AI and Primitive Accumulation

The exploitation of the knowledge commons

Now, I am not an expert in Marx, or post-Marxist analysis, but it does not take a genius to understand the principle of primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation is the process where raw materials are exploited by capitalists, usually at the expense of peasants or indigenous people, especially women, for very little money or none, to be used in the production of commodities. The entire history of settler colonialism is a history of primitive accumulation, the witch trials in Europe, the enslavement of Africans, the plantations of Cromwell, the opium wars, etc. It runs so deep in Western history most of us cannot recognize it. Primitive accumulation is the defining feature of Capitalism, not free markets, free trade, etc.

On the contrary, a necessary condition for the existence of capitalism is the presence of certain kinds of commons. Indeed, without the capacity of capitalists to call upon the mutual aid and class solidarity of other capitalists and to use the communal character of workers to their advantage, capitalism would not have been able survive the shock of class struggle over centuries.

Barbagallo, Camille; Beuret, Nicholas; Harvie, David. Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (p. 209). (Function). Kindle Edition.

It all began with academic journals charging outrageous fees for 5000 word articles to the tune of 35-50$ a pop. And now we are in the midst of the greatest primitive accumulation event in human history. That is all AI is. Anthropic reportedly bought 50,000,000 million books, cut the pages out of them and scanned them through optical character recognition into their database. Knowing how inaccurate OCR can be, is it any wonder that AI is error-filled?

But that is not the main point. Human knowledge is a commons. Now, some dipshit is surely going to be tempted to bring up the long discredited notion called “The Tragedy of the Common.” Save your breath please. Human knowledge belongs to everyone. Not to Google, whose motto is now “Be evil;” not to Anthropic, who just crossed the boundary line from benign actor to existential threat to world civilization with Mythos; to Open AI, which has always been flawed, etc.

Jerry Mander warned us more than three decades ago to be suspicious of technology. The confluence of LLM’s, video, and personal devices is leading us to places we do not understand and are not prepared to cope with. Capital promises everything, and for most people on the globe delivers very little other than war, a polluted environment, rampant illness, and poverty. Don’t believe the hype.