Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
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Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then *you are totally fucked.*
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I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:
Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:
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I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:
Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:
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Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
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Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
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That's how we make good tech: not by insisting all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by *liberating* the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:
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That's how we make good tech: not by insisting all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by *liberating* the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:
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I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because *Einstein was right*:
How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s "Jewish Science" [Excerpt]
In a chapter excerpted from his new book, science writer Philip Ball describes “Aryan physics” and other ludicrous ideas that accompanied the rise of Adolf Hitler
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
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:
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
The complicated story of James Watson, whose landmark DNA discovery with Francis Crick was later overshadowed by his deeply offensive remarks
STAT (www.statnews.com)
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I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because *Einstein was right*:
How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s "Jewish Science" [Excerpt]
In a chapter excerpted from his new book, science writer Philip Ball describes “Aryan physics” and other ludicrous ideas that accompanied the rise of Adolf Hitler
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
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:
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
The complicated story of James Watson, whose landmark DNA discovery with Francis Crick was later overshadowed by his deeply offensive remarks
STAT (www.statnews.com)
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Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:
Von Braun, the V-2, and Slave Labor
By Darren Court, Museum Director/Curator Edited by Jenn Jett, Museum Specialist Contents Warning: This post contains graphic imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Part 1Title and Contents Part 2The Beginnings of the American V-2 Program Part 3Wernher von BraunThe Pioneer of Nazi and American Rocketry Part 4Slave Labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen Part 5The Aftermath Next…
White Sands Missile Range Museum (wsmrmuseum.com)
The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a *normal technology*:
It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":
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Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:
Von Braun, the V-2, and Slave Labor
By Darren Court, Museum Director/Curator Edited by Jenn Jett, Museum Specialist Contents Warning: This post contains graphic imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Part 1Title and Contents Part 2The Beginnings of the American V-2 Program Part 3Wernher von BraunThe Pioneer of Nazi and American Rocketry Part 4Slave Labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen Part 5The Aftermath Next…
White Sands Missile Range Museum (wsmrmuseum.com)
The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a *normal technology*:
It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":
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There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people *will* do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would - under normal circumstances - be called "plug-ins":
I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped.
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There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people *will* do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would - under normal circumstances - be called "plug-ins":
I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped.
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That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.
In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse.
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That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.
In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse.
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Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:
And when it does, I'll make sense of it on this blog.
eof/
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The link didn't work for some reason, perhaps this will https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/
@valehippi Fixed, thanks!
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Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic POV you are a tee.
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@pluralistic POV you are a tee.
@n8chz It's one of those jokes that made me laugh enough that I ran with it, even though it's totally obscure. That's "Number 6" from The Prisoner, with my face matted on.
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Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:
And when it does, I'll make sense of it on this blog.
eof/
Dear Cory,
You are a true inspiration. One of the great thinkers I found when I joined Mastodon. The experience of being on this platform with its tech community among others is a constant delight in a truly bleak moment in human history. Keep up the great work.
CC
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Dear Cory,
You are a true inspiration. One of the great thinkers I found when I joined Mastodon. The experience of being on this platform with its tech community among others is a constant delight in a truly bleak moment in human history. Keep up the great work.
CC
@jawarajabbi Aww, thank you.
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Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
37/
@pluralistic
You make a very good point about using a personal LLM that runs on your own iron.Regarding using stuff originally developed by odious creeps:
The wonderful chorus I used to sing with pre-pandemic once did a song that was cheery, upbeat, and also happened to have been written by an ardent Nazi. After much discussion among the Jewish and Gentile chorus members (and the Jewish director), we all decided we were comfortable singing the piece anyway in the spirit of peace, unity, and making that Nazi bastard spin in his grave.
We repurposed that piece for good.
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Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
1/
@pluralistic rotfl that illustration image. 6 years, i see what you're doing there.
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Dear Cory,
You are a true inspiration. One of the great thinkers I found when I joined Mastodon. The experience of being on this platform with its tech community among others is a constant delight in a truly bleak moment in human history. Keep up the great work.
CC
@jawarajabbi @pluralistic Yeah, defending his use of fashtech is very inspirational. Like how he also promotes Kagi, a crypto bro scheme.
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@n8chz It's one of those jokes that made me laugh enough that I ran with it, even though it's totally obscure. That's "Number 6" from The Prisoner, with my face matted on.
This post is deleted! -
@pluralistic rotfl that illustration image. 6 years, i see what you're doing there.
@stf @pluralistic He's not a number! He's a free man!! -
Dear Cory,
You are a true inspiration. One of the great thinkers I found when I joined Mastodon. The experience of being on this platform with its tech community among others is a constant delight in a truly bleak moment in human history. Keep up the great work.
CC
@jawarajabbi well said. I don't always have the time or attention span to read a long thread, but when I do, I love the way @pluralistic’s meander through personal, prosaic, profound and professional territory from one post to the next.
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@jawarajabbi @pluralistic Yeah, defending his use of fashtech is very inspirational. Like how he also promotes Kagi, a crypto bro scheme.
And then there's the occasional asshole.
