There is a hype i.e technology fetishism in AI applications and “immense accumulation” of data extracted by capitalist Hi-Tech corporations. Foundation models, Such as Large Language Models (LLM), especially generative AI models are believed to mimic Human brain. On the one side, computational technologies like AI and machine learning models are important as productive forces of collective labour, and for planning and shortening human labour. On the other side, while plundered and commodified data increase the wealth of hi-tec capitalism, ecological cost is huge and socialized. Days to remember Marx again: “In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. …The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want… All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.”
This panel invites papers to develop a critical, Marxian understanding of today’s technological hype and relations of production in the perspective of class struggles. It also welcomes the discussions about the transition of the labour processes, the compositional increasement of affective labour, and also booming up of the so-called bullshit jobs. How the technological developments change our everyday life and alters our understanding of life and pleasure is also among the themes we would like to open up for discussion. Lastly, digital commons is an additional topic that needs further attention of Marxists these days.
Our stream will include the following themes (but not limited to them):
-Understanding the labour and relations of production of computing technologies.
– Open Source as innovation subsumed under capitalist production and alternatives.
– Hi-Tech Capitalism.
– AI and Labour Process
– AI and Employment
– Critical Perspectives on Data Extractivism
– Ethics and/or Workers’ Councils in Digital Sectors
– Digital Commons
– Affective Labour
– ‘Bullshit’ Jobs
– Everyday Life and Digitalization – Social Relations, Pleasure, and Games
Historical Materialism Istanbul 2024 