🆕 Never Post! A.I. and New American Fascism

There we are! A bit delayed but excited to be here for you, my friends. On our episode today, Mike asks if there’s anything in the connection between fascism and the aesthetics of A.I.. And if they are connected, how are they? Is there something inherently fascistic about these technologies? Also: OPEIU Local 153 is union PROUD!

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Intro Links

• Vote for us in the Signal Awards!
• Friend.com ads backlash
• ICE looking to create social media surveillance team
• Apple and Google remove ICE tracking apps
• The bots come for Cracker Barrel

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AI and New American Fascism

• White House Posts Ghoulish AI Cartoon Showing Woman's Deportation (Huffpost)
• With Manifest Destiny art, DHS goes hard on ‘white makes right’ (LA Times)
• Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop (e-flux)
• The Other Side of the Canvas (Unpopular Front)
• Ur-Fascism (The Anarchist Library)
• In Unhinged Speech, Pete Hegseth Says He's Tired of ‘Fat Troops,’ Says Military Needs to Go Full AI (404 Media)
• Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline from Ep. 13
• Generated-ish from Ep. 22

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Thank you to Dannel Jurado for recording the Kickstarter picket.

Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

The good news
 is that things will go back to the way they were,
which is also the bad news. Meanwhile, I cut
 an onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine

reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire
 congratulates itself on persisting again. No, thank you,
I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished
 mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven’t said enough

goodbyes to—oh, what was her name? And hers?
 How many We’s did they cut out of me? And whose country
was I standing on, the last time we survived? 

Excerpt of Celebrate Good Times, by Franny Choi

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I am producer Georgia, filling in for Mike here in the intro and news segment of this lovely episode. And I am unafraid to say that we have a scintillating, sensational, and frankly, seismic episode for you. Today, Mike takes a closer look at the idea that artificial intelligence is the new aesthetic of fascism, specifically new American fascism. And what does that relationship mean for us?

Why do we feel like we have to connect those two things? Mike wonders at all of this in search of an answer. But before you hear any of that, it's time to listen to some ads. I know. I know.

Unless you're on the member feed. At which point, don't worry about it, baby. You're good. No ads for you. But when we return, we're gonna talk about some stuff that's happened in the world since you've last heard from us.

And just like that, I'm back. I've got four stories for you. If you live in New York City, chances are you've seen the subway ads for friend.com, the latest attempt by the tech world to make the plot of the movie Her a reality. Friend presents itself as just that, your friend. If your friend was an AI chatbot that never challenges you or asks you any hard questions, friend takes the form of a simple white necklace with a little bobble hanging off of it that will text text you throughout the day stuff like, I'll never bail on dinner plans.

Yikes. But as the New York Times reports, the subway ads have been the subject of a lot of backlash. A bunch of them have since been scrawled over with messages about how AI will never be there for you and how you should make actual human friends. Some of the ads have just been ripped down entirely. The 22 year old founder of friend.com has spun this as proof that he's doing, quote, unquote, big things.

But I personally hope it's nothing but a memetic flash in the pan and that friend is quickly forgotten. Who? ICE, enforcement brutes who are currently tearing my city apart, is looking to build out a twenty four seven social media surveillance team. The idea is to hire a team of 30 contractors to scour through social media profiles and create dossiers of individual people's data. Then, these contractors will send that information to ICE agents who will use it as a justification to imprison or deport any person they so choose.

This team would fulfill the needs of two of the biggest ICE targeting centers. One in Vermont, which handles most of the ICE cases in the Eastern US, and one in California, which covers the West Coast. These social media surveillance contractors are meant to work around the clock, seven days a week, providing ICE agents with an endless stream of information. Now beyond the obvious terror that this suggests, there are also concerns about the abuse of power by this surveillance team. As Del Cameron writes in Wired, quote, contractors are barred from creating fake profiles, interacting with people online, or storing personal data on their own networks.

All analysis must remain on ICE servers. Servers. Past experience, however, shows such guardrails can be flimsy, honored more in paperwork than in practice. May I be the first to say, speaking of ICE, both Apple and Google have banned ICE tracking apps from their app stores. For iPhone users, the app ICEBLOCK, which helps people report ICE activity, has been axed.

That then led both Apple and Google Play to remove Red Dot, another app that offers the same service. Google told four zero four Media that it, quote, removed the app because ICE is considered vulnerable group that had been targeted in recent violence.

I'm scared.

And now to change the vibe completely, Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain briefly changed their logo from its more down home home brand that you know and love to a sans serif monstrosity, and the graphic design inclined among us lost their minds online. Or did they? Gizmodo reported reported that apparently, a good chunk of the online hate lobbed at the old country store was the product of online bots. Peak metrics took a sample of 52,000 posts from Twitter that were made within twenty four hours of Cracker Barrel's rebranding announcement and found that 44.5% of those posts were flagged as likely or higher bot activity.

It got even worse once people started posting about boycotting Cracker Barrel. Of the 1,000 posts in that twenty four hour timeline that mentioned a boycott, 49 were dinged as likely coming from accounts. Real people were also mad about this, but the bots helped push things over the edge, leading the purveyor of highway exit biscuits and gravy to return to their original branding. Now riddle me this. Do Twitter bots dream of electric hash browns?

And that's all the news I've got for you this week. In this week's episode, Mike traverses the overlapping worlds of AI, aesthetics, and fascism. But first, on 09/26/2025, 85% of Kickstarter United members voted to authorize a strike beginning Thursday, October 2 at 8AM, unless management reached a fair contract agreement. Yesterday, October 7, six days into the strike, they took to the streets. And in our interstitials this week, we're heading to the picket line.

We deserve better. So be out for six months negotiating a contract. A contract that says what? Affordability. That says what?

Fair pay. Because that's why we're here to stand up against the Boston and their Boston.

Yes. Yes.

New York City is a union town. Banner stuff, we are reminded of that it is labor. It is labor that took us from a seven day work week to a five day work week. And it is labor that's gonna take us

I've seen this idea around a lot lately, one that proposes some link between artificial intelligence and new American fascism. An Atlantic headline from this month reads, AI and the rise of techno fascism in The United States. Back in February on New Socialist, AI, the new aesthetics of fascism. There's resisting AI, an anti fascist approach to artificial intelligence, a book published by Bristol University Press in 2022. There's AI beauty standards, fascism, and the proliferation of bot driven content, a paper in the journal AI and Society from this year.

The editors of the literary theory magazine n plus one write, quote, when we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media guyer that everyone admits is making life worse. We hand over our autonomy at the very moment of emerging American fascism, end quote. On social media, Reddit posts titled generative AI is a tool of fascism.

Do AI bros realize that if anything, they are the ones that enable fascism and not us? And AI and fascism, a love story. On Blue Sky, it cannot be stressed enough that AI art is the aesthetic of modern day fascism. I used to be wary of the whole AI is the aesthetics of fascism thing, but now I'm pretty sure that's right. Fascism hates creativity because fascism is unable to create anything, which is why all fasc bros love AI.

And on YouTube, a litany of videos, the link between Nazis, fascism, and AI art with an asterisk for the a in Nazis. Fascists love terrible AI art. Here's why. AI fascism, how Trump and the far right turned AI into a weapon against democracy. What I wonder is if the connection between artificial intelligence and fascism, new American fascism specifically, is necessary.

Is there something inherently fascistic about these technologies as many of these takes and headlines seem to suggest? Or barring that, have the aesthetics of generative AI become inextricably associated with the current American regime? I wonder this earnestly. I don't actually know as I sit down to write this where I'm gonna end up, but it's this question that I'm gonna try to answer in this segment. But why, you may wonder, engage in this exercise?

Does it really matter? Is there anything we can do? And I think both of those questions are kind of questions that I wanna answer. I mean, on top of the fact that, like, you know, I'm I'm interested in meaning generally and how it's made. I'm interested in power and how it's maintained, especially through art and media, which help create shared meaning.

So if there's something inherently authoritarian about generative AI, it's instructive in either of those cases. And if there isn't, then maybe there's some surprising retributive uses of the technology currently clouded, let's say, by the associations that we surveyed just a few seconds ago. To borrow and to misapply a phrase from Audre Lorde, we may ask, are these masters tools? Before we begin in earnest, there are a few things that I wanna stipulate. One, the headlines and posts above concern a broad set of AI applications, but they do focus mostly on generative AI images, which means we will too.

LLMs and DOGE's AI powered gutting of the American federal government staff are all related, but those forms of AI are not our direct concern in this segment. Two, yes, AI is inherently violent in that the data centers powering it are implicated in countless ecological concerns. So too are many other things we do not label inherently fascist. Plus, I'm sort of just interested in maintaining a narrow focus on aesthetics for better or worse. And finally, we could argue about whether what is happening in The United States right now is in fact fasc ism, but we won't, for now.

We're gonna recognize, that many people's day to day experiences in The US evoke living in a fascist state, and that's enough to proceed. We're gonna revisit this idea at the very end of this segment. Okay. So is there something inherently fascistic about using models trained on large datasets of copyrighted works built by high valuation Silicon Valley tech companies to make pictures of, you know, whatever you want, anything you can imagine. The discourse suggests that the answer is absolutely.

Let's look at some of the cases for why. Chief amongst them are the fact that the American Departments of Homeland Security and Justice as well as the president himself, his cabinet members, and other high level appointees use generative AI to create, and then share via official government social media accounts images that further their politics and policies. These images often evoked or directly reference, if not fascistic, then certainly white supremacist imagery. Dominican migrant Virginia Bassora Gonzales's arrest was rendered via AI as a Studio Ghibli animation frame and posted by the White House to x. The US DHS has posted various generated images of paintings showing uncle Sam or white settlers on the American frontier with captions like, remember your homeland's heritage.

In its recruitment efforts, the DHS has published content which appears is AI generated. For example, an image of uncle Sam standing at a crossroads with signs pointing in the direction of cultural decline, invasion, and homeland under the banner join ice now. The Southern Poverty Law Center says this complex of references, quote, reflects an escalating trend in American immigration enforcement toward overt use of white nationalist and anti immigrant myths to recruit personnel and justify departmental operations. This all may fall under what scholar Kate Crawford has termed AI slopaganda, quote, a reconstituted AI mash made from stock photos, commercials, Reddit, and Pinterest. Just add water, end quote.

Or what Mitch Theriault writing for The Drift called agit slop, quote, brain dead detournement, far flung images and quotations drained of life and ground into a soylent like slurry to be shoveled indifferently into the gaping maw of the viewer, reader, absorber, end quote. All of it spewing endlessly into your feed, flooding the zone. But claiming this makes generative AI images, the aesthetic of fascism feels nonetheless a little bit hasty to me, like claiming oils are fascist because Hitler was a painter or that Roman ruins and statuary are fascistic because of Mussolini's or Twitter's obsession with them. See our segment on the matter. I'll put a link in the show notes.

True. Both the Nazi and Italian fascist parties had strong visual aesthetics defined by starkness, rigidity, arrangement, and subservience, what Susan Sontag calls orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets on the German side, and as John Gantz describes it, a kind of absurd fusing of modernism and kitsch on the Italian side. But the use of generative AI, thus far at least, hasn't really resulted in such a strong singular set of iconography. It's just mountains of slop looking like anything. Everything, really.

We could take another approach and consider the, collaborative relationship between the US government and the AI industry. OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT and ChatGPT Gov, ex creators of Grok, are both working pasty, decaying hand in hand with the administration. The Mussolini quote that fascism should be more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power is likely apocryphal, but nonetheless, he did discuss the necessity of the fascist state controlling, assisting, and even managing industry in the maintenance of total state power. And anyone out there who reads the charts that come across their feed knows that tech generally and AI specifically is the American industry at the moment. Several of the pieces referenced at the top of this segment also put forth the idea that if you're already predisposed to the dehumanization of others Or even if you're just kind of a dick, the affordances of generative AI might align with your worldview.

You don't need to pay or even interact with artists. The machine won't ever tell you no or say that your ideas are stupid or racist. Plus, you can soak up to your chin in an endless regurgitated past, a warm chunky jacuzzi of times gone by. You can generate as many Roman centurions and paintings as you like, especially on the $200 a month plan. And thank god, never once have to interact with someone who might be poor or queer.

All of this is guilt by association, almost, circumstantial rather than making a case that there's something inescapably, intrinsically fascistic about generative AI. Some of the videos and essays that I mentioned at the top of this segment do try to take on the question of direct relation to varying degrees of success, and there's a character that appears again and again in their reasoning. And that character is a real guy whose name was Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was a German Jewish critical theorist who fled Germany during Hitler's rise to power. He died by suicide on the French Spanish border on his way to Portugal where he hoped to flee to The US when the Franco government of Spain announced that it would be deporting refugees of which he was one.

His brother was killed in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp two years later. I can see why people continually bring up Benjamin. I do think his thought is really useful in approaching this series of questions, just not normally in the way that it's used. Benjamin's most well known work was published while he was in exile in Paris five years before his death. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, as it's called in its second draft, discusses how art, media, and culture change when artworks are mass produced.

His focus is largely on a new technology at the time, film and cinema, and how they can be used to organize and organize the perceptions of the masses. What withers in the age of technological reproducibility of the work of art, Benjamin writes, is the latter's aura. This concept, aura, is the one most seized upon both generally when discussing this essay and specifically when discussing how AI generated works may evince some inherent fascism. The line of thinking goes like this. A physical work of art is significant because of what it has literally, meaning physically, historically, been through.

This is what gives it aura. So artworks endlessly reproduced by technology lack the authenticity granted them by a singular physical presence, and therefore, they lack aura. But fascism is unconcerned with a lack of aura insofar as it represents a kind of truth or respect for the fact of existence. Fascism will happily traffic reproduction to further its heinous aims. Ergo, AI generated images meaningfully lacking in aura and authenticity because they are endlessly reproduced must therefore be fascist.

This isn't really what Benjamin is saying. And even if it was, I don't think it's necessarily right. I don't think it's wrong to say that Benjamin's ideas provide us with a way to look at the political, potentially fascistic uses of generative AI, but I don't know if it's entirely through aura that we should do that. And I don't really know if aura helps us say anything about the inherent nature of a specific technology, especially not now in 2025. Benjamin was writing in the nineteen thirties, nearly a hundred years ago, at a time when highly reproducible works and the cult of audience, as he wrote, that they captured were relatively new.

He was writing before popular culture existed as such, before mass media had a consistent referent. Today, the lack of aura in artworks has become a kind of almost de facto standard. Books, music, television, video games, movies, which we're gonna talk more about later, YouTube videos, anything on the Internet, really, they're all copies with no meaningfully accessible original. In the narrow case of their endless reproducibility, at least, AI images are no different from podcasts, which are not often described as inherently fascistic. But there are a few other thoughts of Benjamin's we may turn to in addition in an attempt to answer the question, if some medium does essentially aid fascism, how might it do that?

We're gonna take a quick break, and then when we're back, more Benjamin.

When say union, you say power. Union. Power. Union. Power.

Power. Power. When I say worker, you say power. Worker. Worker.

Worker. Worker.

Okay. Thank you. We have another speaker for you. Tremlin Griffith, president of the New York City

Central Labor Council is here. I would love to welcome him up. Say a few words.

I have two very, very quick messages. The first is thank you. Thank you for standing up. Thank you for standing together. Thank you for standing strong.

Thank you for standing united. Now I'm gonna say something that is not fair. It is not fair that you have to do this. It is not fair that you have to be here now. It is not fair that you have to go on strike for what you want.

But brothers and sisters, the fight that you are in is the fight for every worker to raise standards on every contract. Every victory moves us forward. Every victory moves working people on. Because we know it is not a complicated thing to ask for good wages and scheduling. That is not about numbers on a piece of paper.

It's not about profit. It's about the very lives that you live. We do not we do not live to work. We work to live. We say, hell no.

Not not tomorrow. So thank you. The second message is sisters and brothers, you are not alone. There are 1,000,000 members of unions who are standing with you. And even as I say that, I know I know that sometimes it's hard to feel, but we have so much in common.

And I would just ask, maybe you could help me show this, sisters and brothers. So can I ask, do you know somebody who lives paycheck to paycheck? If you do, raise your hand. Raise your hand. Keep those hands up.

Do you know somebody who's worried about paying their rent next month? Do you know somebody who's worried about retiring? Do you know somebody who's worried about health care? Yes. We all know these people.

And sisters and brothers, if your hand is not in the fist yet, put your hand in a fist because I am with you. We are with you today, tomorrow, as long as it takes for you to get the contract that you deserve. Thank you.

Benjamin writes, quote, it has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come, end quote. Art and artists imagine new worlds ahead of their necessity, while technology recreates the existing world over and over and over again, and furthermore insists that people adapt themselves, adapt their perceptions, adapt their reactions to its output. By becoming an audience, people attain a cursed kind of freedom within very narrow boundaries. This is a feeling that's maybe relatable to a lot of us thinking about, say, TikTok. A technology which over the last very short amount of time, many of us have bent and shifted our lives to accommodate.

Benjamin was concerned with the creation and maintenance of masses through the media, both how they may be controlled, but also how they may be loosened to resist control. He declared famously that fascism seeks to give the masses expression, but nothing else, thus compacting those masses into a frenzied block. No rights, no change in property relations, just feelings of power and feelings of dominance through available imagery. No actual political agency is granted. No self determination is awarded.

Only a mighty force and its puppets. This, I think, may get us closer to an inherent link between slop and fascism. Generative AI awards one an intoxicating kind of ability to render the whole world and more in images free from any of the cost or consequence or consideration for what manually making those images entails. It confuses and maybe even fuses the role of creator and audience, awarding a kind of freedom and so also a kind of power, but, again, only very narrowly. The technology's output is illustration without illustrator, painting without painter, video without camera.

The prompter is powerful, but only within the narrow bounds of the software's capability. They take action without agency, For one is always ultimately at the mercy of the software, the model, the platform, the black box playing at remove a complex probability game to give you what it thinks is right. The infinite intern providing the world's most content y content for your continuous approval and entertainment. This process is always, always, always by its very design, an endless recreation of the already existing world. Fully generated works are notably not copyrightable.

Not yet, at least. No property relations are created. Certainly, none are changed. Benjamin writes of the Italian futurists, a fascist art movement which celebrated war, machinery, speed, engines, metal, and industry for all of the force and fervor and upset that they felt they represented. They celebrated, they thought, an upheaval, but in fact, practiced a kind of subservience to both literal and figurative machinery of a violent oppressive state.

Humberto Eco, in his essay Er Fascism, writes of the irrationality of fascism, how it depends on, quote, the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before or without any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation, end quote. Benjamin writes of the still machines of a depressed economy under fascism, reanimated in the only way that does not empower the workers operating them. Only war, he writes, makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technological resources while maintaining property relations, end quote.

It's hard to hear this and not think today of ChatGPT, of Grok, of DHS recruitment posters warning of invasions, and really of Palantir. But they're a bit tangential to our narrow focus because I don't think you can use Palantir to generate a racist Studio Ghibli frame. One can imagine a DOJ bureaucrat wrapped in the glow of the prompting screen negotiating with a robot that only knows the past and not really considering if it even makes sense to Ghiblify a state department detention, not stopping to wonder if it sends the right message to depict the president as Apocalypse Now's lieutenant colonel Kilgore while threatening, quote, war on Chicago. The response, one also imagines, to these wonders are the same and the same as asking what government officials mean when posting images reminiscent of white nationalist artwork from two centuries ago or pictures of the president as the pope, and that response is lull. To paraphrase Sartre from anti Semite and Jew, they're amusing themselves.

Only their adversary is obliged to communicate responsibly. They are taking action for action's sake. The overall aesthetic as such becomes one of cruelty and subservience to a power which is adored above all else. Submissiveness, dehumanization, adoration of authority all become more palatable when the world is nothing but an array of images. Human beings become paper dolls to be collaged, accessorized, cut up, and crumpled, placed in their little play dioramas, and made to dance for yucks.

The world is made media in this fact. It becomes unreal, distant, or entirely absent, something society has been reckoning with vis a vis the Internet for a while now, but which finds new urgency in the age of AI. This is at least partially a concern related to aura. And so far as what aura connotes is the fundamental significance of something which has been created and has a physical existence, be that a work of art or a human being. But it's also a question of agency, of what actions are taken and by whom and how these facts impact material conditions.

This defines the use of generative AI more than their look in my mind. The method of their creation, endless, effortless, endlessly, and effortlessly costly, a process which exhibits an undeniable eeriness in the sense theorist and critic Mark Fisher wrote of it. Fisher wrote of the weird and the eerie as a pair of affects that exemplify the often mysterious circumstances of contemporary life. The weird speaks to, quote, a presence, that which does not belong, end quote. Like Lovecraft's interjection of unknowable otherworldly entities into New England.

But the eerie speaks to, quote, a failure of absence or a failure of presence. When there is something present where there should be nothing or there is nothing present where there should be something, end quote. Capitalism, Fisher argues, is a fundamentally eerie force. The famously invisible hand of its markets bend, shift, and pull at all aspects of our lives. The eerie, Fisher writes, is ultimately tied up with questions of agency.

It's unclear, in other words, who is acting and how? Who is acting and how when generating images using AI is murky at best. The person writing the prompt, the software, the software developers, the model, and its source material are all implicated in ways that we don't yet share a comfortable understanding of. The eerie is conceptually downstream of an uninhibited machinic generation, the costs of which are deeply buried or subsidized by the most vulnerable of us and made invisible or barely visible, artists by the use of their works as training data, the general population by its exposure to the environmental impacts of the data centers which power the technology, to name two such examples. The lack of aura in generative AI images is a symptom, not a cause of a celebration of engines, metal, and industry, action for action's sake, the output of which altogether forms a media complex that is additionally deeply eerie and furthermore hauntological, Fisher's term for a past that invades and inescapably suffuses the present.

The question, though, is if these things are aesthetic. I'm not sure, to be honest. I don't think so. Overall, the aesthetic of new American fascism and its posts remain as incoherent as its attempts at governing and statecraft and economic policy and staffing and so on and so forth. Ghiblify to photos next to cinematic film stills, next to portraits, next to nineteenth century landscape portraiture, next to mid century jingoism, next to jib jab style paper doll deepfakes, next to seventies era graphic design, it's all a perpetual stew of every visual element of some political import over the last 200 leading to a brand that's only identifiable via the most vague affect, a desire to be seen as powerful.

And so they adopt the more general aesthetic of generated works, something between trend surfing and the kind of oblique know it when you see it qualities we discussed previously in the generated ish segment. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But the big question is, have the architects of new American fascism exerted so much power in creating and disseminating these types of images that their visual characteristics, however broad they may be, have become unquestionably theirs. When I see a generated image, do I think, regardless of context, of a particular authoritarian regime, similar to how I might when encountering silver on black or the work of the Italian futurists? Not yet, I don't.

But there's still time, and there remains the chance that such associations could be wrestled back out of their grasp. Throughout much of the work of art, Benjamin formulates a nascent kind of media theory around film and cinema, a significant technological development of his time, the foremost exemplar of reproduction without original, and a medium employed to great notoriety by fascists. The films, The Victory of Faith and Day of Freedom, Our Armed Forces, both directed by Lenny Riefenstahl, Hans Vestmar, a fictionalized biography of Nazi martyr Horst Vessel. Hitler Jungkook Kex produced by Carl Ritter and released in The US as Our Flag Leads Us Forward, and more are all third Reich films which would have been released around the time Benjamin was working on his various versions of the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility. Filmmaking, Benjamin thought, had been captured by capital.

And rather than being a tool for workers to build solidarity to understand, quote, themselves and therefore their class, it was used to mollify and compact the masses subjected to it and entranced by it. The same is true of film capital in particular as of fascism in general, Benjamin writes. A compelling urge toward new social opportunities is being clandestinely that. And we're so technology that provides new social opportunities from the grips of capital, from the controlling grasp of the property owning minority in the long term. In the face of an aestheticized politics, the only choice, Benjamin says, is to politicize aesthetics, to turn art for art's sake into a revolutionary force of art for humanity's sake.

This was perhaps arguably and not entirely, but meaningfully accomplished with film, which in the last hundred years has joined literature and painting as an art form widely understood is capable of laying bare some aspect of the human condition even while also bringing us things like Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania. Can the same thing happen with generative AI? Can it be rescued from capital to become a revolutionary force of art for humanity's sake? Or maybe the more practical version of this question is, does anybody want to try to rescue it? Is anybody even interested in doing that?

Kate Crawford writes that building such alternatives for generative AI, quote, would demand the fundamental transformation of existing technical and economic arrangements, alternative energy systems, cooperative ownership models, and cultural protocols that resist algorithmic ingestion. The question that remains is whether we will choose to embrace slop or cultivate desire for something else entirely, Cultural forms moving beyond synthetic reproduction oriented toward flourishing rather than extraction, toward ecological regeneration rather than a hypermetabolic state of exhaustion and breakdown. A tall order, for sure, and perhaps the answer to one of our questions. Is generative AI the aesthetic of new American fascism? No.

But it could become so if we let it, if we want it to. And maybe some portion of us want it to. From one perspective, the anti AI one, to be clear, there is some utility in letting the generated ish aesthetic become twinned with the architects of the current American state and their cronies. To the degree that one will ever be able to confidently identify the output of this technology, that output could then always bring to mind this cohort of bumbling, calamitous strongmen, the de architects of American visual culture, to say nothing of the culture itself. Or slop to become this administration's silver on black or this administration's Stalinist socialist realism, it might halt what waning momentum it retains, being seen to signal and in no small way create the reality that new American fascism seeks.

Which brings us finally back to another question raised at the top of this segment. Is what is happening right now fascism in fact? I don't think so, but it's not for lack of trying. I do genuinely believe that The United States is simply too large and too diverse for fascism to take total hold. This is not to say that there will not be and has not already been misery and suffering on a large and completely unnecessary scale while various members of the administration and the corporate class with whom they've partnered consolidate their power.

What this group is arguably best at is posting. This is a government by, for, and of posters. They excel at a particular kind of public performance, not delivering a coherent message, not inspiring adoration nor dedication, not, I don't think, in Benjamin's terms, compacting masses, at least not the degree to which other fascist movements have been able to. They are good at gaining and maintaining attention, but not many of the things that usually follow once one has it. One need only see Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on stage fulminating at the country's collected military personnel to be disabused of the notion that our leaders have requisite amounts of charisma capable of being meaningfully weaponized.

They are knowledgeable about, maybe even obsessed with, the media. How it's made, how it's useful, the social and economic position it occupies, and the power it commands. Slop, sludge, slopaganda, and agit slop included. They are posters at heart more so than they are leaders. They would appear to put more effort, effort into creating the appearance of a fascist state, a state itself all about appearances, than anything beyond that.

It's perhaps that they don't know there's a step beyond this one. It's perhaps they don't care. It's perhaps they don't know how to progress their project past this stage. It's perhaps that they are always just on the verge of figuring it out. But what remains is that slop and the technology that powers it is indeed one of the most used tools in their box.

Hegseth himself on stage said, this urgent moment requires more troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriot missiles, more submarines, more b 21 bombers. It requires more innovation, more AI in everything and ahead of the curve, more cyber effects, more space, more speed. Here is American action for action's sake, a celebration of war, speed, and machinery, betraying a subservience to the very same in the absence of application, strategy, ideas to be implemented somewhere beyond the cameras and feeds and group chats. I wonder the degree to which artificial intelligence is not a tool of this administration, but a crutch for a group of people who otherwise don't really know how to do much of anything, really, except push ups and lie. Perhaps it would not be easy.

Perhaps no one really wants to do it. But what happens when you find a way to take away that crutch? Would they not stumble?

That is the show we have for you this week. We'll be back here in the main feed on October 22. This show simply would not exist without the member community that we have. And for that, I have to say, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. We are unimaginably fortunate to have such a supportive and incredible community of members. And it's honestly because of you that we are able to do what we do. If you'd like to become a NeverPo's member for as little as $4 a month, you can do so at neverpo.st. And if that's a bit too much to manage in the choppy waters of modern life, you can also tip us a one time any dollar amount, which I will personally promise to spend on retiling the bathroom of the Gothic castle in which I reside.

Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton Hey, that's me and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. And the show's host is Mike Rugnetta. The good news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news.

Meanwhile, I cut an onion and it's onions all the way down. And that's a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire congratulates itself on persisting again. No. Thank you. I'm stuffed.

I couldn't possibly have more hope. I haven't finished mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven't said enough goodbyes to, oh, what was her name and hers? How many wheeze did they cut out of me? And whose country was I standing on the last time we survived?

That's an excerpt from Celebrate Good Times by Frannie Choi. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.