Another example of capital’s AI-powered grammatization of personal communication is Google’s Federated Learning project. This was announced in 2017 as a ‘decentralized’ edge AI, whereby ‘machine learning models are trained directly on smartphones of users’. Google could now delegate AI training to Android phones via an app, which would read users’ files, improve the personalization of their digital profiles, and relay this information to advertising clients, all the while leaving the original data ‘intact’ on the phone rather than lodging it on Google’s servers. Although Google chose to feature the user privacy benefits of this approach, Federated Learning brought the corporation a number of other, more self-interested, advantages. ‘Decentralized’ AI that functions ‘locally’ on users’ devices with no dependence on a network connection, ‘means less power consumption, ... minimal latency and faster machine learning processing’, and actually gives access to ‘more user data’ than could practically be harvested to a remote server in the cloud (Kulian 2017, emphasis added).
In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, it seemed that the growing reach of corporate-owned social media might actually expand possibilities for social dissent. The wave of occupations, assemblies and riots that burst out in 2011 were widely dubbed ‘Facebook (or Twitter, or YouTube) revolutions’. Although this appellation has been widely and properly criticized for its absurd techno-determinism (e.g. Tawil-Souri 2012), it remains true that a feature of these uprisings was the extensive use of social media platforms and mobile phone networks by protestors (albeit alongside good old fashioned on-the-ground organizing and face-to-face communication). This contributed to the rapid mobilization and contagious spread of protests, though probably also to their later problems of political coherence and short staying power (Dyer-Witheford 2015).
In the aftermath of these unrests, however, two AI-related developments posed major problems for networked anti-capitalist movements.
automating the social factory
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