Anarchism

This is more so for people requiring enlightenment, not us learned of it’s dammed origin.

What could be real uses of AI (llm, or generative) for anarchist organizations ?

Is there any ?

So far I didn't come for any AI use except for some fun with creating images, or text. It just gives junk data most of the time.

But are there some real life uses that showed beneficial ?

I found this zine interesting and on-topic for Anarchy. These tactics should be in everyone's mind, specially nowadays.

You have several different formats in the link, pdf, doc, etc.

Hi!

A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That's why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.

So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn't be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j

Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don't want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.

TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It's ok if there's only a framework (as long as it's not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).

Edit: I found something that I can work with

Cross-posted from "For Saturday protests" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

I found https://lausancollective.com/ (HK-based) and https://chuangcn.org/ which both seem to be quite libertarian, writing from the perspective of the Sinosphere. I'm really interested in exploring more contemporary Chinese Anarchist circles though. Anyone that knows anything? I'm able to read in Chinese (or at least work myself through texts) so Chinese sources are also welcome. I just find it hard to find online sources for this, I guess it's all quite a bit underground still and not really organized to a large degree taking the the oppressive state of the mainland into account.

Archive link

Just came across this post today and thought it might be a topical issue to discuss from an anarchist perspective.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29190434

AI has become as a deeply polarizing issue on the left, with many people having concerns regarding its reliance on unauthorized training data, displacement of workers, lack of creativity, and environmental costs. I'm going to argue that while these critiques warrant attention, they overlook the broader systemic context. As Marxists, our focus should not be on rejecting technological advancement but on challenging the capitalist framework that shapes its use. By reframing the debate, we can recognize AI’s potential as a tool for democratizing creativity and accelerating the contradictions inherent in capitalism.

Marxists have never opposed technological progress in principle. From the Industrial Revolution to the digital age, we have understood that technological shifts necessarily proletarianize labor by reshaping modes of production. AI is no exception. What distinguishes it is its capacity to automate aspects of cognitive and creative tasks such as writing, coding, and illustration that were once considered uniquely human. This disruption is neither unprecedented nor inherently negative. Automation under capitalism displaces workers, yes, but our critique must target the system that weaponizes progress against the workers as opposed to the tools themselves. Resisting AI on these grounds mistakes symptoms such as job loss for the root problem of capitalist exploitation.

Democratization Versus Corporate Capture

The ethical objection to AI training on copyrighted material holds superficial validity, but only within capitalism’s warped logic. Intellectual property laws exist to concentrate ownership and profit in the hands of corporations, not to protect individual artists. Disney’s ruthless copyright enforcement, for instance, sharply contrasts with its own history of mining public-domain stories. Meanwhile, OpenAI scraping data at scale, it exposes the hypocrisy of a system that privileges corporate IP hoarding over collective cultural wealth. Large corporations can ignore copyright without being held to account while regular people cannot. In practice, copyright helps capitalists far more than it help individual artists. Attacking AI for “theft” inadvertently legitimizes the very IP regimes that alienate artists from their work. Should a proletarian writer begrudge the use of their words to build a tool that, in better hands, could empower millions? The true conflict lies not in AI’s training methods but in who controls its outputs.

Open-source AI models, when decoupled from profit motives, democratize creativity in unprecedented ways. They enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster, a factory worker to draft a union newsletter, or a tenant to simulate rent-strike scenarios. This is no different from fanfiction writers reimagining Star Wars or street artists riffing on Warhol. It's just collective culture remixing itself, as it always has. The threat arises when corporations monopolize these tools to replace paid labor with automated profit engines. But the paradox here is that boycotting AI in grassroots spaces does nothing to hinder corporate adoption. It only surrenders a potent tool to the enemy. Why deny ourselves the capacity to create, organize, and imagine more freely, while Amazon and Meta invest billions to weaponize that same capacity against us?

Opposing AI for its misuse under capitalism is both futile and counterproductive. Creativity critiques confuse corporate mass-production with the experimental joy of an individual sketching ideas via tools like Stable Diffusion. Our task is not to police personal use but to fight for collective ownership. We should demand public AI infrastructure to ensure that this technology is not hoarded by a handful of corporations. Surrendering it to capital ensures defeat while reclaiming it might just expand our arsenal for the fights ahead.

Creativity as Human Intent, Not Tool Output

The claim that AI “lacks creativity” misunderstands both technology and the nature of art itself. Creativity is not an inherent quality of tools — it is the product of human intention. A camera cannot compose a photograph; it is the photographer who chooses the angle, the light, the moment. Similarly, generative AI does not conjure ideas from the void. It is an instrument wielded by humans to translate their vision into reality. Debating whether AI is “creative” is as meaningless as debating whether a paintbrush dreams of landscapes. The tool is inert; the artist is alive.

AI has no more volition than a camera. When I photograph a bird in a park, the artistry does not lie in the shutter button I press or the aperture I adjust, but in the years I’ve spent honing my eye to recognize the interplay of light and shadow, anticipating the tilt of a wing, sensing the split-second harmony of motion and stillness. These are the skills that allow me to capture images such as this:

Hand my camera to a novice, and it is unlikely they would produce anything interesting with it. Generative AI operates the same way. Anyone can type “epic space battle” into a prompt, but without an understanding of color theory, narrative tension, or cultural symbolism, the result is generic noise. This is what we refer to as AI slop. The true labor resides in the human ability to curate and refine, to transform raw output into something resonant.

People who attack gen AI on the grounds of it being “soulless” are recycling a tired pattern of gatekeeping. In the 1950s, programmers derided high-level languages like FORTRAN as “cheating,” insisting real coders wrote in assembly. They conflated suffering with sanctity, as if the drudgery of manual memory allocation were the essence of creativity. Today’s artists, threatened by AI, make the same error. Mastery of Photoshop brushes or oil paints is not what defines art, it's a technical skill developed for a particular medium. What really matters is the capacity to communicate ideas and emotions through a medium. Tools evolve, and human expression adapts in response. When photography first emerged, painters declared mechanical reproduction the death of art. Instead, it birthed new forms such as surrealism, abstraction, cinema that expanded what art could be.

The real distinction between a camera and generative AI is one of scope, not substance. A camera captures the world as it exists while AI visualizes worlds that could be. Yet both require a human to decide what matters. When I shot my bird photograph, the camera did not choose the park, the species, or the composition. Likewise, AI doesn’t decide whether a cyberpunk cityscape should feel dystopian or whimsical. That intent, the infusion of meaning, is irreplaceably human. Automation doesn’t erase creativity, all it does is redistribute labor. Just as calculators freed mathematicians from drudgery of arithmetic, AI lowers technical barriers for artists, shifting the focus to concept and critique.

The real anxiety over AI art is about the balance of power. When institutions equate skill with specific tools such as oil paint, Python, DSLR cameras, they privilege those with the time and resources to master them. Generative AI, for all its flaws, democratizes access. A factory worker can now illustrate their memoir and a teenager in Lagos can prototype a comic. Does this mean every output is “art”? No more than every Instagram snapshot is a Cartier-Bresson. But gatekeepers have always weaponized “authenticity” to exclude newcomers. The camera did not kill art. Assembly lines did not kill craftsmanship. And AI will not kill creativity. What it exposes is that much of what we associate with production of art is rooted in specific technical skills.

Finally, the “efficiency” objection to AI collapses under its own short-termism. Consider that just a couple of years ago, running a state-of-the-art model required data center full of GPUs burning through kilowatts of power. Today, DeepSeek model runs on a consumer grade desktop using mere 200 watts of power. This trajectory is predictable. Hardware optimizations, quantization, and open-source breakthroughs have slashed computational demands exponentially.

Critics cherry-pick peak resource use during AI’s infancy. Meanwhile, AI’s energy footprint per output unit plummets year-over-year. Training GPT-3 in 2020 consumed ~1,300 MWh; by 2023, similar models achieved comparable performance with 90% less power. This progress is the natural arc of technological maturation. There is every reason to expect that these trends will continue into the future.

Open Source or Oligarchy

To oppose AI as a technology is to miss the forest for the trees. The most important question is who will control these tools going forward. No amount of ethical hand-wringing will halt development of this technology. Corporations will chase AI for the same reason 19th-century factory owners relentlessly chased steam engines. Automation allows companies to cut costs, break labor leverage, and centralize power. Left to corporations, AI will become another privatized weapon to crush worker autonomy. However, if it is developed in the open then it has the potential to be a democratized tool to expand collective creativity.

We’ve seen this story before. The internet began with promises of decentralization, only to be co-opted by monopolies like Google and Meta, who transformed open protocols into walled gardens of surveillance. AI now stands at the same crossroads. If those with ethical concerns about AI abandon the technology, its development will inevitably be left solely to those without such scruples. The result will be proprietary models locked behind corporate APIs that are censored to appease shareholders, priced beyond public reach, and designed solely for profit. It's a future where Disney holds exclusive rights to generate "fairytale" imagery, and Amazon patents "dynamic storytelling" tools for its Prime franchises. This is the necessary outcome when technology remains under corporate control. Under capitalism, innovation always serves monopoly power as opposed to the interests of the public.

On the other hand, open-source AI offers a different path forward. Stable Diffusion’s leak in 2022 proved this: within months, artists, researchers, and collectives weaponized it for everything from union propaganda to indigenous language preservation. The technology itself is neutral, but its application becomes a tool of class warfare. To fight should be for public AI infrastructure, transparent models, community-driven training data, and worker-controlled governance. It's a fight for the means of cultural production. Not because we naively believe in “neutral tech,” but because we know the alternative is feudalistic control.

The backlash against AI art often fixates on nostalgia for pre-digital craftsmanship. But romanticizing the struggle of “the starving artist” only plays into capitalist myths. Under feudalism, scribes lamented the printing press; under industrialization, weavers smashed looms. Today’s artists face the same crossroads: adapt or be crushed. Adaptation doesn’t mean surrender, it means figuring out ways to organize effectively. One example of this model in action was when Hollywood writers used collective bargaining to demand AI guardrails in their 2023 contracts.

Artists hold leverage that they can wield if they organize strategically along material lines. What if illustrators unionized to mandate human oversight in AI-assisted comics? What if musicians demanded royalties each time their style trains a model? It’s the same solidarity that forced studios to credit VFX artists after decades of erasure.

Moralizing about AI’s “soullessness” is a dead end. Capitalists don’t care about souls, they care about surplus value. Every worker co-op training its own model, every indie game studio bypassing proprietary tools, every worker using open AI tools to have their voice heard chips away at corporate control. It’s materialist task of redistributing power. Marx didn’t weep for the cottage industries steam engines destroyed. He advocated for socialization of the means of production. The goal of stopping AI is not a realistic one, but we can ensure its dividends flow to the many, not the few.

The oligarchs aren’t debating AI ethics, they’re investing billions to own and control this technology. Our choice is to cower in nostalgia or fight to have a stake in our future. Every open-source model trained, every worker collective formed, every contract renegotiated is a step forward. AI won’t be stopped any more than the printing press and the internet before it. The machines aren’t the enemy. The owners are.

It is an attempt at a crowdsourced alternative to An Anarchist FAQ, mainly aiming to eliminate any biases by having multiple people write this work.

Thought this was a fun little essay on one of Graeber's last books :)

Cross-posted from "Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

Memoirs of the almost a year I lasted at Google. The name of that year? 2008. Yeah. Topics include: Third World, precariat, tech elitism, queerness, surveillance, capitalism.

Y'all encouraged me to submit this as a full post, and I clearly overcommited to this blog so I hope TechTakes fits for it lol

“The winds of change were never warm.”

This is the story behind the story—the Cold War’s beginning told without the sugarcoating. From Stalin’s stolen chair to Truman’s frozen silence, this isn’t your textbook history. It’s a poetic, brutal unpacking of American myth and manufactured consent.

This version is free, because truth should be.

Ko-Fi link:

Direct download:

Subject index: Cold War, History, Free Download, Truman, Stalin, Political Writing, Educational, E-book, Nonfiction, PDF, Antiwar, Geopolitics, US History, Soviet Union, Storytelling, Poetic Nonfiction

Very insightful interview. Worth watching to see what life before and after prison is from a radical anarchist perspective. Also a lot of ideas on how you can actually provide support even if you don't have the time or energy for much of activism.

If you lived in mid-19th century Portland, chances are you would have been familiar with an eccentric-looking character who roamed the dusty streets with a bundle of his radical newspapers. Jeremiah Hacker was strikingly tall, with a big bushy beard. He carried an ear trumpet because he was nearly deaf and wore an old drab coat covered in patches because he felt “required to clothe himself according to plainness and simplicity of truth.” Often on the edge of poverty, he lived on bread and water in a boarding house on Cross Street, where he wrote his paper, The Portland Pleasure Boat, every week on his knee, assailing the institutions of government, capitalism, slavery, prisons and organized religion.

Although Hacker had devoted readers throughout the country, historians have largely ignored him. Fortunately, Maine journalist Rebecca M. Pritchard has breathed new life into Hacker’s iconoclastic writings in her wonderful new book, Jeremiah Hacker: Journalist, Anarchist, Abolitionist.

Born to a large family in Brunswick in 1801, Hacker was deeply influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which shaped his pacifism and disdain for the hierarchy of organized religion. In the midst of the Second Great Awakening, Hacker joined scores of itinerant preachers who flocked to the Maine countryside. But unlike the others, his aim was to convince people to leave churches, not to join them. He believed that God “dwelleth not … in temples made with men’s hands, but in man” and that “pure and undefiled religion … visits the sick, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and leads man to live inwardly and outwardly unspotted from the world.” As Pritchard notes, Hacker was also fiercely anti-government, believing, like 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman, that all governments rely on violence, so he refused to support them by voting or paying taxes.

He had no love for wealthy capitalists either. “While the wives and daughters of mechanics are toiling over their wash tubs, or cooking over hot fires, the wives and daughters of capitalists are murdering pianos, sighing over novels, sauntering with coxcombs or searching for the latest fashions; and all these things cost money, and this money must by some kind of hokus pokus means, come from the pockets of the producing classes,” Hacker observed in an 1849 essay. “If therefore they can wring an hour’s labor each day from each man in their employ, it will aid in defraying their pious expenses, and in supporting them in luxury and idleness.”

When Hacker launched the Pleasure Boat in 1845 by selling his one good coat to pay the printing costs, the Industrial Revolution was beginning to draw independent artisans and subsistence farmers from the land and into wage labor in the cities and towns. Fearing the impending loss of their economic independence, Maine workers formed associations to call for land reform and the elevation of the producing classes over monopolists, land speculators and bankers. Mainers also experimented with cooperatives and utopian socialist ideas as female textile workers organized the first strikes in Saco and Lewiston for better pay and working conditions. After visiting some of these factories, Hacker poured his outrage into the pages of the Pleasure Boat.

“There are hundreds of young females shipped from this State every year to the factory prison-houses, like cattle, sheep and pigs sent to the slaughter,” he wrote in another 1849 piece. “Every steam boat and car that leaves this State for Massachusetts carries more or less of these victims to the polluted and polluting manufacturing towns where they are prepared for a miserable life and a horrible death in the abodes of infamy.”

Hacker also visited jails and was appalled by the conditions he witnessed, particularly the sight of children in cells with adults. To prove they could be reformed, he bailed boys out of jail and placed them with farmers and a sea captain to learn their trades. He was also the first voice to call for a reform school, which eventually became the Boys Training Center, most recently renamed Long Creek Youth Development Center, in South Portland.

Hacker couldn’t be pigeonholed into one reform group because he was critical of all of them. He opposed slavery, but scolded abolitionists for not boycotting slave-made goods like he did. He chastised peace activists for paying taxes to the war machine. He was an ardent teetotaler, but opposed Maine’s landmark 1851 prohibition law because he believed in persuasion, not coercion. Hacker supported gender equality, but didn’t think anyone should vote.

Many of Hacker’s ideas seem quaint in retrospect. His solution to poverty, crime, alcoholism and wage slavery was to just grant everyone tracts of land where they would “be no longer the landless slave of capital, driven about by landlords, and robbed by shylocks.” But as Pritchard notes, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, granting land to 2 million Americans, and we still have basically the same societal ills that Hacker observed. Hacker failed to grasp the power of capitalism to globalize, or as his contemporaries Marx and Engels put it, “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In spite of his flaws, many of Hacker’s critiques of our institutions still ring true today, even if his solutions are hopelessly naive.

Hacker’s most entertaining writings were his takedowns of prominent figures. He described temperance crusader Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, as “a mad dog with a firebrand to his tale.” And he despised lawyers, declaring them “no more fit to enact laws for a nation of working men than a lady’s bustle is fit for a dairy-woman’s cheese-hoop, or a dandy’s cane for a laborer’s crowbar.”

Hacker was Maine’s original alt-journalist. The Pleasure Boat contained no ads, which gave him the freedom to “hack” away at disreputable businesses that advertised in other Portland papers. His favorite targets were “quack” doctors selling fake miracle cures. After one doctor threatened to sue a printer for printing Hacker’s constant tirades against him, Hacker just found another printer, defiantly writing, “If I live a while longer, there shall be a free press in Portland, if I have to beg rags to procure it!”

In the end, it was Hacker’s fervent opposition to the Civil War that did him in. Incensed readers cancelled their subscriptions en masse in 1862. He would revive his paper in various forms, but they were short lived. After the Great Fire of 1866, Hacker moved to the progressive community of Vineland, New Jersey, to farm and write. He lived for another 30 years before passing at the ripe old age of 94.

Pritchard’s book is quite short (it was adapted from her master’s thesis), but it’s an excellent primer on an influential figure who deserves more attention. And her descriptions of old Portland through Hacker’s eyes — the tenements, the grog shops, the free blacks, sailors, street children, impoverished widows and destitute elderly couples forced to continue working — provide a vivid context for his righteous anger.

“A cruise on The Pleasure Boat was no pleasure if you were the subject,” notes historian Herb Adams. “Hacker was deaf — quite literally — to both pleasure and pain, and let critics of his paper bellow themselves hoarse while he stood silently by.

“He was a true lone eagle,” Adams continued, “happy to keep a shrewd eye and a sharp pen pointed at our world of sin that never quite came up to his expectations. And there was plenty of sin in his time, as he’d say — slavery, alcohol, taxes, politics and people who would not listen, especially to him. He must have been a fascinating neighbor, an exasperating friend, and a terrible foe.”

Chicago, February 27, 1934

Dear Carl: Your letter of February 13 was quite a surprise and illuminating, to learn that you had arrived at the same conclusions that I had some years ago: that is, that Anarchism has not produced any organized ability in the present generation, only a few little loose, struggling groups, scattered over this vast country, that come together in “conferences” occasionally, talk to each other, then go home. Then we never hear from them again until another conference is held.

Do you call this a movement? You speak of “the movement” in your letter. Where is it? You say, “I just feel disgusted.” I have been for a long time.

Anarchists are good at showing the shortcomings of others’ organizations. But what have they done in the last fifty years, you say. Nothing to build up a movement; they are mere pipe-dreamers dreaming.

Consequently, Anarchism doesn’t appeal to the public. This busy, practical world cares nothing for fine-spun theories—they want facts, and too, they want a few examples shown.

They talk about cooperation. You state that you have been trying to get the four little excuses for papers to cooperate to get out one worthwhile publication, but you can’t succeed. . . .

Anarchism is a dead issue in American life today. Radicalism has been blotted off the map of Europe. The Vienna horror-slaughter is too shocking to realize. The worker is a mere appendage to the capitalist factory. Machinery has eliminated him. Robert Burns said: “O God, that men should be so cheap, and bread should be so dear!”

Radicalism is at a low ebb today. We are living in strange times! Despotism is on horseback, riding at high speed. The worker is helpless; he has no voice in his mode or method of life—he just floats along on the tides of ill times.

I went to work for the International Labor Defense (ILD) because I wanted to do a little something to help defend the victims of capitalism who got into trouble, and not always be talking, talking, talking. When the little work that is now being doled out [is finally doled out], what then?

As ever, fraternally, yours

Lucy E. Parsons

Ned Kelly was an Australian outlaw, known for his defiant stand against colonial authorities in the late 19th century, culminating in his capture and execution after leading a rebellion against the police.

The Jerilderie Letter doesn't explicitly mention anarchism, but its themes align pretty good with anarchist principles.

Ned Kelly criticizes the established authority, particularly the colonial legal system, and speaks out against police brutality and the exploitation of his family, which aligns with anarchist critiques of state power and hierarchical structures.

Hs rejection of authority and advocacy for justice and equality can be seen as a precursor to some of the anti-authoritarian ideas found in anarchist thought.

Hello all, I am wondering can you point me to reading material or share ideas on how manifacure of medicine(and other things currently requiring complex supply chains) can be achieved in anarchist society?

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution