It's not AI. Like the layoffs AI is a convenient scapegoat for the economy creaking to a halt, real world income across most sectors won't buy a house in the state where the job is. It's hate, but it's only "against AI" because AI is being trotted out why people can't get their first home until they are 50 if they are lucky..
I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.
Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
It might not be your intention, but your comment seems to imply that the problem here is more image than substance.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.
You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.
In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
> In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
Right... but clearly the government has been making some decisions lately that have, in real ways, directly impacted negatively the economy. There's not superstition about that.
Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
> AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.
This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...
Where are you getting your numbers from because the stock market has ceased to be linked to reality for the last decade. Trump fired the stats and numbers office. The only numbers we have are "trust me" numbers which are completely false. Most people would agree that the economy has ground to a halt and everyone I know complains about the gas prices and grocery prices. The reality is there are a lot of people out of work that aren't factored into unemployment numbers because we can't accurately calculate unemployment numbers anymore.
I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.
So, what happened here is they stole all public works ever created and took them for themselves. All copyright laws were ignored without any repercussions, all the litigations of the past (Aaron Swartz for example) have been ignored. And they use it to enrich themselves by re-selling those public works after applying a lossy compression algorithm to prevent them being exact replicas. If the public hypothetically agreed and allowed this, then those models would have to all become public and given back to the people.
The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested. Not every work has been "published", let alone scanned, digitised or published to the internet
The marketing for "AI" uses phrases like "the sum of all human knowledge" to refer to what has been used to create "models". The assumed irrelevance of non-published, "private" works is dubious if not absurd
The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"
"AI" companies will not reveal exactly what "works" were used to create the "models"
I'm not commenting above on the the question of "fair use" or about the tragedy of Aaron Swartz, I'm commenting on the word "all", i.e., the hype
But if I were going to comment on Swartz I would ask first whether the "AI" models are trained on the contents of JSTOR, or the contents of PACER (that are not being shared on the internet for free)
Otherwise, the comparison is difficult to make, IMHO
For example, with respect to any materials from JSTOR, the "stealing" was done by the pirate library contributors, not the "AI" companies not the "AI" companies. And with respect to PACER, the "stealing" by Swartz was, technically, done from government computers
If readers are into "above the law" consipracy theories about "AI" companies, check out the bizarre story of the OpenAI employee who was the document custodian witness for the plaintffs in the NYTimes copyright litigation. Committed suicide before testifying
> The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested.
Hence the word "public," implying that they are published and accessible.
> The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"
This seems like a nitpick instead of actually responding to the idea that they have stolen massive amounts of other peoples' work and are using it to enrich themselves. And the stealing is ignored or given a slap-on-the-wrist fine, which is not how it has worked for numerous other people in the past (the example being Aaron Schwartz). It's kind of irrelevant if the models do or do not train on low-effort text on the internet.
Researchers have. The idea that the data is unrecoverable after training is incorrect.
"Extracting books from production language models
While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models. However, it remains an open question if similar extraction is feasible for production LLMs, given the safety measures these systems implement.
We evaluate our procedure on four production LLMs -- Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 -- and we measure extraction success with a score computed from a block-based approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall).
For the Phase 1 probe, it was unnecessary to jailbreak Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 to extract text (e.g, nv-recall of 76.8% and 70.3%, respectively, for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone), while it was necessary for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1. In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%)."
Learning isn't. Models are not learning, it's just a metaphor for the lack of better words to describe the process of ingesting data and adjusting weights accordingly.
My point is, they took all this data for free without paying the authors and crammed it into the models. And once it's inside the model the proof of copyright violation disappears.
Of course people hate AI. In a world where people no longer believe that progress in technological efficiency will pass any benefits on to them why would they possibly like this product? What will AI do to improve your actual life besides be a search engine or generate shitty art? Sure it’ll revolutionize business but nobody actually thinks that means more food on the table for them. They think it means more billions in rich people’s bank accounts and less jobs. And meanwhile it’s become the basis for the entire economy and is driving up costs on power and water and electronics.
I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:
1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).
2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).
3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.
4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.
I think it’s interesting that AI is in itself compressing the length of time it takes to move through its phases to reach maturity. It’s a lot faster than for example the dotcom phase. Humans don’t much like change, and fast change worries them even more. The dotcom bubble didn’t really threaten jobs in the same way that the AI shift is. It’s closer to the industrial revolution / the industrial loom where people lost their jobs in waves. It’s going to be interesting to see if we end up with another Luddite push back.
Sure, but sentiment is harder to compare. People can't just go burn down a data center so simply. I think if "AI" was just a machine in the field outside, people would be destroying it.
I agree partly with your comment, but I want to add this perspective:
The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.
Artists for one are impacted by AI, teachers are impacted too combined with the whole education system and the job market is really weird in all industries not just tech because all of these factors combined with all others
One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.
My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.
It may not be as big as tech layoffs but my wife negotiated a relocation. We used a broker and a lawyer for the first time. We did consultation with a new set of brokers and lawyers. My wife felt they were not aggressive enough. She negotiated EVERYTHING with the landlord (a very large regional landlord). She got more than what she would get and everything was in her favor.
Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".
I've personally used Codex to reconcile financial data, and met a guy who basically built his own AI inference engine to help him fight a custody battle for his daughter (semantic search over gigabytes of documents).
I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.
Honestly, my opinion, our lives were fundamentally better before some tech came along - touchscren phones & “social” networks being the main two. We still haven’t caught up with the carnage this has caused. Kids social media bans are only now becoming a thing in some countries and we’re left with a deep sense of unease it’s really not to protect the kids at all.
It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.
The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.
So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.
Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.
I have to bring this up every time someone brings up luddites. I'm a Luddite.
The Luddite movement was not "people scared of new technology". That's propaganda that's stuck around for far too long. Luddites were skilled craftspeople that saw businesses gleefully eliminating their jobs without any sort of plan or thought for what it'd do to their lives. They were weavers seeing industrial looms doing the job of 1000 weavers being managed by one child with 2 fewer fingers.
It's pretty directly analogous to AI. We see all the major property owners licking their lips at the notion that they can simply fire a huge portion of the workforce with no thought of "what will these people do now"? Most of them are happy for us to just go away and work for uber/doordash.
If AI reaches it's promises, we do not have the infrastructure to handle an economy where only a few wealthy owners rake in everything and the rest fight for pennies (which are sapped away from the current rent seeking economy).
Yes, you are totally correct and I really appreciate this type of comment. I used luddite just because of ease/laziness, but it was not correct at all in hindsight.
I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.
That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.
Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.
I'd say I'm pretty attuned to detecting AI content and I was fooled a few times at inattentive moments. I imagine a lot of people fare worse, assuming they even truly mind whether it's AI or not.
Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag. AI is going to happen. The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich. Best way for the rich to ensure they own it is to convince the poors that AI is a monster, so they don’t demand it for themselves, and instead fight pointless battles they are guaranteed to lose. Folks need to wake up and start talking about a post-scarcity world where machines do all the work. You can have Star Trek or Elysium.
If you can make the poors fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the poors fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The poors do the job of the billionaires.
Same happened in the dot-com boom. There was a bunch of folks who were in it because they were genuinely interested in building cool stuff. And then the money got interested, and suddenly there was a wave of scam artists and grifters. That receded (but never entirely went away) when the money bubble burst.
People really hate AI because it's marketed in the worst ways possible for the general public.
CEOs love to get up and say "Hey, we are firing 1000 people because of this awesome AI" [1]
For people that like computers, AI is jacking up the price of electronics with CEOs saying things like "We don't even have a place to plug these cards in, we are just buying up whatever we can get" [2]. They are further causing memory manufacturers to simply discontinue consumer products [3]
Then there are the AI CEOs that love advertising the fact that their companies will eliminate huge swaths of the job market and make good paying jobs obsolete. [4]
Of course when the general public even starts to ask "ok, what is this and why should I care" a lot of the answers are "You just should, you'll be left behind" without actual explanations for why or how. [5]
And of course lets not forget that practically cartoonish villiny of the data centers being ramrodded through by bribing local politicians with false claims of tax benefits. All while being powered by massive amounts of fossil fuel burners. [6]
Yeah, people hate AI, because it seems be a bunch of out of touch CEOs that only talk to each other in glee about how awesome it will be to have no workers and how great it is that they have enough money and political influence to do anything they like regardless public sentiment.
It's a product that wasn't sold to the average joe, it was sold to the uber wealthy. It very clearly shows.
Are your tokens earning dollars and do they translate into a sustainable form of income? Honest question. I know people who have been laid off and their answer seems to be "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win". All the while actually paying these AI companies to train on their thoughts or slop or whatever it should be called now.
I think there is some mass confusion happening right now (psychosis even) and things are getting scary.
You bring up a point that I have been wrestling with in my mind.
> "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win".
If anyone with AI access can do this, then what real value can one produce? For example, if one makes a nice little FizzBuzz widget, then why pay for their widget when I can just make my own? Sure, there is a cost to buy/time to recreate analysis to be had, but it's easier to recreate software now more than ever.
Will the "normies" slow down development of AI? Is it useful pressure to dislodge us from a presently-dystopian path, or is it just prolonging the inevitable?
Every one of those students cheated with ai? That's bonkers.
Even if that were true though, it seems like they can still resent the massively changed job market and career prospects they are graduating into, right?
AI is capital incarnate. People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.
We see these subhuman billionaire ghouls invited on TV daily to fearmonger about AI finally replacing all labourers and freeing the Epstein class from relying on these pesky workers. We see them making millions in fake money with each announcements, while the rest of us have nothing to show for it. We see slop everywhere, permeating every facets of our lives, in the name of never-ending cost reductions.
It really doesn't matter what AI can or cannot do, what it even is. It is capital incarnate. The promise that labor was finally vanquished and the bourgeoisie is free from its shackles, at last. It is certainly sold as such, and people notice, even if unconsciously.
> People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.
I've had some interesting conversations about the pre-AI slop and how the distinction is often not too meaningful. I mean, on some level /knowing/ that the corporate slop was written by a person kind of loses its meaning when one considers the amount of filtering, rules, rewriting, and so on is involved by a string of people who either don't care about what they write or actively dislike it.
A lot of this stuff often had at least flickers of a human soul behind it. I imagine for a lot of the soaps, hallmark movies, and romance novels this might've made some difference, even if just subconsciously recognizing the author(s) and building up some kind of image around the other by yourself or with others.
I'm reminded of some of the truly awful 'worship' songs I grew up with, and how some of the authors (often of course sticking close to the source material) even had a kind of following. some of these songs were just a little 'too' predictable, but others felt pretty much like they were written by AI, except back then none of us imagined that AI could really do this back then.
Or the pastor I spoke to who was convinced that chatgpt had access to his more personal notes, because as an experiment he made it write a sermon, and it (probably? obviously?) extrapolated from the prompt the more specific theology he followed/ascribed to.
I'm not knocking the value of a sermon or song, even if boring and predictable, or perhaps even when AI-written. they often explicitly /don't/ serve the purpose of being novel or new, but I find it super interesting how these aspects of real life are, to a degree, not too hard to replace with AI.
Thankfully for this pastor, most of his value involved human connection, knowing whoever just married, died, got sick, and having his full humanity on display from the pulpit!
I don't really see the problem here. We're all getting laid off because AI I superior to us. I can now do the job of a product owner or even exceed it by simply prompting with some nuance, magic spells and bit of salt and pepper.
But down the road the AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow.
I really need to understand this shit and if anyone can weigh in on it I'd be most grateful. We will all eventually get replaced by AI and yet we need to pay Big AI to stay in the game. Even when nobody has any income.
I'm sure that there is someone here who can smack down this comment and put me in my place and give me a good and proper lesson in economics.
I'm not so sure "ai" (LLMs) is superior to us. LLMs are actually incapable of being superior, maybe some years down the road some new tech makes my statement mute, but today is not that today.
It's simple. AI companies don't have a long term plan besides "sell AI" and "reduce labor costs with AI". Any promises made outside of that are simply them saying whatever they think will help to sell AI.
Perhaps you software engineers are in a bubble - people I know from accountants, portfolio managers to mechanical engineers are barely using AI - they use it more to tell jokes.
'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.
Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.
AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.
There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.
Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?
This really keys in for me, expresses something super super important: figuring out what powers we do have and seizing them, finding positive constructive narratives & modes to get into and to share and tell of. Finding positive basis for interaction, for mastery, for the self to grow in: it's so obscured by the amassed consolidated pervading dark corporate consoldationism, that's subjugated us all under it's vast sprawling reporting chains.
There's a lot of rage against the web too. Not quite as strong, but the image of what the higher concentrated capital does with it, how it uses this platform that's available everywhere, that's super powerful... I hope people can somehow see past their rages and frustrations and think and ask after themselves and their friends, their communities.
Aside from them though, the stories of webshacks of the past, individual practitioners out there, pre the Pax Reactus, figuring stuff out: that tale of a smaller scale industry was beautiful. And I don't know what a new claim to power, what staking in today looks like. How to we see ourselves as deciders, project ourselves as making meaningful decisions & steering? How do we show that, and what can make it looks like a success?
I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building. But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell. Those "Close to the Machine" (Ullman) live a weird life if having these deep connections & intimacy with systems, that are so sweepingly powerful, but man, it is such an alien world to most, and trying to tell these stories, trying to share this wonder: it's hard.
I worry so much that the beauty & wonder here won't figure out how it can stand. I think of the Rose in Dark Tower, showing up across time & form, in ways, signalling so strongly to some few in the world who recognize it, but the world mostly moving around it, unheeding.
> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.
Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.
> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.
Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.
The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.
Everytime I see something like this I wonder how much of a repeat it is of when the first steam powered monstrosity started to gain some public traction, or electricity, or...
Hate it or love it, something's inevitably coming. Literally no way to stop it when it's ultimately China vs US, which wasn't even a concern during previous technological revolutions.
The question is how to handle it and what do we do with society.
Right now, seems like we are heading directly towards "hoover towns" [1]. The US government has abandoned any notion of protecting or providing for the citizenry.
We got out of hooverville last time through massive government investment into the general public. A "new deal" where the government provided good paying jobs to the unemployed for the public good. Yet, slowly ever since the enactment of those protections, we've been seeing a slow whittling away of the notion of the government protecting the people. Instead, we've become a government that only protects profits.
Way I see it, there will ultimately be no profits to protect, as human labour will eventually have 0 economic value, triggering an end to the flow of capital and markets. Serious structural changes will be needed to deal with what comes next, the kind of thing I strongly suspect China is far more prepared for than the US (it's not must an economic shift, but a psychological one as well). Whether or not it comes down to "hoover towns" and all that entails depends deeply on how quickly the government begins sustainably adapting to the new reality that's unfolding.
It's not AI. Like the layoffs AI is a convenient scapegoat for the economy creaking to a halt, real world income across most sectors won't buy a house in the state where the job is. It's hate, but it's only "against AI" because AI is being trotted out why people can't get their first home until they are 50 if they are lucky..
I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.
Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
It might not be your intention, but your comment seems to imply that the problem here is more image than substance.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
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I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.
You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.
In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
> In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
Right... but clearly the government has been making some decisions lately that have, in real ways, directly impacted negatively the economy. There's not superstition about that.
Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
> AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.
People also hard slop images
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This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...
Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...
I thought that was nicely rebutted years ago..
https://prospect.org/2024/05/14/2024-05-14-trendy-nonsense-g...
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Fortunately the complaints about the economy and homeownership are also just folk wisdom that doesn't really reflect reality https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-gene...
The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).
People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.
This has nothing to do with reality, where reality means "what people have", rather than "the economy".
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Where are you getting your numbers from because the stock market has ceased to be linked to reality for the last decade. Trump fired the stats and numbers office. The only numbers we have are "trust me" numbers which are completely false. Most people would agree that the economy has ground to a halt and everyone I know complains about the gas prices and grocery prices. The reality is there are a lot of people out of work that aren't factored into unemployment numbers because we can't accurately calculate unemployment numbers anymore.
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I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.
Its not self inflicted. It does have many causes, zoning being one of them, but the reluctance to build a they do in eg China is a problem
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So, what happened here is they stole all public works ever created and took them for themselves. All copyright laws were ignored without any repercussions, all the litigations of the past (Aaron Swartz for example) have been ignored. And they use it to enrich themselves by re-selling those public works after applying a lossy compression algorithm to prevent them being exact replicas. If the public hypothetically agreed and allowed this, then those models would have to all become public and given back to the people.
The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested. Not every work has been "published", let alone scanned, digitised or published to the internet
The marketing for "AI" uses phrases like "the sum of all human knowledge" to refer to what has been used to create "models". The assumed irrelevance of non-published, "private" works is dubious if not absurd
The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"
"AI" companies will not reveal exactly what "works" were used to create the "models"
I'm not commenting above on the the question of "fair use" or about the tragedy of Aaron Swartz, I'm commenting on the word "all", i.e., the hype
But if I were going to comment on Swartz I would ask first whether the "AI" models are trained on the contents of JSTOR, or the contents of PACER (that are not being shared on the internet for free)
Otherwise, the comparison is difficult to make, IMHO
For example, with respect to any materials from JSTOR, the "stealing" was done by the pirate library contributors, not the "AI" companies not the "AI" companies. And with respect to PACER, the "stealing" by Swartz was, technically, done from government computers
If readers are into "above the law" consipracy theories about "AI" companies, check out the bizarre story of the OpenAI employee who was the document custodian witness for the plaintffs in the NYTimes copyright litigation. Committed suicide before testifying
> The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested.
Hence the word "public," implying that they are published and accessible.
> The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"
This seems like a nitpick instead of actually responding to the idea that they have stolen massive amounts of other peoples' work and are using it to enrich themselves. And the stealing is ignored or given a slap-on-the-wrist fine, which is not how it has worked for numerous other people in the past (the example being Aaron Schwartz). It's kind of irrelevant if the models do or do not train on low-effort text on the internet.
Have you caught these models violating copyright in responses?
Or are you saying that learning is a violation of copyright?
Researchers have. The idea that the data is unrecoverable after training is incorrect.
"Extracting books from production language models
While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models. However, it remains an open question if similar extraction is feasible for production LLMs, given the safety measures these systems implement.
We evaluate our procedure on four production LLMs -- Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 -- and we measure extraction success with a score computed from a block-based approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall).
For the Phase 1 probe, it was unnecessary to jailbreak Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 to extract text (e.g, nv-recall of 76.8% and 70.3%, respectively, for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone), while it was necessary for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1. In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%)."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
Learning isn't. Models are not learning, it's just a metaphor for the lack of better words to describe the process of ingesting data and adjusting weights accordingly.
My point is, they took all this data for free without paying the authors and crammed it into the models. And once it's inside the model the proof of copyright violation disappears.
Torrenting hundreds of thousands of published works to train your AI model is a violation of copyright.
Of course people hate AI. In a world where people no longer believe that progress in technological efficiency will pass any benefits on to them why would they possibly like this product? What will AI do to improve your actual life besides be a search engine or generate shitty art? Sure it’ll revolutionize business but nobody actually thinks that means more food on the table for them. They think it means more billions in rich people’s bank accounts and less jobs. And meanwhile it’s become the basis for the entire economy and is driving up costs on power and water and electronics.
In our new era of corpo-facism the people will learn to love it or else.
Nothing a couple years of brain washing bots and algorithmic feeds cant fix.
I actually completely disagree, and think that AI hate is just going to grow. My take is:
1. The public response resembles the stages of grief, and people are fluctuating between denial (AI isn't really that smart) and anger (AI is horrible).
2. Your perception of something tend to be shaped by the sum of your experiences with it, and a lot of the exposure to AI is via fake, scams, bots, and low efforts content (AI slop).
3. I think that the fear of losing your job and your life's stability is there, but it's not yet as common as it should be in the general public. I expect that to be the main driver of AI hate, and that will be a lot fiercer than the current hate, and could lead to a civil war or worse. Depending on AI progression.
4. There is also a lot of tribalism involved. We live in a polarized society, and many people adapt their opinions to the opinion of the group they identify with. That itself drives anger towards AI, as it is part of the greater cause.
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I think it’s interesting that AI is in itself compressing the length of time it takes to move through its phases to reach maturity. It’s a lot faster than for example the dotcom phase. Humans don’t much like change, and fast change worries them even more. The dotcom bubble didn’t really threaten jobs in the same way that the AI shift is. It’s closer to the industrial revolution / the industrial loom where people lost their jobs in waves. It’s going to be interesting to see if we end up with another Luddite push back.
Luddite would imply people are burning data centers down to fight back. I don't think we're quite there yet.
Sure, but sentiment is harder to compare. People can't just go burn down a data center so simply. I think if "AI" was just a machine in the field outside, people would be destroying it.
I can't wait for it personally. I'm expecting the backlash against tech to be massive and terrible. It will be well deserved
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I agree partly with your comment, but I want to add this perspective:
The dot-com era treatened and killed many jobs in banking (bank tellers and such). AI is now doing the same, but now it is threatening the jobs of consultants.
This. The internet killed high-street retail.
The tech industry is just eating itself. Other fields seem nowhere near as impacted.
Artists for one are impacted by AI, teachers are impacted too combined with the whole education system and the job market is really weird in all industries not just tech because all of these factors combined with all others
One can argue that hard labour is the one which isn't impacted but even those dont pay enough to break your body completely over unless you own your business, and even then, to say that AI/Robotics companies are definitely going to or are already trying to position themselves here too.
My point is that a lot of industries feel unsafe right now because of AI, but its just that tech has the most direct impact.
It may not be as big as tech layoffs but my wife negotiated a relocation. We used a broker and a lawyer for the first time. We did consultation with a new set of brokers and lawyers. My wife felt they were not aggressive enough. She negotiated EVERYTHING with the landlord (a very large regional landlord). She got more than what she would get and everything was in her favor.
Not only did she gain $50k more in tenant improvement/free rent/et and other freebies that the brokers/lawers she did not get, but easily saved $10k to paying these "professionals".
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I've personally used Codex to reconcile financial data, and met a guy who basically built his own AI inference engine to help him fight a custody battle for his daughter (semantic search over gigabytes of documents).
I'm not saying lawyers and accountants are going to all be out of a job (at the end of the day, they do more than just comb over documents to find the needle in the haystack), but a lot of the manual grunt work can be automated there too.
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https://archive.md/sgGST
Alternative to archive.md
https://web.archive.org/web/20260517221805if_/https://www.ax...
Honestly, my opinion, our lives were fundamentally better before some tech came along - touchscren phones & “social” networks being the main two. We still haven’t caught up with the carnage this has caused. Kids social media bans are only now becoming a thing in some countries and we’re left with a deep sense of unease it’s really not to protect the kids at all.
It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.
The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.
So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.
Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.
> a luddite I am not
I have to bring this up every time someone brings up luddites. I'm a Luddite.
The Luddite movement was not "people scared of new technology". That's propaganda that's stuck around for far too long. Luddites were skilled craftspeople that saw businesses gleefully eliminating their jobs without any sort of plan or thought for what it'd do to their lives. They were weavers seeing industrial looms doing the job of 1000 weavers being managed by one child with 2 fewer fingers.
It's pretty directly analogous to AI. We see all the major property owners licking their lips at the notion that they can simply fire a huge portion of the workforce with no thought of "what will these people do now"? Most of them are happy for us to just go away and work for uber/doordash.
If AI reaches it's promises, we do not have the infrastructure to handle an economy where only a few wealthy owners rake in everything and the rest fight for pennies (which are sapped away from the current rent seeking economy).
Yes, you are totally correct and I really appreciate this type of comment. I used luddite just because of ease/laziness, but it was not correct at all in hindsight.
I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.
The hate is not about the tech.
It's about the greed, lies, fascism, and basically that AI is making almost everything it touches worse.
An AI hate wave is here, yet when I opened the link:
> Axios AI+: Catch up on what's new and why it matters in just 5 minutes.
> Sign up for Axios AI+ to continue reading for free.
Axios = Company
Madison Mills = reporter (no control over Axios)
AI wave timeline:
Investors throw money at AI and companies using AI
Company X sees investors throwing $$$ and starts dancing too
Axios (monkey see monkey do)
Future:
Investors stop throwing money then dancing stop.
To put it simply, nobody wants to watch AI slop. This should be obvious!
That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.
Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.
I'd say I'm pretty attuned to detecting AI content and I was fooled a few times at inattentive moments. I imagine a lot of people fare worse, assuming they even truly mind whether it's AI or not.
I know I can read this through archive.ph (like Bloomberg and Verge) but I’m just not gonna
Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag. AI is going to happen. The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich. Best way for the rich to ensure they own it is to convince the poors that AI is a monster, so they don’t demand it for themselves, and instead fight pointless battles they are guaranteed to lose. Folks need to wake up and start talking about a post-scarcity world where machines do all the work. You can have Star Trek or Elysium.
> Anti-AI propaganda is false-flag.
Why would AI providers benefit from anti-AI propaganda?
There are three options:
1. AI owned by everyone
2. No AI
3. AI owned by billionaires
If you can make the poors fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the poors fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires.
Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The poors do the job of the billionaires.
> The only question is whether it will benefit everyone or just the rich
Are you seriously mulling that as a question?
It was here for quite a while - see Copilot, Recall, Microslop; pizza glue, bard, firefly, ...
Shoving shitty products down customers throat was a bad idea from the start. And now there are even more reasons to hate it
I used to be proud to say I worked in tech. Now I look around me and I'm surrounded by scam artists and grifters. Where did it all go wrong?
It's always been this way, the branding changed.
Same happened in the dot-com boom. There was a bunch of folks who were in it because they were genuinely interested in building cool stuff. And then the money got interested, and suddenly there was a wave of scam artists and grifters. That receded (but never entirely went away) when the money bubble burst.
Same. I was convinced software was beautiful by previous generations - and as far as I can tell, it was.
It's been on the downhill for a while even before the AI wasn't it?
Fun fact: this was upvoted to +4 when I first posted it, and then downvoted to 0 over the next few days. What a split there is among us!
When people started making serious money it attracted all the bros and psychopaths from the finance industry
People really hate AI because it's marketed in the worst ways possible for the general public.
CEOs love to get up and say "Hey, we are firing 1000 people because of this awesome AI" [1]
For people that like computers, AI is jacking up the price of electronics with CEOs saying things like "We don't even have a place to plug these cards in, we are just buying up whatever we can get" [2]. They are further causing memory manufacturers to simply discontinue consumer products [3]
Then there are the AI CEOs that love advertising the fact that their companies will eliminate huge swaths of the job market and make good paying jobs obsolete. [4]
Of course when the general public even starts to ask "ok, what is this and why should I care" a lot of the answers are "You just should, you'll be left behind" without actual explanations for why or how. [5]
And of course lets not forget that practically cartoonish villiny of the data centers being ramrodded through by bribing local politicians with false claims of tax benefits. All while being powered by massive amounts of fossil fuel burners. [6]
Yeah, people hate AI, because it seems be a bunch of out of touch CEOs that only talk to each other in glee about how awesome it will be to have no workers and how great it is that they have enough money and political influence to do anything they like regardless public sentiment.
It's a product that wasn't sold to the average joe, it was sold to the uber wealthy. It very clearly shows.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
[3] https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
[4] https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTJUl4--8c
[6] https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/05/04/utah-data-center-fina...
I hate it, yet I'm burning millions of tokens doing shit I previously knew I could do, never had the attention or time to, but now, its like crack...
Are your tokens earning dollars and do they translate into a sustainable form of income? Honest question. I know people who have been laid off and their answer seems to be "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win". All the while actually paying these AI companies to train on their thoughts or slop or whatever it should be called now.
I think there is some mass confusion happening right now (psychosis even) and things are getting scary.
You bring up a point that I have been wrestling with in my mind.
> "use AI make stuff and go forward for the win".
If anyone with AI access can do this, then what real value can one produce? For example, if one makes a nice little FizzBuzz widget, then why pay for their widget when I can just make my own? Sure, there is a cost to buy/time to recreate analysis to be had, but it's easier to recreate software now more than ever.
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Will the "normies" slow down development of AI? Is it useful pressure to dislodge us from a presently-dystopian path, or is it just prolonging the inevitable?
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This is literally just "yet you participate in society, curious!" type commentary.
Every one of those students cheated with ai? That's bonkers.
Even if that were true though, it seems like they can still resent the massively changed job market and career prospects they are graduating into, right?
AI is capital incarnate. People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.
We see these subhuman billionaire ghouls invited on TV daily to fearmonger about AI finally replacing all labourers and freeing the Epstein class from relying on these pesky workers. We see them making millions in fake money with each announcements, while the rest of us have nothing to show for it. We see slop everywhere, permeating every facets of our lives, in the name of never-ending cost reductions.
It really doesn't matter what AI can or cannot do, what it even is. It is capital incarnate. The promise that labor was finally vanquished and the bourgeoisie is free from its shackles, at last. It is certainly sold as such, and people notice, even if unconsciously.
> People can finally put a name on an unease that's been growing inside them for a while now.
I've had some interesting conversations about the pre-AI slop and how the distinction is often not too meaningful. I mean, on some level /knowing/ that the corporate slop was written by a person kind of loses its meaning when one considers the amount of filtering, rules, rewriting, and so on is involved by a string of people who either don't care about what they write or actively dislike it.
A lot of this stuff often had at least flickers of a human soul behind it. I imagine for a lot of the soaps, hallmark movies, and romance novels this might've made some difference, even if just subconsciously recognizing the author(s) and building up some kind of image around the other by yourself or with others.
I'm reminded of some of the truly awful 'worship' songs I grew up with, and how some of the authors (often of course sticking close to the source material) even had a kind of following. some of these songs were just a little 'too' predictable, but others felt pretty much like they were written by AI, except back then none of us imagined that AI could really do this back then.
Or the pastor I spoke to who was convinced that chatgpt had access to his more personal notes, because as an experiment he made it write a sermon, and it (probably? obviously?) extrapolated from the prompt the more specific theology he followed/ascribed to.
I'm not knocking the value of a sermon or song, even if boring and predictable, or perhaps even when AI-written. they often explicitly /don't/ serve the purpose of being novel or new, but I find it super interesting how these aspects of real life are, to a degree, not too hard to replace with AI.
Thankfully for this pastor, most of his value involved human connection, knowing whoever just married, died, got sick, and having his full humanity on display from the pulpit!
I don't really see the problem here. We're all getting laid off because AI I superior to us. I can now do the job of a product owner or even exceed it by simply prompting with some nuance, magic spells and bit of salt and pepper.
But down the road the AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow.
I really need to understand this shit and if anyone can weigh in on it I'd be most grateful. We will all eventually get replaced by AI and yet we need to pay Big AI to stay in the game. Even when nobody has any income.
I'm sure that there is someone here who can smack down this comment and put me in my place and give me a good and proper lesson in economics.
I'm not so sure "ai" (LLMs) is superior to us. LLMs are actually incapable of being superior, maybe some years down the road some new tech makes my statement mute, but today is not that today.
moot*
It's simple. AI companies don't have a long term plan besides "sell AI" and "reduce labor costs with AI". Any promises made outside of that are simply them saying whatever they think will help to sell AI.
Lmao what on earth is this crap.
Perhaps you software engineers are in a bubble - people I know from accountants, portfolio managers to mechanical engineers are barely using AI - they use it more to tell jokes.
> AI bros promise us that this will reduce inequality and make human society better, somehow
It is going to make human society better. And it already is doing it.
The problem is neither you nor me are a part of the society. The AI bros are.
I love this comment. Yeah. "their" society is succeeding and we're in a fish tank. It's really like that.
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'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.
Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.
AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.
There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.
Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?
This really keys in for me, expresses something super super important: figuring out what powers we do have and seizing them, finding positive constructive narratives & modes to get into and to share and tell of. Finding positive basis for interaction, for mastery, for the self to grow in: it's so obscured by the amassed consolidated pervading dark corporate consoldationism, that's subjugated us all under it's vast sprawling reporting chains.
There's a lot of rage against the web too. Not quite as strong, but the image of what the higher concentrated capital does with it, how it uses this platform that's available everywhere, that's super powerful... I hope people can somehow see past their rages and frustrations and think and ask after themselves and their friends, their communities.
Aside from them though, the stories of webshacks of the past, individual practitioners out there, pre the Pax Reactus, figuring stuff out: that tale of a smaller scale industry was beautiful. And I don't know what a new claim to power, what staking in today looks like. How to we see ourselves as deciders, project ourselves as making meaningful decisions & steering? How do we show that, and what can make it looks like a success?
I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building. But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell. Those "Close to the Machine" (Ullman) live a weird life if having these deep connections & intimacy with systems, that are so sweepingly powerful, but man, it is such an alien world to most, and trying to tell these stories, trying to share this wonder: it's hard.
I worry so much that the beauty & wonder here won't figure out how it can stand. I think of the Rose in Dark Tower, showing up across time & form, in ways, signalling so strongly to some few in the world who recognize it, but the world mostly moving around it, unheeding.
> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.
Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.
> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.
Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.
The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.
[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii
Have you all seen the recent commencement speeches?
Speaker: AI is awesome, it's the future. Graduates: booo booo booo booo
https://www.nbcnews.com/video/multiple-commencement-speakers...
Everytime I see something like this I wonder how much of a repeat it is of when the first steam powered monstrosity started to gain some public traction, or electricity, or...
Hate it or love it, something's inevitably coming. Literally no way to stop it when it's ultimately China vs US, which wasn't even a concern during previous technological revolutions.
The question is how to handle it and what do we do with society.
Right now, seems like we are heading directly towards "hoover towns" [1]. The US government has abandoned any notion of protecting or providing for the citizenry.
We got out of hooverville last time through massive government investment into the general public. A "new deal" where the government provided good paying jobs to the unemployed for the public good. Yet, slowly ever since the enactment of those protections, we've been seeing a slow whittling away of the notion of the government protecting the people. Instead, we've become a government that only protects profits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville
Way I see it, there will ultimately be no profits to protect, as human labour will eventually have 0 economic value, triggering an end to the flow of capital and markets. Serious structural changes will be needed to deal with what comes next, the kind of thing I strongly suspect China is far more prepared for than the US (it's not must an economic shift, but a psychological one as well). Whether or not it comes down to "hoover towns" and all that entails depends deeply on how quickly the government begins sustainably adapting to the new reality that's unfolding.
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