It’s Impossible to Think About AI Without Thinking About Capitalism, Fascism, and Liberty
Let me begin with a disambiguation: I’m not talking about AI as some theoretical intelligence emerging from non-biological form — the sentient computer of science fiction. That, I suppose, can be thought about in an intellectual vacuum, to a point. I’m talking about AI, the product. The thing being sold to us daily, packaged in press releases and demo videos, embedded in services and platforms.
AI is, fundamentally, about money. It’s about making promises and raising investment based upon those promises. The promises alone create a future — not necessarily because they’ll come true, but because enough capital, deployed with enough conviction, warps reality around it. When companies raise billions on the promise of AI dominance, they’re not just predicting a future; they’re manufacturing one.
Venture capital, at the highest levels, tends to look from the outside like anti-competitive racketeering than finance. Enough investment, however localized in a handful of companies, can shape an entire industry or even an entire economy, regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever. And let’s be clear: the Big Tech firms investing in AI aren’t simply responding to market forces; they’re creating them, defining them, controlling them. Nobody asked for AI; we’ve been told to collaborate.
Which demonstrates that capitalism, like AI, is no longer a theoretical model about nice, tidy ideas like free markets and competition. The reality of modern capitalism reveals it to be, at best, a neutral system made non-neutral by its operators. The invisible hand isn’t invisible because it’s magical; it’s invisible because we’re not supposed to see whose hand it actually is.
You want names though? I don’t have them all. That’s the point. It’s easy to blame the CEOs whose names are browbeat into our heads over and over again, but beyond them is what I think of as The Fear of the Un-captured Dollar and the Unowned Person — a secret society of people who seem to believe that human potential is one thing: owning all the stuff, wielding all the power, seizing all the attention.
We now exist in what people call “late-stage capitalism,” where meaningful competition only occurs among those with the most capital, and their battles wreck the landscape around them. We scatter and dash amidst the rubble like the unseen NPCs of Metropolis while the titans clash in the sky.
When capital becomes this concentrated, it exerts power at the level of sovereign nations. This reveals the theater that is the so-called power of governments. Nation-states increasingly seem like local franchises in a global system run by capital. This creates fundamental vulnerabilities in governmental systems that have not yet been tested by the degeneracy of late-stage capitalism.
And when that happens, the lack of power of the individual is laid bare — in the chat window, in the browser, on the screen, in the home, in the city, in the state, in the world. The much-lauded “democratic” technology of the early internet has given way to systems of surveillance and manipulation so comprehensive they would make 20th century authoritarians weep with envy, not to mention a fear-induced appeasement to the destruction of norms and legal protections that spreads across our entire culture like an overnight frost of fascism.
AI accelerates this process. It centralizes power by centralizing the capacity to process and act upon information. It creates unprecedented asymmetries between those who own the models and those who are modeled. Every interaction with an AI system becomes a one-way mirror: you see your reflection, while on the other side, entities you cannot see learn about you, categorize you, and make predictions about you.
So when a person resists AI, don’t assume they’re stubbornly digging their heels into the shifting sands of an outmoded ground. Perhaps give them credit for thinking logically and drawing a line between themselves and a future that treats them as nothing more than a bit in the machine.
Resistance to AI isn’t necessarily Luddism. It isn’t a fear of progress. It might instead be a clear-eyed assessment of what kind of “progress” is actually being offered — and at what cost.
Liberty in the age of AI requires more than just formal rights. It demands structural changes to how technology is developed, deployed, and governed. It requires us to ask not just “what can this technology do?” but “who benefits from what this technology does?”
And that conversation cannot happen if we insist on discussing AI as if it exists in a political and economic vacuum — as if the only questions worth asking are technical ones. The most important questions about AI aren’t about algorithms or capabilities; they’re about power and freedom.
To think about AI without thinking about capitalism, fascism, and liberty isn’t just incomplete — it’s dangerous. It blinds us to the real stakes of the transformation happening around us, encouraging us to focus on the technology rather than the systems that control it and the ends toward which it’s deployed.
Is it possible to conceive of AI that is “good” — as in distributed, not centralized; protective of intellectual property, not a light-speed pirate of the world’s creative output; respectful of privacy, not a listening agent of the powers-that-be; selectively and intentionally deployed where humans need the help, not a leveler of human purpose? (Anil Dash has some great points about this.) Perhaps, but such an AI is fundamentally incompatible with the system in which the AI we have has been created.
As AI advances, we face a choice: Will we allow it to become another tool for concentrating power and wealth? Or will we insist upon human dignity and liberty? The answer depends not on technological developments, but on our collective willingness to recognize AI for what it is: not a force of nature, but a product of flawed human choices embedded in vulnerable human systems.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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