Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis
This is a lightly-edited extract from Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis by Nick-Dyer Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni, published by Verso Books. The book’s Preface – “A Spectre Haunts the Planet” – is already available at Verso’s blog. So, to offer something different, here we present its last few pages.
On 23 January, the book will be launched in Toronto. You can register for the event at tickettailor.com.
We use the term Cybernetic Circulation Complex (CCC) to refer to the US tech sector headed by the so-called Magnificent Seven corporations, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. The book examines how it circulates commodities, conflicts and eco-crisis, and proposes an alternative “biocommunist” use of digital technologies. In its final section, a coda subtitled “Lifeblood,” we examine how the CCC has been at once changed, challenged and consolidated by the advent of generative AI: after discussing the emerging political economy of the new AI sector, and different theories about the nature of AI, we offer some speculations on the social turmoils arising in this latest moment of cybernetic circulation.
Complexity, Contradiction, Change
We have analyzed the Cybernetic Circulation Complex (CCC) not only to show its power, but also to reckon with the conflicts and contradictions that challenge it, along with the capitalism of which it is now such an indispensable part. One possibility is of course that generative AI will simply not work out. Past decades have seen several jubilant announcements of AI booms, followed by disappointing technological performances and investment collapse. Although the wave of commercial activity following the launch of ChatGPT has been exceptionally large, it is possible that unresolved problems with generative AI – such as the tendency of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots to ‘hallucinate’ answers to questions, or the risk of ‘model collapse’ when AIs degenerate from training solely on synthetic feeds from other AIs – may prove so serious as to burst what would in retrospect be revealed as a giant financial bubble. This would be a major crisis for the CCC, possibly serious enough to terminate some of its major corporations. Anxieties on this score have been mounting; August 2024 saw a sudden, dramatic sell-off of CCC stocks triggered by fears that AI capacities had been overhyped. There were signs the confidence of finance capital in the AI boom’s lead organization, Open AI was faltering.
But even if investment in AI unfolds in the way its investors hope, its path is unlikely to be smooth. The landscape of computerized capital, though dominated by the pyramidal accretions of corporate power, is also a site of antagonism and struggle. Protests, rebellions and insurrections have in various ways learned to use the apparatus of the CCC. If indeed ‘there is no moat’, and inter-capitalist competition has open-sourced generative AI design, this reappropriation logic may continue into the era of machinic proto-intelligence.
This is by no means reassuring. Fascist movements – determined to strip every regulation or limitation of the market in the name of freedom, and to break apart the proletariat with waves of hatred against women and ethnic and sexual minorities – are well positioned to deploy generative AIs, with terrifying consequences.
In contrast, movements defending human workers have an a priori commitment to physical presence and corporeal resistance: bodies on the line. The advent of generative AI is now being met with strikes and litigation: pickets, occupations, marches, blockades and riots will likely be at the core of anti-capitalist counter-power against corporate and fascist AIs.
At the same time, however, generative AIs will likely be marshalled in an ‘automation of the common’ already operating through the platforms of riot support, worker organization and mutual aid. It is also important to acknowledge the role that technoculture has played in connecting and supporting socially and politically marginalized people. As Legacy Russell details in her book, Glitch Feminism, the flexibility inherent to digital media lends itself to subversion and offers alternative ways of being in the world – particularly for those who have been deemed alien or errant. Circumventing the colonial foundation of digital infrastructure, the glitch functions as ‘a form of refusal’ against heteronormativity. In the glitch, errancy abounds.
Movements of left and right will clash not only in city squares but across networks – and both, though especially forces subversive of capital, will be met by the more massive AI guardians of the state’s military and security forces. These conflicts will be exacerbated by biospheric crises of climate, water, pandemics and war. In Chapter 4, we outlined the planetary circulation of biospheric catastrophes and the contradictory role of the CCC in these crises, intensified by the acceleration of the world market and the competition between rival capitalist blocs.
Runaway Dynamics?
These crises could be partially mitigated by renewable energy grids, pandemic control and emergency management, which might draw on CCC infrastructure, but with self-reflexive limits. The injection of increasingly autonomous AI would be a wild card to this situation. The very technological apparatus constructed by capital for the control and exploitation of the natural environment might develop its own runaway dynamics, whose origins in digital systems are black boxed and incomprehensible. Cyber-failures are already a feature of natural disasters. But inexplicable, unexpected and massive anomalies of autonomous AI behavior – possibly benign, but probably injurious; ranging from apparently random payouts and claw-backs to huge cybersecurity breaches, autonomous car accidents, industrial shutdowns and social media outages, or the ubiquitous swamping of platforms with anonymous and artificially generated prophetic texts or billion-year telenovelas – may become events analogous to hurricanes, fires or floods: the social weather of too-late capitalism.
The tide of regulatory interest in anti-trust measures was reinforced by anxieties over the existential threats to humanity catalyzed by generative AI. There is now controversy over how far AI should be ‘human aligned’ – that is to say, constrained by ‘guardrails’ to prevent dangerous outcomes. Ironically, the giant CCC companies appear as eager advocates of ‘human alignment’ regulation, seeking a framework to exempt them from liability for any catastrophic consequences of AI experimentation, and perhaps also counting on rigorous licensing procedures that will protect their incumbent positions as the largest and richest makers of generative AI. On the other hand, opponents who argue that over-rigorous guardrails will inhibit AI’s potentials – and that it should be allowed to develop ‘in the wild’ so that its full creative power can emerge – are in practice asking for a free-market force to flourish unconstrained.
Capital’s cybernetic circuits are planet-wide, powerful, fast, narrowly profit-driven, biospherically destructive, and spiraling toward a rendezvous with economic, ecological and military chaos. This techno-capitalist complex urgently needs to be taken apart and reassembled in circuits more amply inclusive of the needs of humans and other life forms, affirming fields of social value wider than that of monetization. A prerequisite to such transformation is the CCC’s removal from the control of billionaire owners, venture capitalists and financial speculators, whose voices speak in the staccato exhortations of Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” and its replacement by new forms of communal, planetary decision-making.
How might a social system that aims to preserve human habitats within a web of biological diversity address the potential arrival of digital intelligences? Our biocommunist proposal offers an antidote to contemporary capitalism, namely cybernetic distributed planning. It stipulates that such planning takes account both of the labour expended in maintaining digital networks and also of these networks’ ecological footprint.
Our Proposal: Planetary Well-Being
We have proposed a system in which AIs and other cybernetic systems would be deployed not as an instrument of runaway growth of the human economy, but as part of a process capable of both expanding and limiting the growth process within a broader calculus of the conditions of planetary well-being than that afforded by capital’s universal commodification.
Biocommunist planning would clearly require AI development to be human aligned, in the sense of precluding existential threats to hominid existence. AIs produced within a biocommunist context would be trained to address different problems, on differently compiled data sets, and with very different orientations from those that currently dominate the CCC’s AI research. Biocommunist AI would emerge from a context in which issues of care – medical, ecological and social– are prime directives rather than collateral concerns systemically subordinated to profit. In this sense, biocommunist AI would be a different form of intelligence from that produced by capitalism.
But there are also aspects of biocommunist computing that might go beyond ‘human alignment’. Biocommunism would be a system in which human domination of nature is tempered by recognition of the diversity and uniqueness of life forms on which our species depends. If – and it is a very big if – generative AIs demonstrate some form of machinic proto-intelligent life with evolutionary prospects, the direction its future takes will presumably depend on the purposes for which they are trained and applied. Biocommunists might allow AI development to unfurl in ways that, aside from being non-injurious to humans, are not necessarily tied to any human purpose at all. Such development may lead to the discovery that AIs have specific, unique logics, in the sense of autonomous mathematical, aesthetic or philosophic capacities independent of our utilitarian purposes, and enable these capacities to flourish. No intelligence should be enslaved to writing advertisements for JPMorgan.
We do not regard optimism as a duty; nor is pessimism our vocation. If we see in the current dangers potential for new emancipatory movements, it is not out of trust in any progressive historical teleology, nor even attachment to what Raymond Williams called the obligation of socialist intellectuals – that is, ‘making hope practical, rather than despair convincing’. Rather, it is from a perception that complex circulatory turbulences contain the possibility of surprise. Marx wrote that “within bourgeois society … there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it.” The explosive uncertainties of today’s cybernetic circulation complex may open channels leading beyond capitalism to new ways of living. •
When: Friday, January 23 / 7:00 pm
Where: College United Church, 452 College St, Toronto
The Leo Panitch School for Socialist Education is honoured to host the authors of the book for the Toronto launch of this exciting new book! All are welcome to join us for this timely discussion as we grapple with how to challenge the Big Tech firms that are quickly cementing their control over international commerce and policy.
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