Barbarians at the Gate
And here it is - laid out in quite clear terms.
A deal has to be done on Australian copyright laws before Australia gets a slice of the deliciously rich AI pie.
You and I, everyone in fact, will soon be mapped, captured and appropriated by private capital. Anything that is entered on a keyboard or is recorded digitally, that is not protected behind a content firewall, will be be scraped and included into the oceeans of data that are required to build (and importantly, keep current) the large language models required for AI tools.
Of course there will be glorious rear guard actions, crocodile tears and sanctimonious speeches but the deal will be done, the rolling crisis of capitalism will make it so.
Philosophically, it is revolutionary. The scale of the technology required is huge. The capital being invested is significant to the extent that it is hiding the stagflation that infects the rest of the economy.
It is the gold plated can, that when kicked down the road, will prove to be the next technology wave, that capitalism requires to keep afloat.
Liberal defenders of private property are divided. Copyright, once simply a way of funding your favourite author has created intellectual property rights that can be bought and sold as commodities.
Now it is media corporations who defend copyright and lobby governments to impose forms of taxation on the digital giants to fund journalists and keep the media companies afloat.
But if you identify as a part of the educated elite, this next wave is coming after your favourite sacred cow.
Technocrat capitalists want to unleash their AI crawlers, spiders and robots to trawl and scavenge all that is valuable, ephemeral, arcane and unique and they don't want to pay for it. Their investment in AI corporations will be more than enough. There are always winners and losers.
Scions of the chattering classes, those who have books published, opinion columnists and a raft of culture symbiotes and professional grant recipients, all those who exist as professional creatives have their best plaintive faces painted on as they stretch out their hands, beseeching government to save them from the digital barbarians.
In reality, what they are are doing is asking for their slice of the pie.
Of course its understandable. Everyone wants a comfortable life.
But there are always winners and losers.
Modern capitalism has generated a petit bourgeois class dependent on artistic creation protected by copyright through the sale of unique works and a system of government grants (which is a form of proletarianization).
The popular ones become independently wealthy - most just survive. Their back catalogues are protected by copyright, and they are traded as commodities, by legacy corporations whose business models are being undone by new media platforms using digital distribution.
But the reality of creation is that once it is digitised, its distribution is potentially infinite. For an artist the value needs to be captured at the point of creation.
Anything that is digitally captured has virtually zero cost of distribution and its market value can only be protected through restricting distribution. The artistic value is inherent, monetization is becoming impossible.
AI is just colonising a new terrain, a terra nullius, and the only property they respect is their own. The new philosophy rolls over the old with no compunction.
So it needs to be said, that this change in the market relations of capitalism does not affect the working class. The creation of value by the working class has already been alienated.
But now its coming for the petit bourgeoisie.
Building pay walls is analogous to rebuilding the castle walls of feudalism and they will crumble quickly.
Revolutionary creatives understand that the purpose of their creation is to motivate revolution, to make us all free of the old, the constrictions of private property that enslave us.
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