[continued from previous message]   
      
   offer the AI industry far more concrete help. Just as we might donate   
   to a GoFundMe, the capitalist class will provide mutual aid in the   
   form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and   
   attempting to normalise AI by using it. This process of normalisation   
   has led to the putatively centre-left Labour government pledging vast   
   sums to AI infrastructure. If one of the key features of the   
   Starmerite tendency is their belief that only conservative values are   
   truly legitimate, their embrace of AI and its aesthetics may be part   
   of this.   
      
   The capitalist class will provide mutual aid to the AI industry in   
   the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and   
   attempting to normalise AI by using it.   
      
   We have seen how sensitive the tech industry's leaders are to   
   criticism. Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto, when not   
   conferring sainthood upon deeply evil figures like Nick Land, largely   
   consists of its writer begging the world to love him. Mark   
   Zuckerberg's recent interview with Joe Rogan featured lengthy   
   sections on how he does not feel validated by the press and   
   governments. Just as when they reach out to 'cancelled' celebrities,   
   the right is now proactively creating an alliance with the tech   
   industry by communicating that, even if they can't materially support   
   companies like OpenAI, they can at least offer emotional support. We   
   may all be good materialists, but we can't underestimate the effects   
   that non-material support has in creating networks within capital.   
      
   No amount of normalisation and 'validation', however, can alter the   
   fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is   
   its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that   
   was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn't want   
   it. They would be repelled by it.   
      
   There was a time when reactionaries were able to create great   
   art--Dostoyevsky, G.K Chesterton, Knut Hamsun, and so on--but that   
   time has long passed. Decades of seething hatred of the humanities   
   have left them unable to create, or even think about, art. Art has   
   always been in a dialectical push and pull between tradition and the   
   avant garde: 'art is when there is a realistic picture of a   
   landscape, or a scene from Greek mythology' versus 'a urinal can be   
   art if an artist signs it'. The goal of the avant-garde, as their   
   name suggests, has been to expand art's territory, to show that   
   Rothko's expanses of colour, or Ono's instructional paintings, can do   
   what Vermeer's portraits can, and do it just as well. There was even   
   a time when the right partook in this, the Italian Futurists being a   
   prime example. There were, at one point, writers like Céline and   
   artists like Wyndham Lewis, who not only produced great work, but   
   developed and pushed forward the avant-garde styles of their day. Are   
   there any serious artists on the right today who do not parlay in   
   nostalgia for some imagined time before art was 'ruined' by Jews,   
   women, and homosexuals? Perhaps only Michel Houellebecq, and he is   
   long past his two-book prime.   
      
   The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit   
   in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting   
   political cruelty.   
      
   Art has rules--like the rules of the physical universe they are   
   sufficiently flexible to allow both Chopin and Merzbow to be classed   
   as music, but they exist, and even internet memes are subject to   
   those rules. The most burnt-out shitpost is still part of a long   
   tradition of outsider sloganeering stretching back through 60s comix   
   to Dada and Surrealism. They aren't nothing, and if they're ugly   
   then, often, they're ugly in an interesting, generative way. A person   
   made them ugly, and did so with intent. No matter how deeply   
   avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no   
   artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of   
   harming the already vulnerable. Even the most depraved Power   
   Electronics acts or the most shocking performances of the Viennese   
   Actionists had something more to them than simply causing suffering   
   for its own sake. Andy Warhol's mass-produced art did not create   
   enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies   
   being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why   
   it resonates with the right.   
      
   If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI   
   art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the   
   naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says   
   that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting   
   somebody. That hurt can be direct, targeted at a particular group   
   (like Britain First's AI propaganda), or it can be directed at art   
   itself, and by extension, anybody who thinks that art can have any   
   kind of value. It can often be playful--in the way that the cruel   
   children of literary cliché play at pulling the wings off flies--and   
   ironised; Musk's Nazi salute partook of a tradition of   
   ironic-not-ironic appropriation of fascist iconography that winds its   
   way through 4Chan (Musk's touchpoint) and back into the   
   countercultural far right of the 20th century.   
      
   AI imagery looks like shit. But that is its main draw to the right.   
   if AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent,   
   surprising, soulful, they wouldn't want it.   
      
   I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of   
   reaction, something probably best termed 'postmodern conservatism'.   
   The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a   
   spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the   
   reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to   
   Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being   
   anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish,   
   playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, "irritable   
   mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas," and to 'post-liberal'   
   'intellectuals', that is in fact a good thing--if anything, they   
   believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs   
   to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation   
   altogether. [1] The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask:   
   'what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things   
   that I want to do?' The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the   
   zone--unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with   
   bullshit--in order to erode the intellectual foundations for   
   resisting political cruelty.   
      
   Truth does not set you free. Once you know that 2+2=4, that the   
   capital of the Netherlands is The Hague and not Amsterdam, or that   
   immigration is a net economic positive for Britain, then you are   
   forever bound to that truth. Your world has become, in some respects,   
   smaller, your options diminished. If it would be more   
   enjoyable--because this is, at the end of the day, about   
   enjoyment--to create your own truth then you are out of luck. Combine   
   truths with a concern for human life and thriving, and suddenly rules   
   start to proliferate: we have established the truth that heating milk   
   reduces the bacteria and viruses in it that can harm human beings,   
   which is undesirable to us, therefore we must heat all milk that is   
   sold. A lot of people are fine with this, accepting small impositions   
   on their freedom in the name of the greater freedom from disease.   
   Some are not.   
      
   There is no reason, of course, that any rule made in the name of   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)