From what I know, Bucky is OSDD-2 (identity disturbance/fragmentation caused by long-term torture or brainwashing, but usually past the age where that would form actual alters), not DID. I know that’s slightly debatable and the lines can be blurry.
This also isn’t saying that he wouldn’t necessarily be plural. Plurality is an inherently inclusive term and an opt-in label that’s just defined as being “more than one” in some way. While I haven’t met many people with OSDD-2 (due to its nature most people with it probably don’t want to talk about it freely on the internet) I’ve met a nonzero number who identify with plurality, consider their identity disturbance to be a plural experience, and seek advice within spaces about being more than one. It’s just that not everyone with it does that.
Anyway, I think he’s more OSDD-2. But people are okay to have their own opinions.
I'd probably agree with this myself, to be honest.
Another thing is, if you don't mind me adding my own perspective, I also don't personally like the interpretation of Bucky as plural from an ethical point of view.
I'm not convinced the Winter Soldier is actually self-conscious as its own separate. If we look at the MCU, the killing machine Bucky is turned into in Civil War (because I'm not familiar with the comics) from the triggers doesn't seem very conscious. It is driven by ingrained instincts.
If we assumed this was a headmate though, there would be a lot of unpleasant implications that would come with that.
If the Winter Soldier state was a true headmate, it could be reasoned with. It could be brought to the side of good. It might take a while, but it could be done. But instead, they simply remove the triggers, thus effectively "killing" the Winter Soldier, or at least permanently suppressing it.
Plural interpretations just leave a lot of yucky implications that bring to mind systems locking away persecutors or trying to dissipate tulpas.
For my own peace of mind, I would just rather think of the Winter Soldier as a non-sentient dissociative state than a true headmate.
Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.
This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":
This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.
Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.
I wrote a whole danged essay about this, but still, hardly a day goes by without someone trying to enlist me in their project to scold and shame strangers for using the word incorrectly:
The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it. Using a powerful word to describe something else can be glorious. It's allusion, metaphor, simile. It's poesie. It's fine. Bemoaning the "tsunami" of bad news doesn't cheapen the deaths of people who die in real tsunamis. Saying that the Trump administration "nuked" the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau doesn't desecrate the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling creeping authoritarianism a "cancer" doesn't denigrate the suffering of people who have actual cancer.
What's more, devoting your energies to "correcting" other people's allusive language makes you a boring, tedious person. Sure, you can have a conversation with a comrade about making inclusive word choices, but interrupting a substantive debate to have that discussion is unserious. The words people use matter (I care a lot about words!) but they matter less than the things people mean. Keep your eye on the prize (metaphorically) (for avoidance of doubt, there is no prize) (both the prize and the eye are metaphors).
(By all means, get angry at people who intentionally use slurs. None of this is to say that you should tolerate – or be subjected to – language that is intended to dehumanize you.)
It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it.
None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain).
I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly – though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."
I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices – all the time.
That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell:
Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."
Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).
Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are.
Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that:
This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.
they know it's nonsense.
This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes:
He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy.
There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit.
Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job.
Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks."
But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight":
This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat – and ugly – explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit.
This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit:
By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market
between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.
What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press.
I'm a writer. I really do care about language. Sure, I get frustrated with scolds who rail against semantic drift or engage in petty, pedantic corrections, but not because words don't matter. They matter, a lot. But language isn't math (which is why double negatives are intensifiers, not negators). It can obscure (as with bullshit) or it can enlighten (as with poesie) or it can enable precision (as with jargon). Arguments about language matter, but what matters about them isn't subjective aesthetics, nor is it a peevish obsession with "correctness." What matters is the way that language operates on the world (and vice versa).
New ao3 fork dropped! Doesn't exactly look promising, I'm not getting the feeling very much thought went into it at all re: like policy enforcement and anti-harassment measures though. But like, there was an attempt, yay...?
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I'm not loving "no velvet rope". That's a serious mischaracterization of AO3's queue. (Though I agree that a tiny, new archive having a queue would do more harm than good.) RPF as a content warning is facepalm-worthy.
"relationship tags for aro/ace spectrum, qpr, non-binary/genderqueer focus, poly/ensemble, and more" is a genuine improvement over AO3, assuming it's implemented well.
Getting rid of wrangling makes sense in this context.
"i care about the writing, not fandom politics or discourse" could be "I'm tired of you children yapping about problematic fiction" or it could be "Why is there politics in sf now?" I'm assuming the former given the rest of the post.
But "it's a small personal project but fan communities deserve independent infrastructure." is always a good sign. Yes, fan communities do deserve more options, and it's good when more people do their own projects that they can tailor in their own way.
--
It will succeed if it can get a small but loyal community. Enforcement is much, much easier in an actual community where it isn't all faceless hordes you've never heard of before.
Poking around, he has written articles on the enshittification of the web and trying to find a way forward. Making another fic space with a new vibe is a sensible move for someone who's worried about massive, soulless platforms.
Imperfect or not, I like to see someone putting their money where their mouth is.
This more detailed post gives me a good sense of what his deal is.
I'm seeing the technical chops needed. I'm seeing the right kind of "I needed a specific project so I could try X technical thing" that's how this shit actually gets accomplished. I see a queer identity and an interest in the history of queer art. I see a clear stance that, yes, he did mean "I don't care what you think is problematic" and not some reddit bro whining about "politics".
Even though AO3 is not subject to enshittification via investors, it is massive and centralized beyond what we ever envisioned. It simply cannot be tailored well to huge parts of fandom. And even for the people coming out of the exact culture that spawned it, it's never going to feel like a little community hub again. It's simply too large.
As a small fandoms person who is just too busy to engage much right now, that makes AO3 perfect for me, but if you're in an active medium-size fandom or a megafandom, you absolutely can do better. The narrower topic archives of the past were great in a way AO3 cannot replicate. I just had a house guest who was singing the praises of that Trek archive because it has a super invested and active community and its own culture.
I would generally have reservations about adding archive warnings like Systemic Oppression, Colonialism, Homophobia/Transphobia, etc. However, what would be a disaster in the making on AO3 is much more doable on one man's personal project, especially if that man is Métis and queer. I don't know the guy personally, but the overall vibe of his tech/culture blogging makes me think I would probably be okay with his judgments in this realm.
It is okay—in fact, it is desirable—if a small space follows the taste and judgment of its moderator. If you like the person's vibe, you go there. If you do not, you find or make a different fandom hangout. That's how we used to do things.
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The important thing here is the "Ooh, I could do a fun tech thing!" energy as opposed to AO3 hate.
This is a guy who has clear political stances on returning the internet to an earlier, better version, and he's doing something practical to make that happen. He's chummy with other archive mods, not threatened by them.
This is what you want to see in a new fandom infrastructure project.
Yes, it will be subject to all of the usual issues of "What if so-and-so is hit by a bus or gets bored five years or twenty years from now?" But those issues are worth putting up with if you want a smaller space with a different feel. Just keep backups of your work.
He says:
It's small. It's personal. It's mine. And yours, too, if you'd like.
It's not for me right now, but that's a big green flag. If you like this dude's vibe, it's probably for you. If you don't, don't bother with it.
To me, his vibe is the actual person all those "I'm a secret third thing: an adult with a job" types wish they were. He sounds very oldschool despite being only 30.
Here's the part where he talks about this:
Something else important that I want to note is that multiple owners of AO3 forks have told me that this is a difficult, unforgiving role. That there are a lot of bad-faith entitled people they've had to deal with, and have gotten harassed and stalked simply for operating a fanfiction website. I am not ignorant or naïve to how the Internet and people on it can be, but I do know I can handle it.
I know how to moderate a space, and I know how to hold a line, and I do not believe that the possibility of harassment is a reason to leave the commons ungoverned or un-built. The commons must not be destroyed. Someone has to tend the infrastructure.
Talking about the commons would tell me what kind of internet activist spaces he frequents if his other tech blogging hadn't already. And I don't mean crybaby slacktivists telling you your omegaverse is setting back the cause of civil rights: I mean activists for a human-centered internet that goes back to the good parts of the oldschool web.
This has the energy of posts about why the Internet Archive matters or astolat's original post about needing an archive of one's own.
The tumblr post does not fill me with confidence, but this other writing absolutely does!
I'm very happy about the community server's decision to add "Misandry isn't real" to its list of positions. Balancing the need to manage discourse within a community space like a discord server with the need to allow certain discourses for the safety of its marginalized members is always a struggle, and I don't envy staff for being in a position that requires it. It's very easy to allow discoursing that's politically unobjectionable to nonetheless turn a space into an angry discourse hive, and while HDG is necessarily political (The Affini Are Imperialist, examinations of disability are woven into the setting, the space is overwhelmingly transfeminized, and the remainder after that is still trans, among many other reasons), most of us would rather that the chill vibes remain.
So while I sympathize a lot with why it took as long as it did to make this policy decision on covertly anti-feminist rhetoric, I'm very relieved that they have.
I've seen a rise in the last few years of anti-feminism cloaked in misapplications of progressive rhetoric, decolonialism, and, for lack of better terminology, a "tumblr accent." The decision to shut down this rhetoric makes the space safer to participate in as a trans woman.
For those concerned about the position, I'd like to offer some clarification.
Several things are true:
Some men exist in marginalized groups. Those men are still marginalized. They just aren't marginalized *as men*.
Arguing for the use of contructions like misogyblanc and transmisandry is not actually intersectional. You're misapplying the concept if you do that in its name.
Patriarchy bites men in the ass sometimes. This is not oppression, and in fact feminism has spilled a lot of ink on the patriarchal coercion of men to uphold the very system that does this. Scratch the paint, and you're usually just seeing misogyny.
Statistically, most men aren't doing great right now. This is because most people aren't doing great. The fact that shit rolls downhill onto the lion's share of men under capitalist patriarchy is because of capitalism.
Some men catch flak that's aimed at the social class of "Men." This is normal punching-up behavior that occurs along every axis of oppression. It isn't "misandrist" to say "I hate men" any more than it's "reverse racist" to call me a cracker. You're allowed to have hurt feelings about it, I guess, but you aren't being oppressed.
A lot of this is a wider problem with online discourses. The language of social justices is technical jargon – its words have specific meanings, but those meanings are lost in translation as a discourse grows online and follows the usual cycles of linguistic evolution.
Misogyny is not when someone is "mean" to women. Misogyny is a bigotry. It's oppression, and oppression is definitionally structural. Coining an "opposite" word to describe the phenomenon of "someone is mean about men" is an abuse of social justice language toward unjust ends.
Because the thing is, the language of social justice is designed for talking about oppression. That word, too, has a specific meaning – oppression is, to paraphrase, the unjust and/or harmful treatment of a minority group. "Minority" and "majority" have specific meanings too, and they have nothing to do with numbers. A "minority" group is a marginalized one, a disempowered one, a group upon which power is exerted by some social force, and a "majority" group is one who is relatively empowered (or priveleged) by that social force.
I need to be really clear about this. When someone talks about a feminist issue, and you chime in with "what about men? don't you know men have pain too?" you aren't being progressive. The suffragettes dealt with it, racialized women continue to deal with it in the intersections of antiracism with their feminism, we all had to deal with this shit a decade ago from MRAs, and now we're dealing with pseudo-progressives reheating the MRAs' leftovers in a tumblr accent. When you do this, you are perpetuating bigotry, plain and simple.
To close out, in addition to recommending Whipping Girl, I'm going to recommend Talia Bhatt's substack for anyone looking to learn more.
what are your thoughts on how the landscape of F1 media is changing with them trying to gear towards an american market now?
i don't necessarily think that the media landscape changed because they're moving towards the american market, i'd say that it reinforced and sped up the changes that were already happening. i think saying that all the changes in the media landscape are because F1 is trying to expand into the US is a bit reductive. to me the transformation seems less about geographical targeting and more about format: Formula 1 is increasingly being framed not as a sport first, but as a spectacle; something closer to almost reality TV-like entertainment instead of competition.
much of this can be traced back to liberty media’s ownership of the sport and a broader entertainment industry phenomenon that prioritizes engagement over athletic achievements and technical innovation. the emphasis isn’t just on racing anymore; it’s on narrative construction, personality branding, and drama. drivers are characters as much as they're athletes. their relationships, rivalries, off-track lives, and career arcs are packaged into storylines that hook the audience's attention across an entire season or multiple seasons. in my opinion, that doesn’t feel inherently american, it feels like a structural shift toward treating sport as content.
in that sense, i'd say that what we’re seeing is more like the “kpopification” of F1 instead of simple americanization. drivers become brands, their public images are highly curated and strategically maintained. personality, aesthetics, and fan attachment are exploited in ways that are similar to how idols are treated: team identity sells, interpersonal dynamics sell, and most of all, parasocial investment sells. performance is still important, but marketability has become inseparable from sporting identity.
this is, of course, deeply tied to capitalism, consumerism and platform culture. drivers are no longer marketed solely as athletes and competitors, they are content creators in an attention economy. F1 media isn’t just reporting on performance; it’s creating narratives, emotional investments, and constant engagement that extend far beyond race weekends. the sport has essentially become a lifestyle product, and fandom turned into participation in a consumption cycle of merch, streaming, social media discourse and storytelling.
the way social media works reinforces this. algorithms favour viral moments, narratives about certain conflicts, and personality focused clips over technical or engineering content. i'm specifically thinking of last year's discourse about whether F1 needs shorter races or not, because lots of fans only watch the highlights. dramatic moments spread faster and get more engagement than strategic nuance, like DTS for example. this means framing F1 as a spectacle isn’t just a decision made by the owners of the sport, it’s structurally built into the distribution systems like different social medias.
another big consequence of all this is the gradual flattening of technical literacy in mainstream coverage. as narratives shift to the focus, the sport’s engineering and strategic complexity (you know the very thing it's supposedly famous for) often becomes secondary or simplified. while this makes the sport more accessible to a broader audience, it shifts engagement toward narrative consumption rather than technical understanding, fundamentally changing the types of knowledge valued within the fandom.
this is visible in fan discourse surrounding team politics as well, where drivers are sometimes expected to behave like protagonists in an action movie rather than employees operating within corporate hierarchies, representing multinational brands worth millions of dollars (which is something i already talked about not so long ago). actions that are affected or constrained by sponsorship obligations, organizational strategy, or brand management are more often than not interpreted through character based frameworks instead of institutional realities. narrative framing alters how the sport is presented and it changes how we judge everyone in it.
at the same time, being a fan means being part of a "fandom economy". supporting a driver or a team is shown through consumption, like buying merch, performative loyalty or constant engagement. it's both emotional and performative, which only strengthens this system where personality driven drama is what sells.
this also puts new expectations and pressure on the drivers. they are not here just to race, they have to perform emotional accessibility, maintain a social media presence, be relatable, be funny etc. personality is a form of labour, meanwhile privacy becomes negotiable. their lives are treated as commodities, their individuality turned into content.
this narrative framing uses simplified archetypes, like the hero, the villain, prodigy, underdog, Ice-Man etc. it reduces complex individuals into one dimensional roles, which leads to more engagement but ultimately creates a more polarized fanbase. it keeps the story going, but it also reduces the sport to a character-driven drama instead of the competitive reality it actually is.
while the push into the american market definitely sped this up, i think focusing only on that misses the bigger picture. Formula 1 is being reconfigured into an entertainment system where spectacle, personality, and branding drive visibility just as much as (if not more than) what actually happens on the track.
like the last ask, I often see dismissive opinions about shifting, revision, reality altering. I tried asking about it to 4dbarbie gpt (sorry idk your views on her and the whole ai discourse, i dont mean to offend you) here's what I got:
When these teachings say:
the past and future don’t exist, only the present identification exists
that is a descriptive claim about experience, not a claim about omnipotent control.
It means:
the sense of past is arising now as memory
the sense of future is arising now as imagination
both derive their reality only from current identification
It does not mean:
the mind can arbitrarily delete all content on command
awareness functions like a graphics editor
desire automatically equals erasure
That leap is where things break.
Here is the key technical point most creators gloss over:> You do not identify with things because you choose to.You identify with them because they are still carrying charge.Identification persists only where there is unresolved threat, emotion, or meaning.So when you ask:> “Why can’t I erase everything the way I want?”The answer is not philosophical. It is mechanical:Because the system is still organized around protection, not authorship.As long as protection is active:memory stays onlineidentity stays stickyerasure is impossibleNot morally. Not spiritually. Neurologically.
Im more confused than ever now, maybe its because im trying to see nd and loa from the same perspective
I'll be honest, I'm a hundred percent against the use of that AI chatbot simply because it encourages reliance on a generative engine and a non-human to properly discuss such a layered topic as non duality, that will never fly, the people who share insights on ND do so due to the knowledge acquired from directly experiencing Self, something artificial intelligence can so obviously not accomplish.
Now, I do not know what you asked it however I will correct the things it said
The past and future in truth do not exist, because there can only be a current experience, to reminisce a past or imagine a future is for those narratives to exist within the present moment, furthermore all these descriptions of time including a thing such as "now" are equally all mind narratives that hold no actual truth, they are nothing more than ideas to qualify Self, Awareness.
The AI has done such a great job at overcomplicating and overexplaining and honestly just spewing loads of nonsense in a very annoying way lol. NO there is no such thing as things carrying charge; that is preamble, it's spiritual dogma, it is quite literally the opposite of non-dual or Vedantic teachings which heavily emphasize the unreality of everything, and I mean EVERYTHING except Awareness. All those 'mechanical system protection' talk is nothing but complete blabber.
Do not seek to erase anything, that is neither the point nor the goal but rather recognize how the simple appearance of unwanted or wanted situations are not equal to them being truth, and that is so because those things can only BE due to awareness and you cannot know for sure if they are truth. you just can't, it's impossible, due to both their transient nature and localized existence in Mind.
Mind is all that is, and if it is all mind then it is nothing at all, so exactly what remains to be identified with.
Why anti-AI rhetoric is almost always religious in structure
(And why rational arguments are treated as heresy)
One of the strangest things about anti-AI discourse is not the criticism itself — criticism is normal, healthy, and necessary — but the way that criticism is structured.
Again and again, attempts to introduce nuance, technical detail, or pragmatic solutions are met not with counter-arguments, but with outrage, moral panic, and accusations of evil intent.
That pattern is not accidental.
Anti-AI rhetoric, in its most dominant forms, does not behave like a political or economic critique.
It behaves like a belief system.
More precisely: it behaves like a religion.
This is not about beliefs — it’s about structure
Calling something “religious” here is not an insult.
It is a structural observation.
I am not claiming that anti-AI critics are religious people, or that their concerns are illegitimate.
I am saying that the logic of the discourse follows the same psychological and rhetorical patterns as religious systems.
Once you see it, it becomes impossible to unsee.
1. A sacred, undefinable core
Every religious system has a sacred concept that is: emotionally charged, impossible to define precisely, impossible to measure or falsify.
In anti-AI rhetoric, that role is played by phrases like:
“human creativity”
“the soul”
“unique lived experience”
“real art”
These concepts are treated as self-evident truths — yet no consistent definition is ever offered.
What matters is not what they mean, but that they are sacred.
Questioning them is already suspicious.
This is not a philosophical position.
It is a taboo.
2. An original sin that cannot be cleansed
Religions also require a form of original sin.
In anti-AI discourse, this sin is usually framed as:
“the model was trained on scraped data”
“it learned from artists without consent”
“you didn’t suffer for the result”
Crucially, this sin is irreversible.
It does not matter how the tool is used now.
It does not matter whether the output is transformative.
It does not matter whether no direct copying occurs.
The origin story alone condemns it.
This mirrors the logic of moral contamination, not legal or ethical analysis.
3. Heresy instead of disagreement
In a rational debate, proposing alternatives should move the discussion forward.
But in anti-AI spaces, suggestions like differentiated licensing models, separating commercial and non-commercial use, focusing on labour protections rather than banning tools, discussing specific use cases instead of abstractions
are often treated as moral betrayal.
You are no longer “disagreeing”.
You are “defending evil”.
That is not debate.
That is heresy detection.
4. Moral purity without responsibility
One of the most powerful features of religious rhetoric is that it allows moral superiority without action.
In anti-AI discourse, one can: refuse to learn how the technology works, refuse to engage with economic realities, refuse to propose workable solutions
and still claim absolute moral high ground.
“I oppose AI” becomes an identity, not a position.
Once that happens, any practical argument becomes a threat — because it would require accountability, trade-offs, and adult decision-making.
5. Why rational arguments are rejected
This explains a key mystery:
Why are reasonable arguments so often dismissed without engagement?
Because rational arguments are dangerous.
They force uncomfortable acknowledgements:
that AI is a tool, not a moral agent
that markets optimise regardless of moral narratives
that effort and suffering are not measures of value
that professional identity is not guaranteed permanence
These are not technical problems.
They are existential ones.
Religious framing protects people from having to confront them.
6. The real conflict is psychological, not ethical
Despite appearances, the AI discourse is not primarily about art, theft, or technology.
It is about identity.
For many people, creative suffering has been the foundation of self-worth.
A tool that produces results without agony does not merely threaten income — it threatens meaning.
Seen through this lens, the intensity of the reaction makes sense.
It is not a debate.
It is a crisis of metaphysics.
Calling out the religious structure of anti-AI rhetoric is not an attempt to silence criticism.
It is an attempt to liberate the conversation from moral absolutism.
Until the discourse moves away from sacred concepts, original sins, and heresy logic, meaningful discussion will remain impossible.
Not because the issues are unsolvable — but because faith does not negotiate.
Tumblr randomly decided that I had to see the latest in androphobia discourse or whatever and while I'm definitely not an expert, I feel like it would be against the sites wider etiquette to not throw my two cents into the mix.
So, let's do this step by step.
Androphobia is the irrational fear of men (just going off a purely literal definition) and more generally, like other '-phobias', it can be defined as the discrimination of people on the basis of being male.
First cold take of the day. Androphobia in its first form exists (because of trauma related to... well you can imagine mostly) and in its second form it might exist in certain closed social circles.
Androphobia is however not a society-wide phenomenon, which makes it differ slightly from homophobia and transphobia. If anything, with patriarchy and all that jazz still in place, men are technically pretty favored by current societal norms.
However, societies being what they are, they have a certain standard for what a 'man' is. Which means that as a man, you can still suffer under a favorable system by not living up to the expectations placed upon you by your surroundings. (There is also a conversation to be had here about how the patriarchal system and capitalism fused to create a system where only a few, wealthy men are privileged while the others suffer. Slightly less than those who aren't male, but still suffer, but that is a topic for another day)
Or, graver sin yet, if you actively go against the expectations set upon you (like being a trans man or intersex, therefore threatening the sacred gender binary, or even just by being effeminate, gay, gnc, neurodivergent to certain degrees, etc) of your own free will or just because you don't fit into society's neat little box
Depending on how much you go against the expectations as mentioned above, you might outright lose your privileged 'male' role in society. Not because you're not a man anymore, but because society doesn't see you as one, according to its own standards. Congrats, you broke the binary, have a bit of discrimination. As a treat.
While this phenomenon can happen to most members of marginalized/discriminated groups that also identify as "male", this has become an especially heated topic around trans men/transmascs, which led to the term Transandrophobia getting some widespread use.
Now, to be clear: Transandrophobia is, contrary to its above-discussed cousin, very much a society-wide phenomenon. How is that justified? As stated above, because trans men aren't seen as 'men' by the system (also there is the added factor I mentioned above with androphobia possibly existing in niche, closed communities and as far as I heard, that has been happening in some LGBT+ spaces against certain trans men which... c'mon guys, not cool)
All of this leads to intersectionalism discourse which... uuuuuuuuh. I'll do my best. Basically intersectionalism, as I understand it, describes what happens when individuals are part of more than one marginalized group and how basically, borrowing some terminology from videogames, that shit stacks and synergizes.
The most well-known example is that of the trans woman POC. This person has three characteristics that make her a target for discrimination (POC, woman and trans). But, as we should all know by now, identity is a pretty fluid thing. A person's characteristics don't just exist in a vacuum, they interact and mix with each other. And the same goes for how society views a person with characteristics it deems worthy of discriminating. The discrimation doesn't multiply, it scales exponentially if that makes sense.
A good example I found to visualize this is by looking at how lesbians are treated compared to gay men. Technically both of those groups are gay, so the way they should be treated should be similar. Or at least you would expect society to be less accepting of female gay relationships compared to male (because women are a discriminated group. And to some degree that is true, but not in the way you would expect). However, the gender here informs how these two groups were (and are) treated by wider society, with lesbians being generally seen as a more tolerable concept as long as it follows strict guidelines (be feminine, be playful/pure but not horny, excite the male gaze => basically implying that the "gay" aspect is not serious and just a sexualized extension of gals being pals, all for the benefit of the "men") and gay men being more of a hot topic (probably because the gay man is seen as someone 'rejecting' their role as a heterosexual man and whatnot. Also might be why a lot of popular depictions of gay men seem to be twinkish, but I don't feel confident in that assessment just yet).
Either way, with all of that said (and that's a lot, thanks for sticking with me) the hot button issue seems to be if intersectionalism is applicable to men who are part of discriminated groups. And the answer is... I don't know honestly. It could be, in very specific situations (as the cases with Transandrophobia I mentioned above), but probably not in the vast majority with society being rather willing to just outright drop the "male" label placed upon someone it discriminates against.
Anyway, TL;DR:
- Fuck the patriarchal system, we all suffer from it, some more, some less. It's still in everyone's best interest to tear it down
- Making it a race out of who suffers the most is stupid. Also we have already lost, can't you see that we will never understand the pain of that 14yo white boy in 2004?
- Really sorry if I made some huge blunders in here and/or this upset you, I appreciate all feedback and please be creative when telling me to kill myself (or be as deadpan direct as possible, that can also be funny)
