Fascist Aesthetics

I enjoyed this discussion of AI and the aesthetics of fascism:

Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party posts, then is forced to take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic animals. A few days later, they promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of Britain.

The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To understand it, we must consider the right’s hatred of working people, its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily, its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem like a stretch, but bear with me.

The first point is the most obvious. ‘AI’ – as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney – promises to make anyone who can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?

For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.

Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.

This also explains what the hell is going on with Mark Zuckerberg’s fashion choices these days:

On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. ‘Zuck’ was even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald Trump. (It’s worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to later.) But even Zuck can’t make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need (cf: Microsoft’s Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the technology just isn’t there. Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”

….

Gender revanchism is one of the main organising principles of the postmodern right, and much everyday AI usage demonstrates a particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI ‘girlfriends’ used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that they are being replaced, AI ‘art’ of Taylor Swift being sexually assaulted. It’s no coincidence that the internet’s largest directory of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot. These attitudes are reflected in the upper echelons of the tech and AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – the man we are being told is a generational talent, a revolutionary, on a par with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates – is also, allegedly, a rapist and paedophile, who considered his own sister his sexual property since she was three years old, and who responded to allegations by lamenting that “caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult.” A love of sexual violence is a key part of the identity of the contemporary right, and it is no coincidence that, the further right one goes, the more likely one is to encounter open celebration of rape and, particularly, paedophilia. Altman’s legal trouble will, for many on the right, only confirm that he is one of them. Meanwhile, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg described the tech industry as “culturally neutered” and called for more “masculine energy” and “aggression”.

Let’s return to Zuckerberg’s clothing. It was he that established the ubiquitous ‘grey hoodie’ style for tech CEOs. But recently he has begun to exhibit a new style. Oversized t-shirts emblazoned with ‘It’s either Zuck or Nothing’ in Latin, the unwieldy lines of his Meta AI glasses, a gaudy and unnecessary gold chain. This isn’t taking risks with fashion, like Rick Owens or Vivienne Westwood. It’s just ugly and stupid. Zuckerberg is also significantly more muscular than he used to be, despite doing nothing in his life that would seem to require a bodybuilder physique. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that, as he embraces corporate incelism and AI, he has felt liberated to ignore what does and doesn’t look good, choosing instead to display that he is wealthy and powerful enough to look terrible if he wants. All the emperor has to do, when the child laughs at his nudity, is ignore them. Trump’s haircut, which we all seem to have become inured to, serves the same purpose. It looks like shit and that’s the point. It is a display of power and a small act of cruelty.

These are truly the worst people.