This is primitive accumulation for the 21st century. Our collective cultural memory is being privatized to generate probabilistic text for Silicon Valley’s paying customers. When you ask an AI to "write a critique of neoliberalism," it regurgitates a pastiche of stolen voices, flattening radical thought into a bland, centrist smoothie.
We are witnessing a paradox. The tools that were supposed to set us free—generative AI, cloud infrastructure, and automation—are now the primary mechanisms of enclosure. The digital frontier is being fenced in, not by barbed wire, but by proprietary algorithms and subscription paywalls. redwebzine.org latest
The latest wave of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a unique threat to the leftist project. These models, from the well-known giants to the "open source" alternatives funded by venture capital, are built on the largest act of unpaid labor in human history. They have scraped the entire repository of human creativity—every zine, every protest flyer, every obscure Marxist thesis—without consent, without credit, and without compensation. This is primitive accumulation for the 21st century
The glow of the screen used to promise liberation. In the early days of the net, we spoke of a global village, a democratization of knowledge, a space beyond the reach of corporate boardrooms and state surveillance. Yet, as we sit squarely in the second half of the 2020s, the promise feels broken. We are witnessing a paradox