This is the exact sentiment that prompted me to write the original post. Mastodon is full of these property brained dorks too.

Probably not. Only recently started doing formal reading beyond internet posts.

but I’m curious whether pensions and 401ks give labor aristocrats in the imperial core more of a material interest in empire than those on the periphery

This seems so trivially true that im left wondering if this question is sarcastic. Any interaction with engineers makes it super obvious that even the most “leftist” of them are invested in preserving the imperial status quo whether they are cognizant of it or not.

I think the distinction is that resources like steel and CPUs are constant capital and intrinsically tied to material costs, whereas training models transforms constant capital into a potentially autonomous replacement for variable capital, rather than just a productivity multiplier on your existing variable capital. This is compounded manyfold by the fact that models are infinitely reproducible and inference is cheap enough to run on non specialized hardware like consumer electronics. Feedback mechanisms allowing for self-improving capital feels like a novel development in the history of the relations of production.

Is this qualitatively different enough to be worthy of a distinction? I dunno.

I would file that under “the workers that built those models” but you’re probably right that there is a meaningful distinction worth making here.

Only started reading Imperialism this week, but I vaguely know about the concept of superprofits. Would you consider the relationship between dataset labellers outside the imperial core and capital to be fundamentally different from the relationship between labor aristocratic engineers and capital? Obviously living standards are vastly different, but in terms of how they relate to the means of production?