At their best, our technologies could aid in the fomentation of better, more symbiotic, social and ecological systems. From stateless organizations to cooperatively-owned automation, the advent of advanced technology could lend itself to a communal prosperity and social Enlightenment that would outshine any in human history. But this potential is not what we’re given. Instead, we get surveillance disguised as safety, extraction disguised as innovation, and passivity disguised as progress.
All data that you provide to the AI becomes part of that AI, and trusting to self-monitored corporate safeguards is pure naivety. Programs like Flock Safety and Amazon Ring don’t just watch — they track, they share, and they profit, often in direct violation of privacy laws and without public consent.
This brings us to the idea of the Commons. In perhaps no other technology is this concept more relevant (or more violated) than in artificial intelligence. Peter Kropotkin’s words from The Conquest of Bread (1892) cut to the core:
“By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?”
AI, as a product of collective human knowledge, should be a Commons — a shared resource for mutual betterment. But what we see is enclosure, extraction, and monopolization. A tool that could liberate instead reinforces the hierarchies it claims to transcend.
And this is no accident. The trend in a technocentric society is one where alienation is normalized — where we are distanced from ourselves, from our neighbors, from nature, and ultimately from the very concept of reality. Technology, in this context, is not a neutral arbiter but an active participant in the erosion of agency. Each new “innovation” arrives pre-packaged with the assumptions of growth-consumption, a passive acceptance of the status quo, and the quiet insistence that there is no alternative.
Herein lies the propaganda: the insistence that AI itself is the threat. Critics (and proponents) often anthropomorphize it, lending personhood to what is, in truth, a Baudrillardian simulacrum, just a hollow mimicry of intelligence that nonetheless reshapes our social, digital, and physical realities. But the real danger is not the machine; it is the system that deploys it. The specter of a “rogue AI” serves as a distraction, directing our fear toward a fictional villain while the actual architects of harm (entities and ideologies of dominance hierarchy) operate unchecked.
Likewise, artificial intelligence need not be an ecological disaster… but within a system of endlessly expanding production and consumption, it cannot be anything but. The same logic applies to its social impact: AI, as it exists today, is not a tool for liberation but a mechanism for control. To mitigate its damage, we must confront not just the technology itself but the structures that give it form.
The Chinese model of modern Marxian market economics, for example, ostensibly aims to build a “human community with a shared future,” yet even there, inequality persists as a structural issue, one that their own citizens link to what amounts to a gap between ideology and outcome. Can the “West” do any better? Can we find our path to a shared future, and a renewed Commons? Or will it prove true that no technological development can outrun the contradictions of the system that birthed it?
The great averaging engines of our AI epoch do truly represent a crystallized danger: that our historical oppressions and inequalities will be ossified within the tools we use to interpret the world.
What was once fluid becomes fixed; what was once contested becomes canon. The question, then, is not whether technology is “good” or “evil,” but who controls it and who benefits from it. Right now, the beneficiaries are not those responsible for its creation, and we’re all being placed into an ecological and social debt from which there may be no return.
I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!
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