Who owns the intelligence society produces—and who decides how it shapes our lives?
Artificial intelligence brings a political question into everyday life: who controls the growing capacity to organize work, distribute knowledge, and influence communication?
A worker receives a performance score without an adequate explanation. A creator depends on a platform’s ranking system to reach an audience. A community is asked to accommodate new infrastructure while having little influence over its purpose. These situations raise questions about authority, accountability, and the distribution of technological benefits.
This article argues that the emancipatory potential of AI requires a transformation in the social relations governing its development. When investment and deployment are organized around private accumulation, increased technological capacity can strengthen employers’ control and deepen society’s dependence on corporate infrastructure. A different direction requires people to gain effective power over the systems shaping their lives.
The connection to the book
In A New Social Order in the Age of Consciousness, Volume One, Chapter 2 examines the contradiction between the social production of knowledge and its private ownership. Knowledge develops through education, research, language, culture, accumulated experience, and cooperation across generations. The book recognizes the real contribution of technical innovation and investment while challenging the idea that these contributions justify unlimited control over society’s shared intellectual inheritance.
The analysis developed here applies that argument to work, culture, and human relationships. It asks how a capacity built through social cooperation can become an instrument of power over its contributors. Read the book: free Persian edition.
When management becomes an algorithm
Algorithmic management uses software to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work. Some systems incorporate AI; others rely on simpler rules. This distinction matters because managerial control through software predates today’s generative models.
Research by the International Labour Organization and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre examines these practices in logistics and healthcare. It identifies potential efficiency improvements alongside risks to job quality and intrusive worker surveillance. These findings support scrutiny of how systems are implemented; they do not establish that every deployment produces the same outcome. ILO–JRC, 2024.
The political issue concerns who sets the targets and who can challenge them. A productivity score reflects choices about what counts as valuable work. If speed is rewarded while care, cooperation, and recovery time are neglected, the system can place workers under pressure to satisfy a narrow measure of performance.
Under such conditions, competition can become embedded in daily relationships. Colleagues may experience one another as rivals for ratings, shifts, or continued access to work. The capacity to cooperate remains, but the organization of work can work against it.
Connection to Chapter 1: the book treats freedom of expression, association, and criticism as conditions for producing knowledge. Applied to the workplace, this means workers need the ability to question a system, organize collectively, and influence its design. A workplace that collects workers’ data while suppressing their judgment wastes a vital source of social intelligence.
When social life becomes a source of revenue
Commercial surveillance extends the question of control beyond employment.
The US Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 investigation of major social-media and video-streaming services documented extensive collection and monetization of personal information, with inadequate privacy protections. It identified business incentives encouraging large-scale data collection. This evidence concerns the services investigated; it should not be generalized to every AI application. FTC, 2024.
The broader political implication is that communication can simultaneously serve human relationships and commercial extraction. People seek friendship, knowledge, recognition, or creative expression. Platform owners can obtain commercially valuable information from those activities and set the conditions under which participants reach one another.
The concern is not that every digitally mediated relationship becomes false. People form meaningful relationships and organize valuable communities online. The problem arises when the infrastructure supporting those relationships is governed primarily by interests over which participants have little control.
Connection to Chapter 3: the book links data ownership with economic, political, and cultural power. Its discussion of democratic data governance points toward collective institutions through which people can influence the purposes, limits, and benefits of data use.
A rigorous critique must confront contrary evidence
Platform power, political polarization, and the quality of human relationships are connected questions, but the causal links between them must be demonstrated.
These connections need careful evidence. In a study published in Science in 2023, researchers changed participating Facebook and Instagram users’ feeds during the 2020 US election. Moving to chronological feeds altered platform activity and content exposure, but did not significantly change measured political polarization or other key attitudes over the three-month study period. This does not settle every question about long-term effects; it limits the claims that can responsibly be made from that experiment. Guess and colleagues, 2023.
A revolutionary critique gains strength through precision. Corporate power can be challenged without claiming that algorithms alone explain loneliness, political division, or cultural conflict.
The structural question remains: should institutions with substantial influence over public communication operate under rules that the public has so little power to determine?
Productivity gains should become freedom
AI’s effects on employment are also contingent. The ILO’s 2025 occupational-exposure study identifies job transformation as the most likely overall effect, emphasizing that many occupations contain tasks requiring human input. Exposure to AI is not a measurement of actual job losses. ILO–NASK, 2025.
This uncertainty makes collective intervention more important. Where AI reduces the labor needed for particular activities, the benefits can take different forms: higher profits, intensified production, shorter working hours, better services, or more time for education and care.
The distribution is a political choice shaped by ownership and bargaining power.
Connection to Chapter 4, Section 6: the book examines reduced working hours and new arrangements for distributing wealth. Its argument invites a different measure of progress: how much secure, meaningful freedom technological development creates for people.
A movement for technological emancipation should therefore make shorter working time without loss of livelihood, stronger public services, and shared access to knowledge central demands.
From resistance to collective power
Individual appeals and technical audits can help people contest particular decisions. More durable change requires institutions capable of negotiating—and changing—the rules.
The ILO’s 2025 case studies across five continents document examples of worker representatives influencing decisions about AI, employment, and working conditions. These cases demonstrate possibilities for collective intervention, without suggesting that participation automatically overcomes unequal power. ILO, 2025.
Building on that evidence and the book’s political framework, a transformative program could include:
- Worker power over technological change: collective bargaining before deployment, access to relevant information, independent expertise, and effective rights to challenge harmful systems.
- Democratic data governance: enforceable privacy protections and collective institutions that determine legitimate uses of shared data.
- Public and cooperative infrastructure: computing capacity and digital services governed through accountable institutions involving workers, users, and affected communities.
- A social claim on productivity gains: shorter working hours, universal services, and investment in education, care, and cultural life.
- Freedom to organize and dissent: protection for independent unions, journalism, research, political opposition, and community scrutiny.
These are political proposals advanced by this article. Their precise forms must be debated and tested through democratic practice.
Social ownership requires social power
Chapter 4, Section 7 offers an essential distinction: social ownership is not equivalent to state ownership. Transferring infrastructure to a centralized state can reproduce domination if people lack meaningful authority over its operation.
The book describes possibilities including cooperatives, public institutions, elected councils, and shared governance. It also distinguishes personal possessions and small businesses from monopolistic control over foundational infrastructure. Its transitional approach does not call for the immediate abolition of every form of private ownership.
A revolutionary extension of this argument is to make the democratization of economic power an explicit objective. The people who produce, maintain, and depend on technological systems should acquire enforceable rights to govern them and share their benefits.
That requires safeguards against both corporate domination and bureaucratic monopoly. Open debate, independent oversight, privacy, and the right to oppose those in authority are constitutive parts of emancipation.
The future must remain a collective decision
AI will not bring emancipation automatically. Nor does increasing technical capability make domination inevitable. The book’s opening chapter presents historical transition as a possibility whose outcome depends on human institutions and action.
The revolutionary task is to organize that possibility: connect struggles over workplace surveillance with struggles over data, public infrastructure, cultural freedom, and the distribution of social wealth.
Our collective knowledge should expand our capacity to live, create, care, and decide together. Building institutions that make this possible is a struggle over ownership and power—and over the kind of human relationships we want technology to sustain.
Reading alongside the book
The principal connections are to these sections of A New Social Order in the Age of Consciousness, Volume One:
- Chapter 1: AI as a tool rather than destiny; freedom as a condition of knowledge; conscious transition as a possibility.
- Chapter 2, Section 2: the social production of knowledge and its private ownership.
- Chapter 3: data ownership, concentration of power, and democratic data governance.
- Chapter 4, Sections 6–7: shorter working hours, distribution of wealth, and the distinction between social and state ownership.
These references follow the Persian free website edition; English descriptions of section titles are translations. Access the book.
