Music

Grimes, Who Sided With Elon Musk When Tesla Tried Unionizing, Wants To Tell You About Communism

This is a mess.

by Joseph Earp  4 June 2021
Grimes

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Grimes is confusing.

I can’t think of any better word for the musician, who at best confounds the expectations of genre with her music, and who at worst summons up half-formed, often muddled takes that ultimately piss off precisely the people she seems to want to appeal to.

For instance, just this week, Grimes has taken to TikTok to explain that she believes AI will help bring about the Communist revolution. Sort of.

In the video, the singer-songwriter espouses her belief that automated farming is a better alternative to the “forced farming” of prior Communist revolutions. It is her belief that new developments in artificial technology will allow a form of socialism whereby machines can do the brute work, and workers can kick back and enjoy the fruits of the labor of new technologies.

This view is not new. “Fully automated luxury communism”, the movement that argues we can let robots do all the work, has been around for years. Most memorably, its aims were summed up by author Aaron Bastani, who wrote an entire book on the subject. “Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced computing might be about to eliminate the need for human labor in no small part,” reads a review of the book from The Atlantic.

So yeah, here’s Grimes again, advocating for Communism while married to one of the world’s richest men, a particularly strange left turn given that the singer has in the past argued against Tesla employee’s right to unionize.

Or is it actually a left turn? In the comments section, Grimes refined her position, claiming that she was “not a Communist” and that the whole thing was a joke, explaining that she was a “technocrat” — as in, someone who believes that societies should be run by an elite of experts.

But that didn’t stop the memes from flowing, with Twitter abounding with users making mockery of Grimes’ video.

Ultimately, I’ll give the last word over to Twitter user @besf0rt, who summed up the whole issue well.

‘Nuff said.