this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Cory Doctorow's "Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI" has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn't have a boss and has untold resources for whatever "AI" "tools" he finds useful.
He isn't ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn't do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn't have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new "tool". He simply uses what's useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.
95% of people don't have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the "tool" that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.
I don't see how this means he's wrong though, if people are hating AI as a proxy for hating their abusive relationship with their employer, that doesn't seem like a strong argument that everyone who isn't in that situation must also hate AI.
It doesn't mean he's wrong! it means he's out of touch and doing the propaganda work of capital for free much like many other self-employed/business owning/petit-borgeois people who think they're on the side of capital.
It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this "tool" is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.
Blind hatred for AI as a technology is inherantly reactionary, but that doesn't mean that the implementation of the technology today isn't problematic in many ways.
Yeah I notice he doesn't address the costs, economic and environmental, of LLM proliferation. Way to ignore a large part of the argument while calling anyone opposed to your position stupid.
I hope he gets to eat those words one day, but I doubt he would ever admit he was wrong.
I guess I have that luxury, but I sacrificed hard to get where I’m at.
And, truthfully, way more people could do it if they didn’t feel entitled to the easy way (college > world destroying corp).
Entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand but okay