Georgia Hampton: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I am producer Georgia,
filling in for Mike here in the intro and news segment of this
lovely episode. And I am unafraid to say that we have a
scintillating, sensational, and frankly, seismic episode for
you. Today, Mike takes a closer look at the idea that artificial
intelligence is the new aesthetic of fascism,
specifically new American fascism. And what does that
relationship mean for us?
Why do we feel like we have to connect those two things? Mike
wonders at all of this in search of an answer. But before you
hear any of that, it's time to listen to some ads. I know. I
know.
Unless you're on the member feed. At which point, don't
worry about it, baby. You're good. No ads for you. But when
we return, we're gonna talk about some stuff that's happened
in the world since you've last heard from us.
And just like that, I'm back. I've got four stories for you.
If you live in New York City, chances are you've seen the
subway ads for friend.com, the latest attempt by the tech world
to make the plot of the movie Her a reality. Friend presents
itself as just that, your friend. If your friend was an AI
chatbot that never challenges you or asks you any hard
questions, friend takes the form of a simple white necklace with
a little bobble hanging off of it that will text text you
throughout the day stuff like, I'll never bail on dinner plans.
Yikes. But as the New York Times reports, the subway ads have
been the subject of a lot of backlash. A bunch of them have
since been scrawled over with messages about how AI will never
be there for you and how you should make actual human
friends. Some of the ads have just been ripped down entirely.
The 22 year old founder of friend.com has spun this as
proof that he's doing, quote, unquote, big things.
But I personally hope it's nothing but a memetic flash in
the pan and that friend is quickly forgotten. Who? ICE,
enforcement brutes who are currently tearing my city apart,
is looking to build out a twenty four seven social media
surveillance team. The idea is to hire a team of 30 contractors
to scour through social media profiles and create dossiers of
individual people's data. Then, these contractors will send that
information to ICE agents who will use it as a justification
to imprison or deport any person they so choose.
This team would fulfill the needs of two of the biggest ICE
targeting centers. One in Vermont, which handles most of
the ICE cases in the Eastern US, and one in California, which
covers the West Coast. These social media surveillance
contractors are meant to work around the clock, seven days a
week, providing ICE agents with an endless stream of
information. Now beyond the obvious terror that this
suggests, there are also concerns about the abuse of
power by this surveillance team. As Del Cameron writes in Wired,
quote, contractors are barred from creating fake profiles,
interacting with people online, or storing personal data on
their own networks.
All analysis must remain on ICE servers. Servers. Past
experience, however, shows such guardrails can be flimsy,
honored more in paperwork than in practice. May I be the first
to say, speaking of ICE, both Apple and Google have banned ICE
tracking apps from their app stores. For iPhone users, the
app ICEBLOCK, which helps people report ICE activity, has been
axed.
That then led both Apple and Google Play to remove Red Dot,
another app that offers the same service. Google told four zero
four Media that it, quote, removed the app because ICE is
considered vulnerable group that had been targeted in recent
violence.
Weird Voice: I'm scared.
Georgia Hampton: And now to change the vibe completely,
Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain briefly changed their logo
from its more down home home brand that you know and love to
a sans serif monstrosity, and the graphic design inclined
among us lost their minds online. Or did they? Gizmodo
reported reported that apparently, a good chunk of the
online hate lobbed at the old country store was the product of
online bots. Peak metrics took a sample of 52,000 posts from
Twitter that were made within twenty four hours of Cracker
Barrel's rebranding announcement and found that 44.5% of those
posts were flagged as likely or higher bot activity.
It got even worse once people started posting about boycotting
Cracker Barrel. Of the 1,000 posts in that twenty four hour
timeline that mentioned a boycott, 49 were dinged as
likely coming from accounts. Real people were also mad about
this, but the bots helped push things over the edge, leading
the purveyor of highway exit biscuits and gravy to return to
their original branding. Now riddle me this. Do Twitter bots
dream of electric hash browns?
And that's all the news I've got for you this week. In this
week's episode, Mike traverses the overlapping worlds of AI,
aesthetics, and fascism. But first, on 09/26/2025, 85% of
Kickstarter United members voted to authorize a strike beginning
Thursday, October 2 at 8AM, unless management reached a fair
contract agreement. Yesterday, October 7, six days into the
strike, they took to the streets. And in our
interstitials this week, we're heading to the picket line.
Picketer: We deserve better. So be out for six months
negotiating a contract. A contract that says what?
Affordability. That says what?
Fair pay. Because that's why we're here to stand up against
the Boston and their Boston.
Yes. Yes.
New York City is a union town. Banner stuff, we are reminded of
that it is labor. It is labor that took us from a seven day
work week to a five day work week. And it is labor that's
gonna take us
Mike Rugnetta: I've seen this idea around a lot lately, one
that proposes some link between artificial intelligence and new
American fascism. An Atlantic headline from this month reads,
AI and the rise of techno fascism in The United States.
Back in February on New Socialist, AI, the new
aesthetics of fascism. There's resisting AI, an anti fascist
approach to artificial intelligence, a book published
by Bristol University Press in 2022. There's AI beauty
standards, fascism, and the proliferation of bot driven
content, a paper in the journal AI and Society from this year.
The editors of the literary theory magazine n plus one
write, quote, when we use generative AI, we consent to the
appropriation of our intellectual property by data
scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more
money. We abet the acceleration of a social media guyer that
everyone admits is making life worse. We hand over our autonomy
at the very moment of emerging American fascism, end quote. On
social media, Reddit posts titled generative AI is a tool
of fascism.
Do AI bros realize that if anything, they are the ones that
enable fascism and not us? And AI and fascism, a love story. On
Blue Sky, it cannot be stressed enough that AI art is the
aesthetic of modern day fascism. I used to be wary of the whole
AI is the aesthetics of fascism thing, but now I'm pretty sure
that's right. Fascism hates creativity because fascism is
unable to create anything, which is why all fasc bros love AI.
And on YouTube, a litany of videos, the link between Nazis,
fascism, and AI art with an asterisk for the a in Nazis.
Fascists love terrible AI art. Here's why. AI fascism, how
Trump and the far right turned AI into a weapon against
democracy. What I wonder is if the connection between
artificial intelligence and fascism, new American fascism
specifically, is necessary.
Is there something inherently fascistic about these
technologies as many of these takes and headlines seem to
suggest? Or barring that, have the aesthetics of generative AI
become inextricably associated with the current American
regime? I wonder this earnestly. I don't actually know as I sit
down to write this where I'm gonna end up, but it's this
question that I'm gonna try to answer in this segment. But why,
you may wonder, engage in this exercise?
Does it really matter? Is there anything we can do? And I think
both of those questions are kind of questions that I wanna
answer. I mean, on top of the fact that, like, you know, I'm
I'm interested in meaning generally and how it's made. I'm
interested in power and how it's maintained, especially through
art and media, which help create shared meaning.
So if there's something inherently authoritarian about
generative AI, it's instructive in either of those cases. And if
there isn't, then maybe there's some surprising retributive uses
of the technology currently clouded, let's say, by the
associations that we surveyed just a few seconds ago. To
borrow and to misapply a phrase from Audre Lorde, we may ask,
are these masters tools? Before we begin in earnest, there are a
few things that I wanna stipulate. One, the headlines
and posts above concern a broad set of AI applications, but they
do focus mostly on generative AI images, which means we will too.
LLMs and DOGE's AI powered gutting of the American federal
government staff are all related, but those forms of AI
are not our direct concern in this segment. Two, yes, AI is
inherently violent in that the data centers powering it are
implicated in countless ecological concerns. So too are
many other things we do not label inherently fascist. Plus,
I'm sort of just interested in maintaining a narrow focus on
aesthetics for better or worse. And finally, we could argue
about whether what is happening in The United States right now
is in fact fasc ism, but we won't, for now.
We're gonna recognize, that many people's day to day experiences
in The US evoke living in a fascist state, and that's enough
to proceed. We're gonna revisit this idea at the very end of
this segment. Okay. So is there something inherently fascistic
about using models trained on large datasets of copyrighted
works built by high valuation Silicon Valley tech companies to
make pictures of, you know, whatever you want, anything you
can imagine. The discourse suggests that the answer is
absolutely.
Let's look at some of the cases for why. Chief amongst them are
the fact that the American Departments of Homeland Security
and Justice as well as the president himself, his cabinet
members, and other high level appointees use generative AI to
create, and then share via official government social media
accounts images that further their politics and policies.
These images often evoked or directly reference, if not
fascistic, then certainly white supremacist imagery. Dominican
migrant Virginia Bassora Gonzales's arrest was rendered
via AI as a Studio Ghibli animation frame and posted by
the White House to x. The US DHS has posted various generated
images of paintings showing uncle Sam or white settlers on
the American frontier with captions like, remember your
homeland's heritage.
In its recruitment efforts, the DHS has published content which
appears is AI generated. For example, an image of uncle Sam
standing at a crossroads with signs pointing in the direction
of cultural decline, invasion, and homeland under the banner
join ice now. The Southern Poverty Law Center says this
complex of references, quote, reflects an escalating trend in
American immigration enforcement toward overt use of white
nationalist and anti immigrant myths to recruit personnel and
justify departmental operations. This all may fall under what
scholar Kate Crawford has termed AI slopaganda, quote, a
reconstituted AI mash made from stock photos, commercials,
Reddit, and Pinterest. Just add water, end quote.
Or what Mitch Theriault writing for The Drift called agit slop,
quote, brain dead detournement, far flung images and quotations
drained of life and ground into a soylent like slurry to be
shoveled indifferently into the gaping maw of the viewer,
reader, absorber, end quote. All of it spewing endlessly into
your feed, flooding the zone. But claiming this makes
generative AI images, the aesthetic of fascism feels
nonetheless a little bit hasty to me, like claiming oils are
fascist because Hitler was a painter or that Roman ruins and
statuary are fascistic because of Mussolini's or Twitter's
obsession with them. See our segment on the matter. I'll put
a link in the show notes.
True. Both the Nazi and Italian fascist parties had strong
visual aesthetics defined by starkness, rigidity,
arrangement, and subservience, what Susan Sontag calls
orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets
on the German side, and as John Gantz describes it, a kind of
absurd fusing of modernism and kitsch on the Italian side. But
the use of generative AI, thus far at least, hasn't really
resulted in such a strong singular set of iconography.
It's just mountains of slop looking like anything.
Everything, really.
We could take another approach and consider the, collaborative
relationship between the US government and the AI industry.
OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT and ChatGPT Gov, ex creators of
Grok, are both working pasty, decaying hand in hand with the
administration. The Mussolini quote that fascism should be
more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of
state and corporate power is likely apocryphal, but
nonetheless, he did discuss the necessity of the fascist state
controlling, assisting, and even managing industry in the
maintenance of total state power. And anyone out there who
reads the charts that come across their feed knows that
tech generally and AI specifically is the American
industry at the moment. Several of the pieces referenced at the
top of this segment also put forth the idea that if you're
already predisposed to the dehumanization of others Or even
if you're just kind of a dick, the affordances of generative AI
might align with your worldview.
You don't need to pay or even interact with artists. The
machine won't ever tell you no or say that your ideas are
stupid or racist. Plus, you can soak up to your chin in an
endless regurgitated past, a warm chunky jacuzzi of times
gone by. You can generate as many Roman centurions and
paintings as you like, especially on the $200 a month
plan. And thank god, never once have to interact with someone
who might be poor or queer.
All of this is guilt by association, almost,
circumstantial rather than making a case that there's
something inescapably, intrinsically fascistic about
generative AI. Some of the videos and essays that I
mentioned at the top of this segment do try to take on the
question of direct relation to varying degrees of success, and
there's a character that appears again and again in their
reasoning. And that character is a real guy whose name was Walter
Benjamin. Benjamin was a German Jewish critical theorist who
fled Germany during Hitler's rise to power. He died by
suicide on the French Spanish border on his way to Portugal
where he hoped to flee to The US when the Franco government of
Spain announced that it would be deporting refugees of which he
was one.
His brother was killed in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp
two years later. I can see why people continually bring up
Benjamin. I do think his thought is really useful in approaching
this series of questions, just not normally in the way that
it's used. Benjamin's most well known work was published while
he was in exile in Paris five years before his death. The work
of art in the age of its technological reproducibility,
as it's called in its second draft, discusses how art, media,
and culture change when artworks are mass produced.
His focus is largely on a new technology at the time, film and
cinema, and how they can be used to organize and organize the
perceptions of the masses. What withers in the age of
technological reproducibility of the work of art, Benjamin
writes, is the latter's aura. This concept, aura, is the one
most seized upon both generally when discussing this essay and
specifically when discussing how AI generated works may evince
some inherent fascism. The line of thinking goes like this. A
physical work of art is significant because of what it
has literally, meaning physically, historically, been
through.
This is what gives it aura. So artworks endlessly reproduced by
technology lack the authenticity granted them by a singular
physical presence, and therefore, they lack aura. But
fascism is unconcerned with a lack of aura insofar as it
represents a kind of truth or respect for the fact of
existence. Fascism will happily traffic reproduction to further
its heinous aims. Ergo, AI generated images meaningfully
lacking in aura and authenticity because they are endlessly
reproduced must therefore be fascist.
This isn't really what Benjamin is saying. And even if it was, I
don't think it's necessarily right. I don't think it's wrong
to say that Benjamin's ideas provide us with a way to look at
the political, potentially fascistic uses of generative AI,
but I don't know if it's entirely through aura that we
should do that. And I don't really know if aura helps us say
anything about the inherent nature of a specific technology,
especially not now in 2025. Benjamin was writing in the
nineteen thirties, nearly a hundred years ago, at a time
when highly reproducible works and the cult of audience, as he
wrote, that they captured were relatively new.
He was writing before popular culture existed as such, before
mass media had a consistent referent. Today, the lack of
aura in artworks has become a kind of almost de facto
standard. Books, music, television, video games, movies,
which we're gonna talk more about later, YouTube videos,
anything on the Internet, really, they're all copies with
no meaningfully accessible original. In the narrow case of
their endless reproducibility, at least, AI images are no
different from podcasts, which are not often described as
inherently fascistic. But there are a few other thoughts of
Benjamin's we may turn to in addition in an attempt to answer
the question, if some medium does essentially aid fascism,
how might it do that?
We're gonna take a quick break, and then when we're back, more
Benjamin.
Picketer: When say union, you say power. Union. Power. Union.
Power.
Power. Power. When I say worker, you say power. Worker. Worker.
Worker. Worker.
Okay. Thank you. We have another speaker for you. Tremlin
Griffith, president of the New York City
Central Labor Council is here. I would love to welcome him up.
Say a few words.
I have two very, very quick messages. The first is thank
you. Thank you for standing up. Thank you for standing together.
Thank you for standing strong.
Thank you for standing united. Now I'm gonna say something that
is not fair. It is not fair that you have to do this. It is not
fair that you have to be here now. It is not fair that you
have to go on strike for what you want.
But brothers and sisters, the fight that you are in is the
fight for every worker to raise standards on every contract.
Every victory moves us forward. Every victory moves working
people on. Because we know it is not a complicated thing to ask
for good wages and scheduling. That is not about numbers on a
piece of paper.
It's not about profit. It's about the very lives that you
live. We do not we do not live to work. We work to live. We
say, hell no.
Not not tomorrow. So thank you. The second message is sisters
and brothers, you are not alone. There are 1,000,000 members of
unions who are standing with you. And even as I say that, I
know I know that sometimes it's hard to feel, but we have so
much in common.
And I would just ask, maybe you could help me show this, sisters
and brothers. So can I ask, do you know somebody who lives
paycheck to paycheck? If you do, raise your hand. Raise your
hand. Keep those hands up.
Do you know somebody who's worried about paying their rent
next month? Do you know somebody who's worried about retiring? Do
you know somebody who's worried about health care? Yes. We all
know these people.
And sisters and brothers, if your hand is not in the fist
yet, put your hand in a fist because I am with you. We are
with you today, tomorrow, as long as it takes for you to get
the contract that you deserve. Thank you.
Mike Rugnetta: Benjamin writes, quote, it has always been one of
the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of
full satisfaction has not yet come, end quote. Art and artists
imagine new worlds ahead of their necessity, while
technology recreates the existing world over and over and
over again, and furthermore insists that people adapt
themselves, adapt their perceptions, adapt their
reactions to its output. By becoming an audience, people
attain a cursed kind of freedom within very narrow boundaries.
This is a feeling that's maybe relatable to a lot of us
thinking about, say, TikTok. A technology which over the last
very short amount of time, many of us have bent and shifted our
lives to accommodate.
Benjamin was concerned with the creation and maintenance of
masses through the media, both how they may be controlled, but
also how they may be loosened to resist control. He declared
famously that fascism seeks to give the masses expression, but
nothing else, thus compacting those masses into a frenzied
block. No rights, no change in property relations, just
feelings of power and feelings of dominance through available
imagery. No actual political agency is granted. No self
determination is awarded.
Only a mighty force and its puppets. This, I think, may get
us closer to an inherent link between slop and fascism.
Generative AI awards one an intoxicating kind of ability to
render the whole world and more in images free from any of the
cost or consequence or consideration for what manually
making those images entails. It confuses and maybe even fuses
the role of creator and audience, awarding a kind of
freedom and so also a kind of power, but, again, only very
narrowly. The technology's output is illustration without
illustrator, painting without painter, video without camera.
The prompter is powerful, but only within the narrow bounds of
the software's capability. They take action without agency, For
one is always ultimately at the mercy of the software, the
model, the platform, the black box playing at remove a complex
probability game to give you what it thinks is right. The
infinite intern providing the world's most content y content
for your continuous approval and entertainment. This process is
always, always, always by its very design, an endless
recreation of the already existing world. Fully generated
works are notably not copyrightable.
Not yet, at least. No property relations are created.
Certainly, none are changed. Benjamin writes of the Italian
futurists, a fascist art movement which celebrated war,
machinery, speed, engines, metal, and industry for all of
the force and fervor and upset that they felt they represented.
They celebrated, they thought, an upheaval, but in fact,
practiced a kind of subservience to both literal and figurative
machinery of a violent oppressive state.
Humberto Eco, in his essay Er Fascism, writes of the
irrationality of fascism, how it depends on, quote, the cult of
action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it
must be taken before or without any previous reflection.
Thinking is a form of emasculation, end quote.
Benjamin writes of the still machines of a depressed economy
under fascism, reanimated in the only way that does not empower
the workers operating them. Only war, he writes, makes it
possible to mobilize all of today's technological resources
while maintaining property relations, end quote.
It's hard to hear this and not think today of ChatGPT, of Grok,
of DHS recruitment posters warning of invasions, and really
of Palantir. But they're a bit tangential to our narrow focus
because I don't think you can use Palantir to generate a
racist Studio Ghibli frame. One can imagine a DOJ bureaucrat
wrapped in the glow of the prompting screen negotiating
with a robot that only knows the past and not really considering
if it even makes sense to Ghiblify a state department
detention, not stopping to wonder if it sends the right
message to depict the president as Apocalypse Now's lieutenant
colonel Kilgore while threatening, quote, war on
Chicago. The response, one also imagines, to these wonders are
the same and the same as asking what government officials mean
when posting images reminiscent of white nationalist artwork
from two centuries ago or pictures of the president as the
pope, and that response is lull. To paraphrase Sartre from anti
Semite and Jew, they're amusing themselves.
Only their adversary is obliged to communicate responsibly. They
are taking action for action's sake. The overall aesthetic as
such becomes one of cruelty and subservience to a power which is
adored above all else. Submissiveness, dehumanization,
adoration of authority all become more palatable when the
world is nothing but an array of images. Human beings become
paper dolls to be collaged, accessorized, cut up, and
crumpled, placed in their little play dioramas, and made to dance
for yucks.
The world is made media in this fact. It becomes unreal,
distant, or entirely absent, something society has been
reckoning with vis a vis the Internet for a while now, but
which finds new urgency in the age of AI. This is at least
partially a concern related to aura. And so far as what aura
connotes is the fundamental significance of something which
has been created and has a physical existence, be that a
work of art or a human being. But it's also a question of
agency, of what actions are taken and by whom and how these
facts impact material conditions.
This defines the use of generative AI more than their
look in my mind. The method of their creation, endless,
effortless, endlessly, and effortlessly costly, a process
which exhibits an undeniable eeriness in the sense theorist
and critic Mark Fisher wrote of it. Fisher wrote of the weird
and the eerie as a pair of affects that exemplify the often
mysterious circumstances of contemporary life. The weird
speaks to, quote, a presence, that which does not belong, end
quote. Like Lovecraft's interjection of unknowable
otherworldly entities into New England.
But the eerie speaks to, quote, a failure of absence or a
failure of presence. When there is something present where there
should be nothing or there is nothing present where there
should be something, end quote. Capitalism, Fisher argues, is a
fundamentally eerie force. The famously invisible hand of its
markets bend, shift, and pull at all aspects of our lives. The
eerie, Fisher writes, is ultimately tied up with
questions of agency.
It's unclear, in other words, who is acting and how? Who is
acting and how when generating images using AI is murky at
best. The person writing the prompt, the software, the
software developers, the model, and its source material are all
implicated in ways that we don't yet share a comfortable
understanding of. The eerie is conceptually downstream of an
uninhibited machinic generation, the costs of which are deeply
buried or subsidized by the most vulnerable of us and made
invisible or barely visible, artists by the use of their
works as training data, the general population by its
exposure to the environmental impacts of the data centers
which power the technology, to name two such examples. The lack
of aura in generative AI images is a symptom, not a cause of a
celebration of engines, metal, and industry, action for
action's sake, the output of which altogether forms a media
complex that is additionally deeply eerie and furthermore
hauntological, Fisher's term for a past that invades and
inescapably suffuses the present.
The question, though, is if these things are aesthetic. I'm
not sure, to be honest. I don't think so. Overall, the aesthetic
of new American fascism and its posts remain as incoherent as
its attempts at governing and statecraft and economic policy
and staffing and so on and so forth. Ghiblify to photos next
to cinematic film stills, next to portraits, next to nineteenth
century landscape portraiture, next to mid century jingoism,
next to jib jab style paper doll deepfakes, next to seventies era
graphic design, it's all a perpetual stew of every visual
element of some political import over the last 200 leading to a
brand that's only identifiable via the most vague affect, a
desire to be seen as powerful.
And so they adopt the more general aesthetic of generated
works, something between trend surfing and the kind of oblique
know it when you see it qualities we discussed
previously in the generated ish segment. We'll put a link to
that in the show notes as well. But the big question is, have
the architects of new American fascism exerted so much power in
creating and disseminating these types of images that their
visual characteristics, however broad they may be, have become
unquestionably theirs. When I see a generated image, do I
think, regardless of context, of a particular authoritarian
regime, similar to how I might when encountering silver on
black or the work of the Italian futurists? Not yet, I don't.
But there's still time, and there remains the chance that
such associations could be wrestled back out of their
grasp. Throughout much of the work of art, Benjamin formulates
a nascent kind of media theory around film and cinema, a
significant technological development of his time, the
foremost exemplar of reproduction without original,
and a medium employed to great notoriety by fascists. The
films, The Victory of Faith and Day of Freedom, Our Armed
Forces, both directed by Lenny Riefenstahl, Hans Vestmar, a
fictionalized biography of Nazi martyr Horst Vessel. Hitler
Jungkook Kex produced by Carl Ritter and released in The US as
Our Flag Leads Us Forward, and more are all third Reich films
which would have been released around the time Benjamin was
working on his various versions of the work of art in the age of
its mechanical reproducibility. Filmmaking, Benjamin thought,
had been captured by capital.
And rather than being a tool for workers to build solidarity to
understand, quote, themselves and therefore their class, it
was used to mollify and compact the masses subjected to it and
entranced by it. The same is true of film capital in
particular as of fascism in general, Benjamin writes. A
compelling urge toward new social opportunities is being
clandestinely that. And we're so technology that provides new
social opportunities from the grips of capital, from the
controlling grasp of the property owning minority in the
long term. In the face of an aestheticized politics, the only
choice, Benjamin says, is to politicize aesthetics, to turn
art for art's sake into a revolutionary force of art for
humanity's sake.
This was perhaps arguably and not entirely, but meaningfully
accomplished with film, which in the last hundred years has
joined literature and painting as an art form widely understood
is capable of laying bare some aspect of the human condition
even while also bringing us things like Ant Man and the Wasp
Quantumania. Can the same thing happen with generative AI? Can
it be rescued from capital to become a revolutionary force of
art for humanity's sake? Or maybe the more practical version
of this question is, does anybody want to try to rescue
it? Is anybody even interested in doing that?
Kate Crawford writes that building such alternatives for
generative AI, quote, would demand the fundamental
transformation of existing technical and economic
arrangements, alternative energy systems, cooperative ownership
models, and cultural protocols that resist algorithmic
ingestion. The question that remains is whether we will
choose to embrace slop or cultivate desire for something
else entirely, Cultural forms moving beyond synthetic
reproduction oriented toward flourishing rather than
extraction, toward ecological regeneration rather than a
hypermetabolic state of exhaustion and breakdown. A tall
order, for sure, and perhaps the answer to one of our questions.
Is generative AI the aesthetic of new American fascism? No.
But it could become so if we let it, if we want it to. And maybe
some portion of us want it to. From one perspective, the anti
AI one, to be clear, there is some utility in letting the
generated ish aesthetic become twinned with the architects of
the current American state and their cronies. To the degree
that one will ever be able to confidently identify the output
of this technology, that output could then always bring to mind
this cohort of bumbling, calamitous strongmen, the de
architects of American visual culture, to say nothing of the
culture itself. Or slop to become this administration's
silver on black or this administration's Stalinist
socialist realism, it might halt what waning momentum it retains,
being seen to signal and in no small way create the reality
that new American fascism seeks.
Which brings us finally back to another question raised at the
top of this segment. Is what is happening right now fascism in
fact? I don't think so, but it's not for lack of trying. I do
genuinely believe that The United States is simply too
large and too diverse for fascism to take total hold. This
is not to say that there will not be and has not already been
misery and suffering on a large and completely unnecessary scale
while various members of the administration and the corporate
class with whom they've partnered consolidate their
power.
What this group is arguably best at is posting. This is a
government by, for, and of posters. They excel at a
particular kind of public performance, not delivering a
coherent message, not inspiring adoration nor dedication, not, I
don't think, in Benjamin's terms, compacting masses, at
least not the degree to which other fascist movements have
been able to. They are good at gaining and maintaining
attention, but not many of the things that usually follow once
one has it. One need only see Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegseth on stage fulminating at the country's collected military
personnel to be disabused of the notion that our leaders have
requisite amounts of charisma capable of being meaningfully
weaponized.
They are knowledgeable about, maybe even obsessed with, the
media. How it's made, how it's useful, the social and economic
position it occupies, and the power it commands. Slop, sludge,
slopaganda, and agit slop included. They are posters at
heart more so than they are leaders. They would appear to
put more effort, effort into creating the appearance of a
fascist state, a state itself all about appearances, than
anything beyond that.
It's perhaps that they don't know there's a step beyond this
one. It's perhaps they don't care. It's perhaps they don't
know how to progress their project past this stage. It's
perhaps that they are always just on the verge of figuring it
out. But what remains is that slop and the technology that
powers it is indeed one of the most used tools in their box.
Hegseth himself on stage said, this urgent moment requires more
troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriot missiles,
more submarines, more b 21 bombers. It requires more
innovation, more AI in everything and ahead of the
curve, more cyber effects, more space, more speed. Here is
American action for action's sake, a celebration of war,
speed, and machinery, betraying a subservience to the very same
in the absence of application, strategy, ideas to be
implemented somewhere beyond the cameras and feeds and group
chats. I wonder the degree to which artificial intelligence is
not a tool of this administration, but a crutch for
a group of people who otherwise don't really know how to do much
of anything, really, except push ups and lie. Perhaps it would
not be easy.
Perhaps no one really wants to do it. But what happens when you
find a way to take away that crutch? Would they not stumble?
Georgia Hampton: That is the show we have for you this week.
We'll be back here in the main feed on October 22. This show
simply would not exist without the member community that we
have. And for that, I have to say, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. We are unimaginably fortunate to have such a
supportive and incredible community of members. And it's
honestly because of you that we are able to do what we do. If
you'd like to become a NeverPo's member for as little as $4 a
month, you can do so at neverpo.st. And if that's a bit
too much to manage in the choppy waters of modern life, you can
also tip us a one time any dollar amount, which I will
personally promise to spend on retiling the bathroom of the
Gothic castle in which I reside.
Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton Hey,
that's me and the mysterious doctor first name, last name.
Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is
Jason Oberholzer. And the show's host is Mike Rugnetta. The good
news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is
also the bad news.
Meanwhile, I cut an onion and it's onions all the way down.
And that's a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after
the empire congratulates itself on persisting again. No. Thank
you. I'm stuffed.
I couldn't possibly have more hope. I haven't finished
mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven't said enough goodbyes to,
oh, what was her name and hers? How many wheeze did they cut out
of me? And whose country was I standing on the last time we
survived?
That's an excerpt from Celebrate Good Times by Frannie Choi.
Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
distributed by Radiotopia.