The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Byron Hauck, who begins by asking whose imaginaries for artificial intelligence we are dealing with. Right now, we are being told what AI is: we are in the middle of the technological sublime – we are given a story of what it is supposed to be, what its future is supposed to be, what we are supposed to do with it.
But these visions are not empowering: they allow the current moment to be defined by a handful of capitalist tech leaders, rather than by the people who use these technologies. This is part of the move towards a growing tech feudalism, and there is an urgent need to push back against this – to develop greater solidarity between everyone who is involved in these processes, in order to gain greater control and ownership over digital data and these technological resources.
This might mean adopting a peasant class perspective: the data used to train AI represent surplus behaviour – they digitise our human existence. We are the direct producers of such data, and through these data we are made common, and are exploited through the privatised extraction of our experience. But we are also the direct producers of interpretation, and this is our collective power: we make the stories that interpret how we accept AI in our lives.
Peasants can thus be understood from an economic perspective as the direct producers of their own lives; a peasant perspective can enable us to find more solidarity. This perspective pushes back against the widely entrenched entrepreneurial perspective that blindly adopts a capitalist, market-oriented view that highlights competition rather than cooperation and solidarity, and that is itself empowered by artificial intelligence.
This is important because entrepreneurs are not great innovators: they focus on business returns and market monopolisation, not about genuine invention and progress; entrepreneurialism leads to scale economics, network effects, and market domination. The more imbalanced markets become, the less they are likely to produce new ideas and innovations, or allow for the emergence of new start-ups that do so.
This rapidly becomes exploitative, too, as we see in the widespread breaches of copyright in order to train artificial intelligence systems. It reshapes the relationship between the state and its citizens, as states come to service the capitalist class in the pursuit of global competitiveness, rather than their own people.
A peasant class perspective is also different from one focussed on publics, within a broader public sphere: the public sphere was always a middle-class, bourgeois construct, distinguishing between the public and the private, and assuming some level of equality, inclusivity, accessibility, autonomy, and a commitment to the common good which represents an idealised perspective at best.
This is also reflected in the idea of the public domain, which demarcates public from private ownership of information. Using this approach, we initially understood the Internet itself as a commons, and had high hopes for the democratising potential of the commons – this requires abundance, and an absence of prior claims. But what we have seen instead is increasing digital enclosure, commercialisation, and privatisation. Online and offline, there is now a private overlay over our private and public spaces alike. We must move away from the public, then – not least also because tech companies themselves position themselves as members of the publics.
The peasant approach is also different from a worker-based approach; workers are only a small segment of the broader group of people who are affected by current developments. We have not yet lost the digital commons, but are at the moment of losing it: the moment where peasants turn into digital workers – we must recognise that commonality, and realise the power of peasantry, retaking the state for the people as a whole rather than for capitalism. The peasant class approach provides an actionable symbolism.
