Let us be clear: workers are being displaced by AI in the workplace, but that displacement is not due to the actual ability of AI technology doing the jobs of workers to the same quality, or even to a sufficient quality. It is a market-oriented move by firms to brag about becoming AI-first, while finding cost-savings by laying off employees. And the workers who do remain in their jobs are left to deal with labor intensification, that is, a combination of doing more work with less time, the addition of other work tasks as a result either new technological processes, or taking on the task of other people who have been laid off. As one of us wrote in a recent book, “AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.”

The nature of AI is that it is almost entirely a fascist project, not in a moral sense per se (though I think you could make that argument and I would if pressed) but in the sense that it is a tool meant to empower greater private corporate control over various spheres of life. It creates a worse environment for workers and a better environment for bosses, and in turn it empowers firms to take over more aspects of public life.

The balance of American experience is between public and private infrastructure. Public infrastructure principally serves a purpose for the public, private infrastructure serves a purpose to the shareholders and owners in the form of profit.

I have yet to see a way that largescale "AI" can be used for a public, pro-social end. I think that when we talk about fighting fascism, we have to understand that at least at this time, in this moment, the generative AI 'project' is undoubtedly a fascist one.

A Texas councilmember will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits" and "a total termination of all internet services."

Fascist crashout. #BANDERAMELTDOWN

The endorsements by Hernandez, Jurado and Soto-Martínez are aimed at denting left-wing support for Nithya Raman, who polls show is battling Spencer Pratt for a runoff spot against Mayor Bass.

Archive here.

Really odd moves here from some local candidates running on a DSA-LA slate. It's things like this that make me skeptical of electoral strategies by Left organizations like the DSA -- there's a worrying lack of discipline around these individuals.

I don't think that there is any guarantee of individual actions hewing to the Party line unless the Party is sufficiently fierce about discipline and political education. I'm not even a Nithya fan by any means, but this just looks sloppy and disappointing.

I don’t think I was supposed to get these emails in full. The city had just gotten a new public records officer, and the folder I received in response to my right to know request had both redacted and unredacted copies. I’m pleased to have the unredacted versions, though, because they narrate the push to clean up Downtown succinctly and honestly, spelling out the true drivers of policy: the unbridled revulsion of much of the propertied class for people who have the audacity to exist as poor in public.

Truly wild post here about the insanity of the petit bourgeois in America. I think people who have not experienced "local politics" may not be aware just how fucking evil the average small business-owner is as soon as you mention "the homeless". This is a good article to illuminate how much these people do not need to be listened to.

I think a lot about how the path after whatever This is has to involve a conscious disciplining of the petit bourgeois. Sorry if that's too straightforward of a way to put i, but it's just important to remember that you don't have to listen to these people. Not 'you', reader, necessarily — I have to hope you-the-reader are already not listening to the woes of the Small Businessowners in your neighborhood on homelessness issues — but 'you', the potential ruling majorities of the future.

I would say that the ruling majorities of the present should also keep this in mind, but as it stands the Businessowner class basically already rules, and they don't give a shit about the homeless. Sure would be great if that wasn't the case!

No one can match Third Way’s dedication to keeping the corporate wing of the party punching left.

As always, it's a good reminder that the Third Way -- whether we're talking about an organization or the political concept of a 'third way' between communism and fascism -- is itself a project of liberalism, the moderate wing of fascism.

It seems as though only when we list out all that is happening around us, can we, for a moment, summon the vertiginous feelings of overwhelm and dread we seemingly do everything in our power to suppress. Three years of a genocide transpiring in plain sight — one by which we increasingly scroll with the flick of a thumb; a new, stupid and brutal war whose consequences include an impending economic and energy crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before; the accelerating destruction of the planet; the dismantling or elimination of the institutions that protect and enrich us; the wanton targeting of things that many of us love — the earth, the birds, learning, reading, the arts, one another; an emerging global consensus in which children are increasingly viewed as disposable, the terrifying erosion of the rights of women, trans people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, and the persecution of those on the Left — I can name more, but there is no point, save for perpetuating this mounting discomfort. To consider even a single one of these elements in its entirety is already too much for the ordinary mind to to bear, and yet we are asked to bear all of them simultaneously every single day.

Impossible to talk enough about the memorable quotes in this piece. Kate Wagner once again knocks it out of the park with this, combining the psychological with the social (the psychosocial, some might say) into a rumination, a paean about grief and perserverance.

I don't know where "we" go from here, but I also can recognize that "we" are situated in a moment that I would call 'imperial collapse' (as Kate also aptly puts it), and that things feel incredibly disoriented. Systems that once worked no longer work, horrors beyond measure are commonplace, even intrusive, even in the lives of those who do not directly see them.

I have become transfixed, these days, on trying to figure out how we got this way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not an academic, I'm just kind of an armchair history dork who is finally getting to the modern era, the 19th century and onward, and realizing that all that shit that Lenin was talking about re: the systems of capitalism building up and up and up and creating their own gravediggers might have something to it. There's a lot that I think you can point to the end of WW2 and say "ah, here is where things started getting really bad" and that might be true, but you could also point to a million other times. As Kate points out in the footnotes, the American Reconstruction era is another good touchpoint.

Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence. We learn as children that the suppression of our emotions is integral to social equilibrium within the family, something which is then extrapolated onto public life at the high, high cost of the subconscious belief that our emotional needs do not ultimately matter beyond ourselves. The despair of others frightens us in part because it forces us to reckon with that same bargain. What makes you so special? What gives you the right to cry?

My therapist would chastise me (politely) for agreeing with these feelings, and she would be correct to do so. I grew up a man, I grew up in America. These two things have instilled in me a pathological distaste for expressing tender emotion. It's not a good thing.

The breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened. It has happened and continues to happen by way of several concurrent historical processes from which one can cherrypick their best narratives about how precisely it all came to pass.