Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil and tonight, I want to talk about artificial intelligence but I want to do it through the lens of one of the most beautiful but abused places in the US, the great state of Kentucky.

In the interest of full transparency, the idea for this video came from a passing comment made on the Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast, which I highly recommend if you want to hear Appalachian lefties talk about the news of the day. But yeah, I found the comment so intriguing, I thought I would do a little research and flesh it out into a video essay.

Why? Well, two reasons, really. One, I think from a worker’s rights perspective, it’s important to talk about what artificial intelligence and machine learning mean for the working class. If you’re someone new to the channel with an interest in AI, I promise you, I’m not an anti-AI hardliner. In fact, I used AI to generate this image:

But even though I see the potential for great benefits using AI, it definitely puts the working class in a precarious position and if you’re not a billionaire, I would invite you to give it some thought.

The second reason is a little more selfish: a lot of people talk a lot of shit about Kentucky and the people who live here. I’m hoping this discussion about why Kentucky is the way that it is (at least in my opinion) will help people see this place and its people in a new light and maybe discover a kinship they hadn’t noticed before. So let’s talk about it!

MY RECENT KENTUCKY HOME

Now, I want to state up front: I wasn’t born in Kentucky. I was born in California and didn’t move here until almost a decade ago. Plus, I live in Louisville which is the Los Angeles of Kentucky. So, I don’t want this to be like a Hillbilly Stolen Valor kind thing. This history isn’t MY history.

But it’s a history I’ve come to feel passionate about since I’ve lived here because I love Kentucky. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, particularly the Appalachian region it shares with West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And, there are families with roots here that go back a century or more, and not in an old money Roosevelt kind of way, but in a dogged working class against-all-odds kind of way that commands respect and admiration.

And once you begin admiring the land and the people, you begin to uncover an infuriating truth: this land and her people have been consistently abused, exploited, and downright fucked over almost since the very beginning. The story of Kentucky and Appalachia broadly is a story of a region overflowing with blessings that capitalists wanted to hoard for themselves at the cost of the bodies and blood of the working class.

Now, the origins of the Kentucky coal boom are beyond the scope of this video. All you need to know is that from the 1880s to the 1950s, coal was the dominant source of energy in the United States and Appalachia was chock full of that sweet sweet carbon candy. For many decades, coal companies sent men and boys into dark holes with cut-rate safety features to retrieve it via grueling labor that left miner’s lungs black with sediment and their muscles and joints permanently damaged from exertion. In return, those companies were met with some of the most spectacular organized labor actions in American history.

As petroleum overtook coal in the commodities market in the 60s, coal executives needed to find a way to protect their profits. In addition to more automation, coal companies began the practice of MTR, mountaintop removal. MTR is both horribly disruptive to the natural environment and it requires way fewer workers, two of capitalism's favorite treats.

For the past 50 years, coal companies and their lobbyists have claimed that fewer rules and regulations would allow them to bring jobs and tax revenue back to Appalachia. They’ve fought against labor rights, environmental protections, and safety regulations by promising that economic prosperity for thousands of families was in the balance.

There’s just one issue: it was all bullshit. The coal companies used automation and MTR to strip everything they could from the land, exclude local workers as much as possible, and bring the profits back out of the state. In the past decade alone, over 33,000 coalmining jobs vanished from the country. When those jobs vanished, so did all the other local businesses that supported them. And as the region slid deeper into poverty, the families were caught between Republicans lying to them and Democrats laughing at them.

Then, in a cruel twist of fate, the carbon released from decades of coal burning warmed the planet, caused increased storm activity and increased rainfall in the area, and the mountain top removal process so badly damaged the landscape that those storms now bring catastrophic flooding to a region that was already suffering from underfunded infrastructure. In 2022, at least 37 people were killed in the East Kentucky floods and the region is not even close to being restored even a year later. Many families already dangling from the edge of precarity lost what little they had.

You know who didn’t lose a car, a home, a child, or a community in the floods? The parasitic coal executives who have been bleeding Eastern Kentucky and the rest of Appalachia dry since forever. Not only will they never pay for their crimes against the land and the people, they GOT paid for those crimes and they use that money to make sure it WILL happen again. Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell aren’t human senators, they are soulless automatons fueled by the bloodmoney the worst people in the country ripped from this region.

And if you’re not from around here, you might be thinking… so what? Like, yeah that’s horrible but what does that have to do with me over in Austin, Texas or Denver, Colorado, or Irvine, California, or Madison, Wisconsin?

And the answer is that the same promises of economic booms and rising tides lifting all boats are being peddled by the same class of ghouls that have every intention of stealing everything they can from you and leaving your family in a permanent state of precarity (that they can further exploit).

THE GHOUL IN THE MACHINE

So let’s talk about artificial intelligence. Or machine learning. Or large language models. Or Spicy Autocomplete.

Look, I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here. I’m not an expert in this stuff and my understanding of how it all works is surface-level at best. But this is not about how stuff works, it’s about how it could affect us.

In much the same way that the 1800s saw a bunch of rapacious entrepreneurs sweep across north america looking for resources to exploit, the 2020s has brought us a bunch of rapacious entrepreneurs sweeping across the internet looking for resources to exploit. And the internet is a giant reservoir for a very special kind of resource: data. And much like Appalachia in the early 1900s, there are massive data veins laying around everywhere just waiting to be mined.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning models, whatever we want to call it, they all basically rely on the fact that lots of text and images are just laying around online, visible to anyone and very easy to copy into training sets. So, as is common when capitalists see a resource being “underutilized”, a bunch of bros showed up and started taking things without asking permission.

Articles, blog posts, product copy, photos, digital art, music, videos, basically anything that can be easily accessed by a search engine is being fed into computers which are being trained to mimic the style and structure of those things and then generate their own, wholly artificial versions. And bit by bit, these generative models are learning to be more and more convincing.

And at the risk of pissing off many of my friends, I’ll tell you this: I think the technology is pretty cool. I think it’s fascinating watching these models produce things. One of my favorite hobbies is feeding the Looking Glass AI a bunch of pictures of churches, temples, and cathedrals and then having it generate its own religious sites. It’s like getting a peak at a religion from an alternate universe or something.

But there’s a problem, and for me it has nothing to do with the “soullessness” or qualitative inferiority of material produced by machine learning. For me, the tool itself is neutral in a vaccuum. Instead, the problem is that it’s going to be used by the 1% to put lots of people out of work and into destitution.

In the same way that coal companies promised innovation and revenue from unregulated mining practices, the tech industry is promising a futuristic utopia if we just let them move fast and break things, as the tech bro mantra goes. And, in the same way innovations in mining and mountain top removal destroyed coal mining jobs and the communities that supported them, innovations in AI-generated material are threatening to evaporate countless jobs over the next decade.

We’re already starting to see this with AI-generated intro graphics for Marvel’s Secret Wars and AI-generated voice overs for ads. I’m also pretty sure that over half the articles appearing at the top of search engine results are generated by models trained to produce SEO-friendly content. Hell, in my day job, I’m using chat GPT to help me debug Python code. Our developers are using it to generate entire modules for one of our internal web applications. The technology isn’t perfect yet, it couldn’t replace any one of us yet but graphic designers, copywriters, and voice actors are directly under threat today and it’s only a matter of time before we are too.

And the reason I began this discussion with a history of coal mining in Kentucky is that once again, a massive amount of wealth is going to be stolen from communities, hoarded by rich assholes, and never recirculated back into the communities it was stolen from. While it’s perfectly natural for innovation and automation to make some jobs obsolete, it’s a policy choice to make obsolescence an offense punishable by poverty, neglect, and social murder.

Generative AI has some really exciting possibilities in science, medicine, and elsewhere. If the profit motive wasn’t a factor, we could use the time and efficiency gains of automation to ensure every human being enjoys leisure, education, and a thriving life. Instead, only a few will thrive while they shove everyone else into a permanent underclass.

LEAVING HARLAN ALIVE

One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this topic in this way is because people from Kentucky, West Virginia, and elsewhere always have to endure a smug little sneer from liberals in other states when we talk about our problems. We always hear, implicitly but often explicitly, “Well, you dumb hayseeds brought it on yourself.” And while I’m not going to completely absolve the electorate of its responsibility to think more critically about the world, it’s also pretty asinine to write off an entire region of the US as stupid hillbillies, especially when you don’t understand the history of exploitation and capitalist violence that has shaped it.

People from Kentucky are like people from anywhere: they just want to feed their families and find some enjoyment during their time on this bitch of an earth. And for many decades, a lot of them were in an uneasy alliance with coal companies who enabled them to do that in a way that made them feel dignified and connected to their local culture.

How many of us enlightened city folk are in a similar uneasy alliance today? About 80% of my day job relies on Google and Amazon Web Services. If you work an office job, you’re probably reliant on Microsoft or Apple products. And beyond that, most of us in the workforce are working at a for-profit company owned by individual capitalists or part of some giant corporate frankenstein. There is zero difference between the aims and incentives fueling the coal industry versus any other for-profit venture.

And I want to continue along that train of thought. In Kentucky, mountain top removal produced coal that warmed the planet, put workers out of work and reduced tax revenue for local investment, then made the flooding caused by that warming a hundred times worse, exacerbated by the underfunded infrastructure.

Outside of Kentucky, all these data harvesting technologies have a carbon cost too. It takes an unbelievable amount of electricity to keep server farms alive and computers computin’. One estimate posits that the creation of GPT-3 produced the carbon equivalent of 123 gasoline-powered cars driven for one year. And that’s before millions of people started using it.

So what I want you to understand is that Kentucky is, fittingly, the canary in the capitalist coal mine. Tech companies are going to continue to warm the planet producing technology that puts people out of work and deprives their communities of revenue, thus making them highly vulnerable to the climate-based disasters caused by that warming. AND that technology can now be used to track protesters and intimidate opposition as well as surveil and harass the refugees fleeing the local horrors to come.

For some of us, it will be storms washing away powerlines, roads, and bridges, for others it will be increased hurricane activity slamming into our coastlines. And I don’t think any of us are ready for what happens when heatwaves begin to destroy our agriculture and food supply. If Kentucky is a sneak preview of increased storm activity, the civil wars in Sudan and Syria are a taste of what’s in store when simmering cultural tensions become ignited by climate change impacting food.

Folks, the time to act is now. What the 2022 storms in Eastern Kentucky show us is that when capitalists turn your community into a perpetual underclass, help is not coming from on high. And make no mistake, this is the end game of capitalism: a permanent exploitable underclass at the mercy of a few rich pricks.

Because once they have you hungry and desperate, they can make you do anything. Why on earth would they rescue you from a fate that creates oh-so-much shareholder value? In fact, capitalism’s big idea to “save” eastern Kentucky? Building more prisons to store the other permanent underclass it relies on… and these fuckin’ things STILL don’t generate much local revenue!

I don’t know what the future holds for Eastern Kentucky but right now it looks like a long road to any kind of permanent stability. What I do know is, when it comes to tech companies, we have time to not repeat the same mistakes and we have the foresight to not believe the same lies.

It’s not going to be easy. Tech companies have more money than God and a surveillance state to match. But the only thing harder than bringing them to heel today is going to be doing it tomorrow.

Now, we could look to Appalachia for some inspiration…

But if we’re not quite ready for a gritty cyberpunk reboot of Matewan, I think there are some strategies we can consider. I think one of the most important lessons we can learn from Appalachia is that the working class can be unbelievably powerful when it gets organized.

The dirty secret capitalists don’t want you to know is that they can’t actually DO anything without labor. You think Elon Musk can build a car? You think Jeff Bezos knows how to work a forklift? When’s the last time Bill Gates wrote a single line of code? The owning class is sitting on a bunch of equipment they can’t use and a bunch of raw materials that they can’t process (setting aside finance capital for now).

They need you and your compliant friends to work the machines, write the code, load the trucks, hammer the nails, deliver the packages, and deep fry the potatoes. And they get very, VERY scared when you don’t.

So if you take nothing else from this video tonight, take this: get organized with your peers in the working class. Join a union, join the IWW, do something to consolidate and reinforce your labor power. If you’re disabled, out of work, or otherwise don’t feel like labor organzing is your jam, there are other options. Help start a tenant’s union in your apartment complex to protect yourselves from predatory landlords. Help start a community pantry or a community lending library or a mutual aid network that will help act as a safety net for people losing their jobs.

The reason capitalists want a permanent underclass is because desperate people will put up with abuse and low wages in order to survive. So anything you do that helps people survive and thrive outside of the system directly deprives capitalism of its ability to coerce. Why do you think capitalists hate school lunch programs? It’s because parents will obediently suffer any indignity to keep their kids from starving. Filling a hungry belly is a radical act.

And if you’re vibing with me so far about how capitalism relies on this underclass to function, then come with me the rest of the way and acknowledge that anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-disabled, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant ideology perpetuates that underclass too. I’m not going to get into a chicken-or-egg thing about which came first, because the whole damn battered bird has gotta go.

Racism keeps Black, Indigenous, and people of color economically exploitable, and economic exploitation keeps those same people under the thumb of whiteness. Patriarchy and ableism tag team with capitalism against queers and disabled people in the same way, with the same outcomes. And all of this is supported by a carceral system that lets capitalists criminalize entire communities, forcing them into slave labor in prison and menial labor outside of it.

This means that we can’t fight these tech companies with one hand while shooing away our least favorite identity group with the other. We are outfunded and outgunned, our only hope is to outorganize and outnumber them.

Is there more we can do to fight these ghouls? Absolutely. We can take over school boards and city councils, we can file lawsuits and bog them down in legal tar, we can use ethical hacking and open source software and VPNs and other technology to fight back, and we can watch the movie How To Blow Up a Pipeline. It’s just a movie, not like it’s a call to action, no one is telling you to do anything illegal. It’s just a good work of fiction. Don’t get it twisted!

But none of those things are going to be effective if we’re letting racism, sexism, patriarchy, ableism, or ego dissolve our movements. Capitalists are working overtime to convince you that this violent ethnic group or those poor refugees or these weird trans people or those lazy disabled people are the cause of your precarity because they think you’re a sucker. You’re not a sucker are ya?

Anyway, now you know what’s coming and you can see the blueprint they’re gonna use, everyone say “Thank you, Appalachia, for being our crash test dummy!”. But, apart from that, what say you? What are you doing to organize in your own community? Or, are you someone in tech with some ideas about how we can protect each other? Let us know down in the comments!

As always I really appreciate you stoppin’ by. Please like and subscribe if ya don’t mind, and, as always, please share this video with someone you think might find it interesting. Hope to see you on the next one. Have a good niiight!

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

Appalachian Reckoning: A Response to Hillbilly Elegy

A Rose by Any Other Name by Mike Ivey

Learn More From:

The Trillbilly Worker's Party Podcast

The Last of the Bootleg Miners