Crackpots #90: Cybernetics, Hacktivism, and the Hidden Dwarves who Play Chess (Patreon)

This week's edition of Crackpots comes to us from Joshua Citarella, an artist and internet culture writer. He is the host of Doomscroll. He appeared on TrueAnon episode 425 and wrote Crackpots #33.

*****

Everytime I open X, the everything app, I see some new clip of a tech CEO gleefully describing the ways in which they plan to wreck society. In particular, Palantir’s Alex Karp, has a strange affect of excitement in his voice. It gives viewers the distinct impression that he genuinely takes pleasure in causing other people’s misery.

The rise of the tech-right is one of the most significant shifts in recent American politics. On the liberal center, it marks a definitive end to the Obama-era notion that more online speech would somehow result in more democracy. On the left, it has spurred a neo-Luddism that now takes shape in the growing wave of anti-AI protests and the populist backlash to data centers. 

In this newsletter, I’d like to explore three lesser known topics related to left politics and technology that have been at the forefront of my own thinking over the past few months; cybernetics, hacktivism and the hidden dwarves who play chess.

In the early 1970s, Chilean president Salvador Allende hoped to develop the nation’s predominantly agrarian economy into a stronghold for socialist industry. To accomplish this ambitious task, he enlisted the help of an esteemed computer scientist and business consultant named Stafford Beer. Through advanced mathematics and elaborate planning, Beer devised a system of relays and production methods that could be overseen from a centralized control center, basically a fanfic replica of the USS Enterprise from the original series of Star Trek.

Cybersyn, as the project was aptly named, would use the cutting edge theories of cybernetics to coordinate state-managed industries in real time. In contrast to the existing Soviet model, orchestrated from the top-down, Beers’ system would utilize forms of bottom up feedback, from workers and factories, to reach a harmonious equilibrium. Beneath these grand designs was an important glimmer of hope — that advanced computers could help us to realize socialism in new and previously unimaginable ways.

Sadly, the utopian aims of Cybersyn were never brought to fruition. While many of its key assumptions were directionally correct, regarding complex calculations and the allocation of resources, the computational power available in the 1970s proved vastly inadequate for such a tremendous task. For perspective, today’s iPhone 16 is over a thousand times more powerful than the combined strength of the most advanced computers of that time.

Most importantly, the CIA got one whiff of a South American socialist legitimately winning a democratic election and promptly organized a murderous coup. After a military overthrow, on September 11th of 1973, they installed one of the most repressive dictators in world history; Augusto Pinochet. Never forget.

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly working on a research paper that documents an important but poorly understood period of internet culture. “Redpilling and the Origins of /pol/” is a long form case study that cites primary sources to show where and when online aesthetics became attached to far right politics. Primarily, the article focuses on the emergence of right-wing extremist voices out of 4chan but this research has also meant revisiting the largely forgotten history of Anonymous.

For the Zoomers, Anonymous was a hacktivist collective that first gathered on the /b/ “random” board of 4chan. In the late 2000s to early 2010s, the group was characterized by a variety of trollish pranks that slowly escalated to much more serious political actions. In 2008, Project Chanology was an online protest movement against the Church of Scientology. This included denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, spam faxes and eventually culminated into a mass effort to get the Church of Scientology's tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS.

In the following years, Anonymous would use these and similar swarm-tactics against Stormfront (a white supremacist website), Fox News (also a white supremacist website), other Christian nationalist groups, and finally major financial companies like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. Anonymous’ online attacks would cripple the profits or altogether shut down these companies for days at a time. During Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous even doxxed NYPD officers who used excessive force against protestors. It’s a fascinating and mostly forgotten period of online activism. Beneath these clever strategies was an important aspiration of the time — that decentralized networks could challenge powerful structures in new and previously unimaginable ways.

Strangely, these historic examples of leftwing hacktivism were occurring at the very same time that far right discussions began to unfold on other parts of 4chan. In this early period of internet culture, there was a rising optimism about the potential for a new mass politics through online activity. However, as early as 2011, Palantir and others began to assess crowdsourcing websites, specifically WikiLeaks, as a national security threat. Soon, cyber security was heavily integrated into both state and corporate structures. Many of Anonymous' activities eventually led to arrests and prison sentences.

The left’s relationship to technology has always been highly fraught. Tech is both a source of social domination and exploitation—from the early assembly line to today’s platform economies—but it also represents our means of liberation. Technology increases the productivity of labor which in turn creates the material surplus that would allow for socialism. 

I recently spoke with Professor David Harvey who reminded me that “Individual capitalists working to maximize their profit rate push technological innovations that diminish the role of labor. And if labor is the source of value, it also diminishes the value that is circulating in society. The result is that individual capitalists are destroying the basis of capitalism.” This is the core crisis that a Marxian analysis of political economy can reveal. Harvey continues, “If that's the case, then someone has to step in and save capitalism from the capitalists.”

Historically, this has meant massive state interventions, by figures such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John Maynard Keynes, to manage the contradictions of a capitalist economy. But today, on the threshold of AI, we have no such FDR figure in sight. Our current political instability and kleptocracy gives me little hope for the comprehensive state intervention that will soon be required. More troublingly, far sinister applications of this technology can already be seen elsewhere.

In her celebrated film, Mechanical Kurds (2025), director Hito Steyerl documents the lives of micro workers living in refugee camps in Northern Iraq. Most of the film’s subjects had settled in the area during the early 2010s, near the start of the Syrian civil war. By the 2020s, tech companies had found their way to the region in search of cheap labor and an exploitable workforce.

The film’s subjects are employed by a variety of tech, AI and data firms. Shielded by various subsidiaries, the workers may not know the true identity of their employers. Their daily tasks consist of annotating images, recognizing traffic signs, identifying objects, something like an advanced version of CAPTCHA codes.

In practice, these workers were training the machine vision algorithms that would allow for self-driving cars. Their human ability to recognize certain patterns and objects would inform the autonomous vehicles’ traffic movements and, most importantly, teach them to avoid pedestrians. This piecemeal digital work earned the workers a little over $200 a month. It wasn’t luxurious but it was enough to live on. Beneath these monotonous tasks was an unstated trade off — that compiling this data would eventually result in a technology that benefitted and uplifted everyone.

The film takes its name from an historical reference that dates back to the 1770s; the Mechanical Turk. This was one of the world’s very first automated devices, designed to play chess against a human opponent. A robotic human figure, seated at a giant desk, would take turns playing rounds of the game. Under the table, visible gears and mechanisms churned with each motion as the primitive android moved pieces across the board. Famously, the Mechanical Turk was so advanced that it even defeated grand strategists like Napoleon Bonaparte.

In the 1850s, nearly a century later, it was revealed that under the desk of this seemingly autonomous robot was a concealed dwarf or little person who was just really fucking good at chess. When it was time for the robot to make a move, the pilot simply cranked the gears and made all of the robot's decisions for him. 

It's not surprising that aristocrats and members of the royal court would believe that their machines could yield such miraculous outcomes. Or that they would choose to overlook the literal inner workings of exploitation and degradation. (Seriously, imagine being the actual guy in this cramped little box and having to listen to some multi-generational inbred duke marvel at the intelligence of a robot while you quietly do all the work.) With zero traces of irony, this same job title is still used by Amazon MTurk to crowdsource menial digital tasks, like data entry or machine learning, to a global marketplace of low-paid precarious gig workers.

In Mechanical Kurds (2025), Steyerl brings these absurdist fantasies into the shockingly real and present day. The same machine vision technology that the workers had helped to train was rapidly adopted and integrated into autonomous drones. These tools, which had first allowed self-driving cars to identify and avoid pedestrians, now became the targeting algorithm of killer drones. Soon, these drones were deployed onto people within the very same territory. All technology is dual purpose. It can be used to save lives or to eliminate them. 

Over the past few months, these few stories of Cybersyn, Anonymous and the Mechanical Turk, have stuck in my mind as I try to think through the current crisis of AI and automation. Maybe it's a coincidence or maybe it's something deeper. In each example, there is a glimmer of optimism that ends in failure. Each time a new tool crops up, we have the hope that it could lead toward liberatory ends. Inevitably, it is turned against us.

This is why I so often find myself returning to the work of Marx. Under capitalism, technology continues to change and reinvent itself. Any hope we invest in a particular tool, overlooks the class structure that will eventually determine its use. So if AI has become the tool-du-jour for far right regimes across the globe, what structures might we draw upon to constrain or redirect this unprecedented power? 

Already, attempts have been made by artists and writers to reclaim their data. While this sounds entirely fair, the total royalties for any individual’s contribution, amongst a dataset of over a trillion parameters, usually maths out to just a few pennies. Redistribution is a good thing but it doesn’t entirely change the system of private ownership. These proposals also leave open the dire economic impacts that will soon be felt by workers who didn’t play a role in the training data.

Other proposals suggest a new tax levied onto massive AI companies that would fund a reinvigorated National Endowment for the Arts. Basically, the state would take a fraction of AI profits and redistribute this money in the form of grants to artists and writers. As an artist, I can definitely see the appeal. As a socialist, this sounds like creating a privileged class of non-productive workers. Again, it doesn’t solve much for the vast majority of people who don’t work in the culture industry.

One policy proposal does however stand apart from the rest: if AI companies produce a tool that renders the price of a good or service to near zero, the state would become legally responsible to make it available for free. This type of approach doesn’t seek to just skim profits off the top. Instead, it looks to raise the floor from below. This social democratic approach to AI attempts to bind new tech innovations to an increasing bounty of public services. It’s not perfect but it's the best thing I’ve seen yet.

In reality, nothing truly costs net zero. There is always some small consumption of energy to power the machines. However, a pay-per-use fee, like buying a stamp from the Post Office, would prevent private companies from monopolistically price gouging or inserting unnecessary advertising into public services. Furthermore, this framework could represent a useful return on the vast and crazy amounts of state investment that have been sunk into AI companies.

Legally binding the state to provide free services feels like an elegant solution for the economic crises of AI. However, I’ve spent enough years of my life surrounded by Marxists who are far smarter than me. So I know enough to ask; what is the class power that truly backs up such a demand? What use are the laws written on paper if we do not have strong institutions, organizations and forms of power to enforce them?

This is why I find myself again revisiting Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Unless we have rigorous and disciplined organizations that can meaningfully assert class power, we can rest assured that these technologies will be turned against us.