Cancel the Machines We Have Got

“In all the arts the output of trash is both relatively and absolutely greater than it was.”

“Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into a bottomless abyss.”

“[Man’s] qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world.”

These could have come from a modern (if stuffy) description of the impact of AI, but they do not. They come from the 1920s and 30s.

I found them in Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss, a history of the Frankfurt School — a group of Jewish, Marxist, psychoanalytic thinkers in Weimar Germany who documented the impact of technology and capitalism on the rise of fascism firsthand, until they were forced to flee or die.

I am still reading the book, so no cohesive thoughts yet, but I find the echoes striking. And I worry that there is a similar dynamic happening now, that the changes technology is rending in the social fabric - what it means to be a person in society, what it means to work, what it means to relate to each other - will not be mended.

These changes are pervasive and encompassing, but the impact on work alone is profound. The book quotes the D.H. Lawrence poem, Work, published in 1929:

There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you like an absorbing game. If it doesn’t absorb you
if it’s never any fun,
don’t do it.
When a man goes out to work
he is alive like a tree in spring,
he is living, not merely working.

A romantic view, to be sure. And yet, is it not the way we’d all like to be able to work? What does it say about us as a society that instead of reaching towards the romantic, fulfilling version, we are always driving further and further away from it?

As Jeffries writes:

The kind of work Benjamin and Lawrence blissfully celebrate here is precisely the kind of work denied in machine-age capitalism, wherein the worker is alienated from her labour, what she produces, and therefore from herself.

When I think of the artists and writers whose labors are replaced by generated content, when I think of the engineers I know who only review code, never write it, the people who ask their coworkers a question and get back a response from Gemini or Claude or Grok…

Marx thought that the alienation of labor would give rise to a communist revolution. But in Germany, at least, it led to a very different kind of revolution.

Or as Walter Benjamin, a member of the Frankfurt School who died fleeing Germany in 1940, put it: “The century was incapable of responding to the new technological possibilities with a new social order.”

One could argue that the Holocaust was a new social order, albeit a nightmarish one. Perhaps this is the kind of new social order one gets when you do not, collectively, address the alienations of disruptive technologies.

My favorite member of the Frankfurt School is Erich Fromm. The only core member who was a practicing psychoanalyst, his writings are infused with a deep understanding of psychology. His 1941 book, Escape From Freedom, describes how the changes that capitalist technologies have made to society leave people isolated, powerless and anxious - a form of individualized, negative freedom that people escape via submission and conformity. Or, as he wrote later (unlike Benjamin, he escaped Nazi Germany and lived to take a historical view):

Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation. The individual is made to feel powerless and insignificant, but taught to project all of his human powers into the figure of the leader, the state, the “fatherland,” to whom he has to submit and whom he has to worship. He escapes from freedom and into a new idolatry.

I have a lot more to say about Fromm - about all of this (technology and capitalism and Marxism and psychoanalysis), but about Fromm especially. Fromm’s conception of positive freedom has greatly influenced my thinking, including a talk I gave earlier this year at FOSSBackstage called “Free as in Friendship”. But I have yet to transcribe that talk - I have yet to finish the book I’m quoting from! - so I will leave it here, as unsettling a place to stop as it is.

One last quote, from the end of Lawrence’s Work, to settle us:

At last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like cloth
tissued from his life,
and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver’s nibbled mansion
and drinking from cups that came off his fingers like flowers off their five-fold stem,
he will cancel the machines we have got.