Open Indie

In my youth I was under the all too common delusion that Great Men were to thank for most of society's innovations. Eventually I noticed that the supposedly greatest men of our modern times got to their position of influence and power largely by taking things.

It's harder to outright take material goods like land and money, since we live in a society founded on property deeds and private capital, backed by the right to protect those valuables with deadly force.

But with the slightest bit of power imbalance, the more powerful can take from the disempowered in subtle ways: credit, status, self-respect. That in turn can be converted into capital, and with enough capital accumulation the Great Man will finally be powerful enough to live out the dream of the ultimate individualist by plainly taking land and money from the impoverished without consequences.

With sufficient power disparity the rule of law ceases to be a constraint function and becomes an instrument of the powerful to enact their will with impunity. This power-grab remains the most effective way of getting your name on a building or foundation to say “I did that”.

For every Great Man who supposedly did the thing, it would never have happened without the tens to thousands of collaborators standing behind them, beyond the spotlight, half of them women. As I saw this happening around me in real-time, I realized that a great erasure of credit had happened, and is still ongoing, at an unprecedented scale.

For every man we can read about in the history books of societal innovations there's a contemporary woman of equal brilliance but lesser repute. And for each of those women whose names we do know, there are countless more whose names will never surface, whether because they were too humble and timid to add their name on the record, or because they were maliciously stricken from it for the aggrandizement of a greedy man's legend.

Since time immemorial, would-be autocratic power-grabbers begin by abusing the marginalized, sowing mistrust and division in the process, until there's no united people's faction strong enough to oppose the ruling minority. AI is the culmination of a dominator culture that seeks nothing less than planet-scale dominion by means of absolute information capture and control.

I emphatically oppose this trend, which makes me a neo-luddite. Like the original luddites I am not opposed to technological advancement, I merely oppose any authoritarian centralization of technological power. The luddites weren't resisting the new tech, they were fighting for their rightful co-ownership of it and the wealth-creation derived from their labor. They wanted appropriate attribution, fair compensation and professional agency. While mis-historically seen as preventing progress because they were obstructing the exponential enrichment of the owner-class, in actuality the luddites were champions of a much realer kind of technosocial progress, one of equality and commons-stewardship that still eludes us.

So should all aspiring neo-luddites forgo generative AI tech altogether, in solidarity with the dispossessed? If we look to the ecological movement, they've had more success with an ethos of moderation in our consumptive habits rather than trying to enforce absolute prohibition. You don't have to go fully vegan if that feels like too radical of a change in your life; just eat less meat and enjoy healthier living in the process.

While some disagree, the environmentalists I have in my ear tell me that now is the worst time for ecologically minded change-agents to stop flying altogether, insofar as it would hamper their ability to connect and build coalitions with fellow changemakers. By all means fly sparingly, but do not relinquish that extraordinary affordance to the people who take to the skies on a daily basis without a care in, nor for, the world.

AI-use is the same as flying; if you feel compelled to avail yourself of such an innately harmful technology, be sure to do so mindfully and with purpose.

The fact remains that today's AI is non-consensual, retroactively forced-labor on a planetary scale. If all the knowledge workers in the world had a voice, and sufficient ownership of our work, the most powerful AI machine in existence would be completely transparent in its inner workings, all the way from the troves of learning data to the algorithms that determine what is ultimately learned. And all its output would be a public good, cooperatively cultivated as a Digital Knowledge Commons.

It would be that way because we wouldn't allow for any commercial capture and exploitation of our labor without our explicit consent. Proprietary models would be limited to narrow problem solving, not necessarily excluded from co-operation with planet-scale models stewarded by the Global Labor Commoners, but strictly limited in their commercial purview.

The vast majority of our openly shared knowledge-wealth would first and foremost be used to construct a modern-day Library of Alexandria, freely available to all as a sacred institution of sense-making. Imagine a machine-intelligence guided by the caring hands and scrutinizing eyes of public-service librarians, whose greatest passion in life is cultivating knowledge. Imagine that, as opposed to our status quo ruled by feckless opportunists who care only about enclosing and commoditizing information for their enrichment, making no sense at all.

When you use AI, I desperately need you to acknowledge, for the sake of the unvoiced: These conjured artifacts of value, generated at your will as if by magic, presently comes from a technology wholly premised on the non-consensual extraction and subsequent erasure of past labor.

Either you reclaim your agency as a knowledge worker and redirect that value towards systemic change in a radical act of internalizing an abusive system's externalities, or resign yourself to helpless complicity as we descend into a dark age of the Knowledge Commons, Incorporated.