In the fifth episode of the latest Adam Curtis series, Shifty, the New Labour strategist Philip Gould opines about the democratic power of the ‘focus group’, declaring it to be ‘a way of hearing what the people have to say… a new form of politics.’ Focus grouping is a qualitative research practice in which around six to ten individuals are asked questions about a certain topic or issue by a moderator. These individuals are selected along certain demographic lines in order to represent or model a desired population or section thereof. This pre-selected group of people would therefore constitute, through their answers to pre-selected questions, the data of public opinion. The demographic categories according to which they have been selected for the focus group—and there is no democratic input as to the categories, they have no input in this, for they are the input—allow for the constant production of public opinion from its elementary data sets. The focus group is the feedback mechanism of democracy in the model of the New Labour style of governance. It is the production of democracy through data. The desire of the people, when understood through the categories which government data-analysis places them under, can be miniaturized to the aggregation of a focus group, a data set. To be recognized under the categories of the demographic data set is to be allowed admission into the focus group, and hence into the determining desires which inform political decision making. Efficient, analytical, smoothly managed. For the focus-group politician, the people are constituted by these categories, their stratifications encoding into the data-sets the genetics of the body of The People. With the right sample, this allows The People to be miniaturized into 6-10 individuals. As Jean Baudrillard noted in Simulacra and Simulation, ‘it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation.’ [1]

Government by Simulacrum

The history of the focus group in British governance, under both New Labour and its current farcical replay, is a developmental sequence of the attempt to match government policy to the desires of The People, mediated through the focus group system as adopted from marketing agencies. The People, however, can only be received by the institutions of governance not as they are, but only as they are selected, and they are received not because the selections correspond to them, but because they correspond to the selections, i.e. to the desired or desirable set of responses that policymakers aim to produce. For all of this postmodern fancy, this simulacra and simulation, it would be tempting to declare that such a bourgeois democratic politics has evacuated all reality in favour of simulation, the map in favour of the territory, and that Britain has become a political ‘desert of the real’. Yet it is precisely policymakers who have deserted reality, and amongst the dunes the sun of the real casts its burning light upon them with a radiant hatred. The current regime is despised, and no demographic categorization is desired by them such that they could recognize it.

Indeed, this government are excellent at the generation of their own detestability. It is therefore wholly unsurprising that—as the philosopher Pete Wolfendale recently noted[2]— the currentwonker de jourMorgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Downing Street Chief of Staff, has decided to follow Brecht’s recommendation that they simply dissolve the people and elect a new one. I am referring here to McSweeney’s reported use of “synthetic voters”, LLM-generated focus groups produced from averages of data, which can provide outputs for less money and at greater speeds.[3]This is an intensification of genetic miniaturization, where individuals are broken up into ‘dividuals’. That is, into different accounts on various platforms and consumer metrics, rather than being brought into a space and interviewed as singular human beings. With this, The People are secondary to their data; the map precedes the territory. The reasons why people may consume X content or make Y purchase is not considered from the standpoint of their own testimony. Instead, this is left to the aggregating axioms—the assumptions and desires—of those who code the generators. Nonetheless, people still hate them, and the government is actively making sure that it does everything it can to resist politicized mass desire: it pursues near-universally unpopular attacks on welfare provisions, disabled people, trans people, anyone, and perpetuates an active role in the genocide of Palestinians. It sees its function as catering to The People as a set of managed data, and precisely on that basis does it disdain them as people, those who do not coincide with their subsumption into the conceptual schema of their ‘democratic’ market research. This negative dialectic will be their destruction because they despise everyone. They are imperialists in every sense of foreign policy, and they are domestic imperialists to the extent that they, in Baudrillard’s terms, “attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.”[4]

It is therefore no surprise that the Starmerite regime has thrown themselves entirely into the cult of ‘AI’. The New Labour ideology of data, of the focus group, bears little difference to the way in which ‘AI’ is sold as a solution to the problems of governance whilst, as Dan McQuillan notes, “what it is really doing is applying algorithmic morality judgements to target groups while obscuring the structural drivers of the very problems it is supposedly solving.”[5]This ideology is not, however, a pure worship of LLMs, of the machine, but an extension of the political ideology of the simulation, and the political economy of data. It is the movement of bodies that produces this data whenever they pass through a system of recording, from online purchases and travel through ticketed systems, to financial accounting and social media activity. Data is dead labour, and from this they wish to generate a surplus of political value which they can reinvest into their own attempts at simulated political legitimacy. That the current British regime has walked directly into the arms of the AI cult is unsurprising on this basis, since it presents itself as nothing other than the logical extension of their own ideology of simulation. When Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley—aristo grandchild of Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists—declared that Starmer “gets it” when it comes to their project of ‘AI’ (Palantir’s motto is, of course, “Software that Dominates”),[6]this is not because Starmer underwent a Palantir catechism, but rather because he found that he was preaching to the converted. Lest I be accused of declaring ‘AI’ to be a ‘cult’ on the basis of disdain rather than argument, however, let me unpack what this declaration means. As a brief summary of what follows, I will argue that ‘AI’ is a cult purely because capitalism is a cult, and that ‘AI’ names nothing technological in the sense of a new machine, but rather is the ideological shine of capitalism which has at last appeared in the age of omnipresent simulation, the exemplar of its articles of faith.