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A.I. and New American Fascism · Never Post

0:10
Georgia Hampton: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
0:14
podcast for and about the Internet. I am producer Georgia,
0:19
filling in for Mike here in the intro and news segment of this
0:23
lovely episode. And I am unafraid to say that we have a
0:28
scintillating, sensational, and frankly, seismic episode for
0:33
you. Today, Mike takes a closer look at the idea that artificial
0:38
intelligence is the new aesthetic of fascism,
0:41
specifically new American fascism. And what does that
0:45
relationship mean for us?
0:48
Why do we feel like we have to connect those two things? Mike
0:52
wonders at all of this in search of an answer. But before you
0:56
hear any of that, it's time to listen to some ads. I know. I
1:02
know.
1:02
Unless you're on the member feed. At which point, don't
1:06
worry about it, baby. You're good. No ads for you. But when
1:12
we return, we're gonna talk about some stuff that's happened
1:15
in the world since you've last heard from us.
1:18
And just like that, I'm back. I've got four stories for you.
1:23
If you live in New York City, chances are you've seen the
1:26
subway ads for friend.com, the latest attempt by the tech world
1:30
to make the plot of the movie Her a reality. Friend presents
1:34
itself as just that, your friend. If your friend was an AI
1:40
chatbot that never challenges you or asks you any hard
1:43
questions, friend takes the form of a simple white necklace with
1:47
a little bobble hanging off of it that will text text you
1:50
throughout the day stuff like, I'll never bail on dinner plans.
1:54
Yikes. But as the New York Times reports, the subway ads have
1:58
been the subject of a lot of backlash. A bunch of them have
2:02
since been scrawled over with messages about how AI will never
2:06
be there for you and how you should make actual human
2:09
friends. Some of the ads have just been ripped down entirely.
2:13
The 22 year old founder of friend.com has spun this as
2:17
proof that he's doing, quote, unquote, big things.
2:21
But I personally hope it's nothing but a memetic flash in
2:24
the pan and that friend is quickly forgotten. Who? ICE,
2:31
enforcement brutes who are currently tearing my city apart,
2:35
is looking to build out a twenty four seven social media
2:38
surveillance team. The idea is to hire a team of 30 contractors
2:43
to scour through social media profiles and create dossiers of
2:47
individual people's data. Then, these contractors will send that
2:51
information to ICE agents who will use it as a justification
2:55
to imprison or deport any person they so choose.
2:59
This team would fulfill the needs of two of the biggest ICE
3:02
targeting centers. One in Vermont, which handles most of
3:06
the ICE cases in the Eastern US, and one in California, which
3:10
covers the West Coast. These social media surveillance
3:13
contractors are meant to work around the clock, seven days a
3:17
week, providing ICE agents with an endless stream of
3:21
information. Now beyond the obvious terror that this
3:24
suggests, there are also concerns about the abuse of
3:27
power by this surveillance team. As Del Cameron writes in Wired,
3:32
quote, contractors are barred from creating fake profiles,
3:37
interacting with people online, or storing personal data on
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their own networks.
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All analysis must remain on ICE servers. Servers. Past
3:46
experience, however, shows such guardrails can be flimsy,
3:49
honored more in paperwork than in practice. May I be the first
3:54
to say, speaking of ICE, both Apple and Google have banned ICE
4:05
tracking apps from their app stores. For iPhone users, the
4:09
app ICEBLOCK, which helps people report ICE activity, has been
4:14
axed.
4:15
That then led both Apple and Google Play to remove Red Dot,
4:19
another app that offers the same service. Google told four zero
4:23
four Media that it, quote, removed the app because ICE is
4:27
considered vulnerable group that had been targeted in recent
4:31
violence.
4:33
Weird Voice: I'm scared.
4:35
Georgia Hampton: And now to change the vibe completely,
4:38
Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain briefly changed their logo
4:43
from its more down home home brand that you know and love to
4:46
a sans serif monstrosity, and the graphic design inclined
4:51
among us lost their minds online. Or did they? Gizmodo
4:57
reported reported that apparently, a good chunk of the
4:59
online hate lobbed at the old country store was the product of
5:05
online bots. Peak metrics took a sample of 52,000 posts from
5:10
Twitter that were made within twenty four hours of Cracker
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Barrel's rebranding announcement and found that 44.5% of those
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posts were flagged as likely or higher bot activity.
5:23
It got even worse once people started posting about boycotting
5:27
Cracker Barrel. Of the 1,000 posts in that twenty four hour
5:30
timeline that mentioned a boycott, 49 were dinged as
5:36
likely coming from accounts. Real people were also mad about
5:40
this, but the bots helped push things over the edge, leading
5:44
the purveyor of highway exit biscuits and gravy to return to
5:48
their original branding. Now riddle me this. Do Twitter bots
5:52
dream of electric hash browns?
5:54
And that's all the news I've got for you this week. In this
5:59
week's episode, Mike traverses the overlapping worlds of AI,
6:03
aesthetics, and fascism. But first, on 09/26/2025, 85% of
6:11
Kickstarter United members voted to authorize a strike beginning
6:15
Thursday, October 2 at 8AM, unless management reached a fair
6:20
contract agreement. Yesterday, October 7, six days into the
6:25
strike, they took to the streets. And in our
6:28
interstitials this week, we're heading to the picket line.
7:00
Picketer: We deserve better. So be out for six months
7:05
negotiating a contract. A contract that says what?
7:09
Affordability. That says what?
7:12
Fair pay. Because that's why we're here to stand up against
7:17
the Boston and their Boston.
7:19
Yes. Yes.
7:22
New York City is a union town. Banner stuff, we are reminded of
7:29
that it is labor. It is labor that took us from a seven day
7:34
work week to a five day work week. And it is labor that's
7:39
gonna take us
8:38
Mike Rugnetta: I've seen this idea around a lot lately, one
8:41
that proposes some link between artificial intelligence and new
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American fascism. An Atlantic headline from this month reads,
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AI and the rise of techno fascism in The United States.
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Back in February on New Socialist, AI, the new
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aesthetics of fascism. There's resisting AI, an anti fascist
9:03
approach to artificial intelligence, a book published
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by Bristol University Press in 2022. There's AI beauty
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standards, fascism, and the proliferation of bot driven
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content, a paper in the journal AI and Society from this year.
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The editors of the literary theory magazine n plus one
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write, quote, when we use generative AI, we consent to the
9:27
appropriation of our intellectual property by data
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scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more
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money. We abet the acceleration of a social media guyer that
9:38
everyone admits is making life worse. We hand over our autonomy
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at the very moment of emerging American fascism, end quote. On
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social media, Reddit posts titled generative AI is a tool
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of fascism.
9:56
Do AI bros realize that if anything, they are the ones that
10:00
enable fascism and not us? And AI and fascism, a love story. On
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Blue Sky, it cannot be stressed enough that AI art is the
10:10
aesthetic of modern day fascism. I used to be wary of the whole
10:14
AI is the aesthetics of fascism thing, but now I'm pretty sure
10:18
that's right. Fascism hates creativity because fascism is
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unable to create anything, which is why all fasc bros love AI.
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And on YouTube, a litany of videos, the link between Nazis,
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fascism, and AI art with an asterisk for the a in Nazis.
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Fascists love terrible AI art. Here's why. AI fascism, how
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Trump and the far right turned AI into a weapon against
10:47
democracy. What I wonder is if the connection between
10:53
artificial intelligence and fascism, new American fascism
10:57
specifically, is necessary.
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Is there something inherently fascistic about these
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technologies as many of these takes and headlines seem to
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suggest? Or barring that, have the aesthetics of generative AI
11:13
become inextricably associated with the current American
11:17
regime? I wonder this earnestly. I don't actually know as I sit
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down to write this where I'm gonna end up, but it's this
11:25
question that I'm gonna try to answer in this segment. But why,
11:30
you may wonder, engage in this exercise?
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Does it really matter? Is there anything we can do? And I think
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both of those questions are kind of questions that I wanna
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answer. I mean, on top of the fact that, like, you know, I'm
11:44
I'm interested in meaning generally and how it's made. I'm
11:47
interested in power and how it's maintained, especially through
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art and media, which help create shared meaning.
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So if there's something inherently authoritarian about
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generative AI, it's instructive in either of those cases. And if
12:01
there isn't, then maybe there's some surprising retributive uses
12:05
of the technology currently clouded, let's say, by the
12:10
associations that we surveyed just a few seconds ago. To
12:13
borrow and to misapply a phrase from Audre Lorde, we may ask,
12:19
are these masters tools? Before we begin in earnest, there are a
12:28
few things that I wanna stipulate. One, the headlines
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and posts above concern a broad set of AI applications, but they
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do focus mostly on generative AI images, which means we will too.
12:40
LLMs and DOGE's AI powered gutting of the American federal
12:45
government staff are all related, but those forms of AI
12:48
are not our direct concern in this segment. Two, yes, AI is
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inherently violent in that the data centers powering it are
12:58
implicated in countless ecological concerns. So too are
13:01
many other things we do not label inherently fascist. Plus,
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I'm sort of just interested in maintaining a narrow focus on
13:08
aesthetics for better or worse. And finally, we could argue
13:12
about whether what is happening in The United States right now
13:15
is in fact fasc ism, but we won't, for now.
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We're gonna recognize, that many people's day to day experiences
13:23
in The US evoke living in a fascist state, and that's enough
13:29
to proceed. We're gonna revisit this idea at the very end of
13:33
this segment. Okay. So is there something inherently fascistic
13:41
about using models trained on large datasets of copyrighted
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works built by high valuation Silicon Valley tech companies to
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make pictures of, you know, whatever you want, anything you
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can imagine. The discourse suggests that the answer is
13:56
absolutely.
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Let's look at some of the cases for why. Chief amongst them are
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the fact that the American Departments of Homeland Security
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and Justice as well as the president himself, his cabinet
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members, and other high level appointees use generative AI to
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create, and then share via official government social media
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accounts images that further their politics and policies.
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These images often evoked or directly reference, if not
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fascistic, then certainly white supremacist imagery. Dominican
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migrant Virginia Bassora Gonzales's arrest was rendered
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via AI as a Studio Ghibli animation frame and posted by
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the White House to x. The US DHS has posted various generated
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images of paintings showing uncle Sam or white settlers on
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the American frontier with captions like, remember your
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homeland's heritage.
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In its recruitment efforts, the DHS has published content which
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appears is AI generated. For example, an image of uncle Sam
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standing at a crossroads with signs pointing in the direction
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of cultural decline, invasion, and homeland under the banner
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join ice now. The Southern Poverty Law Center says this
15:11
complex of references, quote, reflects an escalating trend in
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American immigration enforcement toward overt use of white
15:18
nationalist and anti immigrant myths to recruit personnel and
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justify departmental operations. This all may fall under what
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scholar Kate Crawford has termed AI slopaganda, quote, a
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reconstituted AI mash made from stock photos, commercials,
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Reddit, and Pinterest. Just add water, end quote.
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Or what Mitch Theriault writing for The Drift called agit slop,
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quote, brain dead detournement, far flung images and quotations
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drained of life and ground into a soylent like slurry to be
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shoveled indifferently into the gaping maw of the viewer,
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reader, absorber, end quote. All of it spewing endlessly into
16:02
your feed, flooding the zone. But claiming this makes
16:11
generative AI images, the aesthetic of fascism feels
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nonetheless a little bit hasty to me, like claiming oils are
16:20
fascist because Hitler was a painter or that Roman ruins and
16:24
statuary are fascistic because of Mussolini's or Twitter's
16:30
obsession with them. See our segment on the matter. I'll put
16:33
a link in the show notes.
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True. Both the Nazi and Italian fascist parties had strong
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visual aesthetics defined by starkness, rigidity,
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arrangement, and subservience, what Susan Sontag calls
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orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets
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on the German side, and as John Gantz describes it, a kind of
16:56
absurd fusing of modernism and kitsch on the Italian side. But
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the use of generative AI, thus far at least, hasn't really
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resulted in such a strong singular set of iconography.
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It's just mountains of slop looking like anything.
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Everything, really.
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We could take another approach and consider the, collaborative
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relationship between the US government and the AI industry.
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OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT and ChatGPT Gov, ex creators of
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Grok, are both working pasty, decaying hand in hand with the
17:40
administration. The Mussolini quote that fascism should be
17:44
more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of
17:47
state and corporate power is likely apocryphal, but
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nonetheless, he did discuss the necessity of the fascist state
17:54
controlling, assisting, and even managing industry in the
17:58
maintenance of total state power. And anyone out there who
18:03
reads the charts that come across their feed knows that
18:06
tech generally and AI specifically is the American
18:11
industry at the moment. Several of the pieces referenced at the
18:17
top of this segment also put forth the idea that if you're
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already predisposed to the dehumanization of others Or even
18:25
if you're just kind of a dick, the affordances of generative AI
18:28
might align with your worldview.
18:30
You don't need to pay or even interact with artists. The
18:33
machine won't ever tell you no or say that your ideas are
18:36
stupid or racist. Plus, you can soak up to your chin in an
18:42
endless regurgitated past, a warm chunky jacuzzi of times
18:48
gone by. You can generate as many Roman centurions and
18:53
paintings as you like, especially on the $200 a month
18:58
plan. And thank god, never once have to interact with someone
19:03
who might be poor or queer.
19:18
All of this is guilt by association, almost,
19:23
circumstantial rather than making a case that there's
19:25
something inescapably, intrinsically fascistic about
19:28
generative AI. Some of the videos and essays that I
19:32
mentioned at the top of this segment do try to take on the
19:35
question of direct relation to varying degrees of success, and
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there's a character that appears again and again in their
19:44
reasoning. And that character is a real guy whose name was Walter
19:49
Benjamin. Benjamin was a German Jewish critical theorist who
19:55
fled Germany during Hitler's rise to power. He died by
19:59
suicide on the French Spanish border on his way to Portugal
20:02
where he hoped to flee to The US when the Franco government of
20:05
Spain announced that it would be deporting refugees of which he
20:09
was one.
20:10
His brother was killed in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp
20:13
two years later. I can see why people continually bring up
20:21
Benjamin. I do think his thought is really useful in approaching
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this series of questions, just not normally in the way that
20:28
it's used. Benjamin's most well known work was published while
20:32
he was in exile in Paris five years before his death. The work
20:37
of art in the age of its technological reproducibility,
20:41
as it's called in its second draft, discusses how art, media,
20:45
and culture change when artworks are mass produced.
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His focus is largely on a new technology at the time, film and
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cinema, and how they can be used to organize and organize the
21:00
perceptions of the masses. What withers in the age of
21:05
technological reproducibility of the work of art, Benjamin
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writes, is the latter's aura. This concept, aura, is the one
21:16
most seized upon both generally when discussing this essay and
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specifically when discussing how AI generated works may evince
21:24
some inherent fascism. The line of thinking goes like this. A
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physical work of art is significant because of what it
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has literally, meaning physically, historically, been
21:40
through.
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This is what gives it aura. So artworks endlessly reproduced by
21:46
technology lack the authenticity granted them by a singular
21:51
physical presence, and therefore, they lack aura. But
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fascism is unconcerned with a lack of aura insofar as it
22:00
represents a kind of truth or respect for the fact of
22:04
existence. Fascism will happily traffic reproduction to further
22:10
its heinous aims. Ergo, AI generated images meaningfully
22:16
lacking in aura and authenticity because they are endlessly
22:19
reproduced must therefore be fascist.
22:32
This isn't really what Benjamin is saying. And even if it was, I
22:36
don't think it's necessarily right. I don't think it's wrong
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to say that Benjamin's ideas provide us with a way to look at
22:42
the political, potentially fascistic uses of generative AI,
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but I don't know if it's entirely through aura that we
22:49
should do that. And I don't really know if aura helps us say
22:52
anything about the inherent nature of a specific technology,
22:56
especially not now in 2025. Benjamin was writing in the
23:00
nineteen thirties, nearly a hundred years ago, at a time
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when highly reproducible works and the cult of audience, as he
23:08
wrote, that they captured were relatively new.
23:12
He was writing before popular culture existed as such, before
23:17
mass media had a consistent referent. Today, the lack of
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aura in artworks has become a kind of almost de facto
23:25
standard. Books, music, television, video games, movies,
23:29
which we're gonna talk more about later, YouTube videos,
23:32
anything on the Internet, really, they're all copies with
23:35
no meaningfully accessible original. In the narrow case of
23:40
their endless reproducibility, at least, AI images are no
23:44
different from podcasts, which are not often described as
23:49
inherently fascistic. But there are a few other thoughts of
23:57
Benjamin's we may turn to in addition in an attempt to answer
24:01
the question, if some medium does essentially aid fascism,
24:07
how might it do that?
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We're gonna take a quick break, and then when we're back, more
24:16
Benjamin.
24:32
Picketer: When say union, you say power. Union. Power. Union.
24:36
Power.
24:37
Power. Power. When I say worker, you say power. Worker. Worker.
24:42
Worker. Worker.
24:47
Okay. Thank you. We have another speaker for you. Tremlin
24:50
Griffith, president of the New York City
24:53
Central Labor Council is here. I would love to welcome him up.
24:56
Say a few words.
25:01
I have two very, very quick messages. The first is thank
25:05
you. Thank you for standing up. Thank you for standing together.
25:09
Thank you for standing strong.
25:10
Thank you for standing united. Now I'm gonna say something that
25:14
is not fair. It is not fair that you have to do this. It is not
25:18
fair that you have to be here now. It is not fair that you
25:21
have to go on strike for what you want.
25:22
But brothers and sisters, the fight that you are in is the
25:25
fight for every worker to raise standards on every contract.
25:29
Every victory moves us forward. Every victory moves working
25:32
people on. Because we know it is not a complicated thing to ask
25:36
for good wages and scheduling. That is not about numbers on a
25:39
piece of paper.
25:39
It's not about profit. It's about the very lives that you
25:42
live. We do not we do not live to work. We work to live. We
25:51
say, hell no.
25:52
Not not tomorrow. So thank you. The second message is sisters
25:59
and brothers, you are not alone. There are 1,000,000 members of
26:03
unions who are standing with you. And even as I say that, I
26:06
know I know that sometimes it's hard to feel, but we have so
26:09
much in common.
26:10
And I would just ask, maybe you could help me show this, sisters
26:12
and brothers. So can I ask, do you know somebody who lives
26:15
paycheck to paycheck? If you do, raise your hand. Raise your
26:18
hand. Keep those hands up.
26:19
Do you know somebody who's worried about paying their rent
26:21
next month? Do you know somebody who's worried about retiring? Do
26:25
you know somebody who's worried about health care? Yes. We all
26:28
know these people.
26:28
And sisters and brothers, if your hand is not in the fist
26:31
yet, put your hand in a fist because I am with you. We are
26:33
with you today, tomorrow, as long as it takes for you to get
26:36
the contract that you deserve. Thank you.
27:07
Mike Rugnetta: Benjamin writes, quote, it has always been one of
27:10
the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of
27:15
full satisfaction has not yet come, end quote. Art and artists
27:21
imagine new worlds ahead of their necessity, while
27:26
technology recreates the existing world over and over and
27:32
over again, and furthermore insists that people adapt
27:36
themselves, adapt their perceptions, adapt their
27:39
reactions to its output. By becoming an audience, people
27:45
attain a cursed kind of freedom within very narrow boundaries.
27:51
This is a feeling that's maybe relatable to a lot of us
27:55
thinking about, say, TikTok. A technology which over the last
28:01
very short amount of time, many of us have bent and shifted our
28:07
lives to accommodate.
28:10
Benjamin was concerned with the creation and maintenance of
28:14
masses through the media, both how they may be controlled, but
28:17
also how they may be loosened to resist control. He declared
28:22
famously that fascism seeks to give the masses expression, but
28:27
nothing else, thus compacting those masses into a frenzied
28:32
block. No rights, no change in property relations, just
28:38
feelings of power and feelings of dominance through available
28:42
imagery. No actual political agency is granted. No self
28:48
determination is awarded.
28:50
Only a mighty force and its puppets. This, I think, may get
29:03
us closer to an inherent link between slop and fascism.
29:08
Generative AI awards one an intoxicating kind of ability to
29:13
render the whole world and more in images free from any of the
29:19
cost or consequence or consideration for what manually
29:23
making those images entails. It confuses and maybe even fuses
29:30
the role of creator and audience, awarding a kind of
29:35
freedom and so also a kind of power, but, again, only very
29:40
narrowly. The technology's output is illustration without
29:45
illustrator, painting without painter, video without camera.
29:49
The prompter is powerful, but only within the narrow bounds of
29:53
the software's capability. They take action without agency, For
29:58
one is always ultimately at the mercy of the software, the
30:02
model, the platform, the black box playing at remove a complex
30:06
probability game to give you what it thinks is right. The
30:11
infinite intern providing the world's most content y content
30:16
for your continuous approval and entertainment. This process is
30:22
always, always, always by its very design, an endless
30:27
recreation of the already existing world. Fully generated
30:31
works are notably not copyrightable.
30:35
Not yet, at least. No property relations are created.
30:39
Certainly, none are changed. Benjamin writes of the Italian
30:47
futurists, a fascist art movement which celebrated war,
30:50
machinery, speed, engines, metal, and industry for all of
30:55
the force and fervor and upset that they felt they represented.
30:59
They celebrated, they thought, an upheaval, but in fact,
31:02
practiced a kind of subservience to both literal and figurative
31:06
machinery of a violent oppressive state.
31:10
Humberto Eco, in his essay Er Fascism, writes of the
31:13
irrationality of fascism, how it depends on, quote, the cult of
31:18
action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it
31:23
must be taken before or without any previous reflection.
31:28
Thinking is a form of emasculation, end quote.
31:33
Benjamin writes of the still machines of a depressed economy
31:37
under fascism, reanimated in the only way that does not empower
31:42
the workers operating them. Only war, he writes, makes it
31:48
possible to mobilize all of today's technological resources
31:52
while maintaining property relations, end quote.
32:00
It's hard to hear this and not think today of ChatGPT, of Grok,
32:07
of DHS recruitment posters warning of invasions, and really
32:11
of Palantir. But they're a bit tangential to our narrow focus
32:15
because I don't think you can use Palantir to generate a
32:18
racist Studio Ghibli frame. One can imagine a DOJ bureaucrat
32:27
wrapped in the glow of the prompting screen negotiating
32:31
with a robot that only knows the past and not really considering
32:35
if it even makes sense to Ghiblify a state department
32:39
detention, not stopping to wonder if it sends the right
32:43
message to depict the president as Apocalypse Now's lieutenant
32:46
colonel Kilgore while threatening, quote, war on
32:49
Chicago. The response, one also imagines, to these wonders are
32:54
the same and the same as asking what government officials mean
32:58
when posting images reminiscent of white nationalist artwork
33:01
from two centuries ago or pictures of the president as the
33:04
pope, and that response is lull. To paraphrase Sartre from anti
33:12
Semite and Jew, they're amusing themselves.
33:15
Only their adversary is obliged to communicate responsibly. They
33:19
are taking action for action's sake. The overall aesthetic as
33:26
such becomes one of cruelty and subservience to a power which is
33:31
adored above all else. Submissiveness, dehumanization,
33:37
adoration of authority all become more palatable when the
33:41
world is nothing but an array of images. Human beings become
33:46
paper dolls to be collaged, accessorized, cut up, and
33:50
crumpled, placed in their little play dioramas, and made to dance
33:54
for yucks.
33:56
The world is made media in this fact. It becomes unreal,
34:01
distant, or entirely absent, something society has been
34:05
reckoning with vis a vis the Internet for a while now, but
34:08
which finds new urgency in the age of AI. This is at least
34:14
partially a concern related to aura. And so far as what aura
34:18
connotes is the fundamental significance of something which
34:21
has been created and has a physical existence, be that a
34:25
work of art or a human being. But it's also a question of
34:29
agency, of what actions are taken and by whom and how these
34:34
facts impact material conditions.
34:37
This defines the use of generative AI more than their
34:40
look in my mind. The method of their creation, endless,
34:44
effortless, endlessly, and effortlessly costly, a process
34:49
which exhibits an undeniable eeriness in the sense theorist
34:54
and critic Mark Fisher wrote of it. Fisher wrote of the weird
35:05
and the eerie as a pair of affects that exemplify the often
35:08
mysterious circumstances of contemporary life. The weird
35:13
speaks to, quote, a presence, that which does not belong, end
35:17
quote. Like Lovecraft's interjection of unknowable
35:21
otherworldly entities into New England.
35:26
But the eerie speaks to, quote, a failure of absence or a
35:31
failure of presence. When there is something present where there
35:34
should be nothing or there is nothing present where there
35:38
should be something, end quote. Capitalism, Fisher argues, is a
35:43
fundamentally eerie force. The famously invisible hand of its
35:48
markets bend, shift, and pull at all aspects of our lives. The
35:54
eerie, Fisher writes, is ultimately tied up with
35:57
questions of agency.
36:00
It's unclear, in other words, who is acting and how? Who is
36:10
acting and how when generating images using AI is murky at
36:16
best. The person writing the prompt, the software, the
36:19
software developers, the model, and its source material are all
36:22
implicated in ways that we don't yet share a comfortable
36:26
understanding of. The eerie is conceptually downstream of an
36:31
uninhibited machinic generation, the costs of which are deeply
36:36
buried or subsidized by the most vulnerable of us and made
36:41
invisible or barely visible, artists by the use of their
36:46
works as training data, the general population by its
36:50
exposure to the environmental impacts of the data centers
36:53
which power the technology, to name two such examples. The lack
36:58
of aura in generative AI images is a symptom, not a cause of a
37:04
celebration of engines, metal, and industry, action for
37:08
action's sake, the output of which altogether forms a media
37:12
complex that is additionally deeply eerie and furthermore
37:17
hauntological, Fisher's term for a past that invades and
37:22
inescapably suffuses the present.
37:26
The question, though, is if these things are aesthetic. I'm
37:32
not sure, to be honest. I don't think so. Overall, the aesthetic
37:36
of new American fascism and its posts remain as incoherent as
37:40
its attempts at governing and statecraft and economic policy
37:44
and staffing and so on and so forth. Ghiblify to photos next
37:49
to cinematic film stills, next to portraits, next to nineteenth
37:53
century landscape portraiture, next to mid century jingoism,
37:57
next to jib jab style paper doll deepfakes, next to seventies era
38:01
graphic design, it's all a perpetual stew of every visual
38:06
element of some political import over the last 200 leading to a
38:12
brand that's only identifiable via the most vague affect, a
38:17
desire to be seen as powerful.
38:20
And so they adopt the more general aesthetic of generated
38:24
works, something between trend surfing and the kind of oblique
38:29
know it when you see it qualities we discussed
38:32
previously in the generated ish segment. We'll put a link to
38:35
that in the show notes as well. But the big question is, have
38:40
the architects of new American fascism exerted so much power in
38:46
creating and disseminating these types of images that their
38:51
visual characteristics, however broad they may be, have become
38:56
unquestionably theirs. When I see a generated image, do I
39:03
think, regardless of context, of a particular authoritarian
39:08
regime, similar to how I might when encountering silver on
39:12
black or the work of the Italian futurists? Not yet, I don't.
39:19
But there's still time, and there remains the chance that
39:22
such associations could be wrestled back out of their
39:26
grasp. Throughout much of the work of art, Benjamin formulates
39:35
a nascent kind of media theory around film and cinema, a
39:40
significant technological development of his time, the
39:43
foremost exemplar of reproduction without original,
39:47
and a medium employed to great notoriety by fascists. The
39:55
films, The Victory of Faith and Day of Freedom, Our Armed
39:59
Forces, both directed by Lenny Riefenstahl, Hans Vestmar, a
40:03
fictionalized biography of Nazi martyr Horst Vessel. Hitler
40:08
Jungkook Kex produced by Carl Ritter and released in The US as
40:11
Our Flag Leads Us Forward, and more are all third Reich films
40:17
which would have been released around the time Benjamin was
40:20
working on his various versions of the work of art in the age of
40:24
its mechanical reproducibility. Filmmaking, Benjamin thought,
40:28
had been captured by capital.
40:32
And rather than being a tool for workers to build solidarity to
40:36
understand, quote, themselves and therefore their class, it
40:41
was used to mollify and compact the masses subjected to it and
40:46
entranced by it. The same is true of film capital in
40:51
particular as of fascism in general, Benjamin writes. A
40:56
compelling urge toward new social opportunities is being
41:01
clandestinely that. And we're so technology that provides new
41:34
social opportunities from the grips of capital, from the
41:37
controlling grasp of the property owning minority in the
41:41
long term. In the face of an aestheticized politics, the only
41:47
choice, Benjamin says, is to politicize aesthetics, to turn
41:51
art for art's sake into a revolutionary force of art for
41:56
humanity's sake.
42:02
This was perhaps arguably and not entirely, but meaningfully
42:06
accomplished with film, which in the last hundred years has
42:10
joined literature and painting as an art form widely understood
42:15
is capable of laying bare some aspect of the human condition
42:21
even while also bringing us things like Ant Man and the Wasp
42:24
Quantumania. Can the same thing happen with generative AI? Can
42:30
it be rescued from capital to become a revolutionary force of
42:34
art for humanity's sake? Or maybe the more practical version
42:39
of this question is, does anybody want to try to rescue
42:43
it? Is anybody even interested in doing that?
42:47
Kate Crawford writes that building such alternatives for
42:50
generative AI, quote, would demand the fundamental
42:54
transformation of existing technical and economic
42:57
arrangements, alternative energy systems, cooperative ownership
43:01
models, and cultural protocols that resist algorithmic
43:05
ingestion. The question that remains is whether we will
43:09
choose to embrace slop or cultivate desire for something
43:13
else entirely, Cultural forms moving beyond synthetic
43:17
reproduction oriented toward flourishing rather than
43:20
extraction, toward ecological regeneration rather than a
43:24
hypermetabolic state of exhaustion and breakdown. A tall
43:31
order, for sure, and perhaps the answer to one of our questions.
43:36
Is generative AI the aesthetic of new American fascism? No.
43:40
But it could become so if we let it, if we want it to. And maybe
43:47
some portion of us want it to. From one perspective, the anti
43:52
AI one, to be clear, there is some utility in letting the
43:55
generated ish aesthetic become twinned with the architects of
43:59
the current American state and their cronies. To the degree
44:03
that one will ever be able to confidently identify the output
44:07
of this technology, that output could then always bring to mind
44:11
this cohort of bumbling, calamitous strongmen, the de
44:16
architects of American visual culture, to say nothing of the
44:20
culture itself. Or slop to become this administration's
44:24
silver on black or this administration's Stalinist
44:28
socialist realism, it might halt what waning momentum it retains,
44:32
being seen to signal and in no small way create the reality
44:37
that new American fascism seeks.
44:41
Which brings us finally back to another question raised at the
44:44
top of this segment. Is what is happening right now fascism in
44:50
fact? I don't think so, but it's not for lack of trying. I do
44:57
genuinely believe that The United States is simply too
45:00
large and too diverse for fascism to take total hold. This
45:05
is not to say that there will not be and has not already been
45:09
misery and suffering on a large and completely unnecessary scale
45:14
while various members of the administration and the corporate
45:17
class with whom they've partnered consolidate their
45:20
power.
45:22
What this group is arguably best at is posting. This is a
45:29
government by, for, and of posters. They excel at a
45:34
particular kind of public performance, not delivering a
45:38
coherent message, not inspiring adoration nor dedication, not, I
45:43
don't think, in Benjamin's terms, compacting masses, at
45:47
least not the degree to which other fascist movements have
45:49
been able to. They are good at gaining and maintaining
45:54
attention, but not many of the things that usually follow once
45:59
one has it. One need only see Secretary of Defense Pete
46:05
Hegseth on stage fulminating at the country's collected military
46:09
personnel to be disabused of the notion that our leaders have
46:13
requisite amounts of charisma capable of being meaningfully
46:17
weaponized.
46:18
They are knowledgeable about, maybe even obsessed with, the
46:23
media. How it's made, how it's useful, the social and economic
46:27
position it occupies, and the power it commands. Slop, sludge,
46:32
slopaganda, and agit slop included. They are posters at
46:38
heart more so than they are leaders. They would appear to
46:43
put more effort, effort into creating the appearance of a
46:50
fascist state, a state itself all about appearances, than
46:55
anything beyond that.
47:07
It's perhaps that they don't know there's a step beyond this
47:09
one. It's perhaps they don't care. It's perhaps they don't
47:13
know how to progress their project past this stage. It's
47:16
perhaps that they are always just on the verge of figuring it
47:21
out. But what remains is that slop and the technology that
47:31
powers it is indeed one of the most used tools in their box.
47:36
Hegseth himself on stage said, this urgent moment requires more
47:41
troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriot missiles,
47:45
more submarines, more b 21 bombers. It requires more
47:49
innovation, more AI in everything and ahead of the
47:52
curve, more cyber effects, more space, more speed. Here is
47:59
American action for action's sake, a celebration of war,
48:04
speed, and machinery, betraying a subservience to the very same
48:10
in the absence of application, strategy, ideas to be
48:15
implemented somewhere beyond the cameras and feeds and group
48:21
chats. I wonder the degree to which artificial intelligence is
48:27
not a tool of this administration, but a crutch for
48:32
a group of people who otherwise don't really know how to do much
48:37
of anything, really, except push ups and lie. Perhaps it would
48:43
not be easy.
48:44
Perhaps no one really wants to do it. But what happens when you
48:48
find a way to take away that crutch? Would they not stumble?
51:03
Georgia Hampton: That is the show we have for you this week.
51:07
We'll be back here in the main feed on October 22. This show
51:11
simply would not exist without the member community that we
51:15
have. And for that, I have to say, thank you. Thank you.
51:20
Thank you. We are unimaginably fortunate to have such a
51:25
supportive and incredible community of members. And it's
51:28
honestly because of you that we are able to do what we do. If
51:31
you'd like to become a NeverPo's member for as little as $4 a
51:35
month, you can do so at neverpo.st. And if that's a bit
51:40
too much to manage in the choppy waters of modern life, you can
51:43
also tip us a one time any dollar amount, which I will
51:48
personally promise to spend on retiling the bathroom of the
51:53
Gothic castle in which I reside.
51:57
Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton Hey,
52:01
that's me and the mysterious doctor first name, last name.
52:05
Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is
52:09
Jason Oberholzer. And the show's host is Mike Rugnetta. The good
52:15
news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is
52:19
also the bad news.
52:20
Meanwhile, I cut an onion and it's onions all the way down.
52:25
And that's a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after
52:29
the empire congratulates itself on persisting again. No. Thank
52:34
you. I'm stuffed.
52:35
I couldn't possibly have more hope. I haven't finished
52:38
mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven't said enough goodbyes to,
52:43
oh, what was her name and hers? How many wheeze did they cut out
52:49
of me? And whose country was I standing on the last time we
52:54
survived?
52:56
That's an excerpt from Celebrate Good Times by Frannie Choi.
53:01
Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
53:05
distributed by Radiotopia.