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In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man,” android character Commander Data is on trial to determine his humanity—whether he possesses subjectivity, agency, and therefore self-determination, or if he is simply a machine that can be replicated for (slave) labour. The trope of the artificial subject abounds in our culture: Spielberg’s A.I. conjures the synthetic child-as-futurity, Her offers a disembodied AI companion, and Blade Runner imagines labouring Replicants.
Fascism separates those who are marked for life and those marked for death through policing the category of the human. In our shared stories, the imperative to humanize the excluded is ostensibly anti-fascist: to want Data to be human is to be against the fascist domination of those rendered non-human.
My work in the Humanities researches and teaches cultural representations—how we communicate ourselves, our histories, and our possible futures. In its political dimension, this work can illuminate relationality across difference, enable anti-capitalist critique of the state and empire, and connect the cultural imaginary to real violence. From this perspective, how might the institutional imperative to embrace AI serve anti-human political ends?
Chatbots in the classrooms
The term “university” points to the ideal of a unified diversity of research fields, methods, and knowledge production, with all having equal status. Yet the corporatization of the university—including investments in war-profiteering—privileges those disciplines that serve capital accumulation and returns on private investment.
Understanding the operations of Generative AIs—Large Language Models (LLMs) that scrape archives and produce outputs based on probability—reveals why this form would support fascist relations. While all kinds of learning technologies have facilitated knowledge, connection, and flourishing, the LLMs differ in what part of the intellectual process is being automated.
If one is learning calculus, for example, a graphing calculator may facilitate an understanding of the theory of calculus by generating the graphs without compromising an understanding of the equations or their applications. That is, a graphing calculator automates graph generation while leaving the student’s deeper understanding of calculus intact. While there is little substantial variation in the graphing of an equation, the movement from thought to writing can take infinitely diverse forms, each signifying differently.
LLMs are qualitatively different from the graphing calculator, as they automate an essential aspect of intellectual labour. Compiling bibliographies, summaries, critiques, and writing itself, are all intellectual labour. The pedagogical goal of course assignments is not product but rather process itself. GenAI risks automating the very process, friction, and struggle through which understanding emerges.
The I-subject of the chatbot presents itself as an authoritative and often sycophantic voice. Its affective orientation is one of affirmation, praise, and understanding—a crude but seductive facsimile of what is lacking when humans are alienated from each other. This simulated relationality exacerbates capitalist alienation and its concomitant social and political problems, manifesting in new forms such as AI-induced psychosis.
The chats provide information in a commodified form, as smooth singular outputs—an extension of the corporatization and deintellectualization of the academy, with knowledge-as-commodity for job training. Using GenAI as an editor or research assistant removes the training from knowledge production and is an egregious labour issue, affecting the current and next generation of intellectual workers. It is a fundamental violation of the process of knowledge (re)production in the academy. LLMs may have legitimate uses, but the institutional imperative for their adoption and integration serves a broader nefarious political purpose.
Automated brownshirts
The political economy of GenAI as it actually exists also points to more explicit ties to a broader fascist political project. While some attempt to develop more “ethical AI,” the technologies academic institutions are adopting come from large tech companies engaged in mass surveillance—the very infrastructure of fascist regulation.
AI is an essential technology of contemporary fascism on multiple fronts. Imperialist wars of aggression and genocide use AI-powered tech for surveillance and drone strikes, with Palestine, Iran, and Ukraine serving as laboratories where states test and refine AI-powered death. Resource depletion and waste from data centers is devastating communities, and particularly hitting already marginalized communities.
Our capitalist cultural imaginary imbues GenAI chatbots with more humanity than actual human beings subject to colonialism and imperialism, whom capitalism renders surplus to the imagined technofuture. Understanding the cultural, social, political, economic dimensions of AI and how it relates to the category of the human allows us to understand why it’s easier to imagine Data as human than a Palestinian man who resists occupation—and that this is not an accident but rather fundamental to how capitalist ideology is mediated and reproduced.
At a time of capitalist crises, ecological collapse, and ascendant fascism, the AI imperative in the academy is inseparable from war. The commodity-form and I-subjectivity of its putatively frictionless outputs, embedded in a glossy technofuturist fantasy, are contemporary forms of what Walter Benjamin warned was the fascist aestheticization of politics: “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.”
When these mass technologies are used not to distribute wealth and ownership to those actually producing value, the workers, they can only lead to destruction. As Benjamin writes:
The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of ‘human material,’ the claims to which society has denied its natural material.
This is the logic of AI under capitalism: technologies of immense productive capacity, rather than being mobilized for human flourishing are instead turned toward surveillance, extraction, and war, with human beings reduced to data, surplus, and fuel.
21st century machine-breaking
As Pope Leo XIV writes in his first Papal Encyclical, “The ability to access vast amounts of data and information should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value from it” and warns that “Humanity—in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed.”
Famously, the English Luddites who smashed machinery understood this reality: their protest was not against technology as such, but against machines that worsened labour conditions and devalued craft. That industrial system spanned the destruction of Indian textiles, the horrors of the Atlantic, the cotton fields of the U.S. South, and the muslin dresses of Victorian ballrooms. Technology, then as now, touches every part of social, political, and cultural life.
We must resist the conversion of the human into surplus material—cogs in the machine, waste to be discarded, replicated Datas to enslave. We must reject the digital golems that perform a grotesque simulation of our humanity. We must refuse the corporate AI imperative in our institutions, demand public goods and just relations of productions, and commit to the practice of seeing each other fully.
