charles mudede, will ai remember the days of slavery? — review
mudede's first text for e-flux is quite a bit worse than his later submissions, even if it follows a similar style of writing, a form of present critique that uses cultural media to analyze concepts around capitalism more or less every time, it consistently under-arrives even if it ocassionally wants to pass as well-restricted and cleaned out in its definitive narration style. the term under-arrival is meant quite literally here, the term slavery only appears three times in this article even if its the cruical term in the title, it arrives in the very beginning, once in the middle as a conclusion, and at the end as a passing after-statement. every single time it appears in the article, it says the exact same thing "ai fantasy is related to the wiping of the memory of atrocities such as slavery".
multiple times in this article he brackets "(more on that later)", for such a short text it makes you wonder why it isn't arriving immediately? it even makes it seem as if mudede actually is excusing his own analysis, he claims he will return to an argument later and then, worse than not appearing, it slides right back in the end, in fully self-confirmed fashion. the reason mudede seemingly does this is because he might genuienly be giving us his movie-analysis field notes and genuine political speculations rather than a coherent argumentative structure or something pre-delivered. in the appended notes to this volume, he consistently supplies relative context to the article itself, context that very much would have been needed in the actual writing. footnotes are usually either used as secondary contetxualizations or "additionalist detours", but mudede seems to be using them as a compromise between the polemic in his text and the context behind it, a compromise that doesn't make sense because his own dense referentiality collapses any polemical coherence the text would've had without the extra fluff anyways.
mudede gives us extremely important analytical fragments such as "the key line in “clear” is “clear (your behind).” it means both clear the past and free your body, or, more precisely, booty. [...] though the line “clear (your behind)” recalls a line from by funkadelic (“free your mind and your ass will follow”), the former is not about opening the mind but deleting all of its content, including its behind." theses lines not only contextualize the essay but give us a much clearer understanding of his perception of these media pieces (such as why he's analyzing the song clear – which isnt stated in the article itself, he simply uses it to argue that america's financialization and deindustrialization is connected to the detroit scene),. mudede's notes feed back into the text simply because without these associative clusters, the structure of the text in its associative form will consistently remain underdeveloped, which is much more the reason for them to not be in the form of footnotes.
mudede's strongest suit constently appears to be finding little quirks or pockets in the writing where he can create a small subsumption or hole in the argument, but the structure of his writings almost always collapses even if it attempts to lie to you that it's fixed in the end with the final conclusive statement, and this is most evident here.
in this article, there is no transition that explains why supply-side machines are important for the narrative, the analysis seems irrelevant to the larger claim and is dropped away. the actual analysis, again, arrives in the footnotes, where mudede tells us that "the robot in the factory was never about consumer leisure but rather about the struggle between capital and labor." this statement works way better than the statement that its attached to, which simply reads "it’s not about what supply-side machines have always been and will always be about (cutting labor costs) but something airy-fairy (your soul)." its understandable that mudede is attempting to piece together a coherent total narrative in this text, but that then doesnt explain why in numerous other sections he feels free to talk about epistemic invisibility and racial bias or the erasure of moral memories without tying it back to the historical origin of automation, when in fact, thats precisely what the text should be doing?
the main coherent narrative in the text is the observation that american films about ai overenunciate metaphysical questions and re-frame political motives as metaphysical (this was the only supply-side machines point, that its framed as being about losing your soul when its really about cutting labour costs) but the actual structural point behind this analysis doesnt matter, it just serves as an another example of supposed metaphysicization.
another instance happens at the end, where the narrative frame collapses around the question of ai forgetting about slavery, about ai being epistemically prejudiced about black people, and about techno utopia being too sterile, and this all happens in one breath, but the actual driving point (buolamwini -> the idea that global problems are the cultural prorogatives/choices of the powerful and not actual technical problems to solve) is reframed by mudede as "what if it did become a technical issue" but then he simply argues if that did happen, it would be reframed back into metaphysics.
thats all fine, but this five-chunk paragraph follows two paragraphs before and after it that comment on the idea of ai forgetting about slavery and are apparently supposed to suffice/answer this narrative instead? there is no actual scaffolding for this question, the metaphysicization point is clear, but the "forgetting slavery" problem simultaneously becomes "causing slavery through sterility ("racism is built into an economic system that has the exploitation of black african labor as a major part of its foundation)" but also "not caring enough about slavery even if it has solved it" whilst also being "not-so-secretly dominating the economic-political order that creates/cultivates technical reality". (which are all perfectly fair statements on their own)
meanwhile, the start of the text is talking about how the anthropologization of ai simultaneously causes hypocrisy in our vision of freedom and our requirement of a meta-god in the image of ai, which is supposed to supplant the slavery narrative (essentially that the sterility of forgetting slavery by surpassing it is mimicked by our vision of ai as a second level of freedom, one that enslaves us in our image of slavery, or one that is only Z/freed by destroying us).
its not necessarily the case that the text has bad association, on the contrary, the association is excellent, but the continuity struggles deeply. the funniest and most interesting example in the text is the following: "replace the dying android’s final words with those of the mutilated black slave in candide, and what the blade runner, deckard, would have seen (life spared, eyes blinking in the toxic rain)—and what we almost never see in the movies—is a direct link between the robot revolt led by roy batty and the long, underappreciated history of slave revolts in the us, south america, and the caribbean."
mudede clearly uses this to illustrate the way in which american movies mystify philosophical questions unrealistically without the real political tensions behind them, and mudede makes this argument clear in the next passage, but right before this passage, this point connects contentiously with his previous narrative about automation (suddenly the question goes from the economic character of capitalism to the moral question of political legitimacy in popular media).
what follows the sudden candide angle is an equally sudden departure "but what if a machine not only remembered those darkest of days but also realized how they continue to structure the capitalist global economy of our times? is such an ai possible?". this departure isn't poorly situated because of how fast it arrives (which on its own is a totally fair component of associative paragraphs) but due to how it neither offers continuity, segwaying, nor conceptual architecture to validate its move. it almost looks like mudede wanted to talk about automation but remembered halfway through that the article is supposed to be about slavery.