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From: Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink>
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Subject: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2025 16:00:49 -0000 (UTC)
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AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
=================================
February 9, 2025 
Gareth Watkins

It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art
is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on
D-Day. Britain First's co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men
laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song
combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it
into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify's
global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an
ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally
ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer's Labour Party posts, then is forced to
take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic
animals. A few days later, they promised to "mainline AI into the
veins" of Britain.

The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of
the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy,
disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents
having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression,
right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year
posters to 'terrorwave'. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To
understand it, we must consider the right's hatred of working people,
its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily,
its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem
like a stretch, but bear with me.

The first point is the most obvious. 'AI'–-as embodied by large
language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image
generators like DALL-E and Midjourney–-promises to make anyone who
can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic
designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and
often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit
to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The
selling point is that their users don't have to pay (and, more
importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them,
but upon whose technical skills they'd be forced to depend. For
relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time
graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of
crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an
unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of
marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to
get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that,
when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their
utter contempt for labour?

For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not
a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw
attention to its artificiality--think the mass-produced modernism of
the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned),
or the music of Kraftwerk--AI art pretends to realism. It can produce
art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless
Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the
reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without
the need for artists.

Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants
Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly
young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he
induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to
signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his
chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for
the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram
followers.

Companies can't launch a new AI venture without their customers
telling them, clearly, "nobody wants this."

On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also
be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the
rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. 'Zuck' was
even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald
Trump. (It's worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right
he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to
later.) But even Zuck can't make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake
profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six
months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had
Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears
to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored
but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need
(cf: Microsoft's Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the
technology just isn't there. Companies can't launch a new AI venture
without their customers telling them, clearly, "nobody wants
this."

And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as
a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according
to Goldman Sachs--a figure calculated before the Trump administration
pledged a further $500 billion for its 'Project Stargate'. While
previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn't pay off, their bet on
cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly--$3.44 trillion dollars, at
the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air.
All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political
right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the
far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency
almost exclusively. This isn't just about utility, it's about
aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their
adoption of AI.

OpenAI is unable to make money on $200 subscriptions to ChatGPT.
Goldman Sachs cannot see any justification for its level of
investment. Sam Altman is subject to allegations of sexually abusing
his sister. 'Slop' was very nearly word of the year. And then, to top
it all off, the open-source DeepSeek project, developed in China,
wiped $1 trillion off the US stock market overnight.

In other words, the AI industry now finds that it needs all the
allies it can get. And it can't afford to be picky. If the only
places that people are seeing AI imagery is @BasedEphebophile1488's
verified X account--well, at least it's being used at all. The
thinking seems to be that, if it can hang on long enough in the
public consciousness, then, like cryptocurrency before it, AI will
become 'too big to fail'. Political actors like Tommy Robinson won't
be the ones to make that call, but they can normalise its use, and
Robinson certainly moves in the digital circles of people who can
offer the AI industry far more concrete help. Just as we might donate
to a GoFundMe, the capitalist class will provide mutual aid in the
form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and
attempting to normalise AI by using it. This process of normalisation
has led to the putatively centre-left Labour government pledging vast
sums to AI infrastructure. If one of the key features of the
Starmerite tendency is their belief that only conservative values are
truly legitimate, their embrace of AI and its aesthetics may be part
of this.

The capitalist class will provide mutual aid to the AI industry in
the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and
attempting to normalise AI by using it.

We have seen how sensitive the tech industry's leaders are to
criticism. Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto, when not
conferring sainthood upon deeply evil figures like Nick Land, largely
consists of its writer begging the world to love him. Mark
Zuckerberg's recent interview with Joe Rogan featured lengthy
sections on how he does not feel validated by the press and
governments. Just as when they reach out to 'cancelled' celebrities,
the right is now proactively creating an alliance with the tech
industry by communicating that, even if they can't materially support
companies like OpenAI, they can at least offer emotional support. We
may all be good materialists, but we can't underestimate the effects
that non-material support has in creating networks within capital.

No amount of normalisation and 'validation', however, can alter the
fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is
its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that
was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn't want
it. They would be repelled by it.

There was a time when reactionaries were able to create great
art--Dostoyevsky, G.K Chesterton, Knut Hamsun, and so on--but that
time has long passed. Decades of seething hatred of the humanities
have left them unable to create, or even think about, art. Art has
always been in a dialectical push and pull between tradition and the
avant garde: 'art is when there is a realistic picture of a
landscape, or a scene from Greek mythology' versus 'a urinal can be
art if an artist signs it'. The goal of the avant-garde, as their
name suggests, has been to expand art's territory, to show that
Rothko's expanses of colour, or Ono's instructional paintings, can do
what Vermeer's portraits can, and do it just as well. There was even
a time when the right partook in this, the Italian Futurists being a
prime example. There were, at one point, writers like Céline and
artists like Wyndham Lewis, who not only produced great work, but
developed and pushed forward the avant-garde styles of their day. Are
there any serious artists on the right today who do not parlay in
nostalgia for some imagined time before art was 'ruined' by Jews,
women, and homosexuals? Perhaps only Michel Houellebecq, and he is
long past his two-book prime.

The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit
in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting
political cruelty.

Art has rules--like the rules of the physical universe they are
sufficiently flexible to allow both Chopin and Merzbow to be classed
as music, but they exist, and even internet memes are subject to
those rules. The most burnt-out shitpost is still part of a long
tradition of outsider sloganeering stretching back through 60s comix
to Dada and Surrealism. They aren't nothing, and if they're ugly
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