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Socialism After AI
Morozov's December 2025 <em>New Left Review</em> essay arguing that even critics of capitalism have been <em>captured by a soft determinism</em> that treats AI as a neutral instrument to be redirected rather than a specific product of specific institutions.
'Socialism After AI' (New Left Review, December 2025) is Morozov's most sustained recent engagement with the political-economic question the AI transition poses to the democratic left. The essay argues that contemporary capitalism 'no longer tries to legitimize itself primarily through efficiency, but through its capacity to turn constraint into experimentation and self-formation' — a promise AI intensifies, and one that the conventional left critique of technology has struggled to accommodate because it takes seriously the genuine experience of empowerment that AI tools produce.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay's central observation is that AI is not experienced by its users as oppressive. It is experienced as liberating. The engineer celebrating her new productive capability does not feel exploited; she feels empowered. The feeling is genuine — it corresponds to a real expansion of her productive capacity. The political challenge is not to convince empowered users they are actually oppressed, which would be both