Getting ready for whatever the hell is next

Trump’s resurrection. AI’s tightening noose. Happy New Year.

Laura Marland

Hitler at a Nazi rally at Nuremburg.

Trump has been resurrected in glory just as AI is gaining wide acceptance. Is this a coincidence?

I have been getting ready for whatever the hell is next by reading Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, by Dan McQuillan, published by Bristol University Press in 2022.

AI, according to McQuillan, presents “fascistic solutions to social problems.”

I am in the process of writing an initial review of the book, as I simultaneously attack Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stewart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, a very comprehensive review of the field weighing in at 1,045 pages, excluding appendices and other back material.

I am not going to argue that you are a fascist if you use an AI text-to-image generator to make illustrations suitable for birthday cards, or that you are a fascist because you use ChatGPT to cheat on your homework, though you might be a bit of a tool.

Neither am I going to argue that Trump is a fascist.

Hitler swayed the masses through giant spectacle intended to echo religious ritual. We in the 21st century are already awash in spectacle, and we’re not as impressed by organized religion, either. Selling fascism the way Hitler did, with events such as the Nuremberg rally of 1934, which echoed religious ritual and mystery, was intended to promote its acceptance among German Christians, as Ulrich Schmid writes in “Style Vs. Ideology: Towards a conceptualization of fascist aesthetics,” published in 2007 in the journal, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions.

It can’t happen here, not because the masses are too devoted to democracy, or, to say the least, too well-informed, but too angry and divided.

Hitler was a brand, and the swastika was possibly the most effective brand logo in history. Trump has red hats.

Our power structure is oligarchic. We live under the control of a small power group in government and in corporations.

Fascism is far-right and authoritarian. It exists when several conditions are met — when one person is invested with ultimate power, when opposition is forcibly silenced, when individual interests are subsumed under what is considered to be the common good of one nation or race, and when both society and the economy are highly regimented.

After repeated campaign promises to lower food prices, the main reason many voted for him, Trump told Time on Dec. 12 that it will be “very hard” to do that and blamed Biden.

Neither Trump nor his followers have the personal discipline, no matter how misguided, nor the unified set of solutions, no matter how demented, that it would take to construct a fascist state. But, like many others, I believe that the USA is ripe for a dictatorship and that Donald Trump will be the initial vehicle. History echoes; it does not repeat.

The argument has already been made that Trump and his supporters have much in common with fascists, and the kind of government envisioned in Project 2025 is an expression of Christian Nationalism, a fascistic movement harkening back to the Nazis’ concept of the Master Race. It’s interesting, but it’s not here yet, and I think all bets are off about what the next few months hold.

Nor does it appear likely that the ideologues and CEOs surrounding him will tolerate one of the conditions necessary for the construction of a fascist state — a much higher level of state control over business.

No, most of us are not swayed by political rallies that echo religious spectacle, as Ulrich Schmid argues the German people were. Certainly, some in the red-hat crowd are that way, but neither Trump’s attempts to present himself as a savior nor his noted admiration for Hitler were what got him elected.

Hitler got Germany to its feet before he destroyed it. For example, his administration took measures to reduce the unemployed from six million to one million, but one of them was the forced removal of women from the workforce. Another was forced labor imposed on previously unemployed people by the German Labor Front.

After repeated campaign promises to lower food prices, the main reason many voted for him, Trump told Time that it will be “very hard” to do that and blamed Biden. He also said his administration will not be a failure if he fails to deliver on his most important campaign item. Considering his corporate funding, how could it be otherwise?

We, the people have completely lost control. We’ve been losing it for years, at least since we began granting corporations the rights of humans.

However, many of us, myself included, have long clung to the notion that voting gives us some measure of control over what happens to us next. Most of us have lost at least some measure of faith in the democratic process; a few of us, myself included, have lost faith that average Americans can use the gift of democracy effectively anymore.

For many of us, we’ve lost that faith just as AI is noticeably creeping into our lives.

“The People” cannot take control of AI. They cannot use it for what they deem to be good aims. What we call AI is an “apparatus” of “technology, institutions, and ideology,” McQuillan writes. He does not surrender faith in solutions, but as he points out, and that apparatus is not now, anything that the common people will be able to control. It’s way too centralized and expensive.

AI also has the potential to impose control over individuals and solidify control in the hands of the few. As a whole, we’ve been even more gullible about AI than many of us have been about Trump.

Many years ago, I had a friend who was the only true practicing Buddhist I have ever known. He sat in Zen meditation for an hour every morning. One day, he told me about its effects, saying that he was experiencing far less anxiety and worry.

I asked, so what would you, as a Buddhist, do if you knew we were about to be incinerated in a nuclear attack?

He said, “I’d just watch. I’d sit and say, ‘So what are you all going to do now?’”

I am not a Buddhist. I am neither young like most of you, nor rich, so heading out of the country is not an option. I may have to sit tight, read a lot and just watch what happens next.