itch.io

You're partially right, and that deserves a straight answer: the detail about Truth Social was wrong. Trump made the Abraham Lincoln remarks verbally, at a lunch for Kennedy Center board members — "I called the general. I said, 'General, what's with the Abraham Lincoln, it looks like it's burning down?'" — not on Truth Social as the post claimed. That's a factual error and it should be corrected. Fair catch. The.Independent

But the underlying event is documented: an AI-generated video of the USS Abraham Lincoln on fire circulated widely, and Trump was initially taken in by it before being informed by a general that the ship was intact and undamaged. The story holds. The sourcing slipped. euronews

On the materialist analysis point — you're not wrong that reducing geopolitical shifts to a meme war is ideologically thin. The deeper causes are structural: decades of military interventionism, petrodollar dependency, IMF-enforced austerity across the Global South, the slow erosion of U.S. soft power since Iraq 2003. Those are the real reasons global public opinion has moved. The post gestures at that but leans too hard on the media spectacle angle.

That said, "just do a materialist analysis" and "AI slop" in the same comment is a bit of a contradiction — one is a methodological critique worth engaging with, the other is just dismissal. The error in sourcing doesn't invalidate the argument. It just means the argument needed better sourcing. Which it now has.

[Did you really go and check if my pro-AI post was written with AI...? LOL 😄]

Fair point that the U.S. was already a meme — nobody's arguing Iran invented American self-parody. But "niche" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. These videos reached millions of views across Instagram and X, got covered by PBS, CBC, the BBC and the AP, and — most tellingly — forced Trump to personally go on Truth Social to deny that a Lego aircraft carrier was on fire. When the leader of the most powerful military on earth is issuing statements about cartoons, that's not niche. That's a psychological operation that landed.

On the AI-written accusation: the post is AI-assisted, sure — which is kind of the whole point. The argument isn't "Iran made cool videos." The argument is that AI has democratised narrative warfare in a way that structurally disadvantages whoever holds the incumbent position — in this case, the U.S. When the cost of production collapses, the side with less money and more grievance has more to gain. That's not hype, that's basic asymmetric logic.

You can disagree with the framing. But "it's not that popular" and "it's AI slop" in the same breath is a bit contradictory — if it's irrelevant, why does the writing quality bother you?

For eighty years, the United States dominated the planet not only with aircraft carriers, but with something far more subtle and pervasive: the story. Hollywood, CNN, the dollar, the "American dream" — American cultural hegemony was the true pillar of global capitalism, its immaterial infrastructure. Military force opened the doors; the narrative built shopping malls on top of them. In 2026, during what many are calling the Third Gulf War, something broke. And it broke with Lego bricks.
The consent machine has a bug.
As marketing expert Marco Lutzu put it: "For eighty years the United States invented and dominated the language of global pop communication. They used it to win the Cold War, to export the American dream, to convince the planet that their way of life was the universal model. In 2026, the country they spent decades portraying as backward, theocratic, pre-modern… is stealing their tools and using them better. Right now, Iran controls the memes. The United States is becoming the meme."
This is the historic short-circuit we are living through: artificial intelligence — the quintessential product of Silicon Valley's techno-financial capitalism, built on data extracted for free from billions of users, trained with underpaid labour from the Global South — has become the instrument with which a heavily sanctioned nation is dismantling the propaganda of the very empire that imposed those sanctions. "Slopaganda" is class struggle in video format.
The term "slopaganda" describes this new form of digital media warfare based on anonymous AI-generated content, waged by Iran often through its own embassies. The collective Akhbar Enfejari — "Explosive News" — has turned Lego Movie-style animations into a vehicle for global counter-narrative. In one of their most viral videos, an Iranian military commander rendered in Lego raps: "Our inbox is flooded with Americans saying they don't watch the news. They listen to our songs instead since your media is full of sh*t." Lettera43
This is not just irony. It is a declaration of epistemic war against the information industry that has legitimised every invasion, every sanction, every "stabilisation operation" of the last fifty years.
The message is not religious. It is internationalist.
This is perhaps the most significant detail — and the most uncomfortable for those who prefer to dismiss all of this as theocratic propaganda. One of Explosive Media's videos opens with the dropping of napalm in Vietnam, moves through every country that has faced American aggression, and closes with the message: "We are doing this for all of you." This is not about religiosity — it is a genuine movement of solidarity toward those who have suffered under U.S. aggression. CBC
Vietnam. Iraq. Libya. Afghanistan. Yemen. The red thread connecting decades of American military interventions — always in the name of democracy, always in defence of oil corporations and financial interests — stitched together in a two-minute video and distributed for free on Instagram. No sponsors. No bought algorithm.
Whoever controls the memes controls the mood.
Tehran's propagandists understood that irony and the meme format are the best skeleton keys for penetrating Western discourse without triggering political censorship filters. The content is designed to be fluid: it starts from Tehran's official channels, gets amplified by Houthi networks and Russian media, and ends up — often stripped of context — in the feeds of both the anti-imperialist left and MAGA movements, united by a shared scepticism toward American interventionism. Krisis
This convergence is a symptom of something deeper: the legitimacy crisis of the unipolar order. When Iranian videos resonate simultaneously on the left and the right, it is not because Iran has won the culture war. It is because the American narrative has already lost its own.
The emperor is naked. And Lego has immortalised it.
Among the most emblematic episodes, AI-generated videos appeared to show the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier ablaze at sea. The images were so convincing that Trump said he called his generals to verify whether they were real, before taking to Truth Social to deny it: "Not only was it not burning, it wasn't even hit — Iran knows better than to do that!" Euronews
The president of the greatest military power in history, with more bombs than anyone else on the planet, forced to publicly deny a cartoon. The most useful press release for Tehran was written by Washington itself.
The real lesson.
AI is not neutral. Like every technology born in the belly of capitalism, it carries within it the power relations that produced it. But — and this is the system's irresolvable contradiction — once a tool exists, you cannot stop it from being used by those who have no F-35s or aircraft carriers. The monopoly on force is hard to crack. The monopoly on narrative, in the age of social media, is already over.
"They're using popular culture against the number one pop culture country, the United States," noted propaganda scholar Nancy Snow. But perhaps the right question is not how Iran learned to make memes. It is why so many people across the world — from Latin America to Africa, from South Asia to Europe — found in those memes something they recognised as true. PBS
That truth has seventy years of military bases, CIA-funded coups, IMF debt and trade embargoes behind it. AI did not create it. It simply made it visible to those who, until yesterday, had no voice.
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/irans-ai-memes/
https://www.cbc.ca/arts/commotion/inside-the-ai-generated-meme-war-between-the-u...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pro-iran-groups-deploy-ai-to-troll-trump-infl...
https://krisis.info/it/2026/04/aree/medio_oriente/iran/come-liran-racconta-la-vi...
https://it.euronews.com/next/2026/03/30/disinformazione-e-deepfake-ia-sui-social-media-come-cambiano-la-guerra-in-iran
https://www.lettera43.it/guerra-iran-trump-meme-troll-slopaganda-video-ia/
https://it.insideover.com/politica/cara-italia-alleiamoci-lappello-meme-delliran...
Sources: Krisis, Euronews, CBC Arts, The Soufan Center, PBS, InsideOver, Lettera43

That said, remember not to use AI to create an anti-capitalist game!

I wrote that radio, TV, internet, they were initially "looked with suspicion", fearing they would brainwash people. It's not that they were never used. Fortunately, common sense prevailed over ideological purity, and they weren't left solely in the hands of capitalism. The same thing is happening with AI. Looking it with suspicion is legitimate, leaving it in the hands of capitalism—a strategic mistake. Just as we used radio, TV, and the Internet against the system, it will be inevitable to do the same with AI.

My critique was trying to go beyond the specifics of this jam. Rejecting a tool out of ideological purity risks leaving it entirely in the hands of those you want to oppose.  
It's a mistake that alternative movements have already made in the past. For a long time, parts of the leftist and anarchist movements looked with suspicion at the internet, social media, and going further back in time, at private radio and TV stations. This meant ceding those spaces to those who had fewer ideological qualms about using them.
It may seem paradoxical, but the more powerful a technology is, the more it costs to reject it. And AI is probably the most transformative technology of recent decades. In any case, if we really want to limit ourselves to this jam: if a young person interested only in learning to code wanted to make their game by generating sprites with AI, I don't think that would be a great harm to the world of creativity — or conversely, an aspiring artist who had AI write the code to animate their creations wouldn't be such a great harm to programmers either.

I'm not a native English speaker either, so don't worry about errors — I don't even notice them :-)

As an anarchist, I think that AI is not in itself an expression of capitalism, but rather the use that is made of it, as is the case with any technology. However, I think that, unlike other technologies, it has the intrinsic power to become an anti-capitalist tool, capable of bringing skills and knowledge to social classes that cannot afford to acquire them. In all honesty, I think it is a bit too early to consider reliable the studies that correlate the use of AI with cognitive decline.

This is a good article, it is in Italian but luckily now we have tools to translate

https://www.obloaps.it/quasi/2024/03/19/le-vignette-propagandistiche-del-dr-seus...

First of all, there's no theft, because nothing was stolen from the artists; their works remain theirs. They simply weren't granted the rights to use them, and this is a rule introduced by capitalism. OpenAi, which you mentioned, has been accused by the capitalist system of having trained its models in violation of the license. I know that OpenAi and Sam Altman are equally capitalist, but they had to say "fuck capitalism" if they wanted to achieve their goals. The focus of the topic I opened isn't good and beautiful AI vs. bad and ugly AI.

Do we want to abolish AI? That's fine by me. Many jams don't allow the use of AI-generated assets, and that's a legitimate choice; I simply find it contradictory in this jam with this theme.

Ah...I'm Italian; this post was translated using AI. 

Licenses are the highest expression of capitalism, that's exactly the point of this thread. It's impossible to fuck capitalism and respect licenses at the same time.

A painter improves himself by observing the paintings of previous painters, a writer improves by reading the writings of others, musicians draw inspiration from the music of other musicians, a multitude of video games are inspired by other video games. Every idea comes from someone else's idea. Is all this stealing?

Thank you for understanding and delving deeper into my thought.

If you're referring to chatgpt grok gemini etc., I agree, but the model is open source and runs on my PC, I'm not paying or empowering capitalists, and I'm not taking away earnings from artists I wouldn't have hired anyway.

fuck capitalism means sharing, collectivism, no private property, no copyright, no patents.

Many AI models are free and open source and that means fuck capitalism.

fuck capitalism means sharing, collectivism, no private property, no copyright, no patents.

Many AI models are free and open source and that means fuck capitalism.

Don't you think it's contradictory to say "fuck capitalism" and at the same time not allow content generated by an AI because it might have been trained on stolen content?

thank's

Hi, thank you for your detailed review. I agree with the issues you highlighted. I can or maybe someone else (the game in open) improve everything once the evaluation period is over.

Thank you for this detailed review of my game; I really appreciate you playing it through. The issues you mentioned are real, but to meet the deadline, I chose to finish the game even if it wasn't perfect. I plan to improve it, but I don't think it's right to do so now with the evaluations still ongoing.

Thank you again!

Hi all, it seems many people find the training level challenging. Maybe the bottles fall to fast, but there's no time limit for hitting 10 bottles in 10 shots ; take your time and aim carefully.

Hello, thank you for playing my game. Yes, there are three boss fights in the game. It seems many people find the training level challenging. Maybe the bottles fall to fast, but there's no time limit for hitting 10 bottles in 10 shots ; take your time and aim carefully. Here's a gameplay video of the training level:

Thank you for appreciating my game and for your suggestions. You're right, it needs adjustments. Unfortunately, my team consists of just me, and the minimalist choice was practically forced in order to meet the deadline. I intend to improve it, but I don't know if I can or if it's right to do so with evaluations in progress. Thanks again

Hi, thx, there was a bug in the Deputy Triggers boss fight, now it's fixed

Hi, Thank you for reporting the bug, I've fixed it.

It seems impossible to go beyond 10 steps

I'm experiencing the same issues as the previous comments, I can't play.