If you think judging people for using ai is helping anyone or actually a good take, read this please.
I understand where the anger comes from. When we see automation threatening livelihoods, the instinct is to push back hard. But we need to look at who we are actually fighting, because tearing each other down over using tools is not the win for the working class that people think it is.
There is a massive difference between a strategic boycott and rejecting a technological concept.
When we boycott Starbucks, we are targeting a specific corporation because of their specific actions—like union busting and mistreating workers. That is a tactical move to force a bad actor to change. But you cannot "boycott" machine learning. That is like trying to boycott the concept of automation or the internet.
Machine learning, in and of itself, is just a technology. It is a leap forward in how we process information. To be against the very concept of it isn't revolutionary; it’s actually a step backward. It’s ceding the future to the billionaires instead of fighting for the people to have a say in how that future looks.
The problem isn’t the technology; the problem is Capitalism.
The reason AI feels like a threat right now is that under our current economic system, efficiency benefits the owners, not the workers. When a machine can do a job, capitalism says "fire the worker," whereas a humane system would say "now the worker has to work fewer hours for the same pay."
This is where the idea of "No Ethical Consumption Under Late Capitalism" is important. It doesn't mean "everything is bad so nothing matters." It means that individual consumer choices cannot fix systemic exploitation.
When you attack a fellow worker—an artist, a writer, a student, or a small business owner—for using AI to help them survive in a gig economy that demands impossible output, you aren't hurting the tech giants. Google and OpenAI do not care if you bully a freelancer on Twitter.
All that does is divide us. It creates a purity test that turns potential allies into enemies.
If we want to actually help people, we shouldn't be screaming at individuals for using the tools available to them. We should be directing that energy upward. We need to be fighting for regulation, for fair compensation, for labor protections, and for a world where automation liberates us from drudgery rather than starving us.
Don't let them convince you that your enemy is the guy using ChatGPT to write an email. We are all stuck in this machine together. Let's focus on breaking the system, not the other people trying to survive it.
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