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AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
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February 9, 2025
Gareth Watkins
It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art
is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.
Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on
D-Day. Britain First's co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men
laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song
combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it
into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify's
global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally
ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer's Labour Party posts, then is forced to
take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic
animals. A few days later, they promised to "mainline AI into the
veins" of Britain.
The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of
the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy,
disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents
having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression,
right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year
posters to 'terrorwave'. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To
understand it, we must consider the right's hatred of working people,
its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily,
its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem
like a stretch, but bear with me.
The first point is the most obvious. 'AI'–-as embodied by large
language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image
generators like DALL-E and Midjourney–-promises to make anyone who
can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic
designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and
often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit
to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The
selling point is that their users don't have to pay (and, more
importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them,
but upon whose technical skills they'd be forced to depend. For
relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time
graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of
crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an
unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of
marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to
get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that,
when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their
utter contempt for labour?
For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not
a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw
attention to its artificiality--think the mass-produced modernism of
the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned),
or the music of Kraftwerk--AI art pretends to realism. It can produce
art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the
reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without
the need for artists.
Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants
Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly
young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he
induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to
signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his
chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for
the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram
followers.
Companies can't launch a new AI venture without their customers
telling them, clearly, "nobody wants this."
On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also
be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the
rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. 'Zuck' was
even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald
Trump. (It's worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right
he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to
later.) But even Zuck can't make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake
profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six
months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had
Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears
to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored
but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need
(cf: Microsoft's Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the
technology just isn't there. Companies can't launch a new AI venture
without their customers telling them, clearly, "nobody wants
this."
And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as
a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according
to Goldman Sachs--a figure calculated before the Trump administration
pledged a further $500 billion for its 'Project Stargate'. While
previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn't pay off, their bet on cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly--$3.44 trillion dollars, at
the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air.
All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political
right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the
far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency
almost exclusively. This isn't just about utility, it's about
aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their
adoption of AI.
OpenAI is unable to make money on $200 subscriptions to ChatGPT.
Goldman Sachs cannot see any justification for its level of
investment. Sam Altman is subject to allegations of sexually abusing
his sister. 'Slop' was very nearly word of the year. And then, to top
it all off, the open-source DeepSeek project, developed in China,
wiped $1 trillion off the US stock market overnight.
In other words, the AI industry now finds that it needs all the
allies it can get. And it can't afford to be picky. If the only
places that people are seeing AI imagery is @BasedEphebophile1488's
verified X account--well, at least it's being used at all. The
thinking seems to be that, if it can hang on long enough in the
public consciousness, then, like cryptocurrency before it, AI will
become 'too big to fail'. Political actors like Tommy Robinson won't
be the ones to make that call, but they can normalise its use, and
Robinson certainly moves in the digital circles of people who can
offer the AI industry far more concrete help. Just as we might donate
to a GoFundMe, the capitalist class will provide mutual aid in the
form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and
attempting to normalise AI by using it. This process of normalisation
has led to the putatively centre-left Labour government pledging vast
sums to AI infrastructure. If one of the key features of the
Starmerite tendency is their belief that only conservative values are
truly legitimate, their embrace of AI and its aesthetics may be part
of this.
The capitalist class will provide mutual aid to the AI industry in
the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and
attempting to normalise AI by using it.
We have seen how sensitive the tech industry's leaders are to
criticism. Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto, when not
conferring sainthood upon deeply evil figures like Nick Land, largely
consists of its writer begging the world to love him. Mark
Zuckerberg's recent interview with Joe Rogan featured lengthy
sections on how he does not feel validated by the press and
governments. Just as when they reach out to 'cancelled' celebrities,
the right is now proactively creating an alliance with the tech
industry by communicating that, even if they can't materially support
companies like OpenAI, they can at least offer emotional support. We
may all be good materialists, but we can't underestimate the effects
that non-material support has in creating networks within capital.
No amount of normalisation and 'validation', however, can alter the
fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is
its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that
was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn't want
it. They would be repelled by it.
There was a time when reactionaries were able to create great
art--Dostoyevsky, G.K Chesterton, Knut Hamsun, and so on--but that
time has long passed. Decades of seething hatred of the humanities
have left them unable to create, or even think about, art. Art has
always been in a dialectical push and pull between tradition and the
avant garde: 'art is when there is a realistic picture of a
landscape, or a scene from Greek mythology' versus 'a urinal can be
art if an artist signs it'. The goal of the avant-garde, as their
name suggests, has been to expand art's territory, to show that
Rothko's expanses of colour, or Ono's instructional paintings, can do
what Vermeer's portraits can, and do it just as well. There was even
a time when the right partook in this, the Italian Futurists being a
prime example. There were, at one point, writers like Céline and
artists like Wyndham Lewis, who not only produced great work, but
developed and pushed forward the avant-garde styles of their day. Are
there any serious artists on the right today who do not parlay in
nostalgia for some imagined time before art was 'ruined' by Jews,
women, and homosexuals? Perhaps only Michel Houellebecq, and he is
long past his two-book prime.
The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit
in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting
political cruelty.
Art has rules--like the rules of the physical universe they are
sufficiently flexible to allow both Chopin and Merzbow to be classed
as music, but they exist, and even internet memes are subject to
those rules. The most burnt-out shitpost is still part of a long
tradition of outsider sloganeering stretching back through 60s comix
to Dada and Surrealism. They aren't nothing, and if they're ugly
then, often, they're ugly in an interesting, generative way. A person
made them ugly, and did so with intent. No matter how deeply
avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no
artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of
harming the already vulnerable. Even the most depraved Power
Electronics acts or the most shocking performances of the Viennese
Actionists had something more to them than simply causing suffering
for its own sake. Andy Warhol's mass-produced art did not create
enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies
being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why
it resonates with the right.
If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI
art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the
naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says
that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting
somebody. That hurt can be direct, targeted at a particular group
(like Britain First's AI propaganda), or it can be directed at art
itself, and by extension, anybody who thinks that art can have any
kind of value. It can often be playful--in the way that the cruel
children of literary cliché play at pulling the wings off flies--and
ironised; Musk's Nazi salute partook of a tradition of
ironic-not-ironic appropriation of fascist iconography that winds its
way through 4Chan (Musk's touchpoint) and back into the
countercultural far right of the 20th century.
AI imagery looks like shit. But that is its main draw to the right.
if AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent,
surprising, soulful, they wouldn't want it.
I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of
reaction, something probably best termed 'postmodern conservatism'.
The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a
spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the
reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to
Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being
anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish,
playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, "irritable
mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas," and to 'post-liberal' 'intellectuals', that is in fact a good thing--if anything, they
believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs
to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation
altogether. [1] The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask:
'what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things
that I want to do?' The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone--unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with
bullshit--in order to erode the intellectual foundations for
resisting political cruelty.
Truth does not set you free. Once you know that 2+2=4, that the
capital of the Netherlands is The Hague and not Amsterdam, or that
immigration is a net economic positive for Britain, then you are
forever bound to that truth. Your world has become, in some respects,
smaller, your options diminished. If it would be more
enjoyable--because this is, at the end of the day, about
enjoyment--to create your own truth then you are out of luck. Combine
truths with a concern for human life and thriving, and suddenly rules
start to proliferate: we have established the truth that heating milk
reduces the bacteria and viruses in it that can harm human beings,
which is undesirable to us, therefore we must heat all milk that is
sold. A lot of people are fine with this, accepting small impositions
on their freedom in the name of the greater freedom from disease.
Some are not.
There is no reason, of course, that any rule made in the name of
Enlightenment humanism should be necessarily good: liberal politics,
Labour's current mania for austerity, or the interminable
justifications for the Iraq war, are often framed as being based on
reason and humanism while being anything but. If you've been subject
to computer-says-no rules governing your access to the basic
necessities of life, then you'll know how easy it is to disguise
arbitrary and highly politicised whims as laws of nature, as ironclad
as A = π r². The application of rationality and compassion in the
real world brings to mind the (likely apocryphal) Ghandi quote about
Western civilisation: "I think it would be a good idea."
The right is a libidinal formation; it is, for many of its
proponents, especially those who aren't wealthy enough to materially
benefit from it, a structure in which to have fun. A hobby, almost.
Sartre's injunction to remember that antisemites are primarily
"amusing themselves" [2] is true of most--perhaps all--right wing
discourse, no matter how serious it seems or how terrible its
real-world effects. As such, the right are strongly averse to any
sort of reality-testing. It is, to them, beside the point whether
anything they say stands up to the tests developed by the sciences
and humanities, including those which determine (insofar as such a determination can be made) whether a piece of art is 'good', or at
least serious. When they do invoke objectivity, it is misplaced, and
as deeply naïve as their artistic output, premising their objection
to the existence of trans people on 'basic biology', when not only
can biology not define 'woman', it is having difficulty deciding what
a fish or vegetable is. Serious engagement with the world as it
is--with the facts that emphatically don't care about your
feelings--doesn't often, if ever, yield the simple explanations that
the right require. In the face of this complexity, most people will
conclude that it is best to be humble: What is a woman? No idea,
don't really care, but let's act in a way that causes the least
suffering. But the right seem incapable of doing this. Despite all
their absurdist posturing, they struggle to come to terms with a
contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided
categories. They want to assert, simultaneously, that unambiguous
laws govern all aspects of being, while acting as though 'truth' is
whatever they want or need it to be at any given moment.
Despite all their absurdist posturing, the right struggle to come to
terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their
pre-decided categories.
Gender revanchism is one of the main organising principles of the
postmodern right, and much everyday AI usage demonstrates a
particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI
'girlfriends' used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that
they are being replaced, AI 'art' of Taylor Swift being sexually
assaulted. It's no coincidence that the internet's largest directory
of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot. These attitudes are
reflected in the upper echelons of the tech and AI industry. OpenAI
CEO Sam Altman--the man we are being told is a generational talent, a revolutionary, on a par with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates--is also,
allegedly, a rapist and paedophile, who considered his own sister his
sexual property since she was three years old, and who responded to
allegations by lamenting that "caring for a family member who faces
mental health challenges is incredibly difficult." A love of sexual
violence is a key part of the identity of the contemporary right, and
it is no coincidence that, the further right one goes, the more
likely one is to encounter open celebration of rape and,
particularly, paedophilia. Altman's legal trouble will, for many on
the right, only confirm that he is one of them. Meanwhile, on the Joe
Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg described the tech industry as
"culturally neutered" and called for more "masculine energy" and
"aggression".
Let's return to Zuckerberg's clothing. It was he that established the ubiquitous 'grey hoodie' style for tech CEOs. But recently he has
begun to exhibit a new style. Oversized t-shirts emblazoned with
'It's either Zuck or Nothing' in Latin, the unwieldy lines of his
Meta AI glasses, a gaudy and unnecessary gold chain. This isn't
taking risks with fashion, like Rick Owens or Vivienne Westwood. It's
just ugly and stupid. Zuckerberg is also significantly more muscular
than he used to be, despite doing nothing in his life that would seem
to require a bodybuilder physique. I don't think that it's a
coincidence that, as he embraces corporate incelism and AI, he has
felt liberated to ignore what does and doesn't look good, choosing
instead to display that he is wealthy and powerful enough to look
terrible if he wants. All the emperor has to do, when the child
laughs at his nudity, is ignore them. Trump's haircut, which we all
seem to have become inured to, serves the same purpose. It looks like
shit and that's the point. It is a display of power and a small act
of cruelty.
The Cybertruck--itself a work of anti-art that could only be the
product of a mind addled by the far right--failed, largely because it
is embarrassing to be seen in one.
AI is a cruel technology. It replaces workers, devours millions of
gallons of water, vomits CO2 into the atmosphere, propagandises
exclusively for the worst ideologies, and fills the world with more
ugliness and stupidity. Cruelty is the central tenet of right wing
ideology. It is at the heart of everything they do. They are now
quite willing to lose money or their lives in order to make the world
a crueller place, and AI is a part of this--a mad rush to make a
machine god that will liberate capital from labour for good. (This is
no exaggeration: there is a lineage from OpenAI's senior management
back to the Lesswrong blog, originator of the concept of Roko's
Basilisk.) Moreso even than cryptocurrency, AI is entirely
nihilistic, with zero redeeming qualities. It is a blight upon the
world, and it will take decades to clear up the mountains of slop it
has generated in the past two or three years.
AI is, unfortunately, a fever that will have to burn itself out. It
may be the case that, like cryptocurrency, elites are simply so
invested in this technology that, despite its total lack of utility,
they will keep trying to make it happen. Given how great a fit it is
for them psychologically, I would say that this is more likely to
happen than not. However, as we saw in those two brief weeks of last
year's US election campaign, the right wing psyche is incredibly
fragile. For some reason, they are able to process any inversion of
empirical reality, but are acutely sensitive to being laughed at.
Calling them weird absolutely works, and telling them their sole
artistic output looks like shit also works. Laughing at people who
treat AI art as in any way legitimate works. Talking about AI's
environmental impact or its implications for the workforce will not
work--they like that, it makes them feel dangerous. Instead of
talking about taking money from artists, talk about how it makes them
look cheap. If hurting and offending people is part of the point,
then we can take that fun away from them by refusing to express hurt
or offence, even if we feel it.
Technological progress isn't linear, and it's not wholly
undemocratic. We, ordinary people, stopped Google Glass from being
widely released because we mocked its users, calling them
'glassholes'. The Cybertruck--itself a work of anti-art that could
only be the product of a mind addled by the far right--failed,
largely because it is embarrassing to be seen in one. We have already
seen that the AI industry is vulnerable--it was possible for Chinese
grad students to build the same thing for a fraction of the price,
calling into question the entire model of growth through massive
investment in data centres. The left is powerless across much of
society, but a training in ruthless criticism of all that exists has
made us masters of negativity, while always keeping one eye on the
better world that is possible when the slop has been cleared away.
Our most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has
adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics.
They might be replying "cringe," "this sucks," and "this looks like
shit."
[1]
There are, of course, important left critiques of those values, and
of the European Enlightenment project itself. These are not the same
as the revanchism of the right.
[2]
Jean-Paul Sartre. [1948] 1995. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by
George J Becker. New York: Schocken, p.20. Available to read for free
on Archive.org.
<
https://archive.org/details/antisemitejew0000sart_l3n5>
Author: Gareth Watkins (@garethlwatkins)
From: <
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/>
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