Programmers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Back when we had real programmers. Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves. Hackers were hackers in those days before money took over the industry.
Don’t even get me started on LLMs. Could there be a better example of today’s degenerate spirit? A machine to mass-produce software (not good software, just barely good enough), so that the weak minds that dominate the industry can indulge their obsession with quantity: of slop code, of features, and ultimately of money, which is the only way they can understand value. If they weren’t destroying our way of life, they would be pitiable. All of them together don’t have a fraction of the spiritual integrity of someone like Mel. But as it is, we must band together to crush them and drive them from our industry like the parasites they are.
Okay, that’s not actually what I believe. But there sure are a lot of posts 1 and comments on the internet that sound a bit like the paragraph above. Here are some older quotes that might sound similar:
…the third collapse, in which power tends to pass into the hands of the lowest of the traditional castes, the caste of the beasts of burden and the standardized individuals. The result of this transfer of power was a reduction of horizon and value to the plane of matter, the machine, and the reign of quantity.
[2] Usura rusteth the chisel \ It rusteth the craft and the craftsman \ It gnaweth the thread in the loom
[3] The actual accomplishments of the past will nevertheless remain accomplishments, while the artistic stammerings of the painting, music, sculpture, and architecture produced by these types of charlatans will one day be nothing but proof of the magnitude of a nation’s downfall.
[4] These are all from the writings (or speeches) of famous fascists: Julius Evola, Ezra Pound, and Hitler himself. Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism begins by defining fascism as a “spiritual attitude”, which the fascist man adopts in order to regain the mysterious qualities that were lost by the transition to modern life. In his classic
It’s strange to describe anti-AI sentiment as potentially fascist, since a very popular argument is that LLMs themselves are an inherently fascist tool. Surely both sides of the debate can’t be fascist? I do think that the structure of fascist arguments is generally persuasive, and that many avowedly anti-fascist groups do sometimes fall into this trap: describing the world as a struggle between the spiritual power of the macho, traditional man and the corrupting influence of degenerate (often foreign) capital.
For instance, I am a big fan of Lord of the Rings. I’ve read the series and watched the films multiple times, and even made a failed attempt to learn Elvish as a kid. But it’s hard to deny that fascists absolutely love Lord of the Rings. “Marble statue of a Roman emperor” might be the most popular avatar for fascists on the internet, but Aragorn is the second most popular. Neo-fascist movements in Italy explicitly take up Lord of the Rings as a foundational text. Why? Because the core conflict in the text is between the traditional, nostalgic heroism of the Shire and Gondor, and the corrupting modern industrial (partly foreign) influence of Saruman and Sauron 5. I don’t think Lord of the Rings (or anti-AI rhetoric) is intrinsically fascist. In fact, the surface-level reading of the text is anti-fascist: the plucky people of the West banding together to fight Sauron’s command-and-control totalitarian society. But I can see why fascists love it.
One common historical touch-point for anti-AI folks is the Luddites, who were a violent conservative labor movement in early 1800s England. Anti-AI blogs adopt Luddite language like “smashing frames”, and positively cite the Luddites as “the go-to enemies of fascism since its inception”. I’ve written at length about what we can learn from the Luddites in Luddites and burning down AI datacenters, but one point I think is under-emphasized by the (generally pro-Luddite) books is that
Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is the most popular recent book on the Luddites. I enjoyed it, but Merchant’s attempts to paint the Luddites as a friendly, left-wing, proto-feminist movement
We think it quite inconsistent with our duty as men, as husbands and as fathers to suffer ourselves to be ruined any longer by a set of vagabond strumpets and those gibbet-deserving rascals that are looking over them. We will lead them to their satisfaction. We sincerely hope, gentlemen, that you will discharge the bitches and take men into your employ again, or they must take what they get.
These were fundamentally conservative people who felt (correctly) that modernity had deprived them of their elite status, handing it instead to lower-paid inferiors: women, vagabonds, and foreigners.
The Luddites were obviously not fascists 8. However, the basic ingredients were there: wounded pride, a masculine elite identity, hatred of modern economics, and violence aimed at restoring their previous position in society. The currents that produced Luddism are the same currents that guided so many unhappy people towards fascism. When things are looking grim for an elite group, they often turn towards any movement that promises a return to an idealized past.
If my blog has themes, one of them is surely that many software engineers labor under a delusion that their job is to be excellent at their craft. Of course, wanting to be an excellent programmer is not a delusion; it is a completely legitimate value to hold, and a legitimate purpose to pursue. It’s just not what you’re paid to do at work. Your job, unfortunately, is producing shareholder value. This delusion has been punctured by the end of ZIRP, and again more recently by the rise of AI coding. In this environment, I worry that some software engineers will form exactly the kind of disillusioned elite that was the audience for Ezra Pound’s poems about “usury” or the Luddites’ campaign against unapprenticed (often female) textile workers. I worry that AI, and the companies that build AI, are becoming an enemy against which anything is permitted: an enemy which in Umberto Eco’s words is “at the same time too strong and too weak”, unable to reason and yet powerful enough to drastically reshape the global labor market for the worse.
The enemy of fascism is nuance. Fascism presents a good, clean, rousing story about a spiritual conflict between right and wrong. It is anathema to fascism to stop and muddy the waters a bit: in this case, to explore the ways in which LLMs, like any transformative technology, can both support and endanger traditional values.
In The left-wing case for AI I wrote about how AI is being used Being anti-AI is not inherently fascist. Many of the anti-AI posts I’ve quoted are thoughtful, sensitive pieces exploring how the author thinks about one of the biggest changes to our industry. I still think the world needs more articles like that, not less, but the more of them I read, the more I recognize the tropes: spiritually pure lovers of the craft, degenerate peddlers of corrupt modernism, a need to return to the traditional ways of the hacker, and a lament for the (potentially) waning power of an elite fraternity of programmers.
I know I’m tiptoeing around the worst argument in the world. It isn’t a refutation of anti-LLM arguments to say that they are structurally similar in some ways to fascist arguments, any more than it’s a devastating critique to say the same thing about Lord of the Rings. Sometimes it is good to try and halt the march of progress! Some of our past traditions really were purer and more spiritually robust! It just bothers me, that’s all.
I used to read The Story of Mel with unalloyed pleasure. Now it makes me nervous. If you believe you’re fighting the embodiment of fascism, or for the idea of value itself, what tactics are off-limits? What positions might you eventually come to accept?
It feels wrong to directly associate my caricature with any actual posts, but it also feels wrong to make a blanket assertion without examples. Just so you know what I’m talking about, here are some posts that have elements of this attitude. I like some of these posts and dislike others.
Page 329 of my copy of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World.
Ezra Pound, Canto XLV. “Usura” should be read as “usury”, or today we could gloss it as “capitalism”: all Pound’s examples of great art were from the pre-capitalist patronage era of art.
Adolf Hitler, from his speech at the 1933 Party Congress in Nuremberg.
Of course, there’s also historically been a strong pro-technology current in fascist thinking (even specificially Italian fascist thinking).
Page 134 of Blood in the Machine has a brief argument that Luddism was feminist because the (exclusively male) artisans’ wives would provide food for their meetings. No, really.
From Kevin Binfield’s Writings of the Luddites, page 40. I’ve taken the liberty of re-rendering it in modern spelling and grammar. Aside from being too early, they didn’t have any connection to the state apparatus of power (in fact, they were ultimately crushed by it) and they famously lacked a singular leader.
The example cited was BlindRSS.