Production and This and That
All ya gotta do is start
I've been trying to put together a long piece on production as industrial fetish, but its distressingly slow. In these times of contention, as an always recovering news addict, my mind's a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought, cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.
With Donny the Terrible bogusly communing with the Zoroastrian spirits of Ahriman on the Persian plateau, the world continues to turn. The meltdown of the Private Debt industry continues unimpeded, while the WSJ writes,
How Americans Are Navigating Higher Energy Costs on Every Front
They are borrowing Costco memberships, cutting back on nights out and skipping road trips. “You better watch your account to the penny.”
To think, we're not even a month in.
While, the FT has a scoop, "We must not underestimate the peril for democracy." Seems a couple think-tanks became aware American democracy is on the mat. But don't worry, "Only the electoral components of democracy are, it judges, untouched, at least so far." Which is most amusing as I began three and half decades ago telling Americans the campaign system was broken, corrupt, and debauched. Well, as Trippi says, "That and five bucks (or is it ten now?) will get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks."
On the AI front, there's an excellent piece, The AI Industry is Lying to You. The wags would say, "Oh yeah, they're the ones." Nonetheless, an excellent piece on all the AI numbers not adding up, no surprise there, but especially those of compute installation being restricted by the need for electricity. I did point this out as inevitabile three years ago, now I just need five bucks. Most interesting, compute has replaced bytes with watts as a measure of, well, I guess, how much power they're using. Not good. Information scientist Norbert Wiener pointed out seventy-five years ago, "Information is information, not matter or energy."
Which all circles around back to production. Almost a century ago, Simone Weil, put forth a concise, beautiful, to the root, critique and take down of Marx's thought specifically, though it applies just as well to the production fetish beneath all industrial economics. AI and our Tech priesthoods are only the latest manifestation.
Weil wrote,
"We can only understand how Marx and his disciples could still believe in the possibility of a real democracy based on our present civilization if we take into account their theory of the development of productive forces. It is well known that, in Marx’s eyes, this development constitutes, in the last analysis, the true motive power of history, and that it is practically unlimited. Every social system, every dominant class has the “task”, the “historic mission”, of carrying the productive forces to an ever higher level, until the day when all further progress is arrested by the social cadres; at that moment the productive forces rebel, break up these cadres, and a new class takes over power. The recognition of the fact that the capitalist system grinds down millions of men only enables one to condemn it morally; what constitutes the historic condemnation of the system is the fact that, after having made productive progress possible, it is now an obstacle in its way. The essential task of revolutions consists in the emancipation not of men but of productive forces. As a matter of fact, it is clear that, as soon as these have reached a level of development high enough for production to be carried out at the cost of little effort, the two tasks coincide; and Marx assumed that such was the case in our time. It was this assumption that enabled him to establish a harmony, indispensable to his moral tranquility, between his idealistic aspirations and his materialistic conception of history. In his view, modern technique, once freed from capitalist forms of economy, can give men, here and now, sufficient leisure to enable them to develop their faculties harmoniously, and consequently bring about the disappearance, to a certain extent, of the degrading specialization created by capitalism; and above all the further development of technique must lighten more and more, day by day, the burden of material necessity, and as an immediate consequence that of social constraint, until humanity reaches at last a truly paradisal state in which the most abundant production would be at the cost of a trifling expenditure of effort and the ancient curse of work would be lifted; in short, in which the happiness of Adam and Eve before the fall would be regained."
