tanteFeb 20

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.

EDIT: Diskussions under this are fine, but I do not want this to turn into an ad hominem attack to Cory. Be fucking respectful

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

Acting ethically in an imperfect world

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

Smashing Frames
komali_2Feb 21
Show threadBogdan Buduroiu

@tante

> LLMs are based on extraction, exploitation and subjugation

So is torrenting. This is a very capitalist argument, coming from someone that self-identifies as a communist, that one deserves to reap the rewards of them adding value to humanity through some form of gatekeeping and is entitled to a reward from such gatekeeping. You're literally arguing on the side of Elsevier and JSTOR against Aaron Swartz

What does it matter if human knowledge is available as a book or an LLM? The important part is that all of humanity has access to it.

> Omelas is an almost perfect city. Rich, democratic, pleasant. But it only works by having one small child in perpetual torment.

Walking away from Omelas doesn't stop that child's perpetual torment. Your choice is merely ignorance and cowardice in front of injustice. Choosing to stay in Omelas and poison its democratic system to lead to its downfall is the arguably the more moral option. Let's not even get into the argument about how Germany made the Eurozone its Omelas at the expense of deficit-prone southern Europe, and how you should leave Germany by your argument.

> If everything is somehow “free and open” then we have won.

your moral choice to not use LLMs is the same as abandoning Omelas and the eternally tormented child, it serves as nothing but intellectual onanism. Distilling GPT 5, Opus 4.6, commoditising the petaflop (see George Hotz), deploying efficient models on Huawei chips is the same as causing rot in Omelas from the inside, causing the billions invested into AI to be worthless, tearing down the system that is perpetually tormenting that child. It is the only way forward.

Cory was right to label this "neolib purity testing", because 1) it sides with capital (see above point re: torrenting), 2) it tries to don the mantel of dialectical materialism, while viewing this issue through a lens of "individualist action" and static morality and 3) It endlessly criticises power instead of aiming to claim and wield it for good.

Feb 20 at 5:57pmWeb
Show threadJared White (ResistanceNet ✊)Feb 20

@budududuroiu @tante The objection that rankles a lot of people is not about capitalism, aka sheer monetary reward. It's about cultural appropriation.

Look at code, since that's been a very popular use case and it *is* trained on presumably open source code. Even so, it's still not ethical. The reason is that the person generating code trained on open source is not participating in the community & skillset of that open source. It's reaping the rewards of the commons, *while not growing it.*

Show threadBogdan BuduroiuFeb 20

@jaredwhite @tante

> The objection that rankles a lot of people is not about capitalism, aka sheer monetary reward

If it's not about capitalism, what does it bother you that someone appropriates patterns that bubbled up through open source development?

Would it be better if that same person copied the code from the source? (They're still not contributing to the commons)

Would it be better if that person included a comment thanking the original maintainer? If so, is it ethical if the LLM is programmed to do so.

You're arguing that taking advantage of the Commons themselves is unethical, which is antithetical to the whole point of having Commons in the first place.

https://hachyderm.io/@budududuroiu/116038516119616645

Bogdan Buduroiu (@[email protected])

In 1829, when Englishman Thomas Peel tried to establish an agricultural colony on Australia, something unexpected happened: his workers simply abandoned him en masse; a 19th century style Great Resignation. Despite Peel's large amount of capital brought over from England, these workers didn't need to subordinate themselves to Peel's capital, as they could just... move over to the next plot of land and continue to go into business for themselves. Peel's capital had no command, as labourers still had access to The Commons. The enclosing of The Commons was the necessary to shift the power from landowners to owners of capital, and for capitalism to bloom. Similarly, today, frontier AI labs command no control, unless they enclose The Commons: - I have no reason to go to Claude or ChatGPT if I can readily find the information I need in an online encyclopaedia - I don't need to reach for Claude Code if collaborative QA platforms thrive (yes, I'm aware StackOverflow had it's share of issues even before AI) Resisting AI today is the modern battle against enclosing our Digital Commons. I don't think that protections from scrapers are going to work, as they're most likely going to damage to discovery of content and knowledge. #Capitalism #DigitalAutonomy #TheCommons #AI #LLM #Socialism #Labour

Hachyderm.io
Show threadRihards OlupsFeb 20

@budududuroiu @jaredwhite @tante
Imagine a forest. People go there to gather blueberries or something.
Then a company appears which attacks with berry harvesters, destroying moss, berries and a lot of trees because "otherwise we couldn't gather berries!".

The arguments like "but what if humans did it!" and "but it's legal or we'll make it legal!" tend to be pushed by those who want to both to act unethically and not be called out for that.

Show threadBogdan BuduroiuFeb 20

@richlv @jaredwhite your argument seems to imply everything was perfect in the Commons before berries were picked mechanically by this one company, when it very much wasn't:

- Redis profiting off years of open source work to change its licensing model for commercial capture overnight happened before AI - Valkey finding the success it had wasnt because people moralised others to not use Redis, but because the guy with the supermarket where berries are sold "allowed" people to pick berries in their orchard (Valkey is maintained by big cloud providers because its cheaper than paying Redis, but they're still enclosing the Commons, just more permissicely).
- BOOX (and many others) not abiding by GPL and making their bootloaders open source happened before AI. 1) there's no GPL abuse hotline, and 2) China doesn't care even if there were

My argument is that this is a lib take because it operates in the moralistic register rather than having a critical reading of society. It's about what a good person should do, not about how to organize collective power to change the conditions under which these technologies are developed and deployed.

What I wrote above about distilling and running efficient models on other chips is basically buying the company's berries (maybe even buying a lot of them), and using the seeds to start thousands of Common orchards or teach people to grow blueberries at home. It's about having an honest look at the material realisties and acknowledging that the only way to get companies to stop picking berries from the Commons (whether mechanically or not) is to make it economically unattractive to do so.

It's the difference between spiking trees to cause a huge sale of timber to not go through Vs wagging your finger at your neighbour that frankly doesn't care that they bought a 3rd piece of IKEA furniture this month.

Show threadJared White (ResistanceNet ✊)Feb 20

@budududuroiu @richlv I'm going to push back on this line of thinking because we have seen many times over *just recently* that individual actions to boycott businesses, march in protests, and speak out against specific injustices *does* eventually result in collective change. Grand sweaping statements about a mythical future in which all current problems have already been solved is a frame of mind I have difficultly taking very seriously.

In other words, I'm proud to be a finger-wagging lib.

Show threadBogdan BuduroiuFeb 21

@jaredwhite @richlv

> Grand sweaping statements about a mythical future in which all current problems have already been solved is a frame of mind I have difficultly taking very seriously.

Where are the grand sweeping statements? People today are causing billions in damage to businesses, saving acres of forests by spiking trees. Deepseek wiped $600bn off Nvidia alone by demonstrating cheap LLMs that can run at a fraction of the cost.

Actual change on this LLM bubble will come when the first investor will call bs and the market crashes, the capex needed for deployment vanished in thin air, and we're rethinking our strategies for what to do with the tech and all the (now) cheap GPUs lying around

Show threadkomali_2Feb 21

@jaredwhite @budududuroiu @richlv

I'll bite: what change are you talking about? I know you can't possibly mean the Palestine protests and BDS, because nothing material has changed for the Palestinians regarding that.

I know you don't mean anti ICE protests, because ICE still runs rampant.

I know you don't mean BLM, because cops are still out there shooting black people without consequence.

So what do you mean?

Show threadRihards OlupsFeb 21

@budududuroiu @jaredwhite "It wasn't perfect so we're allowed to loot and burn it" is such a sad argument.

Musk paid people to astroturf, surely the genai people with all the billions are not above that...

Show threadBogdan BuduroiuFeb 21

@richlv @jaredwhite

> "It wasn't perfect so we're allowed to loot and burn it" is such a sad argument.

That's not my argument but feel free to strawman me if it makes you feel better about yourself. Only reply if you're interested in good faith discussion

Show threadRihards OlupsFeb 21
@budududuroiu @jaredwhite Vibes of "want to both to act unethically and not be called out for that", coupled with "debate me, bro".
Show threadkomali_2Feb 21

@jaredwhite @budududuroiu @tante

I'm trying to figure out where you got the impression that the use of FOSS code has led to greater participation in the FOSS ecosystem. In my experience, 99% of FOSS usage is a capitalist pillaging codebases to then turn around and sell FOSS back to us, and 1% is super nerds that do a commit or two. The vast majority of FOSS is built on the back of some random individual for any given project.