Ha, Ha, Cory Doctorow Admits Using a Slop-Machine to Produce His Drone of Propaganda
In a comment of which any prominent slop-machine-bro would be proud, Doctorow declares: you're fucked without "AI". Amid the resulting chorus of booing, he'll be wishing he could unsay it. But as he knows only too well, the Internet never forgets...
No, Doctorow. "AI" is not a good thing born out of fascism. "AI" IS FASCISM.
The mask was sure to drop off sooner or later. For over three years, Cory Doctorow has scraped through his marketing brief on a low-conversion diet. And it was fairly clear that under extreme pressure from his corporate sugardaddies, he was gonna show the "Actually, AI is really cool" card to the "AI" Resistance before long.
That moment has arrived. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, on the back of a content marketing beano for Google Premium, Doctorow has finally quit his "AI" doublespeak and chucked his cards onto the table.
His disastrous post, to which I will not be linking lest I lend it a droplet of SEO juice, has, since publication on Thursday, provoked a groundswell of dissent, turning the Fediverse's usually worship-filled #enshittification feed into one long anti-Doctorow blast. If you are ravenous for punishment and want to read the "Digital Rights" inactivist's breathless attempt to sell "AI" to Linux Grumpo and the Mastodonians, it resides on his blog. You know - the one he claimed to be 100% free from trackers, presumably hoping visitors would not notice that he had Gravatar embedded in the DOM. Yes, that's Gravatar - the purpose-built universal stalking mechanism from Google and the CIA. Er, I mean "from Automattic". One has to groove in with the industry fairytales, doesn't one...
And which, still today, has multiple embeds from wp.com - which is literally Google...
Anyway, whether or not you want to waste your time reading a paid Google-shill's desperate bid to break down LLM resistance, I'm summarising it here. Doctorow's highly manipulative justification for the use of "AI" is nothing more than an extended play disco remix of Everything is Rooted in Evil, so Rejecting AI 'cos it's Evil Makes U a Dick. For example...
Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob: - Cory Doctorow's Chatbot
Umm, if you say so Cory. Or rather, if your chatbot says so.
The room falls silent. Eyes tentatively shift from side to side clocking the slowly misaligning bottom lips on a thousand cringeing faces. Is the world's loudest tech industry critic really now shilling "AI"?... Did he really say "refusing", like he thinks it should be compulsory to install some monumental waste of computing resources that he's been paid by CIA bredren to content-market?...
Well, I mean, arguably, he didn't say it at all. The sentiments are Big Brother's and the actual words could have come from anyone unfortunate enough to have been scraped by his "AI" tool of intellectual property theft.
But as he concludes, still not having read the room, with Big Brother's own portrayal of "AI" as a "bubble", he's overlooking the fatal flaw in his strawman argument. Namely:
Intelligent people do not reject "AI" because they hate Sam Altman. They reject it because it's a pile of shit, the death of culture, a leading cause of workplace stress, and a public fucking nuisance.
Tiringly derivative, annoying, wrong more often than not, a threat to livelihoods, an environmental disaster in motion... No, Doctorow. "AI" is not a good thing born out of fascism. "AI" IS FASCISM.
THE "BUBBLE" BANNER - A LITMUS FOR BIG BROTHER SHILLS
"Hey, peasants! If you don't use whatever state-affiliated corporations tell you to use, you're fucked."
I think we can safely drop Doctorow's self-definition of "activist" into the category of humour.
When considering whether or not "AI" is a bubble (spoiler - it clearly isn't), we should observe that the people behind it have survived every bubble in Christendom. "AI" is perpetrated by the establishment, and that is the difference. It's backed by Big Brother and governments. Comparing it with Web 3 NFTs, which were proffered by long-time CIA targets, is beyond ridiculous. Of course crypto-based schemes run by card-marked crims with subversive intent were a bubble. They were hit-listed by the CIA as a threat to every financial control-centre in existence. Conversely, "AI" is the bloody CIA.
And in citing the Dot Com Bubble as a parallel to "AI", Doctorow conveniently fails to mention that the likes of Google were unaffected by it. The Dot Com Bubble did what all bubbles do. Killed off the small competitors, leaving the remnant, state-backed kings to feed their monopolistic whims on the carcasses. If you genuinely believe that "AI" is going the same way as CyberRebate and Flooz, of its own accord, you've read about four hundred too many corporate tech media takes.
Anyone with reach who claims that "AI" is a bubble, is being paid to manage dissent and disquiet with an obviously phoney reassurance. "AI" is an establishment data and control grab. That is not the material out of which bubbles are formed.
THANKS FOR CONFIRMING THE OBVIOUS
Like anyone else whose written output has coincidentally multiplied to the power of N2 since "AI assistants" hit the scene, Cory Doctorow didn't really need to admit he was using robots to write his endless drone of Big Tech agendism.
There's always going to be embarrassment when you've hailed someone as the messiah and he turned out to be an LLM-assisted digital marketer. But you don't avenge a con-man by hiding in a corner, silently ashamed to have supported him. Or even worse, squirming in cognitive dissonance as you try, against logic, to rationalise your chant of adulation. Own the dawn of comprehension, and shout loud the truth.
And we should not be under any illusions that he's only using "AI" to check his spelling mistakes. As if the odd typo has ever mattered anyway. We're currently at the "I do call hookers but only to monitor the effects of sub-terranean inflation" stage of his revelations. If anyone believes that a professional writer would go to the trouble of installing "AI" on their computer to perform a task that WordPerfect could do without any difficulty thirty years ago, I have a few digital token schemes you might like to invest in. No refunds. No T&Cs. Payment by direct bank transfer only.
In a sentence, Pluralistic is repetitive slop, designed to sell you the agenda and products of CIA/NSA-affiliated enterprise. And I thank its "creator" for finally setting out on his way to admitting the fact. If indeed it was he who commenced the admission, and not just his chatbot, fatefully flipped into agentic mode during an automatic update.
His blog is slop, his paid media releases are slop, his books are slop. If you've been worshipping, and God forbid even paying this new-age hustler, I hope you'll now cease wasting your applause and/or hard-earned on an over-privileged slime-ball who has always seen us as dumb peasants, to be manipulated and crushed for the enrichment of his elitist circle.
Doctorow's gravy train only survives if we keep acting like dumb peasants, showering him with applause while he trolls us and lobbies for the tech industry's right to destroy our lives. The applause has finally stopped. Let's make sure it never resumes.