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Intelligence has never been an objective quality that can be ascertained the way we measure the (actually increasing) carbon in the atmosphere. It is a political device that preserves power and care for those deemed worthy of it, and which simultaneously withdraws such care from everyone else. Its latest incarnation, with that modifier artificial, asserts its power through programs that wash accountability from the programmers: control, wealth, and power run up to founders and investors while harms run down to the rest of us with no possibility of redress. The ideology beneath AI is nothing more than white supremacy glammed up by a techbro aesthetic, white hoods swapped for tactical pants, the old racial slurs upgraded to anti-DEI rhetoric, the burning cross traded in for midnight reductions in force.

I recently came across her writings these days, and all of her essays resonated much to how I felt towards how AI was introduced and is being selling to the mass. Please take a look at her essays, they deserve your care and attention.

I am not fond of when in Google I/O 2026, they announced a new kind of “searching” based on “agentic browsing” experience, which sounds kinda confused for most normal people. Techbros and AI-obsessed people still hype them up though.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.

A more critical view of the Luddities. While I very much idealized their reactions towards the automations, their core ideals and actions of “destroying the machines” are never the answer we want to look for if we really want to pursue ways to harness new technologies for the better.

We have seen what happens when those who yearn for a return to the past are given power. When the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia in 1975, they emptied the cities and drove the population into the rice fields in pursuit of an agrarian Year Zero. The scale of violence is incomparable to anything the Luddites had the power to do, but the ideological shape is the same. It is the simple call to smash the instruments of modernity, return to a simpler, purer social order. The Luddites wanted to restore the medieval craftsman; the Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the agrarian peasant. Both treated the people empowered by modernization as threats to be suppressed. The reactionary romanticism and the hatred of the leveling effects of new productive forces are the same impulse.