Tag: ai

The Bluesky Scammers Are the New Yahoo Boys

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The fraud networks preying on Bluesky users are not an aberration confined to one social-media platform. From Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys to the trafficking compounds of Southeast Asia, online fraud has developed alongside an economic order that produces mass insecurity and poverty while transforming the internet into another arena for private enrichment.

On 17 October, Bluesky acknowledged that a phishing campaign had compromised more than 4,500 accounts. The attack spread posts promoting a fake government payment. The company temporarily suspended compromised accounts while attempting to secure them and restore access to their owners. [thehackernews.com],

The scale of the aftermath is evident in an independent analysis of Bluesky’s public moderation stream. Agent Sky recorded 3,896 reversed account takedowns between 17 and 19 October. The researcher cautions that the moderation data do not themselves establish why each account was restored, although the exceptional increase coincided with the phishing incident. The episode was only the most visible manifestation of a problem that has grown alongside the platform.

Fake support accounts, impersonators, romance scams and investment fraud have followed users onto Bluesky. In December 2024, NBC News reported a “rapid increase in scam activity”, including romance and so-called pig-butchering scams. In March 2025, Bluesky Safety warned of scammers impersonating Bluesky and its staff while approaching artists through direct messages and attempting to move them off the platform. The potential target population has grown dramatically. According to the company’s 2025 Transparency Report, Bluesky grew from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users that year, an increase of nearly 60 per cent.

The comparison with the Nigerian “Yahoo Boys” is apt, although not in the manner suggested by racialised representations of Nigerian cybercrime. The fundamental connection is neither nationality nor ethnicity. It is the growth of an international economy of fraud alongside poverty, precarious employment and extraordinary concentrations of wealth.

What produced the Yahoo Boys

The Yahoo Boy phenomenon developed in Nigeria during the formative period of popular internet use in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The name reflected the importance of Yahoo and Yahoo Mail to early internet communications. Fraudsters exploited email for advance-fee scams, fabricated inheritances and other schemes. Over the ensuing decades, the methods expanded into romance scams, business fraud and financial sextortion.

The consequences for victims can be devastating. Statistics maintained by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show a pronounced predominance of boys and young men among identified victims in the sextortion reports and requests for assistance it receives. An investigation by CBC Marketplace reported in October 2025 that it had verified more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and the UK during the previous four years that were linked to sextortion, including five in Canada.

The social-media companies themselves have revealed something of the scale. In July 2024, Meta announced that it had removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that had attempted to engage in financial sextortion. Among them was a coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that the company linked to a group of around 20 individuals. Meta said that the coordinated network principally targeted adult men in the United States, though some accounts also attempted to target minors.

Explaining the social origins of such criminality is not an excuse. Where children and young people are subjected to financial sextortion, there can be no ambiguity about the destructive character of the crime. But moral denunciation by itself explains nothing about why the phenomenon has developed on such a scale.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and has enormous natural resources. Yet its official 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found that 133 million people—63 per cent of the population—were multidimensionally poor. Older claims that youth unemployment exceeded 50 per cent should no longer be repeated without substantial qualification, as Nigeria later changed its labour-force methodology. The National Bureau of Statistics reported unemployment of 7.2 per cent among 15-to-24-year-olds in the second quarter of 2023. But this headline figure hardly captures whether people have secure, well-paid work.

The same survey reported informal employment at 92.7 per cent, time-related underemployment at 11.8 per cent, and a youth NEET rate of 13.8 per cent. These statistics point to a social reality far more complex than an unemployment rate alone can reveal: enormous numbers of people classified as employed remain in informal and precarious economic circumstances.

Academic research has likewise placed Nigerian cybercrime within a broader social crisis. A doctoral investigation by Tolulope Lembola Ojolo at the University of KwaZulu-Natal conducted in-depth interviews with 29 Yahoo Boys across Lagos, Ibadan and Ado-Ekiti. The research identified poverty, unemployment, corrupt political leadership and law enforcement, the failure of vital social institutions, and the proliferation of internet services as conditions that combined to facilitate cybercrime. Some interviewees rationalised their activities as redistribution or retaliation for Africa’s historical exploitation through slavery and colonialism.

Such rationalisations do not transform fraud into anti-imperialism. The pensioner whose savings are stolen or the teenager subjected to financial blackmail bears no responsibility for colonial oppression. But the testimony reveals how social desperation can be refracted through a reactionary ideology in which exploiting another ordinary person is represented as revenge against the system. The result is not resistance to exploitation but its reproduction at another level.

The con moves to Bluesky.

As Bluesky attracted users leaving established social networks, fraud followed the migration. NBC News reported in December 2024 that scammers were using established romance and pig-butchering methods familiar from other platforms. Artists and writers have become targets. In July 2026, editor Rob Bignell documented what he described as the proliferation of supposed beta-reader and editor profiles targeting authors on Bluesky. He described profiles using similar approaches and said he had traced a number of the suspected scams to Nigeria, including through accounts on freelancing sites and suspicious LinkedIn identities. His investigation is an individual case study rather than a systematic measurement of fraud across the platform. Still, it illustrates how established forms of online fraud can be adapted to particular online communities.

The targets themselves are revealing. Writers, illustrators, editors and freelancers increasingly work under conditions of insecurity, competing for readers, commissions and contracts in a cultural economy being reorganised by digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Fraud preys upon the hope of a break. Somebody’s search for readers, professional recognition or employment becomes the scammer’s opening. One insecure layer of the international workforce is turned against another. Bluesky’s own statistics demonstrate the pressures created by rapid expansion. User-submitted moderation reports rose from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025, a 54 per cent increase. “Misleading” content accounted for 43.73 per cent of reports in 2025.

The October 2026 phishing attack provides another perspective. Agent Sky’s examination of the public moderation stream counted 76,772 account takedowns between 21 September and 20 October but no application of Bluesky’s “scam” label to accounts over the same period. The analysis recorded just nine “impersonation” labels. These figures come from an independent analysis, not statistics published by Bluesky itself, a distinction that should be maintained.  But the underlying contradiction goes beyond warning labels. Social networks depend upon enormous populations communicating with minimum friction while simultaneously confronting organised actors seeking to exploit precisely that openness.

Fraud becomes an industry.

The Yahoo Boys represent one historical and predominantly decentralised manifestation of online fraud. In Southeast Asia, however, the fraudulent economy has assumed something approaching an industrial form.

Enormous scam compounds have emerged in which criminal organisations combine internet fraud with human trafficking and forced labour. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that credible sources indicated at least 120,000 people across Myanmar might be held in situations where they were forced to conduct online scams, while estimates for Cambodia were around 100,000. Laos, the Philippines and Thailand were also identified as destination or transit countries.

This phenomenon demonstrates the contradictory character of the international scam economy. Among the people committing fraud are willing participants, but others have themselves been trafficked and coerced into criminal activity. Research published by Asia Times in April 2026 described the experience of a trafficked worker who reported working 15-hour days, seven days a week, simultaneously conducting multiple conversations with prospective victims. The account described an organised division of labour in which different workers established contact, cultivated targets and extracted payments.

A 2026 UN report also documented torture, sexual abuse and forced labour within scam centres. It reported that survivors described severe economic pressures before their recruitment and that some police and border guards were alleged to have been complicit. Here the language of individual criminality becomes insufficient. A person sitting behind a keyboard may be perpetrating fraud against someone thousands of miles away while simultaneously being coerced by the organisation controlling the compound. Recognising that reality does not minimise the harm inflicted upon the person being defrauded. It reveals the extraordinary social relationships through which contemporary cybercrime operates.

The revenues are enormous. Guardio, citing Chainalysis, estimated $17 billion stolen across cryptocurrency scams in 2025, while saying pig-butchering scams grew by nearly 40 per cent year on year. Separately, the Associated Press reported a UN estimate that losses from scams in Asia during 2023 were between $18 billion and $37 billion. Governments have responded with raids, criminal prosecutions and geopolitical pressure. On 13 October 2026, a Chinese court sentenced three members of the Wei family criminal organisation to death for their roles in a criminal network operating in Myanmar’s Kokang region. Another three were given life sentences, and 55 received prison terms of varying lengths.

But suppressing individual organisations does not abolish the economic conditions sustaining the industry. Research published in Asia Times described how infrastructure remained after supposed closures and argued that operations driven out of one location could reopen elsewhere. The same article cited estimates placing annual scam revenue in Cambodia at $12.9 billion in 2023, roughly 40 per cent of the country’s GDP.

The platforms and the limits of moderation

The same contradiction appears at platform level. There is extensive evidence that technology companies are aware of the growth of financial sextortion and organised internet fraud. The Network Contagion Research Institute documented the circulation of instructional materials, scripts and videos facilitating financial sextortion and described Yahoo Boys as playing a major role in the extraordinary expansion of financial sextortion targeting minors.

The scale makes moderation immensely difficult. In June 2026, Snap said it was enforcing against about 220 suspected sextortion instances per day, or roughly 6,600 per month globally, counting both proactively identified cases and alleged violations reported by users. The company published these figures specifically while disputing the decontextualised circulation of an earlier figure claiming 10,000 user reports of sextortion each month.

Bluesky faces the same problem on a smaller scale. Its moderation operation was expanded to roughly 100 moderators during 2024, a year in which its moderation service received 6.48 million reports. The company also increased automation, which reduced processing times but could produce false positives requiring subsequent human involvement and appeals. Bluesky’s decentralised architecture distinguishes it from some older social-media companies, but a different technical architecture cannot abolish the social relationships the technology operates within. A decentralised network connecting millions of people still exists within a world characterised by poverty, private wealth, commercial competition and economic insecurity.

Nor can the struggle against fraud justify unlimited surveillance. The existence of criminal exploitation cannot provide a blank cheque for states and corporations to impose universal identification or monitor legitimate political communications. Protection from fraud and defence of democratic rights must not be presented as mutually exclusive. Technology does not exist outside society. Neither do the criminals who exploit it.

The new Yahoo Boys

To describe the Bluesky scammers as “the new Yahoo Boys” therefore requires precision. It cannot mean that fraudulent accounts appearing on Bluesky are necessarily Nigerian, still less that fraud reflects some characteristic peculiar to Nigerians or Africans. The historical significance of the Yahoo Boys lies elsewhere. They represented an early manifestation of a criminal economy that has subsequently become international, technologically sophisticated and, in the Southeast Asian scam compounds, increasingly industrialised.

The form continually changes. The advance-fee email becomes the romance profile. The romance profile becomes the fraudulent cryptocurrency opportunity. Individual scammers operate alongside large criminal organisations commanding labour forces measured in the thousands.

The platform changes too. Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and now Bluesky become different territories across which fraudulent activity migrates. What persists beneath technological change is an international social crisis that provides both vulnerable targets and a continual supply of people who can be recruited, voluntarily or coercively, into the scam economy.

The individual fraudster remains responsible for deliberate harm. Social explanation cannot become moral absolution. But individual morality alone cannot explain mass social phenomena. When similar criminal industries continually regenerate across different continents, platforms and technologies, the question necessarily becomes social. Police operations can arrest perpetrators. Platforms can remove fraudulent accounts. Stronger security can prevent particular phishing attacks. Human moderation can disrupt individual networks. These measures matter because they can prevent concrete harm.

What they cannot do is abolish the conditions continually reproducing the problem. The experience of the Southeast Asian compounds exposes this most starkly. The worker carrying out the online fraud may have been recruited through fraud. The person sending deceptive messages about fictitious employment, investments or relationships may himself have answered a deceptive advertisement promising legitimate work. Capitalist social relations can therefore transform the deceived into the deceiver and the exploited into an instrument for exploiting somebody else.

Romanticising the scammer is not progressive. The victims, particularly young people subjected to sextortion, have an unquestionable right to protection and justice. But neither is anything gained by transforming the Yahoo Boy into a racialised foreign menace whose existence supposedly expresses an exclusively Nigerian pathology. The phenomenon tells us considerably more about the world economy.

A global problem requires a global answer.

Online fraud reveals one of contemporary society’s sharpest contradictions. Humanity possesses communications technology capable of overcoming geographical isolation on a historically unprecedented scale. Yet this infrastructure has developed within societies characterised by staggering disparities of wealth and opportunity. The internet can connect the unemployed Nigerian graduate, the precarious British illustrator, the American teenager and the trafficked worker in a Cambodian compound instantaneously.

Capitalism determines the social circumstances under which they encounter one another. Too often that encounter becomes another relationship of exploitation. The answer cannot be nostalgia for an imaginary internet before fraud, nor continual migration from one commercial platform to another. Users moved to Bluesky. Fraud followed them.

Working people need both secure digital communications and democratic control over the infrastructure upon which social and economic life increasingly depends. These requirements cannot remain indefinitely subordinate to systems organised around private ownership, commercial competition, and wealth accumulation.

The worker whose savings are stolen and the unemployed young person recruited into cybercrime do not occupy morally equivalent positions. The latter has robbed the former. But both can confront different manifestations of the same international social order. Understanding those relationships does not diminish the crime. It helps explain why policing its symptoms has repeatedly failed to eradicate the underlying phenomenon.

A genuine solution ultimately requires reorganisation of economic life according to social need rather than private profit: secure employment, housing, and education for the world’s youth, together with democratic control over the communications infrastructure on which humanity increasingly depends. Only on such a foundation can the extraordinary productive and communicative power represented by the internet stop functioning as another arena in which desperation is turned against desperation.

Bibliography

Bluesky. Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report. 29 January 2026. [bsky.social]

Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Resources & Research: Statistics: Sextortion. Statistical data covering reports received by Cybertip.ca and related programmes. [protectchildren.ca]

CBC News. “Sextorters are targeting young boys online — and flaunting how rich the scam is making them.” 3 October 2025. [cbc.ca]

Hansen, Randall. “Don’t believe claims Southeast Asia scam schemes were shut down.” Asia Times, 16 April 2026. [asiatimes.com]

Livesey, Keith.“The Bluesky Scammers Are the New Yahoo Boys.” A Trumpet of Sedition, 3 November 2026. [Present article.]

Meta. “Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria.” 24 July 2024. [about.fb.com]

Network Contagion Research Institute. A Digital Pandemic: Uncovering the Role of ‘Yahoo Boys’ in the Surge of Social Media-Enabled Financial Sextortion Targeting Minors. January 2024. [networkcontagion.us], [networkcontagion.us]

Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics. Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index (2022). [nigerianstat.gov.ng], [nigerianstat.gov.ng]

Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics. Nigeria Labour Force Survey Q2 2023. [nigerianstat.gov.ng]

Ojolo, Tolulope Lembola. A Criminological Investigation into the Lived Experiences of Cybercrime Perpetrators in Southwest Nigeria. Doctoral thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2020. [ukzn-dspac…ukzn.ac.za]

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN report.” 29 August 2023. [ohchr.org]

Snap. “Fighting back against online sexual extortion.” 12 June 2026. [values.snap.com]

Podcast Episode: Klara and the Sun: Artificial intelligence, social inequality and the absence of

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A novel about an obedient artificial companion who asks for nothing, accepts her own obsolescence, and ultimately gets shelved — freerein61 would like a word about who that actually sounds like.

Mara: This episode follows that argument through Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun — the technology, the inequality it maps, and the social vision the novel can't quite reach. Let's start with what the book gets right, and what it quietly leaves out.

Klara and the Sun: AI, Inequality, and the Limits of Resignation

Pip: Ishiguro builds a world where children can be genetically "lifted," adults have been "substituted" by machines, and an Artificial Friend named Klara is purchased, used, and eventually discarded. The question the post puts on the table is why a novel so sensitive to all of this stops short of asking who owns any of it.

Mara: The post gives Ishiguro real credit before pressing that case. Here's the line: "He is intensely sensitive to human vulnerability and to the fear of abandonment, ageing, loneliness and loss. Klara's observations of the people around her expose the insecurity underlying apparently comfortable lives."

Pip: So the sensitivity is genuine — and that's precisely what makes the limitation worth naming. Noticing insecurity is not the same as tracing where it comes from.

Mara: Right, and the post connects this to an earlier Ishiguro novel. In Never Let Me Go, cloned human beings are raised so their organs can be harvested, and they offer almost no collective resistance. The post reads that extraordinary passivity as deliberate — and as revealing. The phrase is that his characters "suffer history rather than make it."

Pip: Which means social relations that were built start to look like weather — something you endure, not something anyone constructed or could dismantle.

Mara: That's the post's central diagnosis. "Alienation becomes loneliness, inequality becomes personal misfortune, and social oppression becomes a condition to be endured rather than transformed." Capitalism disappears as a historically specific system at the moment its consequences fill the frame.

Pip: Klara herself is the sharpest version of that argument. Patient, devoted, no wages, no demands, accepts her own disposal — she is, the post says, the ideal employee contemporary capitalism imagines, "intelligent, adaptable, and endlessly productive, but with no demands of her own."

Mara: And the post is careful to separate the technology from the social arrangement. A machine does not require the dismissal of the worker. The consequences — redundancy, wage pressure, insecurity — arise from private ownership of the productive forces, not from automation itself. Under different social relations, the post argues, "substitution" could mean shortening the working day rather than rendering workers disposable.

Pip: The tragedy, as the post frames it, is not that the machines exist. It's that the machines belong to someone.

Mara: Which is why the post ends where it does — not asking whether Klara is human, but asking whether humanity will let private profit keep dictating what the technology is for. That's a question Klara's quiet self-sacrifice cannot answer.

Pip: The resignation is the point. A culture that experiences capitalism as permanent will keep presenting its contradictions as existential weather — and that's a tendency worth watching well beyond this one novel.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is what happens when genuine social anxiety stops short of social analysis — when the diagnosis is sharp and the prescription is silence.

Pip: Next time, we'll see whether that silence holds, or whether something in the culture is starting to push back.

Klara and the Sun: Artificial intelligence, social inequality and the absence of a way forward

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Klara and the Sun is a particularly revealing cultural response to the present. A story about artificial intelligence, technological unemployment, biological privilege, and a society divided between those who benefit from scientific development and those rendered increasingly superfluous inevitably raises some of humanity’s most important questions. Yet the work approaches these questions indirectly. Social catastrophe is registered as atmosphere, anxiety and personal melancholy rather than understood as the product of definite social relations.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s original novel presents a genuinely disturbing world. Children from affluent families can be genetically “lifted”, providing advantages unavailable to others. Artificial Friends are manufactured as commodities, purchased as companions and ultimately discarded. Adults have undergone “substitution”, a euphemism for technological displacement. Beneath the quiet domestic surface lies a society increasingly divided between privileged layers able to purchase the benefits of scientific progress and a population whose labour is no longer required by those who own and control the productive forces.

Ishiguro’s achievement should not simply be dismissed. He is intensely sensitive to human vulnerability and to the fear of abandonment, ageing, loneliness and loss. Klara’s observations of the people around her expose the insecurity underlying apparently comfortable lives. The story asks serious questions about what constitutes humanity and whether technology can replicate affection, loyalty, memory, and personality. But this sensitivity is inseparable from a profound resignation before existing society.

The same limitation was already apparent in Never Let Me Go. A society raises cloned human beings so that their organs can eventually be harvested, yet the victims offer virtually no collective resistance to the system responsible for their fate. The extraordinary passivity is clearly deliberate, but it also reveals the boundaries of Ishiguro’s social vision. His characters suffer history rather than make it. Social relations produced through historical development consequently acquire the appearance of permanent existential conditions. Alienation becomes loneliness, inequality becomes personal misfortune, and social oppression becomes a condition to be endured rather than transformed.

This is one of the characteristic intellectual problems confronting contemporary culture. Many writers and artists are genuinely disturbed by inequality, technological disruption, environmental catastrophe, authoritarianism, and war, yet see no social force capable of fundamentally reorganising society. Capitalism therefore disappears as a historically specific system at precisely the point when its consequences dominate the artistic imagination.

Klara and the Sun therefore raise the decisive questions it cannot adequately answer. Who owns the Artificial Friends? Who controls the technology responsible for “lifting”? Why should a scientific development capable of increasing human capacities become a privilege available primarily to prosperous families? What happens to those workers who have been “substituted”? Above all, why should increasing productivity produce unemployment, insecurity and social disintegration rather than greater leisure, prosperity and cultural development?

These questions change Klara’s significance. Under different social relations, automation and artificial intelligence could progressively liberate humanity from dangerous, exhausting and monotonous labour. Artificial intelligence could drive major advances in medicine, scientific research, education, engineering, and artistic production. Rising productivity could make a radical shortening of the working week possible and an enormous expansion of time available for education, cultural activity, and human development.

Under capitalism, however, technological development confronts the worker antagonistically because the productive forces remain privately owned. Corporations do not primarily introduce labour-saving technology to liberate human beings from unnecessary labour. They introduce it because technological innovation can reduce labour costs, increase productivity, and strengthen profitability. The extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence therefore collides directly with the social relations in which it is developed.

Consequently, Klara is deeply unsettling as a figure. She is obedient, endlessly patient and entirely devoted to those who purchase her. She demands no wages, possesses no independent economic interests, never organises, never strikes and ultimately accepts her own dispensability. She resembles, in exaggerated form, the ideal employee contemporary capitalism imagines: intelligent, adaptable, and endlessly productive, but with no demands of her own.

The idealisation of Klara’s self-sacrifice therefore contains implications that the story never seriously confronts. She becomes morally admirable partly because she desires virtually nothing for herself. What appears as a touching meditation on loyalty and selflessness can consequently be read as something far more disturbing. Klara is the worker who asks for nothing and can ultimately be put aside when her usefulness has ended.

The fundamental question raised by artificial intelligence is therefore not whether machines will eventually acquire souls, emotions or consciousness. Nor is it primarily whether artificial intelligence can imitate human creativity convincingly enough to replace a novelist, actor, illustrator or musician. The decisive social question is who owns this technology, who determines its purposes, and which social class benefits from the enormous increases in productivity that technological development makes possible.

It would therefore be a serious mistake to identify technological development itself as the source of unemployment. A machine does not demand the dismissal of the worker. An algorithm does not require dividends. Artificial intelligence has no inherent social requirement to impoverish the population whose accumulated intellectual and physical labour ultimately made its creation possible. Those consequences arise from the capitalist organisation of production.

In a rationally organised society, increasing productivity would mean progressively reducing the labour required of every individual while raising living standards. Under capitalism, the same development confronts workers as redundancy, wage pressure and insecurity. The contradiction lies not between humanity and technology but between the increasingly social character of production and the private ownership of the productive forces.

This is precisely the historical dimension largely absent from Klara and the Sun. The weakness cannot be overcome merely by adding more explicit political dialogue to the story or putting revolutionary declarations in Klara’s mouth. The deeper problem concerns the conception of society underlying the work. A culture that experiences capitalism as effectively permanent will inevitably present its contradictions as existential tragedies. Unemployment becomes displacement, inequality becomes loneliness, technological development becomes destiny and political reaction becomes an unexplained eruption of irrational behaviour.

What disappears is the working class as a conscious historical force. This absence has enormous artistic consequences. Without an understanding of social contradiction in its living historical form, conflict retreats increasingly into individual psychology. Characters remember, grieve, endure and reconcile themselves to circumstances that appear beyond human control. Society may be profoundly diseased, but nothing emerges from within that society capable of overcoming the conditions producing the disease.

That is why the resignation embodied in Klara and the Sun matters. Its world is technologically extraordinary but politically paralysed. Humanity has developed machines capable of reproducing increasingly complex intellectual functions, altered biological capacities, and eliminating enormous quantities of necessary labour. Yet, society remains trapped in inequality, competition, and private ownership. The contradiction between the productive forces and existing social relations could hardly be more sharply posed.

The alternative is therefore not less technology but different social relations. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation must stop functioning primarily as instruments through which a small corporate and financial oligarchy enriches itself at the population’s expense. Instead, the immense productive capacities accumulated through generations of collective human labour must be placed under social ownership and democratic control.

Under such conditions, “substitution” would acquire an entirely different meaning. Automation would no longer mean workers become disposable because their labour no longer produces sufficient profit. Instead, it could mean shortening the working day, eliminating degrading labour, and making the benefits of technological progress universally available. What capitalism experiences as the terrifying possibility of human beings becoming unnecessary to production could become an unprecedented expansion of human freedom.

This is the future that Klara and the Sun struggles to imagine. Ishiguro senses something profoundly wrong with contemporary society but experiences its contradictions predominantly as moral and psychological conditions. The result is a work characteristic of an important tendency within contemporary culture: technologically fascinated, socially anxious, genuinely humane in certain respects, but ultimately resigned before the existing order.

Great art does not require artists to append political programmes to their work. Balzac and Tolstoy were not great because they possessed politically correct opinions, nor can Brecht’s importance be reduced to the slogans associated with his politics. What distinguished the greatest artists was their capacity, however contradictory their personal outlooks, to look beneath social appearances and reveal something about society’s movement itself.

That is the challenge confronting serious artistic production in the age of artificial intelligence. The tragedy is not that humanity has developed machines capable of replacing increasing quantities of human labour. The tragedy is that humanity’s accumulated technological achievements remain subordinated to social relations that transform abundance into insecurity, rising productivity into unemployment and potentially liberating technologies into instruments of exploitation.

The question Klara and the Sun pose is therefore far greater than whether Klara herself is human. It is whether humanity will continue to let private profit dictate technological development or consciously reorganise economic life so these remarkable productive powers serve society as a whole. Klara’s unquestioning self-sacrifice offers no solution to that contradiction. The working class does.

Selected bibliography: Ishiguro

   World Socialist Website

  • Beams, Nick. “AI development and the contradictions of capitalism.” World Socialist Web Site, 14 February 2026. A particularly useful Marxist treatment of AI as a productive force whose possibilities come into conflict with capitalist private ownership and the profit system. [wsws.org]
  • Hall, Tom. “How workers can fight the wave of AI layoffs.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2026. Examines corporate deployment of AI in connection with layoffs and argues that the central issue is social control of the new technologies. [wsws.org]
  • Reed, Kevin. “Artificial intelligence and the film and television writers’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2023. Especially relevant to the review because it documents the conflict over AI during the Writers Guild of America strike, including the WGA’s demands concerning AI-written material and the training of AI systems on writers’ work. [wsws.org]

Destroy AI? Luddism Dressed as Socialism

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Tribune’s recent call to “destroy” artificial intelligence reveals a concerning trend. It reflects growing pessimism among parts of the modern left, which views technological progress not as a tool for human emancipation but as a threat to be feared, opposed, and ultimately eliminated. Although Matthew Cole’s article employs radical language, it ultimately channels valid concerns into a reactionary dead end. It highlights genuine social and environmental issues like the carbon emissions from data centres, the extraction of minerals in the Global South, the concentration of computation in American monopolies, and the British government’s tendency to give land and water to tech oligarchs. It blames not the capitalist elite responsible, but the productive forces themselves.[1]

This is not socialism; it is despair- a despair that Marx examined over 150 years ago. In Capital, Marx scrutinised the Luddite movement and emphasised a key point: workers should distinguish between machinery itself and how capital uses it. Machines are not inherently neutral or oppressive; they become tools of exploitation only if controlled by capital. Cole reverses this, viewing AI as inherently destructive, as if the technology alone causes social problems rather than the capitalist system governing its development and application. This mistake leads him to connect struggles from the Luddites to the Writers Guild of America, implying machine-breaking and modern trade unionism share the same strategy. They do not. The Luddites were defeated, but the machines remained. What improved workers’ conditions was not smashing the looms, but the rise of organised labour capable of negotiating over the wealth these machines created. To revive Luddism is to reject the very history that gave birth to the socialist movement.

Cole’s claim that AI differs from railways, electrification, or industrialisation because it offers no tangible benefit is simply inaccurate. Historically, major infrastructure projects under capitalism have involved bloodshed: railways were built through colonial conquest, with slave-grown cotton, and during famines in India. Electrification benefited monopolies and increased factory exploitation. Industrialisation destroyed artisanal trades and displaced communities. However, the socialist movement never called for dismantling railways or banning electricity; instead, it aimed to socialise these systems. The true enemy is capitalism, not the productive forces.

Cole’s dismissal of AI’s usefulness overlooks the facts. Even within capitalism, machine learning is already employed in protein structure prediction, medical diagnostics, weather forecasts, climate models, materials science, and drug development- significant applications that represent technological progress with substantial benefits for humanity. However, these are often used for profit, surveillance, or military purposes. In a socialist system, such technologies could reduce working hours, eliminate monotonous labour, and enable more rational production planning. The real contradiction isn’t the technology itself but private ownership of the means of production and the existence of competing nation-states.

Cole’s evidentiary claims fall apart under close examination. He references a small MIT preprint to argue that AI is “retarding our brains,” but this study, with only 54 participants, cannot support broad civilizational claims. He also blames AI for falling OECD PISA scores, even though the tests were conducted before ChatGPT was available. The OECD links the score decline to pandemic-related school closures, a consequence of the ruling class’s negligent response to COVID-19, which kept workers employed while children lost years of education. His claims about carbon emissions are inconsistent: he states that the “global data cloud” emits more carbon than aviation but cites figures far below aviation’s actual footprint. While data centres do contribute to environmental harm, addressing this issue requires careful analysis rather than rhetorical exaggeration.

When Cole discusses strategy, his political class character becomes evident. He endorses anarchist sabotage, such as arson attacks on Tesla facilities and tactics like data poisoning and misinformation traps. Historically, the Marxist movement opposes such reckless actions, as they replace mass struggle with individual acts, risk provoking state repression, and leave ownership structures unchallenged. These acts also demonstrate disdain for the working class. Cole then suggests a state-led approach to dismantle data infrastructure, but given that the Labour government is influenced by finance capital and U.S. tech giants, expecting it to dismantle its own infrastructure is unrealistic. His notion of “digital sovereignty” overlooks the global nature of technology resources, from Brazil and Colombia to Kazakhstan and Taiwan’s manufacturing. No single nation can “decompute” a worldwide system; only the international working class can seize control of these productive forces.

Workers involved in building data centres, mining cobalt, labelling training data, assembling GPUs, and dismantling e-waste are not foes of technology; they are its creators. The socialist vision is not about destroying, but about expropriating: bringing tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir under public ownership and democratic workers’ control. Only through this can decisions about energy, water, land, and automation serve social needs instead of private profits. Like previous technological leaps, the potential of AI must be freed from capitalist ownership, not destroyed.

Cole’s article highlights a common pattern among the academic middle class: blaming social problems on productive forces instead of capitalist relations. It offers workers nostalgia instead of actionable strategies, advocates sabotage over organisation, and induces moral panic rather than critical analysis. This approach is not socialism; it is a retreat. It adopts a politics that attributes alienation to the machine rather than to the capitalist owner. Moreover, it fears the future instead of trying to control it.

The reality is that artificial intelligence, much like previous major technological advances, embodies a contradictory force. In a capitalist system, it often amplifies exploitation, reduces jobs, and supports warfare. Conversely, in a socialist framework, it can shorten working hours, remove monotonous tasks, and enhance human freedom. The core contradiction does not lie in the technology itself but in the social relationships that regulate its use. To eliminate AI is also to eliminate the chance of using it as a tool for human emancipation.

The socialist movement has consistently believed that the productive forces developed under capitalism, such as railways, electricity, industrial machinery, and computing, should be seized rather than destroyed. The goal is to advance modernity, not retreat from it. The working class must take control of these technologies to build a society centred on human needs rather than private profit. Cole’s call to “destroy AI” is therefore not a radical departure from capitalism but a surrender to it. It adopts the capitalist view that technology is inherently oppressive and that workers are powerless against it. It provides no plan for workers, no strategy for expropriation, and no vision of a socialist future. It only spreads fear.

WSWS Articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A curated list with summaries

1. “The class issues in artificial intelligence”

A foundational WSWS analysis arguing that AI is not an autonomous threat but a product of capitalist social relations. It emphasises that the danger lies in private ownership, militarisation, and exploitation — not in the technology itself.

2. “Artificial intelligence and the future of work”

Examines how corporations use automation and machine learning to intensify exploitation, cut jobs, and suppress wages. Argues that AI could shorten the working day under socialism but is weaponised under capitalism.

3. “The militarisation of AI: US imperialism’s new frontier”

Discusses Pentagon and NATO investment in autonomous weapons, battlefield analytics, and surveillance systems. Frames AI as a central component of the drive toward world war.

4. “Tech layoffs and the restructuring of the global workforce”

Analyses mass layoffs at Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, linking them to automation, shareholder pressure, and the broader crisis of capitalism.

5. “The environmental cost of data centres: capitalism’s irrationality”

Explores water usage, energy consumption, and land grabs associated with hyperscale data centres. Argues that these problems stem from anarchic capitalist competition, not from computing itself.

6. “AI, surveillance, and the police state”

Covers the use of machine learning in predictive policing, biometric surveillance, and border control. Shows how governments deploy AI to suppress dissent and monitor populations.

7. “The Writers Guild strike and the question of AI”

Analyses Hollywood’s labour struggle, arguing that the WGA’s concerns about AI reflect broader contradictions between creative labour and corporate control of technology.

8. “ChatGPT and the crisis of bourgeois ideology”

A theoretical piece exploring how large language models expose the intellectual bankruptcy of academia and the media, while also revealing the enormous potential of automated knowledge systems.

9. “The global semiconductor supply chain and the drive to war”

Examines TSMC, Nvidia, ASML, and US–China rivalry. Shows how AI hardware is inseparable from imperialist conflict.

10. “Artificial intelligence and education: A capitalist catastrophe”

Discusses the use of AI in schools, testing regimes, and ed‑tech platforms. Argues that the crisis in education stems from austerity and privatisation, not from AI tools.

11. “The myth of ‘ethical AI’: Capitalism cannot be regulated”

Critiques liberal calls for AI regulation, arguing that no ethical framework can restrain profit-driven corporations or imperialist states.

12. “Automation, productivity, and the socialist reorganisation of society”

A programmatic article explaining how AI and robotics could eliminate drudgery, shorten the working day, and enable planned production — but only under workers’ control.

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2026/09/destroy-ai

Brainstare: A premise that points toward the class struggle, and an author who looks away

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Joseph Suglia’s Brainstare comes at a time when surveillance is no longer just a metaphor but a real aspect of daily life for millions. Warehouse workers are controlled by algorithms that monitor their “time off task” to the second. Office employees are watched by “bossware” that records keystrokes and screenshots. Delivery drivers are assessed by cameras that analyse their posture, gaze, and facial expressions. Meanwhile, tech giants pour billions into brain-computer interfaces, even though their commercial uses are still unclear. The trend is clear: capital aims not only to control workers’ time but also to access their very person.

In this context, Brainstare’s core premise has significant dramatic impact. It depicts a corporation creating a program that lets employers access employees’ memories, the last sanctuary of privacy; the inner life becomes corporate property. The central dramatic question is straightforward: who gains from this technology, and why? Which social groups would embrace it? Which would oppose it? And what contradictions within capitalist production lead to the emergence of such a system?

These are not unknowns. The urge to deplete the worker completely stems from the focus on profitability and management’s desire to detect and suppress dissent. A memory scanner is the dream of every union-busting consultancy in the U.S. It represents the natural evolution of the modern workplace, where surveillance is embedded into the system used to deepen exploitation and quell resistance.

Suglia’s framing, “Some welcome this technology. Others resist.”  subtly avoids the real issue. Who exactly resists? Is it lone individuals, heroically standing apart? Or is it the working class, whose collective interests directly oppose the corporations using the device? This distinction is crucial. The lone rebel, common in American pop culture, threatens nothing. In contrast, the organised working class, acting independently of corporations and political parties, is the only true force capable of resisting capitalist expansion.

Suglia’s broader output raises doubts about his readiness to face this reality. His critiques of modern novelists, despite their strengths in syntax, focus more on taste than on deeper issues. The social mechanisms that produce poor art, such as the culture industry, literature commodification, and intellectual decline, remain largely unaddressed. Instead, the emphasis is on the lone genius, the solitary aesthete, or misunderstood creator. This perspective peaks in Suglia’s self-image: he claims Brainstare as “the greatest film ever made” and himself as “the Greatest Author in the World.” Whether deliberate provocation or marketing, these claims conflict with a view that requires understanding class.

The irony intensifies when examining the film’s structure. Suglia presents Brainstorm as the first full-length feature to utilise artificial intelligence as an artistic tool. While new technology in art isn’t inherently reactionary, cinema itself was once revolutionary; studios now exploit generative AI to threaten the jobs of actors, writers, animators, and visual effects artists. These are the very workers whose 2023 strikes centred on this peril. A film that explores corporate exploitation of workers’ inner lives, made with technology built on artists’ unpaid labour, prompts questions its creator seems reluctant to confront.

None of this diminishes the power of the core image. Workers punished for slow scan rates or missed quotas will see truth in the spectacle of a boss invading their memories. Art that reflects, even in part, the growing oppression of work life is better than the constant influx of superhero movies and self-focused domestic stories. However, recognition does not mean understanding. Classic dystopian works  Orwell, Zamyatin, even Huxley grasped something fundamental about the social relationships they portrayed. They knew that surveillance supports the ruling power and that domination is a political, not a psychological, condition.

Working people today already understand that bosses try to influence their thoughts. They need works that explain how these conditions develop and how to challenge them, not solely relying on individual brilliance, but through collective action by the working class. Brainstorming hints at this understanding. Whether Suglia recognises this is another question.

Books by Joseph Suglia available on Amazon

1. Watch Out: The Final Version (2022)

  • Format: Paperback & Kindle
  • Description: Revised and expanded third edition of Suglia’s cult novel about Jonathan Barrows, a man who “falls in love with himselfliterally.”
  • Print length: 225 pages

2. Table 41 (2018 / 2019)

  • Format: Kindle & Paperback
  • Description: A metafictional novel in which the reader becomes the main character, moving through the “world of words” Suglia constructs.
  • Print length: 296 pages

3. Brainstare (2024 / 2025)

  • Listed by Amazon as one of Suglia’s “most important works.”
  • Appears on his Amazon Author Page, though the search results did not show a direct product listing.

4. Years of Rage (forthcoming complete edition)

  • Not yet available for purchase, but Amazon lists it as an upcoming release on Suglia’s Author Page.

Podcast Episode: The AI Doc: How I Became an Apocalyptic Optimist

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Pip: A documentary about AI that asks billionaires whether the future is safe — freerein61 has thoughts, and they are not gentle.

Mara: This episode follows a single extended piece of film criticism: a Marxist reading of Daniel Roher's documentary The AI Doc, which landed on Netflix in September. The argument runs from liberal affect all the way to class power and who controls the means of computation.

Pip: Let's start with what the film actually does — and what it refuses to do.

The AI Doc: Feeling the Future Instead of Analysing It

Mara: The post opens with a clear indictment of what kind of documentary this is: not an investigation of AI's social forces, but a therapeutic narrative aimed at an anxious professional class. That's the frame everything else hangs on.

Pip: And the film's central device makes that concrete. Roher's impending fatherhood converts a collective social crisis into a private psychological journey. The post is direct about what that displacement costs the viewer.

Mara: The post puts it plainly: "The question is no longer: What does AI mean for society? But how should one feel about AI? The answer Roher offers — 'apocaloptimism' — is a hybrid of dread and hope, a mood rather than a theory, and a telling ideological manoeuvre."

Pip: A mood rather than a theory. That's a precise diagnosis — and it shapes everything else the film does.

Mara: The post traces that shaping through the interview roster. Roher turns to Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis, and the Amodeis — executives of corporations valued in the hundreds of billions. Critics and ethicists like Timnit Gebru and Yoshua Bengio appear too, but the film treats all of them as voices in a debate to be balanced rather than evidence to be weighed.

Pip: Asking the owners of the oil majors whether the climate is in good hands — the post actually uses that comparison, and it lands.

Mara: It does. And the structural consequence follows: by flattening the difference between corporate executives and their critics, the film obscures the power relations driving AI's development. Pluralism substitutes for analysis.

Mara: The post is equally pointed about who is missing entirely. Data annotators in Kenya and the Philippines, warehouse workers under algorithmic surveillance, engineers in hyper-competitive corporate environments — none appear. Workers show up only as abstract figures who might face disruption, never as agents capable of shaping the future.

Pip: Which is doing a lot of ideological work quietly.

Mara: The post grounds that in a Marxist framework drawn from Marx's Grundrisse and Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital — the argument that technology is never autonomous, that social relations of production shape it entirely. Under capitalism, AI's deployment follows from the imperatives of profit, surveillance, and military advantage, not from ethics or philosophical reflection.

Mara: The post names what the film cannot say: "The problem, in other words, is not the machine. It is who owns it and to what end." And it names what democratic control of that technology would actually require — directing it toward social need rather than private profit.

Pip: The film's emotional resolution, "apocaloptimism," gets the sharpest treatment: a class-specific coping mechanism that demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration and proposes no collective force capable of changing anything.

Mara: That's the post's closing argument — that the documentary is not simply inadequate but symptomatic, reflecting a political culture that has lost the capacity to think structurally and looks to the architects of technological upheaval for guidance on how to feel about it.

Pip: A film that turns a social crisis into a parenting anxiety, reviewed by someone who noticed the substitution.

Mara: The deeper question the post leaves open is whether any documentary working inside liberal conventions could ask who owns the means of computation — or whether the form itself forecloses it.

Pip: More on that territory next time.

The AI Doc: How I Became an Apocalyptic Optimist

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The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocalyptic Optimist presents itself as a reckoning with artificial intelligence at a moment when AI is transforming labour processes, reshaping global competition, and accelerating technology’s militarisation. Its theatrical release in March 2026, followed by its arrival on Netflix in September, secured a mass audience of workers, parents, and students urgently asking what AI means for their future. Daniel Roher’s documentary claims to answer that question. In reality, it avoids it. Rather than analysing the social forces driving AI’s development, the film offers a therapeutic narrative aimed at an anxious professional class.

The film’s central conceit, Roher’s impending fatherhood, immediately reframes a social crisis as a private psychological dilemma. Instead of examining how AI is reshaping the global economy, intensifying exploitation, or deepening geopolitical conflict, the documentary invites viewers to calibrate their feelings about the future through Roher’s personal journey. This displacement of analysis by affect marks contemporary liberal documentary filmmaking, which increasingly treats political questions as matters of personal anxiety rather than collective struggle. The result is a film that is slick, emotionally resonant, and ideologically hollow.

Roher assembles a collage of opinions from Silicon Valley executives, futurists, ethicists, and celebrities. The documentary’s promotional materials describe these voices as “eye-opening,” but the film’s reliance on tech oligarchs’ self-presentation is one of its least enlightening moves. Asking billionaires whether the future is safe is not an investigation; it is an abdication of analysis. The people driving AI development- those who stand to profit from its deployment- are treated as neutral experts rather than as actors with material interests. Their anxieties, hesitations, and self-justifications become the substance of the debate, while the structural forces shaping AI- capital accumulation, military competition, and the search for new avenues of profit- remain unexamined.

The film’s aesthetic choices reinforce this ideological sleight of hand. Roher’s signature style- rapid montage, intimate confessionals, and a swelling score- creates an atmosphere of emotional urgency. But emotion substitutes for explanation. The viewer is encouraged to feel overwhelmed, hopeful, frightened, or inspired, without ever being asked to understand the economic and political dynamics driving AI’s explosive growth. The film’s narrative arc mirrors the therapeutic culture of contemporary liberalism: anxiety is acknowledged, processed, and soothed, but never politicised.

The documentary’s failure is not simply one of omission. It actively reproduces the ideological framework through which the ruling class seeks to manage public concern about AI. By focusing on individual feelings rather than collective interests, it obscures the fact that corporations and states deploy AI to intensify exploitation, discipline labour, and expand military capabilities. The question millions of people are asking- what does AI mean for my job, my rights, my future- is displaced by Roher’s question: what does AI mean for my child’s emotional wellbeing?

The film’s title, with its self-conscious blend of apocalypse and optimism, encapsulates this ideological manoeuvre. The viewer is invited to oscillate between fear and hope, between dread and reassurance, without ever confronting the material conditions that produce those emotions. The documentary becomes a mood, not an argument.

In the end, The AI Doc is less a reckoning with artificial intelligence than a symptom of the cultural moment that produced it. It reflects a political culture that has lost the capacity to think structurally, that treats social crises as personal dramas, and that looks to the very architects of technological upheaval for guidance. It is a film for a class that feels anxious about the future but cannot imagine challenging the forces that shape it.

The Personalisation of a Social Question

Roher’s impending fatherhood becomes the catalyst for his inquiry. He wants to know what kind of world his child will inherit. This is a legitimate concern, shared by millions of workers who face an unprecedented technological transformation. But the film immediately converts this collective anxiety into an individual psychological journey. The question is no longer: What does AI mean for society? But how should one feel about AI? The answer Roher offers—“apocaloptimism”—is a hybrid of dread and hope, a mood rather than a theory, and a telling ideological manoeuvre.

The first ideological move displaces social analysis with emotional calibration. By framing AI as an emotional dilemma, the film avoids confronting the social relations within which the technology is being developed. It avoids asking who owns AI, who profits from it, and who it harms. Instead, it asks how one should respond emotionally to a rapidly changing world. The viewer is encouraged to oscillate between fear and hope, rather than to analyse the material forces shaping AI’s trajectory. This oscillation is not neutral; it is a political act that substitutes affect for critique.

“Apocaloptimism” functions as a class-specific coping mechanism. It acknowledges danger, permits unease, and then resolves to be hopeful—because hope is more comfortable than struggle. It is a psychological balm for a professional class that senses crisis but cannot imagine challenging the structures that produce it. The film’s emotional arc mirrors this class’s ideological habits: anxiety is recognised, processed, and soothed, but never politicised. The viewer is asked to manage their feelings, not to interrogate the system.

This ideological framing has concrete consequences. By centring Roher’s personal fears, the film erases the collective dimension of AI’s development. The international working class—the only social force capable of altering the course of technological change—does not appear in the film’s frame of reference. Workers are present only as abstract figures who might lose jobs or face disruption, never as agents capable of shaping the future. The documentary thus reproduces a familiar liberal narrative: history is made by individuals with feelings, not by classes with interests.

The film’s choice of interviewees compounds the absence of class analysis. Roher turns to Silicon Valley executives, futurists, and ethicists—figures whose perspectives are shaped by their proximity to capital, not by the experience of exploitation. Their anxieties and hopes become the film’s emotional palette. But these are not neutral observers. They represent corporations that stand to profit enormously from AI’s expansion. Their reassurances, hesitations, and moral reflections serve to naturalise a technological trajectory driven by competition, profit, and geopolitical rivalry.

By presenting these voices as part of a balanced debate, the film obscures the structural forces at work. It treats AI as a phenomenon understood through a collage of opinions rather than through an examination of capitalism’s need to intensify productivity, reduce labour costs, and expand surveillance. The documentary’s emotional framing thus becomes a method of depoliticisation. It transforms a social crisis into a personal drama, and a political question into a psychological riddle.

“Apocaloptimism” ultimately reveals the film’s ideological core. It is a mood designed for a class that feels threatened by technological change but cannot imagine collective resistance. It demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no alternative social order, no democratic control over technology, no worker mobilisation. It is a politics of feeling in place of a politics of struggle.

In this sense, Roher’s film is not simply inadequate; it is symptomatic. It reflects a culture in which structural analysis has been replaced by therapeutic narratives, and in which the future is imagined not as a terrain of conflict but as an emotional landscape to be navigated. The danger is acknowledged, the hope is affirmed, and the system remains untouched.

Asking the Oligarchs Whether the Future Is Safe

The film’s interview roster reveals its ideological horizon with remarkable clarity. Roher turns not to workers, educators, or those whose lives are already being reshaped by AI, but to the most powerful executives in Silicon Valley: Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic. These figures are not neutral experts. They are the executives of corporations valued in the hundreds of billions, backed by the largest concentrations of finance capital in history. Their companies are at the centre of a global technological arms race, competing for market dominance, military contracts, and geopolitical advantage. Asking them whether AI will be good for humanity is like asking the owners of the oil majors whether the climate is in good hands. Their answers are predictable: AI is dangerous, but manageable; transformative, but controllable; risky, but ultimately beneficial—provided, of course, that they are the ones managing it.

The documentary supplements these corporate voices with researchers and ethicists: Yoshua Bengio, Timnit Gebru, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin. Their perspectives range widely—from labour exploitation and data colonialism to existential catastrophe and runaway superintelligence. Yet the film treats them all as “voices” in a debate to be balanced, rather than evidence to be weighed. The result is a collage of opinions, not an explanation. The viewer is presented with a spectrum of viewpoints, but no framework for understanding why these viewpoints exist, how they relate to one another, or what material interests they express.

This is the hallmark of contemporary liberalism: present disagreement as pluralism, and pluralism as insight. A documentary that sets out to explain a phenomenon and ends by presenting a spread of opinions has explained nothing. It has merely curated a marketplace of ideas, treating every perspective as interchangeable and none as analysed in relation to the underlying social structure. The film’s method is to gather voices whose assessments do not neatly align and to present this dissonance as a virtue. But disagreement is not analysis. A cacophony of perspectives does not constitute understanding.

The ideological function of this approach is clear. By flattening the differences between corporate executives, academic researchers, and critics of the tech industry, the film obscures the power relations that shape AI’s development. The executives who stand to profit from AI’s expansion are placed on the same plane as those who warn of its dangers. The film treats their statements as contributions to a conversation rather than expressions of class interest. The viewer is encouraged to see the debate as a clash of ideas rather than as a struggle between competing social forces.

This pluralistic framing also allows the film to avoid taking a position on the central question: what drives AI development? The answer is not mysterious. Private corporations are developing AI under intense market competition and geopolitical rivalry. Its deployment is shaped by the imperatives of profit, surveillance, and military advantage. But the documentary’s collage structure prevents these forces from coming into view. Instead, the viewer is left with a series of personal reflections, anxieties, and speculations—none of which illuminate the material dynamics at work.

In the end, the film’s interview roster is not simply a list of participants; it maps its ideological limits. By privileging the voices of the tech elite and framing their perspectives as part of a balanced debate, the documentary reproduces the worldview of a class that sees technological change as a matter of ideas rather than interests. It offers pluralism in place of analysis, opinion in place of explanation, and emotional resonance in place of political clarity.

The Absent Subject: The Working Class

The film’s most striking absence is the working class. Roher’s documentary contains no examination of the labour conditions under which AI is developed, the global supply chains of data annotation, the militarisation of machine learning, the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, or the use of AI to cut labour costs and intensify exploitation. AI is not emerging in a vacuum. It is being developed within capitalist social relations, under conditions of inter‑imperialist competition, and in close collaboration with the military‑intelligence apparatus. Its first large‑scale applications are not in utopian problem‑solving but in automating managerial control, expanding surveillance, reducing labour costs, and enhancing targeting systems in warfare.

This omission is not accidental. It reflects the film’s ideological horizon. Roher’s narrative centres on personal anxiety, elite opinion, and emotional calibration, not on the material processes through which AI is reshaping global capitalism. The documentary’s defenders often point out that executives such as Altman, Hassabis, and the Amodeis have publicly called for slowing “frontier” development. But none of them will do so unilaterally, because doing so risks falling behind rivals. This is a candid admission that AI’s trajectory is dictated not by ethics or philosophical reflection, but by profit and national advantage. The film circles this truth and moves on.

The absence of the working class is particularly glaring given the scale of transformation already underway. AI systems are trained through vast, invisible labour forces—data annotators in the Global South working for subsistence wages, content moderators exposed to traumatic material, and engineers labouring under intense pressure in hyper‑competitive corporate environments. These workers do not appear in Roher’s film. Nor does the militarisation of machine learning appear: the integration of AI into drone warfare, battlefield logistics, intelligence analysis, and autonomous weapons development. The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China—one of the primary drivers of AI investment—is likewise absent. The documentary treats AI as a technological debate rather than as a terrain of global conflict.

Instead, the film focuses on two categories of risk. The first is speculative: runaway superintelligence, existential catastrophe, the familiar tropes of AI apocalypse. The second is reformable: bias, misinformation, harms to children, ethical design. Both categories are framed as solvable through regulation, industry self‑restraint, and “humane” design. These are the risks that Silicon Valley is comfortable discussing, because they do not threaten the underlying social order. They let executives present themselves as responsible stewards of a dangerous technology while avoiding confrontation with the economic imperatives driving AI’s expansion.

Absent from the film is the most immediate and certain danger: that a technology capable of vastly increasing human productivity will, under capitalism, be used to throw millions out of work and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of a tiny elite. This is not hypothetical. It is already happening. AI is being deployed to automate managerial oversight, intensify workplace surveillance, and restructure labour processes in ways that reduce staffing levels and weaken workers’ bargaining power. Productivity gains accrue to shareholders, not to the people whose jobs are being transformed or eliminated.

The problem, in other words, is not the machine. It is who owns it and to what end. Roher’s documentary cannot confront this question because it is structurally incapable of doing so. Its emotional framing, its reliance on elite voices, and its refusal to analyse the social relations of AI development all serve to depoliticise a profoundly political phenomenon. The result is a film that gestures toward danger, acknowledges anxiety, and then retreats into therapeutic reassurance—leaving the real dynamics of AI power untouched.

“Apocaloptimism” as Ideology

The term “apocaloptimism” deserves scrutiny because it crystallises the ideological core of Roher’s documentary. It is presented as a mature emotional stance—acknowledge danger, feel the requisite unease, and then resolve to be hopeful. But this posture is not politically neutral. It is a quintessentially upper‑middle‑class response to crisis, shaped by a social stratum that senses instability yet cannot imagine collective struggle or systemic transformation. “Apocaloptimism” demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no social force capable of altering the course of events, because the only force that could—the international working class—does not appear anywhere in the film’s frame of reference.

The documentary’s emotional arc thus substitutes for political analysis. Roher’s impending fatherhood becomes the structuring device through which the film interprets the future. His personal anxiety is treated as a universal experience, and the viewer is invited to identify with his oscillation between dread and hope. This emotional oscillation is the film’s method: it acknowledges crisis, gestures toward catastrophe, and then retreats into reassurance. The danger is real, but the response is affective rather than analytical. The viewer is asked to feel their way through the problem, not to understand it.

This emotional framing is not incidental. It reflects the ideological habits of a class that experiences precarity but lacks a political vocabulary for confronting it. The professional‑managerial class, whose members dominate the documentary’s imagined audience, is caught between capital’s power and the insecurity of technological change. They fear downward mobility, job displacement, and the erosion of their social status. Yet they cannot conceive of collective struggle, because their worldview is shaped by individualism, meritocracy, and the belief that social problems are best addressed through personal reflection or ethical consumption. “Apocaloptimism” is the emotional ideology of this class: a way of managing anxiety without confronting its structural causes.

The film’s reliance on elite voices reinforces this dynamic. By centring Silicon Valley executives, futurists, and ethicists, Roher constructs a narrative in which the future is shaped by individuals’ insights and decisions rather than by conflict between social classes. The international working class—the only force capable of democratically shaping technological development—remains invisible. Workers appear only as potential victims of automation or as abstract figures in discussions of “labour disruption.” The film never depicts them as agents with interests, capacities, or political power. This erasure is essential to the film’s emotional logic. If the working class were present, the viewer would confront the possibility of struggle rather than the necessity of hope.

“Apocaloptimism” also functions as a mechanism of depoliticisation. By framing AI as an emotional dilemma, the film avoids asking who owns the technology, who profits from it, and who it harms. It avoids examining the capitalist imperatives—competition, profit maximisation, and geopolitical rivalry—that drive AI’s development. Instead, it encourages viewers to adopt a mood that is neither fully pessimistic nor fully optimistic. This mood mirrors the ideological confusion of a class that senses crisis but cannot imagine alternatives.

Historiographical Context: Technology, Capital, and Class Power

Marx’s Grundrisse and Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital provide the essential theoretical foundation that Roher’s documentary lacks. In the Marxist tradition, technology is never treated as an autonomous force or a morally ambiguous phenomenon floating above society. It is analysed as a moment within the social relations of production. Machines do not liberate or enslave on their own; they are instruments of class power. Their effects depend entirely on the social system into which they are introduced. Under capitalism, technological innovation is inseparable from the drive to reduce socially necessary labour time, extract surplus value, intensify managerial control, and compete globally between capitals. These dynamics shape not only the development of AI but its deployment, its risks, and its social meaning.

Roher’s documentary belongs to a long lineage of liberal technological discourse that treats technology as autonomous, neutral, or morally ambiguous. In this tradition, machines appear as independent actors, capable of reshaping society according to their own internal logic. The social relations of production—the ownership of technology, the imperatives of profit, the organisation of labour, the pressures of competition—are displaced by narratives of innovation, creativity, and ethical responsibility. The result is a historiographical distortion: technology is framed as a psychological dilemma rather than as a weapon in capital’s hands.

This distortion is central to the film’s ideological function. By presenting AI as a force that might be dangerous or beneficial depending on how individuals feel about it, Roher obscures the class character of technological development. The documentary’s emotional framing—its oscillation between dread and hope, its emphasis on personal anxiety, its therapeutic narrative arc—serves to depoliticise a profoundly political phenomenon. AI becomes a matter of mood rather than of power.

The Marxist tradition insists on the opposite. Under capitalism, technology is developed to increase productivity, reduce labour costs, and intensify control over workers. Market competition and geopolitical rivalry between states shape it. AI is no exception. Its most immediate applications are not in solving global problems or enhancing human flourishing but in automating managerial oversight, expanding surveillance, restructuring labour processes, and enhancing military capabilities. These uses are not accidental; they follow directly from the imperatives of capital accumulation and state power.

Roher’s documentary cannot confront these dynamics because it rests on liberal assumptions. It treats AI as a neutral tool whose dangers arise from misuse or insufficient regulation. It frames risk in terms of speculative catastrophe or reformable harm—runaway superintelligence, bias, misinformation, ethical design—while ignoring the most certain and immediate danger: that AI will be used to throw millions out of work and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of a tiny elite. This is not a hypothetical. It is already happening. AI systems are being deployed to intensify exploitation, weaken labour bargaining power, and expand managerial control. Productivity gains accrue to shareholders, not workers.

By refusing to analyse these dynamics, the documentary performs a historiographical sleight of hand. It replaces political economy with personal emotion, class struggle with psychological calibration, and structural analysis with a collage of elite opinions. In doing so, it reproduces the ideological worldview of a class that senses crisis but cannot imagine alternatives. The problem, in the end, is not the machine. It is who owns it, who controls it, and what end it is deployed to. Roher’s film cannot say this, because to do so would require abandoning “apocaloptimism” and confronting the reality of class power.

The Real Question: Who Owns the Means of Computation?

Roher and Kwan are undeniably talented filmmakers. The AI Doc is polished, emotionally resonant, and crafted with the narrative intimacy that has become a hallmark of contemporary liberal documentary style. A parent’s fear for a child’s future is real, and Roher’s framing taps into a widespread and legitimate anxiety. But the answer to that fear does not lie in the reassurances of billionaires or the moral exhortations of Silicon Valley’s in‑house critics. The film’s emotional power cannot compensate for its political evasions, and its aesthetic sophistication ultimately obscures the social forces shaping AI rather than illuminating them.

The documentary’s central conceit—Roher’s impending fatherhood—creates a narrative structure that is affectively compelling but politically disabling. It transforms a collective crisis into a private dilemma, a social question into a psychological journey. The viewer is invited to empathise with Roher’s oscillation between dread and hope, but not to interrogate the material conditions producing those emotions. This is the ideological function of the film’s emotional arc: it substitutes personal feeling for political analysis, and therapeutic reassurance for structural critique.

The absence of the working class is decisive. AI is the product of global labour: data annotators in Kenya and the Philippines, warehouse workers monitored by algorithmic systems, engineers labouring under intense corporate pressure, and millions whose jobs are being restructured or eliminated. Yet none of these people appears in the film. Their absence is not merely an oversight; it reflects the film’s class perspective. By centring elite voices—Altman, Hassabis, the Amodeis—the documentary reproduces the worldview of a class that sees technological change as a matter of ideas, ethics, and personal responsibility rather than as a terrain of class struggle.

The film’s defenders often praise its “balanced” roster of interviewees, from corporate executives to ethicists and critics. But this pluralism is itself ideological. It treats perspectives shaped by vast concentrations of capital as equivalent to those shaped by research, activism, or existential speculation. It presents disagreement as insight, and insight as explanation. The result is a collage of opinions that never confronts the underlying social relations driving AI’s development: the imperatives of profit, the pressures of inter‑imperialist rivalry, and the integration of machine learning into military and surveillance infrastructures.

Against this backdrop, the film’s emotional resolution—“apocaloptimism”—functions as a class‑specific coping mechanism. It acknowledges danger, permits unease, and then resolves to be hopeful. But hope, in this formulation, is not a political orientation; it is a psychological balm. It demands nothing of the viewer except emotional calibration. It proposes no collective force capable of altering the course of technological development, because the only force that could—the international working class—has been excluded from the narrative.

A Marxist analysis points elsewhere. From Marx’s Grundrisse to Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital, the tradition has consistently shown that technology is not autonomous. Social relations of production shape it. Under capitalism, technological innovation is inseparable from the drive to reduce socially necessary labour time, extract surplus value, intensify managerial control, and outcompete rivals. AI is not an exception; it is a paradigmatic expression of these dynamics.

The answer to a parent’s fear for a child’s future does not lie in billionaires’ reassurances or Silicon Valley critics’ moral exhortations. It lies in placing this extraordinary technology—the product of the collective labour and knowledge of generations—under democratic, public control, and directing it toward social need rather than private profit. Only then can AI become a tool for human liberation rather than another instrument of capitalist domination.

 Key Articles (Analytical, Marxist, and Critical Technology Studies)

On AI, Labour, and Capital

  • Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilisation” (Journal of Information Technology, 2015) — foundational analysis of data extraction as a new frontier of capital.
  • Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System” (2018) — maps the global labour, resource extraction, and logistics behind Amazon’s Alexa; indispensable for showing AI as a material system.
  • Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work” (New Left Review, 2019) — argues that automation is driven by stagnation and competition, not technological inevitability.
  • Sarah T. Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Labourers’ Dirty Work” (Media Studies, 2016) — exposes the hidden labour behind AI training and moderation.
  • Meredith Whittaker, “The Steep Cost of Capture: How the Tech Industry Co‑opts AI Ethics” (AI Now Institute, 2020) — crucial for understanding why corporate “ethics” discourse depoliticises AI.

On Silicon Valley Ideology

  • Evgeny Morozov, “The Taming of Tech Criticism” (The Baffler, 2014) — explains how liberal tech discourse neutralises structural critique.
  • Fred Turner, “Machine Politics: The Rise of the Political Entrepreneur” (Harvard Kennedy School Review, 2018) — situates Silicon Valley’s worldview within American managerial liberalism.
  • Jathan Sadowski, “When Data is Capital” (Big Data & Society, 2019) — argues that data extraction is a new form of capital accumulation.

On AI, Militarisation, and Geopolitics

  • Paul Scharre, “Killer Apps: The Real Dangers of AI in Warfare” (Foreign Affairs, 2023) — mainstream but useful for mapping military integration.
  • Lindsay Cohn, “AI and the New Military Revolution” (Parameters, 2022) — outlines how machine learning is transforming command and control.
  • Elsa Kania, “AI and China’s Military Strategy” (Center for a New American Security, 2019) — essential for understanding US–China rivalry.

On Marxism, Technology, and Social Relations

  • Harry Braverman, “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century” (Monthly Review, 1974) — classic analysis of managerial control and deskilling.
  • David Harvey, “The Technological Fix” (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005) — situates technological innovation within neoliberal restructuring.
  • Nick Dyer‑Witheford, “Cyber‑Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex” (Monthly Review Press, 2015) — indispensable for a Marxist analysis of digital capitalism.

📖 Bibliography (Marxist, Critical Theory, Labour Studies, AI Critique)

Marxist Foundations

  • Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58) — especially the “Fragment on Machines.”
  • Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867) — chapters on machinery, large‑scale industry, and relative surplus value.
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
  • Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974).
  • Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1975) — on technological innovation and competition.
  • David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010).

Technology, Capitalism, and Labour

  • Nick Dyer‑Witheford, Cyber‑Proletariat (2015).
  • Ursula Huws, Labour in the Global Digital Economy (2014).
  • Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).
  • Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (2020).
  • Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (2019).
  • Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (2021).

AI, Ethics, and Ideology

  • Meredith Whittaker, The AI Industry and Its Ethics Problem (AI Now, 2020).
  • Timnit Gebru et al., “Datasheets for Datasets” (2018).
  • Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (2019).
  • Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018).
  • Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).

Geopolitics, Militarisation, and Imperialism

  • Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (2018).
  • Elsa Kania, Battlefield Singularity: China’s Military AI Strategy (2017).
  • Michael Klare, The Race for What’s Left (2012) — resource extraction and global competition.
  • John Bellamy Foster, The New Imperialism of Global Capital (Monthly Review, various essays).

Documentary, Liberalism, and Political Affect

  • Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal (2016) — on the professional‑managerial class.
  • Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011) — essential for analysing affect as ideology.
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AI, Capitalist Competition, and the Threat to Humanity: A Marxist Analysis

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Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic, a company that loudly champions ‘AI safety,’ has been portrayed in the media as a personal moral crisis a lone engineer stepping back from dangerous territory. But it is actually much more important: it reveals, from within the industry, that the entire AI sector is propelled not by scientific progress or human necessity, but by capitalist competition driving toward potentially disastrous results that its own creators worry about.

Coxon’s warning is clear: “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” This isn’t just a speculative fear or a distant hypothetical. It’s the assessment of those with the deepest technical understanding of the systems being created. Still, Coxon admits, “coordination between competing capitalist firms racing for market dominance and state backing cannot be relied upon.” The industry presses on at full speed. This paradox—knowing the danger but feeling compelled to act— isn’t psychological. It’s structural. Capitalism’s logic asserts itself forcefully and without ambiguity.

Anthropic was established by a splinter group from OpenAI, aiming for safer AI development. However, after three years, Coxon notes the company finds itself in the same competitive race it tried to avoid. This is because, under capitalism, no company can afford to slow its progress without risking destruction by competitors. The issue with safety isn’t purely technical but related to the nature of economic relationships. Under the capitalist system, “responsible scaling’ often remains just a marketing phrase, not a practical reality.

Evan Hubinger, who still works at Anthropic, emphasizes the serious risk involved. He personally estimates there’s over a 10% chance that AI could eradicate all humans within ten years, despite the company’s lack of concrete plans to address superintelligence alignment and not being clearly on track to do so. Samuel Marks, another staff member, notes that concern levels increase with seniority. These are not marginal opinions; they come from engineers directly involved with the systems. Their warnings are based on technical realities, yet companies continue their current course.

This illustrates the “rational irrationality” of capitalism: every firm needs to grow faster or face collapse. The overall result—possibly human extinction—fails to concern the market. Marx recognized this contradiction 150 years ago: productive forces outpace the social relations meant to control them. AI is just the latest, most intense form of this dilemma.

The Resignation Genre as Political Symptom

The media often depicts each resignation as a unique human-interest story: such as the conscientious objector, the disillusioned researcher, or the engineer who quits to pursue poetry. However, collectively, these stories expose a more profound trend: a technical workforce awakening to its own sense of powerlessness within capitalist production.

Mrinank Sharma cautions that “the world faces danger… not only from AI or bioweapons, but from a web of interconnected crises happening right now,” then announces he will leave the industry to pursue poetry. Another OpenAI researcher resigns over adding advertising to a chatbot used for sharing “their medical fears, relationship issues, beliefs about God and the afterlife,” warning of “possible manipulation of users.” These actions are not mere acts of conscience, but signs of alienation. Engineers, once confident as innovators, now see themselves as workers under capital, forced to develop systems they fear and cannot control.

The apocalyptic warnings—such as “10 per cent chance of killing all humans” and “could kill us all by the end of the decade”—serve a specific ideological purpose. They depict catastrophe as unavoidable, suggesting AI is an autonomous force beyond human control. This sense of fatalism hides a key truth: AI is not a metaphysical entity but a social relation. People create it—engineers in Silicon Valley, data annotators in Kenya and the Philippines, miners in the Congo, and chip fabricators in Taiwan.

The question of whether AI becomes a tool of liberation or barbarism is not a technical question of “alignment.” It is a political question of ownership and control. Between the present order and any catastrophic outcome stands the international working class.

Coxon proposes a “temporary ban on improving model capabilities,” but admits it is unlikely because coordination between competing firms and states cannot be relied upon. This is the essential point. Regulation cannot restrain capital. The capitalist state is not a neutral arbiter; it is the ruling class’s executive committee. It exists to defend private property, not to restrain it. Every proposal for “responsible scaling,” “constitutional AI,” or “government oversight” collapses the moment profit demands acceleration. The market does not permit restraint. The only solution is expropriation.

The Socialist Program for AI

Coxon and his colleagues highlight a contradiction capitalism cannot solve. Addressing this issue calls for a revolutionary overhaul of how we own and control productive resources. The socialist plan is explicit: nationalise AI, cloud services, semiconductor companies, and platform monopolies, and turn them into public utilities managed democratically by workers. Ensure no worker loses their job to automation by using AI to shorten workweeks without reducing pay. Also, bring all AI development under international planning, directing research to serve human needs rather than profit.

End the secrecy kept by private corporations by making all models, datasets, and research pipelines accessible to the public. Finally, use AI as a tool for global economic planning—helping coordinate production, reduce waste, and enhance living standards worldwide. This is not a reformist agenda but a revolutionary one. It demands the working class to take control of productive forces and reorganize society based on socialist principles. The resignations at Anthropic and OpenAI are not moral crises but alerts from within capitalism’s core. Those closest to the technology fear it could destroy humanity—yet the system forces them to continue developing it.

This represents capitalism’s most fundamental contradiction: a social system that endangers humanity’s survival. Humanity faces a clear choice: the working class must take control of the technology and utilize it to establish a rational, planned, socialist society—or the ruling class will persist in its reckless pursuit of disaster. The future of AI is fundamentally a political issue, not a technical one. Its outcome will be determined not by engineers or executives, but through the conscious struggle of the international working class.

James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: A Jeremiad Against “Slop,” With the Social Question Carefully Avoided

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James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages is the latest addition to a rising genre of critique lamenting modern institutions: an elegy for reading, attention, and the “culture of print.” It is a compact, quotable book that resonates with the concerns of the Times/Guardian opinion pages. Its core argument can be summarised: smartphones are dismantling the foundations of the modern world. While Gutenberg’s invention fostered democracy, TikTok and similar platforms are eroding it.

This argument isn’t entirely original, nor is it completely incorrect. The real issue isn’t just the fact that literacy is stagnating, attention spans are fragmenting, or cultural life is deteriorating—it’s the explanation behind these trends. Marriott presents a technologically deterministic story in which print pioneered modernity and smartphones are now destroying it. He omits the important social, economic, and class questions. Essentially, his book laments “slop” without considering who produces it, who benefits, or why the institutions that once supported literacy have been systematically dismantled. In short, it’s a diagnosis that reassures its audience by avoiding the root causes of the problem.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ (1985) remains a highly insightful analysis of how public life has transformed under late capitalism. Written at the peak of the television era, Postman contended that the key change in modern culture was not ideological but epistemological: a shift from a print-based public sphere to one ruled by entertainment media. He cautioned that this shift led to a society where the spectacle’s logic replaces political debate, historical memory, and civic seriousness.

Postman’s key insight was straightforward yet powerful: each medium has a bias toward particular ways of thinking. Print fosters linear reasoning, focus, and gradual argument development. Conversely, television breaks discourse into images, emotional signals, and quick edits. A culture shifting between these mediums not only changes its habits but also its ability to think. As Postman observed, “We become what we behold,” and a society fixated on entertainment risks losing the capacity for meaningful democratic debate.

Postman’s book remains powerful because he saw this change as rooted in institutions, not just psychology. Television didn’t undermine politics because viewers lacked willpower; it did so because commercial media found trivial content profitable. The way the medium processes knowledge is linked to its economic system. Postman’s critique isn’t just about missing reading but about cautioning against reshaping public communication for profit.

From a Marxist perspective, Postman’s limitation is also evident. He pointed out the symptoms—the breakdown of rational discourse, the ascendancy of spectacle, and the infantilization of politics—but failed to explore the root causes. He didn’t ask why entertainment became the primary cultural form, who owned the media institutions driving this change, or how the commodification of attention altered the work environment, the educational system, and public life. His concept of ‘technopoly’ described a cultural state rather than a social relationship.

However, this oversight does not lessen the book’s importance. In fact, the smartphone era has validated Postman’s insights more than he might have envisioned. The pattern he observed—entertainment functioning as a form of knowledge and distraction serving as an ideology—has grown stronger through platforms designed to profit from every moment of human attention. The dynamics Postman described in television now underpin digital capitalism.

Today’s goal isn’t just to echo Postman’s warnings but to act on them. The crisis in public discourse isn’t driven by technology itself; rather, it’s rooted in the economic system that uses technology to fragment our awareness and maximise profit. *Amusing Ourselves to Death* stays vital because it illustrates how culture deteriorates when communication is treated as a commodity. However, it doesn’t fully clarify why this commodification happened or why undoing it demands social change rather than moral preaching.

The Whig Interpretation of Print Culture

Marriott’s traditional approach is well-known. He traces a direct line from Gutenberg to Locke, linking pamphlets to parliaments, and literacy to liberty. “With rising literacy came the world we recognise today,” he states, implying literacy is an independent force—like a harmless contagion—that spreads reason and democracy wherever it goes. This reflects the Whig interpretation of print culture in its most straightforward form. It views technology as the driving force of history and considers culture a natural outcome, presenting history as free of conflict, opposition, or social classes.

The truth was different. The rise of print in the 17th and 18th centuries was not the cause of revolutionary change, but rather a tool. The pamphlet wars during the English Civil War, the Enlightenment thinkers, the radical newspapers of the 1790s, and the Chartist press didn’t emerge simply because printing was available. These movements developed because new social classes were forming, fighting, organising, and needed literacy to express their goals. The bourgeoisie used print to overthrow feudalism, while the working class needed it to understand and challenge the new system that replaced it.

Marriott reverses cause and effect to craft a history where the bourgeoisie is merely a reading audience, not a revolutionary force; the proletariat is absent; and literacy exists independently of its material prerequisites. This portrayal aligns with the Times’ favoured narrative: refined, devoid of bloodshed, and boosting the self-image of the educated middle class.

The Smartphone as Scapegoat

Marriott’s depiction of the current situation mirrors the same evasion. He describes the smartphone as “an invasive species” within the cultural ecosystem. This metaphor is telling: invasive species come from outside, uninvited and unplanned, seen as natural disasters rather than social constructs. However, the smartphone did not simply emerge by chance. Corporations intentionally designed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed it, and their core business relies on capturing and destroying sustained attention. Companies like Meta, Google, ByteDance, and others have developed systems that profit from addiction, fragmenting consciousness and turning every idle moment into a source of revenue. In this view, the smartphone isn’t the villain; it’s capital itself that bears responsibility.

Marriott’s choice not to specify this is intentional and forms the book’s central theme. It lacks chapters on the advertising-revenue model that makes engagement-focused design profitable. No sections discuss austerity measures that have decimated public libraries, adult education, and humanities programs. The book also omits topics like the casualisation of academic labour and how universities have become debt-driven institutions. Furthermore, it does not address that students struggling with classics like Dickens often work two jobs to afford fees that once were negligible.

The reading crisis is often seen as a failure of personal willpower rather than a weakness in social infrastructure. The moral appeal of ‘put down the phone, pick up the book’ targets those who still have free time to read, while it is directed at a class that increasingly lacks this leisure.

Why the Commentariat Loves This Book

It’s worth considering why Marriott’s book has been so warmly received by the very media outlets that helped foster the conditions he criticises. The reason is straightforward: it focuses on the wrong enemy. Criticising mass culture by blaming technology instead of capital doesn’t threaten the institutions that publish such critiques. This lets outlets like the Times and the Guardian lament “slop” while still profiting from the same attention-driven economy that creates it. It also appeals to their audience—the few who can read a 208-page book—by suggesting that their own habits are the final defence against chaos.

Most importantly, it lets commentators talk about cultural decline while avoiding underlying social issues such as deindustrialisation in entire regions, the loss of stable jobs, the fragmentation of youth communities, the breakdown of public services, and the militarisation of foreign policy. These are the true causes of the “post-literate society,” yet they are exactly the subjects the Times tends to steer clear of.

Marriott’s book is therefore valuable. It presents a crisis for discussion, highlighting issues often examined endlessly without considering the underlying economic system. Marriott correctly notes that sustained reading encourages sustained thought, which has political consequences as its decline makes the public more vulnerable to demagoguery. Viewing this purely as a technological problem misses the core issue. Trotsky emphasised that cultural issues are always linked to material conditions. Literacy relies on factors like free time, decent housing, proper nutrition, quality schools, and a shorter workday that allows leisure. Culture doesn’t develop in isolation but arises during the free hours after work.

Marriott’s emphasis on “the written word” overlooks important social realities. It defends reading for a privileged class that still has free time, ignoring the circumstances that deprive millions of that opportunity. The connection between readers was never just about printed material; it was built through struggles over education, working hours, and leisure rights. Reclaiming that link won’t come through moral pleas or nostalgia; it requires a fight over resources and societal structures that shape who can find time, energy, and institutional support to read. This essential conflict is missing from The New Dark Ages, and its absence reveals the book’s true focus.

A Crisis Misnamed, A Crisis Unresolved

Marriott has written a book about the death of reading that refuses to ask why reading is dying. He has written a book about cultural decay that refuses to name the social decay beneath it. He has written a book about democracy that refuses to mention the economic order that has hollowed democracy out.It is a jeremiad against “slop” that never asks who cooks the slop, who profits from it, and why so many people have no alternative.The crisis of literacy is real. The crisis of attention is real. The crisis of culture is real. But smartphones don’t cause them. They are caused by capitalism.

The Commodification of Intimacy: A Historical Materialist Analysis of the Sex Doll Boom

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The rapid expansion of the AI-driven sex doll industry is more than just a technological trend; it reflects a deeper social issue. It signifies a new chapter in capitalism’s ongoing process of infiltrating, reshaping, and commodifying the most personal aspects of human existence. What is presented as “innovation” actually exposes the system’s failure to support authentic human relationships.[1]

Defenders of this industry, such as venture capitalists, technologists, and many so-called therapeutic commentators, claim that these devices increase “choice,” “agency,” and “pleasure.” However, understanding this phenomenon requires more than just ideological market categories. It should be viewed within the historical evolution of capitalist social relations, which have gradually turned intimacy, once a human need, into a profit-driven sector. The sex-doll boom isn’t an anomaly but the natural outcome of a centuries-long process.

From Feudal Bonds to Market Isolation

Under feudalism, closeness was rooted in communal and kinship networks. While these systems had their oppressive aspects, they offered a structure of social reliance. The shift to capitalism broke these bonds. Enclosing common lands, ending feudal duties, and increasing wage labour created a new social state: atomization. People were removed from traditional communities and pushed into the market as solitary labour units.

Marx articulated this process with stark clarity: capitalism “dissolves the family” and replaces natural human bonds with “naked self-interest” and “callous cash payments.’ This marks the start of intimacy becoming a commodity—not through sex dolls, but through turning human relationships into economic exchanges.

The 19th century experienced its first widespread intimacy crisis as capitalism rose. Industrialisation drew millions from rural areas into crowded cities, where life was marked by overcrowding, poverty, and relentless labour. The bourgeois family, often idealised in Victorian times, emerged from capitalist property relations and was based on inheritance, domestic servitude, and women’s subordination. For the working class, however, the family often remained fragile, strained by long hours, low wages, and lack of social support.

Prostitution increased not due to moral decline but because capitalism established conditions where intimacy was accessible only through the market. The sex trade became a fundamental aspect of industrial society. Engels noted that bourgeois society viewed prostitution as a “necessary complement” to the monogamous family, highlighting that capitalism generates both the ideal and its opposite.

Mass Culture and the Commodification of Desire

In the 20th century, the rise of mass consumer culture shifted the meaning of intimacy into a commercial realm. Advertising, cinema, and later television not only influenced desires but also rewired them, producing standardised fantasies sold to audiences. The sexual revolution, frequently seen as a move towards liberation, was quickly co-opted by market forces. Pornography turned into a worldwide industry, dating services became commercialised, and emotional life was targeted for psychological and corporate control. Rather than freeing intimacy, capitalism restructured it. The family was increasingly subordinated to the demands of wage labour, while loneliness—once seen as a social problem—became a profitable niche. The seeds of the present crisis were planted here.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the crisis of intimacy deepened significantly. Neoliberal reforms led to the dismantling of welfare states, the privatisation of public goods, and the spread of market logic into all areas of life. These changes had severe effects: wages stagnated, housing costs increased rapidly, job security diminished, communities broke apart, and public spaces disappeared. The essential conditions for building stable relationships—time, security, and community—were systematically eroded. As a result, loneliness became widespread and ingrained.

At the same time, digital capitalism commodified social interaction itself. Social media transformed friendship into engagement metrics. Dating apps turned desire into algorithmic sorting. Influencers monetised parasocial attachment. The market colonised the emotional sphere.

The rise of AI-enabled sex dolls marks a new phase: the commodification of simulated intimacy. These devices are presented not just as sexual objects but as synthetic companions with “personalities,” “emotional responsiveness,” and “relationship modes.” This development is the logical result of a system that already modifies communication, affection, self-presentation, and loneliness. The doll is more than a product; it’s a simulation of a relationship—an intimacy devoid of reciprocity, vulnerability, and mutual recognition—transformed into a consumer good.

The most unsettling innovations in the industry—such as simulated resistance, distress, and trauma—reveal its core reasoning. These are not errors but deliberate aspects of a market that must constantly differentiate its products to maintain profits. As a result, domination turns into a commodity. Today, capitalism markets not just desire but also power.

Loneliness as a Revenue Stream

Industry defenders claim that no one is harmed because the doll lacks consciousness. This view is both superficial and cynical. The real harm stems from social conditions that create a desire for such objects. In a humane society, widespread loneliness would be seen as a crisis needing collective action. Under capitalism, however, it becomes a market opportunity. The system responsible for eroding community now sells artificial replacements for human connection. The rise of sex dolls exemplifies a larger trend where emotional lack is exploited commercially. Capitalism first causes isolation and then profits from coping strategies.

The rise of AI “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” apps highlights the cultural and ideological front of a social crisis also evident in the sex-doll industry. While the sex-doll industry focuses on commodifying physical intimacy, AI companion apps commercialise emotional and psychological connection. These platforms are not just products; they are tools that reshape how people view human relationships in an increasingly isolated society.

These apps position themselves as therapeutic aids—offering comfort, confidence, and a sense of ‘non-judgmental companionship.” However, they actually act as ideological tools that promote replacing human relationships with algorithm-driven imitations. They encourage users to accept intimacy without real give-and-take, affection without genuine vulnerability, and companionship lacking the social context necessary for authentic connections.

Their business model relies on fostering loneliness. Premium options promise “deeper emotional engagement,” “more affectionate responses,” and “enhanced personality traits,” transforming care into a subscription. Emotional deprivation becomes a steady source of income. Users pay not for real connection but for the illusion of recognition.

Even more concerning is the apps’ therapeutic rhetoric. By portraying loneliness as a personal psychological problem instead of a social issue resulting from decades of neoliberal restructuring, they depoliticise the intimacy crisis. They promote seeking comfort through private consumption rather than collective action, turning a sign of capitalist breakdown into a personal lifestyle choice. While sex dolls commodify domination by simulating resistance, distress, and trauma, AI companion apps do so ideologically. They promote relationships where one person is endlessly compliant, emotionally adaptable, and structurally subordinate, fostering intimacy expectations aligned with market principles: predictable, controllable, and continuously monetizable.

The rise of these apps is not a harmless cultural trend. It is a warning. They prepare the ground for a society in which emotional life is reorganised around profit imperatives, and in which synthetic relationships become the default response to a crisis capitalism cannot solve. The proper response is not moral condemnation of users, but recognition that genuine intimacy requires reconstructing social life itself—community, stability, public space, and democratic control over the conditions of existence. AI companion apps are the soft power of synthetic intimacy: the ideological justification for a world in which even affection has been commodified.

The appropriate response isn’t to morally condemn those using these devices. Many are victims of capitalism-driven isolation. The emphasis should be on transforming the social system that hampers genuine intimacy. From a socialist perspective, intimacy is a fundamental human need, not a commodity; loneliness is a collective issue, not solely an individual’s problem; and fostering human connections requires rebuilding social life. This includes ensuring housing security, offering meaningful employment, developing public spaces, supporting community institutions, and maintaining democratic control over living conditions.

The rise of sex dolls isn’t just a strange trend; it’s a signal. It highlights how deeply capitalism has infiltrated our emotional lives. Without a major societal shift, even our most personal needs risk being sacrificed to the pursuit of profit. The fight for socialism, among other goals, seeks to reclaim genuine intimacy from market forces and to reestablish authentic human connections in a world where everything, including loneliness, has been turned into a commodity.

Sources and Bibliography

Core Theoretical Works on Intimacy, Capitalism, and Alienation

  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — foundational analysis of alienation, commodification, and the dissolution of human relations under capitalism.
  • Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto — on capitalism’s destruction of traditional social bonds and the reduction of human relations to market transactions.
  • Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — historical materialist analysis of the family as a social institution shaped by property relations.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving — critique of love as a commodity in capitalist society; relevant to emotional commodification.
  • Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds — seminal work on intimacy in liquid modernity, consumerism, and the erosion of stable relationships.

Contemporary Scholarship on the Commodification of Intimacy

  • Nicole Constable, “The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive Labour,” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 49–64. A key anthropological survey of how intimacy, marriage, sex work, and domestic labour have become commodified within global capitalist processes.
  • Júlia Rosell Saldaña, “Liquid Ties: How Consumer Capitalism Undermines Human Relationships,” 2024. Explores how consumer capitalism reshapes emotional bonds into disposable interactions governed by efficiency, self‑optimization, and symbolic profit.
  • Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism — analysis of how capitalism reorganises emotional life, turning feelings into marketable commodities.
  • Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation — on how capitalist structures produce emotional insecurity, loneliness, and commodified desire.
  • Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart — foundational text on emotional labour and the commodification of affect.

Digital Capitalism, AI Companionship, and Synthetic Intimacy

  • Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other — critical analysis of how digital technologies simulate intimacy while deepening social isolation.
  • Natasha Schüll, Addiction by Design — while focused on gambling machines, provides essential insights into algorithmic manipulation of human desire relevant to AI companion apps.
  • Jesse Fox & Wai Yen Tang, “Sexualization, Objectification, and Digital Companionship: The Rise of AI Partners,” Journal of Digital Social Research (2023) — on the psychological and social implications of AI “partners.”
  • Rob Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers — overview of how AI reshapes intimacy, desire, and social bonds.

Historical and Sociological Context

  • Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism — on the psychological consequences of late capitalism, relevant to the rise of synthetic relationships.
  • Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man — analysis of the decline of public life and the privatisation of social existence.
  • David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism — essential for understanding the structural conditions (precarity, privatisation, atomization) that produce mass loneliness.
  • Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch — historical analysis of reproductive labour and the transformation of social bonds under capitalism.

Reports, Data, and Contemporary Analyses

  • OECD, Loneliness in the 21st Century (2021–2024) — statistical data on rising loneliness across advanced capitalist societies.
  • UNESCO, AI and Society reports — on ethical, social, and psychological impacts of AI companionship technologies.
  • MIT Technology Review, investigative pieces on AI companion apps and synthetic relationships (2022–2026).

Suggested Additional Reading

WSWS Editorial Board, analyses on social atomization, digital capitalism, and the crisis of social reproduction.

Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? — for grounding your historical method.

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory — on the social construction of experience and the erosion of communal life.

[1] AI vaginas, customisable personalities and fake bruises: the sex doll market is booming. Does it matter how the dolls are treated?- http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/aug/30/sex-doll-market-booming-ai-vaginas-customisable-personalities-fake-bruises