The crybabies who freak out about *The Communist Manifesto* appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it - chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: #greenwashing, #genderwashing, #queerwashing, #wokewashing - all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.
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A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.
In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, @Mer__edith, @davidthewid and #SarahBMyers document a new kind of -washing: #openwashing:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807
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Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of #openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."
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So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "#OpenSource," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code #transparency, #reusability and #extensibility, which are three important virtues.
But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the #FreeSoftware movement, whose goal is to promote *freedom*, and whose *method* is openness.
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The point of #SoftwareFreedom was #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology *does*, but who it does it *to* and who it does it *for*:
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement.
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The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "#FreeAsInBeer" when really it means "#FreeAsInSpeech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").
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Cory Doctorow
LisPi