/2024/10/81336/) This part takes up a discussion of how algorithmic technologies are used in the context of imperialist exploitation and military operations.

In a digital landscape marked by leaks from people like Edward Snowden, Thomas Tamm, Mark Klein and Julian Assange, it comes as no surprise that the ruling class is continuously devising and upgrading new systems to maximize profits (read: maximize theft of the surplus of labor) and automate oppressive structures. Some of this technologically-reinforced oppression is deliberately designed, and some is a byproduct of the automation of the profit motive.

Digital systems create oppressive circumstances through three major avenues: environmental impacts, surveillance and warfare and economic or bureaucratic processes that govern a particular function in society. These three avenues impact both the domestic and international community. Systems which are used for the reinforcement of neo-colonial or imperialist projects can easily be brought home and used to intensify the oppression and exploitation of people here in the imperial core.

This discussion will be divided among several articles, with one set focusing on the situation abroad and one set focusing on the situation at home.

The most straightforward of the avenues to explore is the way in which digital systems contribute to environmental damage, climate change, environmental racism and imperialist extraction. Simply put, our computer devices — from smartphones to laptops to bluetooth speakers — all require materials that are first mined and then engineered to create the electronics that do what we need them to do. The current technologies also require large amounts of electricity and massive cooling systems to operate properly — which contributes significantly to climate change and depletion of freshwater reserves.

Within the context of mining, some materials, such as copper and aluminum, are able to be domestically mined. Others, including europium and niobium, are harder to find in North America and have to be mined elsewhere. The deindustrialization of the U.S. and subsequent industrialization of countries in the Global South have led to a situation where much “domestic” technology — such as computer chips — is created elsewhere in the world. 

The exporting of capital and labor shuttered many manufacturing plants in the U.S. and Canada — especially unionized ones. Jobs and sometimes whole plants were moved to places where (with the exception of China) the imperialists could use violence, impose poverty wages and not pay for necessary safety equipment — except where needed to ensure the quality of the manufactured product, as with the cleanrooms used for computer chip manufacturing.

The heavy machinery and processes involved require massive amounts of fossil fuels and in places such as the Congo or Colombia are carried out with child labor and often at gunpoint. The harm to both the environment and the lives of the laborers is seen as an “ancillary cost” by the capitalists and is brushed off. The use of force from both state actors and extralegal paramilitaries is calculated into the cost of doing business — a cost that is necessary for the continuation of profit-taking and the expanding wealth of the capitalist class.

Digitized militarism

Digital systems are used by military forces aligned with the U.S.-led capitalist order to automate certain components of settler-colonialism, suppression of resistance movements and even warfare. Two prominent examples of this come from the tactics used against Iran and Occupied Palestine.

Israeli Signals Intelligence Unit 8200 is at the heart of some of the worst systems, cyber attacks and malicious software in recent history. It is also a training and testing ground for Silicon Valley’s “top minds and startups,” according to the Wall Street Journal. (Aug. 31; Sept. 3) 

The AI security, generative AI and deepfake company Palo Alto Networks was started in part due to its founder’s association with Unit 8200. Some of the most infamous operations carried out by Unit 8200, with support from the CIA, National Security Agency and Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency), include: Operation Merlin, Operation Olympic Games and the Stuxnet virus, the cyberweapon codenamed Flame, drone strike programs Lavender and Where’s Daddy, drone control systems in Ukraine and the pager bombings in Lebanon. This is just a small sample that the general public has access to.

And these and other operations have occurred under the express direction or involvement of every U.S. president from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, according to multiple whistleblowers and leaked documents from over 30 years. (USA v Sterling court documents; The Guardian, Jan. 1, 2006; The Guardian, May 20, 2010; Wired, Nov. 3, 2014; Symantec W32 Stuxnet Dossier, Nov. 2010; Ars Technica, June 15, 2017; NYT, June 1, 2012; skywiper: A Complex Malware for Targeted Attacks (PDF) by Budapest University of Technology and Economics, May 28, 2012; +972 Magazine, April 3)

One of the advantages these automated warfare and surveillance systems have for the ruling class is their ability to be developed once and then deployed as many times as they are needed. This military technology, one could argue, is on par with the development of nuclear weapons or the machine gun. It demonstrates how the ability of capitalism to develop the means of production also creates the ability to develop the means of mass destruction.

Destruction is not the only thing these technologies and government entities are capable of — they are also able to use automated means to manipulate information and public opinion as part of propaganda and psychological warfare operations. Democracy Now has also uncovered that capitalists like Elon Musk invest in the technologies of groups like Unit 8200, because the core algorithms are able to be multi-purposed for platforms like X. (Democracy Now, Aug. 24, 2023)

Companies such as G4S — which designs border and prison security systems for occupied Palestine, the U.S.-Mexico border and Guantanamo Bay — have a vested interest in the development of the pattern, facial and behavioral recognition systems Unit 8200 and other military groups develop. These systems are excellent at automating parts of the process of security around a settler colony or an imperialist-run prison and reducing the amount of soldiers required to hold a military encampment.

Imperialism’s ‘operating system’

The final category to be examined is the autonomous system of economic and bureaucratic structures. Many of these systems, like insurance claims software and resume review software, are used to perpetuate exploitation against working-class and oppressed people at home. However, the rise of generative AI is an example of an automated system which functions as ideology — or propaganda for capitalism and Western individualism.

In Hyperallergic magazine, Marco Donnarumma explained: “It is clever, it works well, and you don’t need a PhD to see that such a process has very little to do with any kind of creativity, however you may define it.

“But beyond the tired issue of creativity lies something more crucial. AI image generators would not deserve much criticism were they reliant on artists’ consent and marketed as software plug-ins. They are, after all, playful and accessible entry points into computational art and, if the dull homogeneity of their output is diversified, may even become useful tools for some artists. 

“It is the claim to a new form of art by the industry’s public relations engine and the art market that is extremely problematic, especially when it is used to motivate hyperbolic claims of machines’ general intelligence. Such claims exploit culture and art to reinforce what I call an ideology of prediction, a belief that anything can be predicted and, by extension, controlled.

“Prediction ideology is the operating system of the Global North. Wealthy corporations and individuals are frenetically investing in deep and probabilistic learning research. Given that most of the Global North is structured around algorithmic systems (from welfare, justice, and employment to warfare, finance, and domestic and international policy), implementing deep learning at scale offers a potentially huge financial gain to those running the business. 

“Yet, while deep learning has proven useful in specific cases, such as modeling of protein folding or biodiversity loss, its signature on society has been so far abysmal. Consider the role of Cambridge Analytica in the British Leave.EU campaign and Donald Trump’s election; the entanglement of Google and the U.S. military in Project Maven, where Google’s machine learning library, TensorFlow, was used to enhance warfare drones and analyze surveillance data; the automated exploitation of labor from Amazon and Netflix to Uber, Spotify and Airbnb; the ability of algorithmic trading to destabilize already volatile financial markets, as in the flash crash of 2010; and the daily psychological violence on children by Meta’s Instagram.

“AI art is, in my view, soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction.” (Hyperallergic, Oct. 24, 2022)

Adobe and other companies have announced that they will start collecting user files to train the AI systems that they are exporting all around the world as part of their software packages, including Photoshop and Illustrator. Facebook/Meta and Google have already been doing this on a global scale. Hollywood, which exports U.S. ruling class propaganda to the world, has been locked in a battle over the use of these generative AI systems which offer Hollywood executives the opportunity to significantly reduce the amount of labor needed for a movie or television show at the expense of both the filmmakers (who lose their jobs) and the viewers (who are tricked into consuming vapid content.)

Seize the digital means of production!

Whether it’s the feedback loops of convenience and gratification of instant buying or social media, the alienation of people from each other and from labor, the profiting off antagonism online, or the exporting of digitized capitalist systems and software to exploit and profit in new and creative ways, all of this constitutes the further forcing of U.S. ruling class ideology on the world, as well as a particular capitalist subjectivity of “digital consumer” and “digital consumption.” This was started originally by the bourgeois and petty bourgeois “creators” in Silicon Valley.

The internet and computational technology have changed the world in profound ways that many of us may not even realize. The utopian “socialism” of many engineers and artists (like Jaron Lanier) during the early days of the internet that projected a global progressive movement of some kind failed because of its petty bourgeois sentiment of being able to reform capitalism from within the early formation of Silicon Valley startups. It was not based in scientific and practiced Marxism-Leninism.

This same mistake was made in the early days of factory work and can be seen in the classic 1920s sci-fi theater script for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” which is a sci-fi play by Karel Čapek about robots that gain human level intelligence and seize the means of production from humans who oppress them.

Technological development and political consciousness are dialectically linked but are two separate forces. Technological advances, when used to eliminate workers’ livelihoods, can accelerate class consciousness. New information technology can be used to further spread progressive and revolutionary ideas, but it takes a working-class revolution to bring about socialism.

At the “China at 75” event held in New York City in September 2024, a speaker pointed out that within the context of China, many capitalists — Elon Musk, for example — try to superexploit the workers but find that regulations enacted through socialist control of the government make that task difficult. Furthermore, having a communist party in charge means that the People’s Republic of China can use the capitalists to develop the means of production and then seize that production from the hands of the capitalists and re-develop it for the good of the people. This constitutes a class antagonism against the capitalist class and is one of many motivators behind both the Biden and incoming Trump administrations’ push for expansion of domestic computer chip manufacturing in the chip war between the U.S. imperialists and People’s China.

The only meaningful way we can challenge the digital age of capitalism we are living under is through class struggle. Working-class and oppressed people around the globe need to seize the digital systems — and all the means of production — and develop only the technologies that benefit society and the ecosystem.

We need to utilize digital space as we do physical space: as a place for class warfare, proletarian discourse and proletarian solidarity. We need to take full control of our union movement here in the imperial core to steer it in a direction where workers — including engineers — are supported in the fight to no longer operate in complicity with genocidal and imperialist ruling-class agendas.