On Wednesday evening, Grimes posted a video to her personal TikTok account outlining a "proposition…
- Grimes posted a TikTok on Wednesday about AI technology and communism.
- “AI is actually the fastest path to communism,” she argues in the video.
- Grimes, who is in a relationship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, faced some backlash for the post.
Grimes, the “Miss Anthropocene” singer and mother of tech mogul Elon Musk’s child, posted a TikTok video with some thoughts on artificial intelligence, communism, and farming on Wednesday evening.
By Thursday morning, “Grimes” was trending on Twitter, with some people criticizing the singer for speaking about communism while dating one of the richest people in the world, Elon Musk. Others merely questioned, in the words of one tweet from Media Matters for America senior researcher Olivia Little resharing the singer’s TikTok video, “please what the f— is grimes talking about.”
The original TikTok, which currently has over 1.4 million views, begins with Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, saying that she has a “proposition for the communists.”
In the video, she says that most of the communists she knows are “not big fans of AI,” but then argues that “AI is actually the fastest path to communism.”
@grimes A.I. Is the fastest path to communism ##ai ##communism ##farming
⏠Vivaldi – Spring – Allegro – Essential Band
Grimes then hypothesizes that AI could automate farming and “weed out systematic corruption,” providing food for all without anyone having to work.
“So basically, everything that everybody loves about communism, but without the collective farm,” she says in the video.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in the Soviet Union, collective farms – known as kolkhoz in Russian, among other titles – were farms operated on state-owned land that peasants in the collective worked on, earning compensation as salaried employees based on their labor. In the process of forming farms through collectivization, peasants were forced to give up their individual farms to join collectives. Upon the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the early 1990s, collective farms were privatized.
In the video, Grimes says that AI could lead to a communist future in which “nobody has to work” but everyone is provided for, which isn’t in line with Karl Marx’s 19th-century writings on communism. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica and per Marx, a true communist society would be stateless, classless, and adhere to the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” in the distribution and production of goods.
On social media, people questioned why Grimes was speaking about communism on TikTok.
grimes on tik tok talkin ab communism pls
— mars (@ceIisus) June 3, 2021
why is GRIMES of all people talking about communism on tik tok in front of a beserk manga panel ?? pic.twitter.com/J02NEQWxJ2
— femboy enthusiast (@smalleyhead215) June 3, 2021
Many pointed out the irony of Grimes’ comments on communism, considering her partner is the second-richest man on the planet. Musk, the “Technoking” of Tesla, has had an awful lot of success in a capitalist society.
The singer later said in the comments of her original TikTok that she’s “not a communist” and that the video was a joke, but that “maybe the technocrats and communists could get along!”
A contact listed as Grimes publicist did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
