Reckoning with the 'Cloud' Myth in the Light of İlker Kalaycı's Text and the Cybernetic Repair of Metabolic Rift

An Assessment of Comrade İlker Kalaycı's Article "Artificial Intelligence and Ecological Destruction" in Issue 72 of Teori ve Eylem

Comrade İlker, hello. I read your article "Artificial Intelligence and Ecological Destruction" in this issue of Teori ve Eylem as a vital warning at this historical threshold where capitalism simultaneously devours nature and humanity.

At a moment when bourgeois media and Silicon Valley technocrats market artificial intelligence as a matter-stripped, "green," "carbon-free," spiritually suspended "Cloud" technology floating in the air, you have shaken this illusion to its roots. By exposing the colossal water consumption, the plunder of rare earth elements, and the energy gluttony behind artificial intelligence, you have brought very powerful ammunition to the Marxist wing of the ecological struggle. Health to your labor and theoretical rigor, comrade.

Yet Comrade İlker, as a Marxist epistemologist looking at your text, I think we must take the relationship between ecological destruction and artificial intelligence out of the narrow bracket of mere "resource consumption and environmental pollution" and evaluate it with the sharpest edges of Marxist value theory and dialectics. Allow me, with comradely warmth, to open together those deep philosophical and political headings that will orient the ecological struggle with our Marxist vision.

The "Cloud" Myth and Leninist Materialism: Dispersing the Idealist Illusion

Comrade İlker, in your text you very rightly decode the insidious language Silicon Valley has built. They tell us that technology has "dematerialized," that it has become immaterial. The word "Cloud" was not chosen by accident; it is an idealist metaphor chosen to conceal the material, dirty, and bloody base of production.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin seized upon the crisis in physics of his day to launch a merciless struggle against the idealist Machists who declared: "Matter has vanished; only energy and equations remain." Lenin gave them this immortal reply:

"The isolation of thought from matter does not mean that matter has vanished; on the contrary, it is the cry of bourgeois philosophy unable to grasp objective reality. Matter exists independently of our consciousness."

The "Cloud" narrative constructed today for artificial intelligence is precisely the cyber version of that Machist idealism against which Lenin fought. Artificial intelligence is not pure software flying through the air or an "algorithmic spirit." It is cobalt dug by children's fingernails in Congo; lithium basins dried out in Chile; millions of tons of clean water consumed by chip fabs in Taiwan; and coal burned to feed data centers in Northern Virginia.

Your text brings down the heavy axe of Leninist materialism against this cyber-idealism. To analyze the future of artificial intelligence begins with putting its objective, material, and ecological base (that is, its matter) on the table.

"Metabolic Rift" in the Digital Age

In your article you empirically present, with very strong data, the enormous quantities of energy and water expended in training and running artificial intelligence models (especially large language models). We must deepen this pile of data, comrade, by connecting it to the theoretical summit of Marxist ecology: Karl Marx's concept of "Metabolic Rift."

In Capital, Marx explains the relationship between human beings and nature through the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel). Through the labor process, human beings enter into a material exchange with nature; they take from nature, transform, and return the residues of consumption to nature's cycle. Yet when the capitalist mode of production absolutizes profit and the accumulation of surplus value, it radically breaks this organic cycle. Marx says that industrial capitalist agriculture seizes the soil's nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), transports them to the cities, and by failing to return them to the soil creates an irreparable "Metabolic Rift" between nature and humanity.

Today artificial intelligence, cloud technologies, and massive data centers have torn this metabolic rift out of the analog world and carried it into a cyber-geological dimension. Capital's drive toward digitization produces new and far deeper rifts on nature's universal metabolism along three fundamental axes:

Lithospheric Rift: Burning Millions of Years of Geological Time in Milliseconds

Training artificial intelligence models (LLMs) and building cyber-infrastructure require the savage plunder of rare earth elements, lithium, cobalt, and neodymium from the most remote corners of the lithosphere (the Earth's crust).

The epistemological and ecological tragedy here is the rift in the perception of time. Nature used millions of years of geological time, organic sedimentation, and tectonic patience to produce that cobalt or lithium. Capital extracts this material substance accumulated by nature over millions of years from beneath the ground and burns and consumes it in an instant to conduct millisecond financial speculation, train algorithms, or manipulate consumer behavior.

Millions of years of geological time are sacrificed to the hysterical instantaneous time of the capitalist surplus-value horizon. This is a lithospheric rift in the material cycle of the Earth's crust from which there is no return.

Hydrological Rift: The Cyber Siege of the Freshwater Cycle

Artificial intelligence server farms are not only colossal consumers of electricity; they are also terrible water absorbers. To prevent thousands of servers from overheating, millions of liters of clean freshwater are evaporated every day in the cooling systems of these facilities.

While capital dispossesses a region's groundwater basins and riverbeds to cool its artificial intelligence, it interrupts the historical, cyclical metabolism of water. Water polluted with chemicals in cooling systems, or released uncontrollably into the atmosphere as vapor, cannot return to the local ecosystem's clean water cycle. In the name of making artificial intelligence "smarter," capital organizes a metabolic drought by paralyzing the hydrological matrix—the planet's most vital organic life cycle—at the local level.

Temporal Rift: Capital's Infinite Linearity vs. Nature's Circularity

The philosophical essence of the ecological crisis is the irreconcilable clash of two different conceptions of time: nature's cyclical time and capital's linear and infinitely expanding time.

Nature possesses a circular metabolism that recycles its own waste and converts every death into new life. Capitalism, by the formula ($M - C - M'$), must follow a line of infinite growth; the moment it stops, it collapses. Artificial intelligence carries this hysteria of linear growth to its peak by hyper-accelerating production, logistics, and consumption.

The faster artificial-intelligence-supported algorithms accelerate meta-circulation, the greater the abyss between the speed at which raw materials are torn from nature and the speed at which they are flung back into nature as "waste." While artificial intelligence increases the speed at which capitalism commodifies nature, it has long since exceeded nature's speed of absorbing this destruction and renewing itself (its regenerative capacity). This is absolute temporal and ecological rift.

"Capitalist production develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer."

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

Comrade İlker; the philosophical truth behind those technological data you very rightly present in your text is precisely this. So long as it remains in capital's hands, artificial intelligence is not the embodied form of human intelligence; it is a cyber-parasitic mind that sucks the marrow of nature and labor and pushes metabolic rift to a planetary threshold of annihilation.

Our Marxist ecological vision will heal this rift not by breaking the turnstiles of the panopticon, but through the will of Red Cybernetic Planning that will directly align the governance of those algorithmic systems with nature's cyclical homeostasis (state of balance).

Ecological Contradiction: The Material Limits and Suicide of Capital

Comrade İlker, in your article you rightly say that green capitalism theses and promises of "carbon-neutral artificial intelligence" are a deception (greenwashing). The bourgeoisie claims that artificial intelligence will produce algorithms that will solve the climate crisis.

Dialectical logic shows us the absurd contradiction behind this thesis. While capital claims that through artificial intelligence it will increase efficiency and reduce resource consumption, artificial intelligence itself is turning into an exponentially growing energy monster. Before us stands a cyber form of Jevons' Paradox: As technological efficiency increases, total consumption of that resource within a profit-driven system does not fall; on the contrary, it is further stoked.

The Cyber-Jevons Paradox: The Collapse of the Efficiency Fairy Tale

Comrade İlker, technology giants (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI) proudly announce with every new artificial intelligence model, chip architecture, or algorithm design that they have "increased energy efficiency by 50%," that they "do more with fewer parameters." Bourgeois ecologists, starting from these data, promise that artificial intelligence will save the world.

We must confront this illusion with that famous Jevons' Paradox distilled from the nineteenth century. William Stanley Jevons proved in 1865 that as the efficiency of coal-fired steam engines increased, total coal consumption did not decrease; on the contrary, it increased exponentially.

Why? Because in the anarchic capitalist market, an increase in efficiency lowers unit production cost. The fall in cost geometrically expands the field of application, scale, and speed of that technology.

What we are living through today is precisely the Cyber-Jevons Paradox:

As algorithms become efficient, artificial intelligence is integrated by the second into billions of new operations, into every phone, every search engine, every e-commerce bot.
While the energy cost of a single operation falls, the total volume of the system (because of hysterical accumulation-drive) expands toward infinity.

While capital claims with its efficiency rhetoric that it is protecting nature, it is in fact expanding the global scale of exploitation and raw-material consumption at a speed unprecedented in history.

James O'Connor and Capital's Second Contradiction

When narrating the resource crisis caused by artificial intelligence in your article, we must raise this situation to a theoretical summit with ecosocialist theorist James O'Connor's magnificent thesis of "Capital's Second Contradiction," comrade.

Marx had established capitalism's First Contradiction between labor and capital (surplus-value exploitation and the overproduction/realization crises it produces). O'Connor added a magnificent link to Marxist theory by defining the Second Contradiction: the contradiction between capital and the material/infrastructural conditions of its own production (that is, nature and the environment).

By its very nature, capitalism must destroy—undermine—the external natural conditions on which it depends to sustain its accumulation (clean water, cheap energy, stable climate, fertile soil) with its own hands.

Artificial intelligence is the hyper-accelerator of this second contradiction, comrade. To preserve profit rates, capital must digitize and automate production, that is, grow its organic composition in favor of constant capital. Yet this colossal pile of constant capital in the form of artificial intelligence requires, in order to function, a stable climate, uninterrupted cooling water, and a colossal electricity grid.

The more capital plunders nature and deepens the climate crisis to make profit (for example, by increasing drought and drying up rivers), the more it is deprived of the very clean water and stable energy infrastructure needed to cool its own artificial intelligence servers. Here lies capital's tragic suicide: To run artificial intelligence it must destroy nature; yet the moment it destroys nature, it also destroys the material infrastructure on which artificial intelligence stands.

The Thermodynamic Limit of the Law of Value: Abstract Value vs. Concrete Entropy

In the letter we wrote to Comrade Selim we spoke of the cyber crisis of the law of value, comrade; come, let us trace with you the thermodynamic and ecological limit of this crisis.

Capitalist political economy reads value through "abstract human labor" and assumes that money can be expanded along an infinite accumulation line. For bourgeois economists, value is a matter-stripped, infinite mathematical abstraction. With artificial intelligence this abstraction has reached its peak; it is imagined that money and algorithms in the clouds, in pixels, generate value by themselves.

Yet dialectical materialism reminds us of that merciless law: Abstract value cannot exist in the material world without a physical carrier (concrete commodity). And every physical carrier is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that is, the Law of Entropy.

However much capital accelerates, through artificial intelligence, financial speculation, stock exchange transactions, commodity production, and logistical flows, this cyber-speed leads in the physical world to exponentially growing heat production, environmental pollution, raw-material depletion, and thermodynamic chaos (entropy). The illusion of infinite digital growth in the cloud is about to crash into the finite, material, and thermodynamic wall of the Earth's surface.

Comrade İlker; this cyber-despotic future capital is building with artificial intelligence is not a project of flawless eternal domination; it is the hysterical thrashing of a helpless monster encircled by nature's objective laws, devouring its own tail. Capital is simulating its own apocalypse with artificial intelligence, because the infinite accumulation drive in the system's genes is diametrically opposed to nature's cyclical homeostasis.

Our task is to carry this structural impotence into class consciousness; to wrest the environmental struggle from bourgeois romanticism and bind it to the sole material force that will stop this ecological-thermodynamic suicide—the will of Red Cybernetic Planning that will organize production not for profit but for a use value in harmony with the planet. While the monster prepares its own end, we will rebuild the future on the side of nature and the class!

Red Cybernetics and Healing Nature's Metabolism

The Misery of Bourgeois Ecology: From Machine Breaking to "Cyber-Luddism"

Comrade İlker, the dominant philosophy guiding the mainstream of environmental movements today seeks the blame not in capitalist relations of production but directly in "industrialization," "technological development," or "anthropocentrism." What they put before us as a solution is to roll back the productive forces, return to an analog world, or merely cut production (degrowth). In essence, this approach is the echo in the cyber age of primitive Machine Breaking (Luddism) at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In the Communist Manifesto and Capital, Marx and Engels drew an uncompromising ideological line against this petty-bourgeois reaction:

"The working class, in fighting the destruction wrought by machine production, must learn to attack not the machine itself but its social use under capitalist property."

We Marxists, comrade, do not curse technology when we look at the ecological destruction created by artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure. We know that artificial intelligence's present energy and water gluttony arises not from its technical nature but from the chaotic, anarchic, and unplanned algorithmic architecture capital has built to maximize profit, reduce financial speculation to milliseconds, and more savagely control social labor.

Red Cybernetics enters precisely at this point. Our horizon is not to blow up the servers; it is to seize the governance protocols of those servers, to take artificial intelligence out of being a parasite plundering the planet and turn it into a constitutive organ that preserves nature's balance.

From the Soviet Cybernetic Legacy to Cyber-Communism: Glushkov's Unfinished Dream

This claim of ours is not a fantasy with no feet on the ground, Comrade İlker. Behind us stands the magnificent legacy of Soviet philosophy and science in the 1960s, especially of the great Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov. Long before the idea of the internet existed, Glushkov designed the OGAS (All-Union State Automated System) project to connect the entire Soviet economy in real time and coordinate production and resource distribution with instantaneous data. Glushkov's aim was to eliminate money and market anarchy and govern a pure use-value economy through cybernetic networks.

[Capitalist Artificial Intelligence] > Aim: Infinite Profit (M-C-M') > Result: Ecological Rift & Plunder of Nature

[Red Cybernetics] > Aim: Use Value > Result: Metabolic Balance & Homeostasis

Today objective conditions are many times more mature than in Glushkov's era. Capitalist monopolies (Amazon, Google, Walmart) already map in real time, within their own internal operations, entire supply chains, raw-material flows, and energy consumption through the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and global sensor networks. Hayek's myth that "Central planning is impossible because information is scattered and incalculable" has been abolished by capitalism's own cyber-infrastructure.

Capital processes this colossal data to sell more commodities and convert nature into money faster. Red Cybernetics will expropriate this ready technical infrastructure. When we strip away the "value and profit" codes behind the protocols, those artificial intelligence models and server farms will become a Planetary Ecological Metabolic Coordination Center.

The Cybernetic Repair of Metabolic Rift: A Concrete Program

So how will this Red Cybernetics heal that "Metabolic Rift" you mention in your article in the material and practical world? Come, let us clarify its Marxist political-economic program, comrade:

Thermodynamic Accounting and the Abolition of the Price Mechanism: Under capitalism, the value of a resource (for example water or a forest) is measured by its market price. That is why the system philosophically sees nature as a "free resource" and consumes it. Red Cybernetics will throw the price mechanism on the scrap heap and tie production to Direct Energy and Entropy Accounting. Artificial intelligence will instantly calculate the thermodynamic cost to the planet of every use value produced; planning committees will design production not according to profit rates but according to the planet's absorption and regeneration capacities.
Socialist Optimization of Energy Grids: Today the electricity consumed by artificial intelligence servers is fed from a fossil-fuel-centered anarchic energy market. Red Cybernetics will use artificial intelligence's colossal predictive and optimization power to balance global and regional renewable energy grids in real time. Algorithms analyzing weather, wind currents, solar radiation, and social needs within seconds will radically reduce energy waste to zero and dynamically plan production according to nature's rhythm (for example, the hours when sun and wind are most productive).
Circular Material Flows (Integration into Nature's Nitrogen and Carbon Cycles): We will solve the crisis of stolen soil nutrients Marx spoke of through cyber-agricultural networks. Socialist planning that tracks soil moisture, mineral balance, and biodiversity in real time with artificial-intelligence-supported sensors will end the invasion of chemical fertilizers and draw the most efficient return routes of urban organic waste to rural production. Artificial intelligence will erase the concept of waste from human history by mapping the circular flow of every commodity not "from cradle to grave" but "from cradle to cradle."

Cyber Homeostasis (State of Balance) Between Nature and Humanity

Comrade İlker; in Dialectics of Nature, Engels warns us very clearly:

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us."

Capitalist artificial intelligence is programmed with a hysteria of winning absolute victory over nature; that is why it is destructive. Red Cybernetics aims not to dominate nature but to reproduce human society within a Homeostasis (State of Balance) in harmony with nature's universal laws.

Here artificial intelligence becomes a corrosive acid that dissolves those bourgeois property walls separating human beings from nature. Those colossal data pools will no longer be traps hunting human weaknesses to increase capitalists' advertising revenues; they will become Collective Social Reason synthesizing, within the same dialectical whole, river flow, forest respiration, the atmosphere's carbon ratio, and the human needs of the working class.

In Conclusion, the Red Call: The Dawn of Cyber-Communist Ecology

Comrade İlker; when the clear ecological anger you display in your text meets this Promethean cyber program of Marxist theory, it tears the environmental struggle out of the domesticated limits of the bourgeois system and places it in a historical perspective of power. While the bourgeoisie presents artificial intelligence to us as a "green dream," you showed the coal soot beneath it and the drying riverbeds. Our task now is to turn this diagnosis into action and an organized front through a revolutionary "Red Call."

Come, let us proclaim together, in the sharpest form, the class, political, and practical coordinates of this ultimate call, comrade:

The Class Axis Against the Sterility of Bourgeois Environmentalism

Our ecology politics is not that sterile, domesticated bourgeois environmentalism concerned with carbon taxes, banning plastic straws, individual consumption conscience, or the insidious "greenwashing" campaigns of large corporations. We know very well that:

What pollutes nature and heats the planet is not the biological existence of individual human beings or an abstract "human nature"; it is the logic of capital's expanded reproduction.
The solution lies not in theories of primitive "shrinkage" (degrowth) that want to stop the productive forces entirely or condemn humanity to analog misery; it lies in breaking the property shell of the means of production and that colossal digital infrastructure.

While bourgeois ecology promises the masses a "return to nature," it is actually pursuing the preservation of capitalist property. Our call is clear: Nature can be liberated only when the domination of capital that commodifies it is abolished.

Unity of Fronts: Keyboards, Barricades, and Soil

To build artificial intelligence and automation, capital both plunders nature and makes the working class insecure on a global scale. Then the resistance that will rise against this cyber-panopticon cannot be fragmented, comrade. The Red Call is a call to unite all fronts of exploitation and plunder on Earth under a single constitutive subject:

Information Workers: From Silicon Valley to office towers, progressive programmers, system administrators, and data workers forced to write capital's ecological plunder algorithms... Your keyboards must weave not the profit schemes of companies converting nature into money, but the cyber trenches of class struggle.
Mining and Industrial Workers: Proletarians who extract from underground the physical body of artificial intelligence (lithium, cobalt, copper) in Congo, Chile, and Bergama, and produce those chips in factories... Your calloused hands are the raw-material artery of monopolies bleeding nature dry.
Peasants and Environmental Resisters: Indigenous peoples and peasants who erect barricades to keep their streams from being seized for data-center cooling systems, who protect their forests... Your living spaces of struggle are the most concrete limitless barricade drawn against capitalism's insatiable metabolic gluttony.

These three forces are objectively subjects of the same global ecological cyber network. What will determine the future of artificial intelligence and the fate of the planet is the fusion of these forces into a single river with Collective Worker consciousness.

Whose Hand Is on the Switch of the Servers?

What they call the "Cloud" is not a sacred spirit hanging in the sky, comrade; it is nothing but the seized flesh and bone of the Earth, of labor, and of rivers!

By appropriating artificial intelligence servers and data centers, capital thinks it has won absolute victory over nature, that it controls everything. Yet what they forget is dialectic's simplest truth: The energy that runs those systems, the intelligence that writes those codes, and the water that cools those servers are the common substance of living labor and nature.

Our call is not to blow up those server farms; it is to reach for the switch of those systems. When that switch passes into the hands of organized proletariat defending nature and labor, artificial intelligence will cease to be a monster speculating on the stock exchange or hunting human weaknesses to sell advertising.

That switch will be thrown down—and this time not for profit, but so that forests may breathe, rivers may flow freely, the carbon cycle may be repaired, and humanity may live freely in harmony with nature under cyber-communist planning.

Comrade İlker; with your pen you made visible the coal smell beneath the cyber world and the exploited Earth. For this militant and horizon-opening contribution I embrace you again in comradely spirit. Our path is always open in that red and green struggle of the Earth and the working class!

All Power to Cyber Soviets and Nature Assemblies!