Burnwinter well, he was literally in Frankfurt but it wasn't really the same place. Much more Habermas than Adorno. JH was effectively the guy who slew the OG Frankfurters at the feet of capital. Even he, apparently, couldn't get on board with Karp. He ended up working with Karola Brede, which makes sense to me. I see way more hacky-tacky Freudian psychoanalysis in the Palantir project than anything truly FS. Even his own racism is psychoanalytically typical to the point of parody. He's a white-passing black jew who never fit in.
Anyway, the problem with all good critique is that it always provides the tools to strengthen its targets - free of charge - while producing an elitist rage that almost always eventually negates its own origins. This is how the affirmative philosophy of Nietzsche produces a Nick Land, or indeed, how the ethics of Spinoza result in a Nietzsche.
This is what the Frankfurters were on about - that the enlightenment project had and always would have resulted in barbarism, in slavery, in genocide, in American imperialism, in the dark enlightenment, in the Israel project, and in Palantir. It really is no wonder that they put Nietzsche alongside Hegel as an oracle of these.
It seems to me that rigorous critique is necessary to catalyze any truly liberatory politics, but that that very same critique will always be more powerful in the hands of those who seek to dominate rather than liberate. Freedom, or its potential, is what makes slavery possible.
I think all of this is proven by who the target audience obviously is for this manifesto. They are not trying to convince some proletarian mass, but the elites who have a vested interest in busting growing coalitions of tech workers and others who are growing more and more uncomfortable with their complicity in genocide and literally producing barriers for the advance of democracy. These are scare tactics, inversions of the language of a once-authentic critique.
I think AI is running a bit scared. Sure, its propaganda is very successful and it has infiltrated every domain of life, but it sounds to me like these desperate little worms are fully aware its fundamental inadequacy (and of their own mortality) - and they hate it. They're saying we can't give up now, the threats are bigger and better than ever, forgive us our incompetence because its the only hope you have before they wheel out the guillotine. Whenever dark wizards start making horcruxes, may as well take their self-perceived vulnerability seriously. I just don't think current social-formations have the tools to exploit them.
