I’m part of the Occupy organizing committee, and one of the committee members yesterday during a call, Jerry Ashton, asked us to critique Occupy’s current website.

I took this homework assignment seriously, so today, I visited the website to consider its flaws, and then I wrote an email to Jerry. The email also included comments about AI that were inspired by a remark from another participant who seems to think that we can leverage AI. That’s a hard NO.

Here’s what I had to say to Jerry:

Celebrating is great and all — I like that notion, but we also have serious problems to address. First, we need to clarify who our enemies are, and I object to embracing AI in any form. Allow me to explain.

When Occupy descended on Wall Street, they were angry with, as we know, the financiers and big bankers. They got bailed out, while the little people, the 99%, got screwed and were left holding the bag.

The new enemies are even richer and entangled with finance, but they’re in Silicon Valley — they have specific names (Musk, Karp, Thiel, Zuck, Bezos, you get my drift). They have created an entire industry that fuels technofascist capitalism, interconnecting it with AI.

There is absolutely nothing redeeming about AI. It is wrapped up with surveillance, wars, and genocide. It cannot be harnessed for good. The data centers are environmentally toxic; they drain water and gulp enormous amounts of energy from our electrical grid. And you know what? The average person, and I’m not just referring to leftists, is pissed about these things. This could be a galvanizing concept for Occupy 2.0, or whatever we’re going to call it.

So, this notion that we can use AI for better things is absolute malarkey.

On another note, it is stealing from writers and artists. It’s a thief, and there is no accountability for how brazenly it steals from us. They are also buying tens of thousands of books from collectors, despining them in their large data centers, and destroying the books afterwards.

AI is also part of rape culture. These white men never once asked us if we even wanted AI. We had no choice. We couldn’t even say no. They simply crammed it down our throats.

I remain skeptical that AI will wipe us out, as the recent Anthropic whistleblower has warned. But I do think it will make people dumber and more apathetic, thus making them easier to manipulate and easier to control. As we both know, the road to liberation is defiance. AI runs counter to that, since it goes hand in hand with the surveillance states, wars, and genocide (we’re already witnessing how it’s used in Gaza!).

In short, AI is designed around the misogynistic, xenophobic, eugenicist fairytales of a few parasitic bunker-class white men. Period.

On another note, I think this next iteration of Occupy needs to be international in spirit, and we need to convey that on the website as well. Why would we want to limit it to the silly boundaries of the U.S.? We want to inspire people across the globe, just as we did the first time around, right?

In solidarity,

Cryn

On that note, if you are able to, I hope you can join us at Zuccotti Park on September 17th to celebrate Occupy’s 15th Anniversary! We’re going to discuss a lot of important things, and then return to our respective neighborhoods and make change happen at a hyper-local level, much in the spirt of ✨your weirdo friend✨’s Daisy Chain. Onwards!

By Cryn Johannsen
Author. Abolitionist. Antifascist.

Republished here with permission. Originally published on Cryn’s Substack.