Rewriting Marx to expose the data society and AI

Abstract

As I show with examples from the Grundrisse and the Capital, some fundamentals of Marx’s critique of political economy can be rewritten with simple substitutions to yield surprisingly pertinent analyses of today’s “information society” and the role that data and AI play in it. The reason behind this strange phenomenon is that Marx’s penetrating study of money as a dehumanizing abstraction and self-replicating capital can be extended with minor changes to the main abstraction and “automatic fetish” of our historical regime: digital data. As money-capital tends to grow by itself independently of humans, so does data. AI is the main engine of this new dangerous cycle.

Keywords

• digital data
• artificial intelligence
• information society
• automatic fetish
• personal knowledge