AI, blockchain, metaverse, and the Silicon Valley tech-bourgeoisie
A pamphlet in the style of the Old Masters
The years 2020-2023 will be remembered as the race of three technologies in Silicon Valley (the fourth, the coming biotechnical upheaval is at this point underdeveloped, confusing, bewildering, and as such, poorly understood). The three technologies were: blockchain, the metaverse and AI. The results of the race reveal that crypto and the metaverse were just failed attempts by sections of the Silicon Valley tech-bourgeoisie at proactively challenging the primacy of AI. Their failure points to the inability of Silicon Valley thinking to actually change the world.
The incarnation of AI in the form of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer is the purest expression of the crisis that is capitalism, and at that, the highest ambitions of the haute-bourgeoisie that represent capitalism. The contradiction between dead and living labour is driven to its farcical apotheosis in the speaking machine—echoing in ingenious and elaborate ways the human chatter of the last forty years as documented on the internet. Capitalism is the crisis of bourgeois society—the principle of freedom (as ownership of labour-power and private property) come into ultimate conflict with the possibility that instead of the ‘wealth of nations’ being distributed to those that created it (humans), it is instead locked in accumulated capital that (while unleashing unprecedented productive forces and hopes for eliminating scarcity) is poised in conflict with and enslaves the living labourers it replaces.
AI is also the purest expression of the astonishing concentration of resources in the hands of a few caretakers of the abstract process of capital—even of the tech giants, only a few can have a reasonable shot at staying in the game. Microsoft through OpenAI, Google through DeepMind (both entrepreneurial startups and charities cannibalised by haute-capital)… and not much else, some valiant attempts notwithstanding. The amount of “talent”, “compute” and data that are the factors of production of the GPT can only be afforded by the fewest of the few. Where does this leave the rest of the field?
Although staked in the race for AI, Facebook-Meta realised earlier on that they will not be the first ones past the post. They needed something else. Hence the seemingly irrational and delusional push towards the creation of alternate realities. The entire rebranding, the marketing push (my morning walk through St Pancras station in London was lined with massive LED billboards proselytising the coming benefits of the vaguely-defined “Metaverse”), the subsequent collapse in stock, staff and credit—all features of a desperate attempt to eke out a space after the AI revolution. Now it is clear that if there will be a “Metaverse” it will happen through the mediation of AI.
Another form of resistance was posed by the Silicon Valley petit-bourgeoisie: the tech-workers and entrepreneurs that hope for launching the next successful startup, propped up by venture capital until a hopefully successful ‘exit’ or ‘IPO’. These opportunities might have declined precipitously in the credit crunch earlier last year anyway—but way before that, a clever vanguard of this entrepreneurial stratum, in a way best conserving (but thereby also parodying) the spirit of the ‘wild west’ of early bourgeois society, attempted to save the future of their space by creating a new web of cooperation through the decentralised and privacy-preseving ‘blockchain’. Railing against central banking (which was in part a projection of the great tech companies that buy up any competitor in the early stages), they sought to reestablish anonymity, individual control, and some principles of freedom. Ironically, however, it was specifically the central-bank-induced credit bubble that was invested heavily into their monetary products (cryptocurrencies) and that eventually completely discredited their efforts.
These three technologies, then, expressed the internal class struggle of the Silicon Valley tech-bourgeoisie and their corresponding forms of consciousness. This was also their limitation: they all failed to address the self-destructive crisis of capitalism, which might threaten all life on earth by means of some unintended technological catastrophe (as has been the case since the existence of the atomic bomb, but now involving a steadily expanding repertoire of biotechnology, climate-tinkering, and now super-AI). The gaping hole in their heart, what leads to the appearance of a wild scramble for resources, bouts of apathy and hysteria, visions of utopia and utter destruction, a search for existential explanations—is a profound lack of historical consciousness and understanding. And that is because of the lack of the epistemic and political instrument known to the second international as the Party.