As AI slop is weaponized into fascist aesthetics, as the ghosts of Stalin and Kautsky are resurrected on the left, as absurdities mount, has the mainstream prohibition on radical alternatives morphed into something else? To what degree have elements of capitalist realism — market Stalinism, business ontology, depressive hedonia, reflexive impotence — attenuated, allowing the return of “grand narratives,” however weakened? To what extent do these dynamics continue, including within the left itself? And what does it all mean for the working-class, the Left, and art?
Read MoreLocust Review's Lucky 13
Math and bigotry seem to be the main coping mechanisms of the US capitalist class. Math provides the utopia — through technology and AI — as well as fixes election results, fixes labor, fixes society. At the same time, bigotry is being used as a cudgel, in part, to obscure the shifting algorithms of capital. Altogether this is a response to climate disaster and imperial decline, creating concentric racist circles of automated fortress.
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