Generative AI: The aesthetics of Fascism

The forgetting will continue until morale improves.

finally a place that serves coffee for less than $2

Doing .jpeg compression to images of a genocide will not get rid of the smell.

On Feb. 26, the chief of the American regime reposted a video originally circulated by the pro-Israeli social media ecosystem. The video itself is simple: A succession of images intended to resemble the destruction of Gaza, followed by the emergence of running children into a bright, AI-generated future city that looks like a cross between Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Miami and Hong Kong. Interspersed are images of Elon Musk eating slop, bearded belly dancers, Donald Trump dancing with a woman dressed up in an orientalist costume, and a bunch of gold baubles and luxury cars. Sometimes money rains from the sky.

The images are set to a computer voice song with the following lyrics:

“Donald is coming to set you free/Bringing the light* for all to see/No more tunnels, no more fear/Trump Gaza is finally here

Trump Gaza shining bright/Golden future, a brand new light/Feast and dance the deal is done,/Trump Gaza number one

Trump Gaza shining bright/Golden future, a brand new light/Feast and dance the deal is done,/Trump Gaza number one”

Of all the propaganda images to emerge from the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people this one, I fear, is the most prescient.

Not that it portends anything specific for Gaza; the strip is not under Israeli control. There is no reason to think the Israelis or Americans will be able to ethnically cleanse Gaza without a resumption of fighting that dwarfs the 2023-5 conflict in its scale, cost and intensity. [Update: the IDF is trying again to ethnically cleanse Gaza, this essay was written during the ceasefire.]

Rather, this is the vanguard of fascist aesthetics in the 21st Century. A vision made by a dream machine for a nightmare age.

Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921

Generative Artificial Intelligence uses a variety of complex calculations to turn a series of inputs (typically questions) into mathematically plausible text or image outputs. Some of you, probably most, already know this. But we’re going to walk through it for any readers who may have bought ChatGPT’s marketing hype, or who may not understand what these programs are.

Two things about generative AI matter for the purposes of aesthetic production: 1. Output is constrained by the content of training data. 2. The program is not intelligent.

Coherence, according to the famous paper “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots,” is in the eye of the beholder.

These programs are trained by analyzing the associations between bits of data within training sets: which words occur together, in what order, what kinds of words appear near them, in what frequency. The same with images: what colors occur near one another, what buildings or arrangement of buildings are likely, what words in a training set are these things associated with.

Using these techniques it is possible to produce an image that resembles real life, or a text that resembles real speech.

But, crucially, these outputs are unstable and non-reproducible, they are weighted averages of texts and images. As such, they’re incapable of producing anything new. Every image made by generative AI already exists; its constituent elements have been stolen from the entire corpus of human art and photography. Every sentence is built on the relationships within previously existing sentences. These are images of sentences, images of images, like a camera raw file converted into a jpeg—the original semiotic relationships are lost.

At a technical level, this is why Trump Gaza is a succession of visual cliches, and why those cliches slide into each other like the pieces of a dream—the bearded belly dancer is an image I return to, given the right’s genocidal hostility to trans people.

The program is incapable of arranging these symbols in a way that says anything about them. The closest these programs get to the cinematic eye is a predictive Kuleshov effect. Because their training data contains images that are intentionally associated, they can create images that appear to be associated with each other and with some base reality. But these images, in fact, bear no relation to each other.

There is no authorial hand in the arrangement of the images. Editing choice is what separates the cinematic form from a livestream from a static camera; the editor/director creates meaning through the deliberate arrangement of images based on their intentional association.

Generative AI does not know that Dubai is financed by oil money, that Gaza lacks the petroleum reserves to sustain such an obscene, terraformed urban cancer, that there is already a real estate scam city on the Mediterranean that served as the playground for a regional elite, that the contradictions of that place (Beirut) were so intense that the most disciplined of the anti-Zionist political movements emerged from its southern suburbs. Generative AI knows only Arab, Sand, Skyscraper, Beach, Boy, Elon Musk, Sexy Lady, Car, Money. The prompter asks for these things arranged.

What would my dream look like as imagined by your training data?

The computer does the work of producing the fantasy. The training data are drawn from the profane output of the American Empire and its satellite states in their digital decline. So the answer is usually gauche, gaudy, Eurocentric.

What comes out of these things is a computerized wailing, madness babbling back to you. What a dead machine thinks you might dream.

It is the application of the laws of capitalist production to the production of desire.

It is the image at the end of The Shining, the white ball goers in their black eveningwear, the photo a little too dark to make out the details. Faces that look like other faces, and in the middle, you stare back at yourself, smiling, unaware that the symbolic language of the film tells the story of the genocide of the Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the growth of the patriarchal figure from indentured settler to jet set capitalist.

So too with Trump Gaza. You eat fondue from a bread bowl with the richest man in the world, you wear a black shirt under a black suit. A car goes by. There are no Palestinians here, but there is a girl from the Philadelphia suburbs who voted for Likud. She is wearing strings of fake jewelry, grinding into your crotch. Someone brings you a tray of food.

When you breathe too deep, you smell the pulverized concrete, and the decomposing corpses of Palestinian medical workers summarily executed with their hands zip tied behind their backs.

The image wobbles, but images do that. You have only lived in dreams.

Guided by the beauty of our weapons

As an historian, I do not believe that Fascism exists in the 21st century. I think Fascism was a specific political response to the conditions of Europe from 1918-1945. However, the historians have largely lost the popular debate over the big F word, and most people I know call what is happening now ‘fascism.’ I will use their term, though I think it is so wrong as to be dangerous.**

Matt Christman once described Fascism as the political manifestation of the death drive. And I think what is happening right now in the Anglophone world and our closest vassal states is the triumph of the death drive over the rational imperialism of the neoliberal era. This is not to say that the post-War order was good; rather, the American and European ruling class is senile. They have forgotten the lessons of their early victories.

They fetishize the exercise of power for its own sake. They repeat the empty slogans that the slaughter of innocents from the air is “self-defense,” that forcing a small country to fight on for years after the peak of its military strength is a path to “peace,” that death is beautiful over there, impossible here.

I first realized this when alleged journalist Brian Williams, speaking of American missile strikes on empty Russian military installations in Syria, said: “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.’ And they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight over this airfield.”

That was during the first Trump Administration. That beauty was the worship of death. Anyone who sees beauty in a cruise missile is a death worshipping Fascist.

But one key difference between the Fascism of the 20th century and the fascism of the 21st is that the fantasy now is not one of apocalyptic conflict, but of a world remade without contradiction.

Death in 20th century Fascism was the end. But 21st century fascism has as its end a psychotic consumer fantasy that requires ecological collapse and the violent repression of any objection to its vision of a good life. 21st century fascism is a fascism of consumption and accumulation, its end is the gaudy displays of Trump Gaza, baubles, cars, golden goodies. The good life as one where you indulge in melted cheese and half-legal sex tourism. Not death in battle, but death through amusement. Not absorption into the body of the nation through eroticized violence, but absorption into the body of capital by the digitization of all aspects of life.

21st century reaction is both a backward looking phenomenon: Make America Great Again. And a futurist one: The Startup Nation. These visions are not incompatible; naked imperial aggression, theft, hyper exploitation of the periphery and the replacement of labor with ever greater amounts of capital, sustain this life for a select few and create a fantasy of it for a much larger segment of the population. The dreamers of this fantasy include the great bulk of American and European liberals, who have arrived, through their faith in progress, at the worship of a technology capable only of producing images of the past—yet another example of the Iron Law that any coherent definition of fascism including Donald Trump also includes Joseph Biden.

You can have your white picket fence life, and you can have your cryptocurrency. There are no tradeoffs. This is heaven on earth.

Because of this contradiction, the 21st century fascist speaks only ironically. But he speaks without understanding the irony of his words. The distance between rhetoric and reality does not matter in a politics of fantasy.

Moments of material contradiction require fresh technologies for the production of cultural fantasy and fresh techniques of social discipline.

And this is where generative AI comes in.

Forgetting their yesterdays

Reality is too intense for mimetic digital recording to be practicable. The colors are too vibrant, the light too varied. Most images posted online are .jpegs, a compressed image format that requires much less storage space than something like camera raw (.cr, the gold standard for photojournalists). Where .cr captures everything the camera is capable of capturing with its given settings, .jpeg algorithmically reduces the size and content of the image produced when light hits the camera sensor.

This compression happens too when you resave an image.

The compressed image is not the same image; it depicts the same things with less information. Curves become pixelated. Colors wash out. Fine details vanish. Over repeated compressions an image loses its content. This is clearest with memes. Repeated rounds of .jpeg compression—say by screenshotting and then saving the screenshot as a .jpeg—produce distinctive collapses. Text gets fuzzy and then unreadable and colors disintegrate into sheets of uniform pixel coloration. A meme that has undergone enough .jpeg compression to look noticeably different is called a ‘deep fried’ meme. Often, the fried quality of the image is part of the joke; you’ve seen it so many times that you understand what the components of the image are saying, even though that meaning is no longer necessarily legible at the level of the text.

Generative AI does a sort of .jpeg compression to common cultural images. The same way .jpeg compression eventually destroys backgrounds, context and subtleties, gen AI removes symbols from their contexts while preserving something like a recognizable, generic outline.

Almost immediately after the start of the 2023 war, pro-Israeli accounts began circulating AI generated images of Gaza’s “future”: glittering towers, white robed sheikhs, bright blue water.

These were not an attempt to imagine what life might look like in Palestine after a diplomatic settlement. These were images of the recent past in Dubai, Riyadh, and Vegas reassembled as a passable fantasy of capitalist utopia. The memories of other times, other places, were repurposed into a backwards looking futurism. It was .jpeg compression applied to a place inhabited by 2.2 million people.

21st century fascism, with its hatred of art, its bizarre online obsessions and its techno-utopian aspirations, has found the technique of production best suited to its fantasy. Endless abundance. Endless ease. All troubles forgotten. All history replaced with images of smoothly rendered power fantasies. This is the technology of forgetting. It produces cultural senility.

Generative AI is meant to rob you of history and replace it with innocence. To take from you the ability to interpret images and experiences and replace them with images from the dreams of dying billionaires. It is a project doomed to failure—by energy constraints, by the expense of extracting rare earth elements, by the tendency of heatwaves to reduce per acre crop yields.

But just because it is a dream does not keep the rest of us safe from it, these dreamers would burn us all to stay asleep another hour. We are living in their dream, you and I. The machines have not taken our mouths, as Harlan Ellison feared, but they are beginning to take our voice, and, in any case, the screams of human beings are inaudible over the hum of data center cooling systems and the howl of supersonic shells.

No words can wake the death dreamers.

The clearest example of this sort of fantasy comes from Germany. Their fascist party, Alternativ Für Deutschland, makes its campaign ads with generative AI. The one I’ve linked here was made for the regional elections in 2023, and exhorts Germans to choose the Brandenburg built by their grandparents, to choose the mass deportation of immigrants, to choose fear. To choose fantasies of families without any trouble. The life here is indistinguishable from the life of the Hoess family in Zone of Interest, (the defining film of the Biden era) but its inhabitants are incapable of hearing screams.

Where art made by human effort contains, even at its most derivative, the imprint of the individual, art produced by computer programs consists of decontextualized signifiers ripped from pre-existing forms. This is a radical experiment in compressing art until the content is squeezed out, until only the bare image remains, given its ideological imprint by the pre-existing social fantasy it summons in the viewer. There is no text, there is only reception.

It is a memory projector.

The stability of the images degrade over time. They become more fixed as cliches but move ever further from any ability to convey something beyond their own existence. The demands of training the next model mean the makers of the machine feed it its own output. Each piece of memory, each brick of art strays further and further from its ability to convey meaning, from its ability to resemble any reality that ever was. Slowly, slowly, the fantasy becomes nightmare. The nightmare becomes fantasy. The ability to distinguish the two disintegrates.

The dreamer sees a garden of earthly delights, but, possessing no ability to interpret, he sees the form of the Edenic vision—the rictus grins of fleshless skulls become the American smile. The picture flattens until the Sonderkommando photos show not a massacre but a barbecue, just men and women in a field on a summer’s day: the Brandenburg your grandparents built. The IDF butchers dressed in stolen women’s underwear become belly dancers in the neocolony of the future.

The blood in the tank treads takes on the consistency of hummus. A six-fingered hand scoops it up, shovels it into that slightly ironic smile, smears it on the meme t-shirt. A drooping visage of insatiable hunger looks down at you.

More, it says, more.

Feed it a hand grenade.

Next Week: Three short story collections: Pure Hollywood, Cheating at Canasta, Dark Lies the Island. We will elaborate on today’s topic almost endlessly. This is my thesis statement on Generative AI.

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*AI songs sound unstable, the phonetic content hesitant, uncertain. Light or life? The only light that would make this vision possible is the flash of the atom bomb.

** the identification of decaying capitalist democracy with Fascism was the central analytical error of the left from 1923-33. What we are living through is a reactionary oligarchy, it is not Fascism. It requires a different set of political tools to defeat.