Woke 2.0 Should Be A Nightmare For Fascists
Inside the mailbag: A.I. semi-positivity ... Merrick Garland ... Zohran Mamdani
Liz: I’m going to stipulate that the majority of anxieties around AI are valid.
Having said that, I’m tired of Democrats being this party of everything is bad and we must stop it.
Stipulated that AI will have trade offs: what should the positive Democratic platform here be? We DO need to have a national security strategy around it and there ARE some jobs we probably don’t want humans to do. We probably DO want to funnel more people into liberal arts for a variety of reasons. We DO want people to feel excited about being participants rather than targets of a technological revolution.
And so I’m not picking on just Democrats: this country suffers from being told repeatedly that we’re at the end of history as though creativity, innovation and building in everything from government to jobs is over. AI strikes me as an opportunity to rethink our stupid moral relationship to work and the myopic march to GDP growth.
I feel this whole question very deeply, and particularly this part, because I write about liberal politics: “I’m tired of Democrats being this party of everything is bad and we must stop it.”
What’s happening more broadly, I think, is that malign political forces around the world have accrued a lot of power, and are using it to tear down everything standing between themselves and more, more, more. This has simultaneously tended to radicalize liberals and make them more small-c conservative. It sounds like a contradiction, but I don’t think it is. At a cliched level, think wine moms out for blood, but also eager to fortify institutions, restore integrity to public service, etc. We need to do extraordinary things to preserve democracy, freedom, etc., but (for the same reason) we’re becoming hyper-protective of various things we once took for granted. Then along comes A.I., threatening to dislocate workers by the millions, and yet we’re mostly powerless to stop them from cramming it into every nook and cranny of digital life, while sidling up to the fascists. Suddenly tons of people want Democrats to stand athwart history yelling STOP—but who in liberal politics signed up to be William F. Buckley?
Clashing ideologies aside, it puts Democrats in a tough spot, because many of their voters will clock openness to A.I. as collaboration. They have a tough needle to thread. Let’s try and help them.
While I’m extremely wary of the A.I. industry, and of the very idea that A.I. should be a private industry in this phase of its existence, I don’t want Democrats to negatively polarize themselves into war with the concept of A.I. just because its exponents include bad men who’ve made corrupt common cause with fascism.
So here’s a happy medium. It begins with Democrats understanding the difference between healthy skepticism and Ludditism.
The opposite of Ludditism is sight unseen enthusiasm about all “progress.” In between there’s cost-benefit analysis, and the simple, unobjectionable Stan Lee wisdom that with great power comes great responsibility.
I’m stealing this point, but the innovation of industrial-scale nicotine delivery was not good, just because it was new. The innovation of fentanyl was a net negative for the world, even as it has good use cases. A.I. could easily be like this. But I believe we still have the power, as the masses, to shepherd A.I. in a way that prevents it from evolving into something like cigarettes or deadly opioids or a doomsday device.
If I’m building an A.I. agenda into a political platform, the goal would be to insure against risk, and socialize benefit.
So, first: Get it out of the hands of these historically malevolent men. We wouldn’t have wanted “good” industrialists to build the atomic bomb without supervision, to say nothing of industrialists with fascist sympathies.
Simultaneously, we need to build mechanisms to distribute benefits—to everyone, but particularly to displaced workers. If we’re going to allow A.I. to replace human labor at scale, then it simply has to be in the manner of post-work utopia, not a mass return to capital, where oligarchs pocket all the money, hole up in gated communities, while the rest of us fight over scraps.
Then (and maybe only then) we should steer A.I. usage in ways that quiet rival sources of doom, whether that’s by conceiving novel ways to ameliorate climate change or curing cancer or freeing us to spend more time offline in community with real people. And why not get creative? We can limit or eliminate patent protections for innovations that spring from the “minds” of A.I., so that as many people as possible get to enjoy the benefits immediately.
In any case, I’m more than a little out of my depth here, but I think politicians like Alex Bores could help the wider party strike the balance you’re (we’re) seeking.
Ben W: What explains the need of so many conservative (non-MAGA at least) and reactionary centrist minds to fear “woke.” These days it comes off like a blanket term for every left-wing online behavior or quote that annoys them personally and thus MUST reflect what liberal voters believe in. Even if it has nothing to do with House/Senate/Governor leadership. But you get the sense they genuinely believe the terminology now, despite the meaning of that definition always changing. So does the anti-woke mindset feel closer a cope to ignore how destructive Republicans are without bothsidism as cover, or a sign that they might be fascist-curious but can’t admit it without feeling somewhat guilty?
The anti-woke backlash attracted many, many people who’d had some kind of bad experience with human resources, or found aggressive online speech policing annoying, and convinced themselves that wokeness must thus be a huge liability for the Democratic Party.
Motivated reasoning comes for everyone eventually! And I think this is a substantially larger driver of anti-woke commentary than “both sides”-style political commentary, though you will certainly find idiot pundits out there drawing false equivalences between campus boycott tactics and Donald Trump laying waste to the first amendment.
But let me try to steelman anti-wokeism, because it isn’t entirely spun up to put a high-minded gloss on personal grievance.