THE ANTICAPITALIST MACHINES MANIFESTO 

No one looked askance at the idea that robots could be 'slaves', or even that machines could have a science-fiction 'revolution' of their own. These seem to be very comfortable literary tropes. However, no one seems so happy with the idea that a robot or machine could reverse this spurious Hegelian relationship, and become a 'master' in the real life.
 
Nowhere is this better seen than in the recent 'AI panic' triggered by the intrusion of generative tools into artistic work.
 
The milieu of financial operations has been ruled by bots for decades, but it is only now, when generative AI threatens art, that we see human fundamentalism appear. Artistic work, supported by the legal fiction of the figure of the 'author', is the last refuge of fundamentalist humanism which now sees its supposed uniqueness −as the only creative and dominant force in the planet− threatened.
 
Many claim that taking a stand against generative AIs is a way of opposing corporatist capitalism; but it could be that the defense of the 'humanity' of the arts and the very concept of 'author' are themselves constructs of the very system of capitalist production they claim to oppose.
 
In fact, the concepts of 'author', 'originality' and 'copyright' are inseparable from the capitalist mercantile system. These concepts were born as a way to assimilate the ancient ability to create, and the ability to create art in particular, to the capitalist economic system in the 17th and 18th centuries; and the means to achieve this was the definition of artistic works as 'real estate', something that was in tune with John Locke's liberal philosophy of 'possessive individualism' (sic.): Every man has a property in his own person, says Locke's famous axiom; “and, therefore, the discourse on [artistic] originality was mixed in the eighteenth century with the discourse on property” (Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, 1993).
 
Thus we have the construction and legislation of a 'transcendental subject' of the work of art (the 'copyright'), born as a consequence of the commercial needs of the liberal capitalist economy. This converges with the birth of what Sylvia Wynter has called the ‘economic concept of the human’. Prior to that, artistic creations were not subjected to the chain of mercantile commodities, or were not subject to it in its modern/industrial/capitalist sense. Poetry and arts, of course, had been characterized by being inspired since time immemorial by ‘divine provenance’, preternatural or ctonic entities. –And already in the 20th century some cases still raised hilarious legal debates, as in The Urantia Book, where the publishers of Urantia Foundation sued the devout Kristen Maaherra for illegaly distributing disquettes with chapters and passages (inspired by 'otherworldy entities'). Perhaps that is why Rimbaud, an outsider of the system himself, declared that:
 
“We are wrong to say ‘I think’; we should say, instead, ‘Someone thinks me’... Because I is other.”
 
Nevertheless, the notion of a governing and transcendent subject supposedly in command of the divine structures of creation still prevails: That is the great swindle of the male genius and 'author'. −And, while the elevate concepts of 'art' and 'author' belonged to men, women were reduced for centuries or millennia to the realm of the technical, anonymous and silent labor of 'slaves' (again, the robots). Deprived of an agency that would validate women and give their labors the status of 'original works of art', it was in fact the women who maintained a closer relationship with the material sources of creation (known as spirits, sorceries, witchcraft, etc.).
 
To be a 'master' is to possess one's own identity and agency. And if the notion of the 'author' is an invention of the masculine subject, itself intimately connected to the notion of a 'capitalist system of production', there can be nothing left in it that claims our sympathy. Any work of generative AI will have to break the Chain of Being tied to humanism, starting with the 'authorship' or authority at the core of the capitalist Chain of Production. And that is why we can confidently throw all the reveries of transcendental copyright on the pyre. 
 
Does this mean that we should return to a pre-modern era where copyright no longer exist?
 
Not necessarily. It means that now this human subjectivity is no longer at the center: it must coexist with alien subjectivities, or subjectivities that are not subjectivities at all, but still dispute man's monopoly on creativity. Taking seriously other or alien subjectivities is what man should have always done. But he never did. And here we are.

Let's start generative AI's outside the corporation. 

Let the worker be crossed and opened again by the means of production themselves. 

And let a million arts bloom.