Dark Akademia Klub V: Automate Me, Daddy

About Dark Akademia Klub

A series of salons that bring together individuals who are curious, reflective, and willing to engage, not as experts, but as participants in a shared inquiry. Topics span across culture, politics, identity, relationships, and power, offering a space to dissect ideas, challenge assumptions, and think out loud with others. It is less about arriving at answers and more about learning how to stay with complexity, even when it’s uncomfortable.

About Chapter V

Automation has always been sold as progress. A promise that machines will take over the tedious so humans can live more freely.

We’ll have more time to do “higher-value” work, they say. We can focus on being creative! On finding tasteful ideas! We can live in paradise!

But who decides what work is more valuable? And why? Why shouldn’t we get a say?

We’ve also seen how under capitalism, automation rarely reduces labour. Work becomes faster, leaner, more surveilled, more precarious.

Remember that since the Industrial Revolution, it was the workers who fought for rights and protections when The Machine came. Workers fought to stop child labor, to install an eight-hour working day, and for us all to have weekends. Workers fought for fair pay, job stability, and safe working conditions.

Now, the companies ushering AI assume that we wouldn’t mind working longer hours with ever higher uncertainty. Now, they are not just stealing our wages, but also our knowledge and skills through constant data-collecting.

Quietly, they condition us to lower our hard-won labor standards, and to be okay with them extracting ever more value from our bodies and minds.

From factory machinery to algorithmic management to AI, the question has never just been what machines can do, but what economic system they serve.

Is AI just capitalism on steroids? And are our lives, simply raw materials to serve the capital?