Numerous executives in tech repeatedly talk about how they think “AI” is going to replace workers. By their own account, that seems to be the point of the technology.

So far, the impact seems limited to a few select fields. Copywriters have been hit hard. Translators and illustrators are losing gigs everywhere I look. Training, especially in software development, seems to have been hit hard. Voice actors are getting replaced with generated voices.

The goal, if we are to take tech executives at their word, is to make these trends the norm, not the exception.

That is a political project. Attacking labour, deskilling the work force, and driving down wages, is fundamentally a political project and an extremist one at that.

Centrally managing language, using pervasive chatbot adoption as a lever to change corporate writing at scale, is another explicit goal of these companies. When Musk and Altman argue about which of their respective chatbots is less “left-wing”, their intent is clearly that they want to make all writing done with their tools less left-wing.

Centralised ideological control over all corporate writing is, again, an extremist political project, historically associated with violent authoritarianism.

We could go through how these tools are being used to power a wholesale takeover of our education systems, create a tiered system of healthcare access, and automate decisions to ensure that nobody can be held accountable for atrocious decisions, but it all comes down to the same, repeated point:

The AI Bubble is a right-wing political project that goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing resurgence of fascism.

Tech is a pop culture. Very few of the decisions made in the industry are made rationally or empirically. Studies and tests are used to justify the emotional decisions of the executive or management class. Infrastructure and stack decisions are made hedonistically – “cool” tech that makes the engineers and devs feel good about themselves almost always gets a priority over “boring” tech that has no risks.

The industry, especially the software side of tech, is driven by emotion and a sense of what is fashionable. There is genuinely more grounded engineering – materials, machinery, process, supply chains, etc. – taking place in the fashion industry than there ever has been in the software industry.

That’s why it’s a pop culture, not a fashion culture.

I think of the engineers and designers who have spent decades honing their skills, deepening personal and public creative practices in service both to the users of the systems they built and to their own brilliant spirits, now being told to park themselves in front of a sycophantic oracle that can be appeased only through rote dictates, and which never tires of lying even as their own minds and muscles atrophy from disuse. What is being automated here: the work or the people?