The Loom of History

You know how sometimes a new technology comes along and it feels like it changes absolutely everything, but what if it doesn’t? What if it’s really just the latest, most complicated knot in a thread that’s been woven for centuries? Well, today we’re going on a kind of historical detective story. We’re going to follow a single thread back through time to really understand the machine that’s on everyone’s mind. Okay, so let’s get right to it. The central mystery we’re trying to solve today is this. Is generative AI a true revolution? A complete break from everything that came before? Or is it just the latest echo of a very, very old pattern? Is this thing a visitor from the future, or was it, you know, kind of predictable all along? To get to the bottom of this, we need a name for our main suspect. So, let’s call it the spinning robot. That’s our stand-in for generative AI. And what we’re going to see is that this robot, it didn’t just appear out of thin air. No, it was spun on a loom that’s been running for hundreds of years. A loom that weaves together things like labor, desire, and power.

Now, to solve any mystery, you need the right tools, right? Our toolkit for this investigation is a really interesting concept called surplus pragmatics. It’s basically a way of looking at history, not through kings and queens, but through the lens of what societies produce in excess and how technology is used to organize all that too much. So, what do we actually mean by too much? Well, surplus pragmatics looks at four key types. And it’s not just about extra profit or money. It’s also about the extra data that gets extracted from our behavior. The extra, often hidden enjoyment that keeps us hooked on certain routines, and of course, the extra power that lets you influence people from a distance. It’s about how machines from old school looms to modern algorithms are designed to manage all of it.

Let’s break down these four threads because this is super important. First, you’ve got surplus value. That’s the classic one. The extra hours squeezed out of workers in a factory. Then there’s surplus information. That’s all the behavioral data that gets scraped from us online every second. Then there’s this weird one, surplus enjoyment. You know that sticky feeling, that little jolt of outrage or envy that just keeps you scrolling? That’s it. And all of that leads to surplus power. The ability to steer our attention and our choices. These four threads are woven together by pretty much every major technological system we’ve ever built.

All right, we have our toolkit. So, let’s visit the crime scene, history itself. We’re going to look for clues for these specific moments where the entire operating system of power got a fundamental reboot and in doing so revealed the pattern that leads directly to our spinning robot. So, our investigation really hones in on four critical hinges in history where the rules of the game were totally rewritten. First up, 1886 and the Haymarket Affair. This was all about the fight for the 8-hour workday, which made controlling human time and labor a central battle. Then we jump forward to 1968. This was a global revolt, not just against factory bosses, but against the top-down one-to-many authority of broadcast media. Fast forward again to 2001. The 9/11 attacks basically kicked the door open for mass global surveillance, turning our personal data into a resource for managing risk. And finally, 2023, when the October 7th war ripped the curtain back on the hidden governance of online platforms, forcing the politics of AI moderation right out into the open. Each one of these moments retuned our relationship with technology and power.

And here’s a crucial clue. Technology is never ever neutral. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse had a term for this, technological rationality. The idea is that the tools we use don’t just help us do things. They actually change our very definition of what’s reasonable or efficient. The factory clock, the TV schedule, the social media feed, they all impose their own logic on our lives. And they can make other ways of thinking and living seem, well, irrational. But why do we go along with it? This is where another philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, gives us a really important clue with this idea of surplus enjoyment. See, it’s not that we’re just being duped. It’s that these systems offer us a weird kind of hidden pleasure, a fantasy, the thrill of being angry online, the comfort of a perfectly personalized feed that actually attaches us to the very systems that are extracting from us. It’s the psychological glue that holds the whole thing together.

But there’s a huge piece of this story that’s missing, a crucial human element. At every single one of these stages, there was a specific kind of labor, often invisible and often feminized, that made these massive technological shifts possible in the first place, right before it was automated away. Let’s call this the factory of womanhood. You see this pattern again and again. First, in the factories, it was the relational skills needed to organize production. Then, in offices, women became the human routers for communication. Think telephone operators, secretaries. With television, emotional and aesthetic labor became the engine of advertising. And today, well, it’s the absolutely crucial work of community moderation and managing the emotional tone of online spaces. That’s what keeps social platforms from just collapsing into chaos. And in each case, these skills are essential. Then they’re studied. And then finally, they’re automated.

Okay, we have our clues. The four surpluses, the four historical hinges, the logic of technology, the psychology of enjoyment, and the hidden history of labor. It’s time. Time to connect it all back to our suspect, the spinning robot, and deliver the verdict. So, the verdict is this. Generative AI is not a revolution. It is a repetition. It is the culmination of this centuries long process of identifying, capturing, and automating human skills to extract all those different kinds of surplus. It’s the most sophisticated knot we’ve seen yet, woven from all four of those threads: value, information, enjoyment, and power.

So, you might be wondering where does AI get all its power from. It comes from something Karl Marx actually called the general intellect. And what is that? It’s us. It’s our collective intelligence. All the books, all the articles, the conversations, the code, everything we’ve ever put online. Generative AI works by scraping this general intellect and turning our own shared culture into a productive force, a giant statistical machine that can remix it all right back at us. And this means the real fight for the future. It isn’t about stopping technology. It’s about something much, much deeper. It’s about what we can call the protocols of desire. These are the hidden rules, the lines of code, and the community guidelines that now govern how we’re allowed to express ourselves, what we want, and even who we can be online.

I mean, just think about it. These protocols written by a pretty small group of engineers and policy makers are basically the new operating system for our social lives. They decide what pops up in your feed and what gets buried. They decide which of your emotions get amplified. They decide what kind of speech is safe. They decide how your deepest wants and needs get turned into profit. They are quite literally the invisible architecture of our reality now. And that leaves us with one final absolutely crucial question. If AI is powered by our general intellect, by the culture that we all created together, then who should get to write these protocols of desire? Who should get to decide the rules for our collective future? That isn’t a technical question. It’s a political one, and it just might be the most important one we face.