Tag: artificial-intelligence

Not an Aberration, but the Logic of the System: Capitalism’s Destruction of Culture in the Age of AI

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The details from 404 Media regarding Amazon’s LAS8 facility — where workers remove spines from books, scan them, and discard the remains — have caused widespread shock. The rumoured internal logo, depicting a tyrannosaurus devouring an open book, is more than just dark humour; it symbolises the relationship between capital and culture. The key point is not the gruesome imagery or the destruction of rare books but that this process is not unusual. It exemplifies capitalism’s fundamental principle: turning all human labor, creativity, and cultural heritage into raw materials for profit.

Capital views only inputs, not the rarity or scholarly value of a first edition, a rare monograph, or a fragile volume. It ignores the loss of centuries of intellectual effort because it measures only the rate of return. The destruction of books to develop AI isn’t a flaw in the technology; rather, it’s how the technology functions within capitalist social relations.

The irony of “uncontaminated” text

The AI industry’s demand for pre-digital books highlights a deeper contradiction. As noted, these books are valued because they are “uncontaminated’—free from the recursive errors and stylistic decline caused when AI models are trained on AI-generated texts. This situation exemplifies a system consuming itself. The companies flooding the internet with machine-produced content now have to destroy physical books to access untainted text, as their digital outputs have compromised the quality of the digital commons, effectively strip-mining humanity’s intellectual heritage.

This is more than just irony; it vividly illustrates a core contradiction highlighted by Marx: as productive forces evolve, they surpass the social relations that regulate them. While AI has the potential to broaden human knowledge, remove monotonous tasks, and make culture more accessible, within capitalism it largely accelerates the erosion of cultural heritage and deepens exploitation.

Who owns the accumulated knowledge of humanity?

Tom Hall emphasises that AI systems are built upon the collective labour, knowledge, and creative outputs of millions of workers. This is especially true for the books destroyed at LAS8, whose contents—including scientific discoveries, literary works, and historical scholarship—represent the intellectual labour of humans across generations. These works are social products, created collectively and meant for universal access. However, under capitalism, they are regarded as a “finite and depleting resource” to be privately exploited by companies like Amazon, Anthropic, and others. After their informational content is extracted, the physical copies are often discarded as waste.

This isn’t simply a copyright dispute; it’s about who owns humanity’s collective intellectual legacy. The solution isn’t to stop AI progress—such reactionary calls divert blame from capitalism and target the technology itself. As Trotsky emphasised, technology represents a fundamental victory for humanity. While machines may oppress workers, workers can ultimately achieve liberation only through machines. The real question isn’t whether AI should exist but rather under what social conditions, in whose interests, and who should control it.

A key insight from the 404 Media investigation is that it relied on anonymous Amazon workers who risked personal safety to testify. This highlights a recurring point the WSWS emphasises: beneath every element of “automation,” human labour exists—hidden from public view and controlled entirely by corporate interests. The workers at VGT3, who cut spines and feed scanners, are part of a global workforce that also labels training data, moderates toxic content, and performs routine tasks critical to AI development. Their work is vital yet often deliberately kept out of sight.

The revelation about Amazon did not come from regulators but was uncovered by a $29 AirTag and a proactive reporter, which itself highlights a problem. No laws require Amazon, Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI to reveal what data they scan, delete, or how they protect rare materials. The industry’s own explanation of its actions surfaces only when it is compelled to disclose information—and even then, often through vague corporate statements.

Amazon’s statement, which claims to “purchase books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” is a carefully crafted avoidance. It omits any mention of AI, destruction, or why a company primarily selling books now runs a facility focused on their disassembly.

Removing rare books to train AI models does not indicate a regulatory failure. It cannot be addressed solely through disclosure requirements, cultural heritage protections, or ethical guidelines — although these measures might temporarily lessen the harm. Instead, it reflects the core conflict between the social nature of production and the private ownership of its outcomes.

Humanity’s accumulated knowledge is a social creation, and the technology that makes this knowledge universally accessible is also the result of extensive social labour. However, a few monopolies control both and treat them as private assets for profit. The answer is not to reject AI but to advocate for the expropriation of major tech companies and their conversion into public utilities managed democratically by workers. The knowledge in books—and the technology that enables access—rightfully belongs to all of humanity, not to corporations like Amazon.

Podcast Episode: BBC investigation into OnlyFans exposes the brutal reality of platform capitalis

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Pip: A BBC documentary tears the veil off OnlyFans and somehow manages to indict everyone except the economic system running the whole operation. Impressive restraint.

Mara: freerein61 takes that contradiction apart in a piece that connects platform capitalism, the pseudo-left's defence of commodification, and what the collapse of sustainable cultural work actually looks like on the ground. Let's start with the BBC investigation itself and what it reveals — and conceals.

BBC Investigation, Platform Capitalism, and the Pseudo-Left's Alibi

Pip: The BBC went inside OnlyFans expecting to find bad actors. What the post argues is that they found the system working exactly as designed — and then flinched from saying so.

Mara: The piece sets the frame directly: "he is following a business model that is discussed openly in these forums." The agent who threatened a woman and her daughter, who sent masked men to strangle her in her own home, is not a rogue element. He is the informal enforcement arm of a platform taking a twenty percent cut and disclaiming responsibility for everything downstream.

Pip: Which is the rentier logic in its purest form. OnlyFans generated $684 million in pre-tax profits last year by extracting value from labour it does not employ, policing exploitation it does not acknowledge, and parasitising creators it does not protect.

Mara: And the BBC's response to all of this is to invoke the Online Safety Act and interview the UK's anti-slavery commissioner. The post argues that framing matters enormously here: calling it "modern slavery" portrays extreme exploitation as a rare crime rather than a structural feature. It "individualises exploitation, prosecutes the worst offenders, and leaves the economic structure that produces the desperation intact."

Pip: So the documentary functions less as exposure and more as pressure-release — enough outrage to satisfy viewers, not enough analysis to threaten the system producing the outrage.

Mara: The post makes the same argument about the pseudo-left. The "sex work is work" position, it contends, is not progressive but capitalist realist — it accepts that all human relations must become commodities and frames resistance as prudishness. The post puts it plainly: "No amount of regulation can make the commodification of the human body humane."

Pip: The comparison to justifying nineteenth-century child labour lands harder than it should.

Mara: There is also a sharp economic dimension. The piece points to Kate Nash losing money on every tour and turning to OnlyFans to cover costs — streaming paying $0.00173 per play, touring costs up forty percent since the pandemic, eighty percent of music revenue captured by one percent of artists. The post's argument is that sexual commodification is not a choice but a forced response to the collapse of culturally supported work.

Pip: The language of agency, the post notes, belongs to a class for whom OnlyFans might be a lucrative side hustle. "For Rebecca from South Wales, it was a trap."

Mara: The Marxist position the post advances is abolition of the conditions, not sanitisation of the market: expropriating tech monopolies, socialising digital platforms, treating cultural labour as a public good. Regulation, it argues, cannot humanise a market whose violence is not accidental but structural.

Pip: The violence, as the post puts it, is capitalism without its ideological mask — which is perhaps the one thing the BBC documentary accidentally got right by showing it.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is what happens when a system has no use for most of its people and no language for saying so honestly.

Pip: Next time, presumably, the BBC will commission a follow-up about Uber drivers and call it a labour story. We'll be here.

Emma and the Fake, AI-generated profiles on Twitter (X)

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I have known Emma for over a month. She has contacted me four times and follows me after I post an article. Although she claims to live in Shoreditch each time, she seems to have multiple personalities. Her end goal appears to be to generate revenue from her OnlyFans page, which she advertises.

To draw in customers, she shares photos of herself in revealing clothing. She is attractive and has a notably large backside, if that’s your preference. The source of these images is uncertain, but they are likely generated with highly realistic synthetic faces, bodies, or bios created by language models to mimic real users. These accounts are primarily involved in coordinated influence campaigns, crypto scams, spam, and political boosting. Research shows that such accounts often operate in groups and tend to have fewer followers.

To understand how these accounts operate, particularly given the advanced AI technology involved, visual and behavioural cues are crucial. Emma’s fake accounts seldom post original or varied content. Other fake profiles often act as reply-guys, spam affiliate links, promote schemes like “get-rich-quick,’ cryptocurrency scams, or use generic language similar to ChatGPT. These profiles usually follow thousands of users but have very few followers.

Although Emma the bot dismisses her work as trivial and insists she’s real, the rise of AI-generated fake identities and synthetic bot networks poses more than just a technical challenge. It exposes a deeper problem rooted in capitalism’s social dynamics. This issue significantly affects humans as aware, social beings and could be harmful. To fully understand this, we must link it to capitalism’s long history of using technology to benefit the ruling class, as well as the wider social crisis capitalism has induced in human awareness and community.

I identified Emm’s game early, but for others less aware, a collapse of Shared Reality can threaten mental health. One of the most damaging effects of AI-created fake profiles is what can be called an epistemic crisis—a systematic breakdown in an individual’s capacity to tell reality from falsehood. This problem isn’t novel under capitalism; historically, the ruling class has sustained control via ideological mystification.

However, AI bots operating on an industrial scale mark a significant advancement. When someone cannot be sure if their online interlocutor is human or machine, if the consensus they see reflects genuine public opinion or a synthetic effort, and if the emotional connection they feel is with a real person or an algorithm  the very basis of rational social discourse begins to break down..

This has profoundly corrosive effects on individuals. The natural human response to an environment saturated with deception and manipulation is a generalized suspicion, not merely of bots but of everyone. When you cannot reliably distinguish the genuine from the fake, you begin to distrust all online interactions. This cynicism is, in many ways, a rational adaptation to an irrational environment, but it carries an enormous psychological cost. It deepens social atomisation, makes solidarity harder to build, and breeds a pervasive sense of isolation and powerlessness. People retreat from engagement, or are drawn into filter bubbles where algorithmic amplification — often driven by bot networks — creates false communities built around manufactured outrage.

In this already fragmented social landscape, the emergence of AI-generated fake social environments often results in predictable harms. Young people, still forming their social identities and seeking validation through peer interactions, are particularly vulnerable. When online communities are dominated by artificial personas created to provoke engagement, outrage, or emotional reliance, authentic developmental progress is hindered. The fundamental human ability to form genuine relationships—based on mutual vulnerability, genuine uncertainty, and meaningful stakes—is jeopardised when these interactions occur mainly with machines rather than real individuals.