Sebastian Flores
@sebas
Sebastian Flores
- Limited public capacity in AI is stifling our collective capacity to shape the direction of society.
Public AI Network
As mentioned in The Wealth of Networks, who creates information creates culture and is able to shape society. This was previously done by humans. Information is now created by non-humans, AI LLMs, which means our culture and society will be shaped by non-humans. LLMs are controlled by private enterprises and a small group of researchers that shape responses. Ergo, this small group will determine collective culture. This isn’t necessarily new — social media algorithms have been doing this already and we are seeing the effects on our society and brains.
The choice is stark: rebuild democratic economic power from below or concede the terrain of infrastructure and technology to unaccountable private empires.
Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires
f the Left wants to stop narrating defeat and start shaping power, it must abandon the fantasy that elections alone can confront firms that control energy, data, computation, and labor at planetary scale.
Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires
Social movements and unions can use cooperatives to build the economic power needed to advance their struggles, distributing benefits in the present while prefiguring socialist enterprises. In this sense, cooperatives can function as what Gramsci saw in the factory councils of the 1920s: worker-owned and worker-governed forms of a socialist... See more
Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires
We no longer live in an industrial economy. What was easily defined as a worker back then is harder to define today, because much of our 'work’ is done for free by the users of these platforms. the work is data creation and therefore provide value and utility to the platforms they use. So first we need to tell people that what they are doing is indeed work, and once they see this, they will feel they need to be compensated for this work. Then we can organize ‘workers’ in today’s modern networked economy.
claims to be apolitical reflect not a cooperative principle but a political choice, since there is no such thing as being apolitical: for James Baldwin, refusal is a privilege; for Hannah Arendt, withdrawal abandons responsibility; and for Antonio Gramsci, indifference consolidates hegemony.
Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires
cooperatives show that democratic ownership already exists at systemic scale and can function as counterpower to concentrated digital control.
Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires
“Counterpower to concentrated digital control.” if we continue to subclassify ‘digital’ then we’re missing the point. our lives are digital now. the economy is primarily digital now. As is written in wealth of networks, we live in an industrial information economy, where value is created by digital firms and activity captured by these firms. This underlines the importance of digital in our economy.
W. E. B. Du Bois understood this after the 1929 crisis, when he turned to cooperatives as tools of survival and black economic rights. He wrote:
What we need today is not fighting but that basis of economic security which will permit us to fight. What we need is not a vociferous complaint but such victory over threatened starvation will give us... See more
Socialist Co-Ops Against Silicon Valley Empires
Against Racism
Against Racism
If the Left is to matter again, intellectual work must be rejoined to organization and material struggle.