For starters, I wish to clarify the parametres of what I mean when I say automation. Automation is, especially in the field of engineering and technical labour: An absolute necessity. I am referring to political automation, a utopian idea. I am referring to the people who, in bad faith, attempt to equate the full abolition of labour through automation with Microsoft Excel.
There are numerous arguments as to why automation in this political sense would completely malform humanity. A machine without its own autonomy, wherein it relieves the worker of her burdens, and instead is maintained and managed by such a worker, is perfectly fine. But a machine which is maintained and managed by other machines, who then in turn maintain and manage themselves, will be a dystopia.
What worries me is not that something would go wrong. If it did we could just shut them down, or break them. Humanity has a great talent for sabotage, and we can manage this challenge. Rather, the true terror lies within its realisation, in the machines doing precisely what they were designed to do, as to completely alienate us from our own means of production.
As all labour is removed, only two avenues remain: Namely art and intellectualism. But not its true forms, rather its alienated forms wherein we are all drinking that most flaccid and degenerate of poisons: Bohemianism.
As we are all guided by the miscreant class of people who drown themselves in the well of absinthe and abstractions, telling the world that they have found true salvation.
As inspiration is not derived from authentic experience, produced by a condition of circumstance, discovery and curiosity, but rather the cheap sophistications of libertine whims. As we are all suddenly planning, arranging and aspiring to life, rather than to simply live it on its own terms. As we are robbed of the driving forces that commits us to knowledge and achievement.
We cannot pursue the sublime, rather, the sublime finds us. It is precisely this which makes it sublime.
Social media is a wonderful example of this alienation, as you are basically trapped in the conditions of a vacuous word processor, wherein your mind immediately grows vapid. As every prompt is produced by its own self-contained rationalism and notion, without any study or concern. Social media carries out a psychological lobotomy, in which it hijacks the frontal lobe, and produces disjointed and meaningless nonsense from its user.
What gives us meaning is precisely the pursuit which follows inhibition, wherein we are able to refrain. Without being able to refrain, we lose ourselves to the world around us, and ultimately become infinitely tragic iterations of Jason Pollock. As life is no longer attainable, but rather a source of infinite distractions from an oppressive inertia produced by our own sloth.
We all become children to a mechanical mother, who will nurse us from cradle to grave, as each generation grows more infantile than the other, until one day, as probability strikes, the machines break down, and we starve to death in our own filth, surrounded by feeding tubes and frivolous home appliances, carefully robbing us of every talent, every ability and every inspiration, until we are meaningless lumps of flesh, pathetically begging a computer for another dose of dopamine.
Marxism is about the working class achieving self determination, it is not the pursuit of one paternalistic ruler for another. We must feed ourselves, clothe ourselves and realise ourselves, and if a machine can be produced to do this for us, then we must kill the fool who attempts to invent it.
The kindest act we can do is to help someone who needs something. But the cruelest act we can do is to help someone who wants something.
