The Ideas Letter

Evgeny Morozov knows how to theorize (and, a fortiori, how to intellectually provoke) like few other mortals. The elegance of his argumentation and the sophistication of his critiques are legendary. Several issues back, Morozov launched a grenade by suggesting that socialist attempts to harness AI have treated it like other basic tools of capitalist production—as a neutral instrument that can simply be redirected—rather than as a transformative force that actively shapes social values and human capacities.

We now have two responses to Morozov’s original essay, one from the Cornell historian Aaron Benanav, a target of Morozov’s earlier salvo, and another from the NYU scholar Leif Weatherby. For Benanav, humanity stands between two technological revolutions—generative AI and the green energy transition—and how we choose between them will determine the shape of the future.  His essay develops a broader project of designing a post-capitalist “multidimensional economy” (for more see his coruscating essays in New Left Review this past year ) while rebutting Morozov’s claim that such a framework would stifle technological “worldmaking.” 

Weatherby, who looks at both Morozov and Benanav, argues that contemporary Marxist and socialist analyses of technology fail to engage adequately with the entanglement between technological rationality and capitalist ideology. To understand AI and the digital economy, Weatherby suggests, one must see them as the logical outcomes of a longstanding merger between mathematics, computation, and neoliberal governance—a fusion that has turned “optimization” into both the logic and the theology of capitalism itself.

Morozov responds in analytically stentorian tones asserting misrepresentation. His rebuttal is a blistering defense of his original essay on socialism and AI. Morozov accuses Benanav of no less than misreading his arguments, erecting straw men,