Against the New Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defending Anti-Fascism at The New School in NYC
A Message for Higher Education at the Luddite Conference at The New School
We live in intellectually dangerous times. In the age of artificial intelligence, to be smart — to teach, to share knowledge — is increasingly transgressive. We are in New York City at the moment, and while spirits are high now that Mamdani is mayor and the Knicks have won the NBA championship, I ask that our hearts and minds be with the people of Alvarado, Texas, and with the activists that have cumulatively received 450 years in prison for calling themselves “anti-fascist."
Tomorrow will be the sentencing of Ines Soto, a father of three, to 50 years in federal prison. His crime? Having an office printer to print and distribute leftist zines. Soto's children were interrogated after their heads were bagged by police, and he was accused of providing material support to terrorists using Trump's new counter terrorism directives. His bond was set at $10 million dollars.
The philosophy Soto espoused would not be unfamiliar to anyone here: support for trans rights, the environment, workers, women, and anti-capitalism. His tools would also not be unfamiliar to us: zines, signal chats, even sharing plant seeds for propagation — all taken as evidence for his conviction, as well as that of his spouse, leaving their children without parents.
As we will learn in this conference, AI tools, and their owners, play a key role in shaping this reality: one where Americans can be framed and punished as terrorists for exercising their rights.
In these dark times, some institutions and people are rising up. I've personally seen groups of teachers, librarians, and students rise up across the country to meet the moment. Even the Catholic Pope has released a comprehensive critique of AI and its authoritarian and violent tendencies. Our institutions of higher learning, however, have not heeded the call or met the moment. The institutions that once nurtured radical thought, the kind that interrogates systems of power, have been subdued.
Today we are at The New School, known originally as the “university in exile,” a place that once provided refuge for critics of authoritarianism, and for the dangerous ideas that challenged fascism in Nazi Germany. But this school, like many others, is now caving to financial pressures and defunding programs and positions in the humanities.
But without my humanities education — my studies in philosophy, colonialism, feminism, and critical theory — I would not have realized the significance of the AI tools I was building when I worked for Palantir and other tech companies. After years of creating materials to teach people (including at the Pentagon) about how AI works, I came to realize that big tech was not building "solutions” for people, but new weapons of mass destruction. I now call them WMD3’s: weapons of mass deception, distraction, and destruction.
Weapons of mass deception: because companies, scammers, and politicians are using AI tools — especially Generative AI — to deceive people and warp reality.
Weapons of mass distraction: because big tech companies weaponize our personal information, preferences, and behavior against us to keep us glued to our screens and addicted to their platforms.
Weapons of mass destruction: because AI is used in combination with surveillance, satellites, drones, and our private information to target people, to methodically wipe entire cities off the map, and to help remove accountability from war crimes like the strike at the girls’ school in Minab, Iran.
We need to reach a better, more humanist understanding of AI — one which doesn't come from the companies which are fueling this administration's authoritarian tendencies. In order to save our democracy from the grip of big tech, we have to establish a new “university in exile” — a new humanism, a new luddism, a new American transcendentalism — and develop a study of AI that contextualizes it within our humanist institutions, history, and critical traditions.
Why? Because AI is how powerful institutions and individuals — through a marriage of corporations and the state — are destroying our democracy. AI companies like Palantir are exactly how Americans are turned into terrorists, how weapons used to kill using surveillance and personal data abroad, in places like Gaza, are also used here for ethnic cleansing and forced migration by ICE and the DHS. Companies like Palantir are precisely how databases of "terrorists” are built based on data regarding people's constitutional freedom of speech and association.
What does it mean to be anti-fascist? Adorno and Arendt — whose intellectual movements were closely affiliated with the New School — taught us that fascism results from the alienation and atomization of mass society. Therefore, to be anti-fascist means to stand up against atomization and alienation, the very tools by which the people in power hold their power, and the very tools by which they entrench us within their platforms while damaging our social fabric.
In order to fight this threat, we must teach each other, we must keep intellectual traditions alive, and we have to invite faculty and students to participate in preserving our intellect and humanity in the face of artificial intelligence. We have to revive studies in feminism, colonialism, anthropology and the social sciences — disciplines that allow us to critique and challenge those in power.
Most importantly, we can't be afraid to take pride in anti-fascism, the fight and hope for an end to our alienation and atomization.
Note: this post is based on my notes for the speech and revised for accuracy after a discussion with a reporter covering the developing events in Texas, who fortunately attended the conference.