Fundamentally, the question is what a movement needs to know and to know how to do in order to bring about the change it needs …
I am distressed by AI and tech bro fascists, intensive water and energy use, racial bias, errors, surveillance, policing, knowledge collapse, hallucinations, bioweapons, critical thinking and labour and intellectual property issues. When it comes to AI tools being used for writing, as an organiser and media maker I am further agitated: what happens to our movements if we skip over the process of thinking together?
Time is the irreplaceable stuff of relationships and relationships are the connective tissue of life. Relationships are what will give us the strength and solidarity to navigate and respond to the many, compounding and accelerating crises we face.
I’m staunch in my belief in the power of social movements and the value of social movement thought — how we learn and write together. I consider all modes we use to transmit our ideas — speeches at rallies, essays, social media posts, theatre, song or blogs — to be modes of writing. Writers and scholars have long explored the relationship between writing and thinking. Philosopher Richard Menary formulates a concept with a long history when he argues that writing is thinking. I extend on this thesis here, where I take writing and reading together to be forms of thinking together.
Open letters in solidarity with Palestine are a powerful demonstration of thinking together, with clear links between thought and action. The collection of open letters that is hosted here on the Overland site is a powerful archive of collective movement thinking. Writing together, thrashing out ideas, arguing about nuance: Do we say ‘war’? Do we say ‘Israel’? Do we say ‘genocide’? Why should we say this and not that, what do we mean, who are we speaking to, what matters most to us, what will I sign on to and what will I not sign on to? Why? These questions matter deeply. The ethics of the thinking we do together shapes the decisions we make about what we do, the actions we take and who we choose to do things with. We can open up new possibilities when we share analysis, critiques and visions for other futures with each other.
The process of editing, talking, thinking, arguing, debating, and critiquing together matters deeply to our organising. As the Building Movement Project puts it, solidarity statements can “articulate visions of co-liberation” and be “part of a sustainable, long-term, movement building strategy”.
I have a long interest in the ways in which movements — from the Black Panthers to the African Nation Congress, from la zad to First Nations justice on this continent — embody thinking together, particularly through reading groups, zines, community media and radical bookshops. Claudia First, paraphrasing Chris Wellbrook, says the role of reading groups in movements, “is the mutual transformation of both material conditions and the self”.
At the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic I collaborated with the Commons Social Change Library on the Reset Reading Group. This continent-wide reading group had six sections, from First Nations justice to Centring Justice & Care and was an opportunity to develop shared ideas and visions for a just future together.
Reading to reMAKE and The Australia Institute’s Australia’s Biggest Book Club are two similar examples of movement reading groups, which convene conversations around books to “collectively explore new ways of thinking”. As a teenager from regional Victoria, my visits to Barricade Books in its 1990s location on Sydney Road were formative. It was there that I was able to access anarchist, queer and Marxist thinking for the first time. I started publishing my own zines and got involved in community media, which was the beginning of my life’s work at the intersection of stories and organising, film, writing and movements.
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Writing is hard. Writing together is tough. It requires thinking about audiences, purpose and contesting the meanings of dominant frames, while articulating visions for and pathways towards the liberation we dream of. It takes deep attention to think through how we are reframing ideas, moving past biases and assumptions and articulating the just futures we want to create.
Another fundamental aspect of thinking together is the relationships that grow between us as we do this work. Only time spent doing things with one another stitches trust and comradeship. Time spent together setting up stalls and stages, painting banners, shouting together on the streets. Time spent arguing, thinking and learning from each other. Time spent editing shared documents, in chat groups, in online meetings, and in meetings over shared meals.
As we descend further into whatever we understand this time to be — collapse, end-times fascism, the inevitable extension of white supremacist and colonial logics — one thing is increasingly clear: we need each other more than ever. We need to trust each other, or we turn on each other. We need to be in relationship with one another, or blame will fester and scarcity set in. As many have observed, the more engaged we are with people around us, the less vulnerable we are to misinformation and polarisation. As Dublin based Social movement researcher Laurence Cox says:
What we need to know in order to make a better world — and the tools to create that knowledge, share it, take it further — comes directly or indirectly from movements for change, not from the world we are trying to overthrow.
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All of us are seeing more AI slop clog our feeds, identically designed posters for recruiting football players or seeking bar staff, the barrage of memes, wild fake images and believable fake images. Alongside this, more and more people are using AI in their writing from emails to newsletters and reports. The reduction of time spent thinking together in the collective writing of essays, emails and web copy is becoming more common. It’s also increasingly visible across event curation, programming, grant writing, project design and campaign strategy development. The logic of urgency pushes us to do things quickly and do less research, rather than take more time to slow down, think deeply, make considered ethical decisions, have debates, argue, reflect, listen to one another. What’s striking is that as we adopt these tools, few are even suggesting that they will free us up for a for a shorter working week, or important things like care work. It seems instead we’re just speeding up to do more work. As Lizzie O’Shea reflected in a conversation about this essay, we are often “internalising the concept of productivity — that more is better and faster”.
It is seductive to believe that AI tools will free us up from time-consuming and tedious tasks, and that we will be able to “get more done” and focus on the “more important” work. But what if the most “important work” is thinking together and allowing time for the hard, messy work of building relationships and trust? And focusing on the hair pulling, tiring work of re/arranging words to articulate our visions and dreams?
Freedom and efficiency are always marketed alongside technological leaps. But, just as the washing machine did not liberate women from household chores, we need to be wary of the productivity that these word guessing machines promise. What do we miss when we opt to increase our capacity for doing more work and fast track making content? What are we assuming (and trusting) about the content it generates? Are we doing higher-quality work or just going up another notch — moving faster, breaking things, missing nuance, missing each other?
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In our age of rapid-fire AI-produced content, the human ability to comprehend just cannot keep up. This has created an impossible attention imbalance. If we use AI to cut down the time it takes to write something, why should we expect someone to take so much of their human time to read it?
“‘We have to develop the capacity to listen for the signals, not the noise” my friend and artistic collaborator, David Pledger, reminds us. As AI production reaches mind-bending proportions, the sheer volume of noise is hard to fathom. At the time of writing around 500 hours of video content are uploaded to Youtube every minute — around 720,000 hours per day. At least thirty-four million images are generated every day — which is more than the number of photographs taken over the entire 150 years of photographic history up until now. No human, researcher, library or archive can contain the vast amount of content being produced at this rate. This raises concerns about quality and meaning: if we are not paying attention to what we are making, are we just producing more noise and workslop? If we engage in less critical thinking in the making of content, then we are not respecting those we want to communicate with and are just adding to the torrent of noise.
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To be clear I am not saying every social media post or press release needs to be edited by committee and involve arduous late-night meetings. Nor am I saying people should never use AI tools for any purpose.
Many people find AI useful when they are working in a language that is not their first, or if they are working with large amounts of data. AI can also be supportive for people with disabilities. However, most of the larger and most mainstream AI programs have not been purposely designed to be primarily assistive or with improving accessibility in mind. The hacks and work arounds people are finding useful with AI do not solve the structural issues of ableism and racism and in fact may further entrench them.
Rather than shrugging our shoulders and accepting that these tools are now too ubiquitous to question and here to stay, we can still make choices about if and how we engage with AI, and we must think critically about its uses, together.
A few ideas for how we engage with AI (if at all);
- Agency: We don’t have to use AI tools and can instead choose to boycott them all together. The QuitGPT campaign demonstrates that millions of people are unwilling to simply accede their critical thinking to corporate mega-tech-bros. The AI Resist List provides a database of ways to mobilise “to resist the empires of AI and to nourish visions of the future that work for all of us”. The Commons Social Change Library shares tools on How to Stop a Data Centre in Australia.
- Discernment: We must be clear about if/when we use AI tools to assist our work and what steps actually requires a human in the loop. How can we stay attuned to bias, hallucinations and ideological slippages and set up systems to check our work? Workplaces must have AI policies in place and clear conversations about how these tools are being used and checked. Workers also need clarity on how jobs are being protected from the risk of replacement by AI tools.
- Awareness: We must ask: who is developing these tools and who are they aligned with? What are their agendas? We need to be aware of the risks of allowing tech companies — who are more concerned with profit than social responsibility — shape how we communicate with each other. Machine generated content may mimic liberatory thinking, but if we are not generating it together, meeting to discuss ideas, working relationally and testing things together this will not lead us to transformative change.
- Transparency: Where we do choose to use AI tools (or are made to in our workplaces), we should be transparent about their use. We should see notes at the end of newsletters, websites, reports and publications when copy has been written by AI and clarifying notes in research about how data was managed by AI. We owe it to each other to make it clear when and how AI has been used to produce content and undertake research. If we aren’t comfortable disclosing it, then we shouldn’t be using it.
- Protection: We must demand regulation that protects the intellectual property of artists, writers and in particular Indigenous people in the data mining used to train AI models. We should also be supporting the livelihoods of artists, designers and writers by continuing to engage them and pay them for their craft instead of replacing them with content generated by the theft of their IP.
Finally, in our social movements, we must be alive to what we stand to lose when we allow machines to do work that could have instead been undertaken collectively.
When we rush to produce content without doing the tough, slow, sometimes bloody frustrating, relational work of thrashing things out together we perpetuate the urgency of capitalism. We can miss great ideas that may instead emerge slowly, after reflection, by testing things and discussing them with one another.
Most importantly, if we use the tech bros’ machines instead of doing things with each other we will miss out on deepening our connections. Relationships are integral. They fill our hearts and make us accountable to each other. Relationships are what will nourish us and enable us to build the fabric, thinking, strategic muscle and power of our social movements to face the complexities ahead, together.
This essay took far longer than I had hoped. I had to stop, read more and talk with many others to finish it. It was tedious and annoying to write — a discomfort I’ll be mindful to maintain so as not to get sucked into fast tracking completion. I’ve learnt a lot over the months of writing this and discussing these ideas with others. Thanks to Lizzie, Jinghua, Sophie, Maya, Lisa, Yoann, Rosemary, Naomi, Maya, Holly, Nelson, Tim, Jesse and David for conversations and feedback on drafts at various stages. All bad articulations of ideas and em-dashes remain mine.