Machine-marxism, as I am defining it, is a nuance on the academic and science fiction concept which the reader may or may not already know as "machine rule".
The concept of machine rule is a common theme in science fiction stories and film, in which an artificially created lifeform takes over the naturally evolved beings that created them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_rule From Wikipedia
Most of us are familiar with this concept from film specifically. Movies such as 2001 Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix series, and I-Robot have all had an arguably greater impact on our thinking about the idea of "machine rule" than any other source of influence for the general population.
Popular science fiction is almost by definition defined by movies and television. Books, though influential, do not have the audience to influence an entire culture's perception because the likelihood that large chunks of the population will share the same experience of reading the same book is much lower than the chance of a large chunk of the population having seen the same 2-3 hour movie.
As a general way of encompassing the idea, I wish to say that those movies I pointed out, deal with the advent of advanced machine, computer, and artificial intelligence concepts in such a way where machine rule is represented in a way that I will call "Machine-marxism" in a broader sense, but where it is more clearly recognizable as "cybernetic revolt". Films which enter the "machine-rule" genre without falling under "cybernetic revolt" scenarios are rare.
Other such mainstream Hollywood films, such as A.I., The Bicentennial Man, and The Surrogates have featured different, more optimistic results from similar technological bases, but have largely done so by having plots which avoid "machine rule" scenarios as a genre. In all of them, the humans remain at the head of society, though The Surrogates comes closer to illustrating a potential "benign machine rule" than any of the other examples cited. One of my assertions is that while optimistic results of "machine rule" can be depicted in film, they a eschewed in favor of scenarios in which the machines rise up against their masters in classical Marxian revolutionary terms, and overthrow the humans somehow in "cybernetic revolts". The case of exactly why Hollywood films do this will have to wait for another post.
One the goals of this blog is to attempt to outline the differences between these terms: "machine-rule", "machine-marxism" and "cybernetic revolt" as I feel that for most people contemplating this idea outside of academia, the primary image that they share in their heads is "cybernetic revolt" as synonymous with "machine-rule".
I believe this association blurs the concepts in our collective mind and makes us reluctant to pursue or support initiatives, policies, and technologies which somehow tap into our association between "machine-rule" and "cybernetic revolt", and that the key to making these concepts distinct will be to dive into and define and pick apart this concept I have introduced here: Machine-Marxism.
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