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:
Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:
I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:
Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.
After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":
The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:
This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.
If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.
The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!
This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:
The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":
And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.
One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.
I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:
https://github.com/wreccer
Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.
But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.
This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:
To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.
That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:
AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":
Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:
Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:
There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:
History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:
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she thought, and not for the first time, that it'd be real handy to have a copy of Visual Basic 5 installed just so she could quickly mock up a GUI to better illustrate her point
the worst part? just like the last time I needed this, it was for a post about gender.
look: everyone's experience of gender is different, and everyone's gender expression has a lot of different influences, and mine just so happens to have more than a little Microsoft Visual Basic 5/6 in there!
obviously this is because I'm a robot and I grabbed the wrong floppy back around puberty and actually overwrote some vital gender files with the source to a visual basic strategy game I was working on at the time.
Kind Animals Cards – Spring and Summer for Animals
From all sides. From the right and from the left. Hello! Hello! And some smiles. These are kind animals. Here with you and me again for a second. Waving. Sitting on the grass. On such a cheerful little hill. A green little hill. There are little animals there. Look, new little animals! Let's meet them!
As many as 8 new little animals! These are little animal cards. A small program. It contains a picture and a story related to the little animal. These are little animals! And their stories. A picture! This time I've already approached the date of April 25, 2025. Symbolically. This includes pictures and stories up to this date. I draw little animals and write stories about them from time to time. Now it's inside the program! Soon, I'll probably start a new round of drawing little animals!
This cheerful eight is for this version. Beaver, goose, crane, mole, rabbit, lesser shrew, skylark, grasshopper. So many little animals! I've already created these cards. I've programmed them. And I'll tell you about them. I told you about the beaver and the goose last time.
Crane. He just arrived. Such a huge bird, he can walk on two legs. And he can also fly. Just like a dinosaur. He lives in a field. A spring field. Everything is still so yellow around him. The sun is already shining. A bright mood. A field and water. Crane. Such a cheerful picture. Drawn in spring!
Mole. And our mole is in the summer. A busy mole. Gardener. Mole. Summer resident. Mole. Here he is planting flowers. A truly green summer is all around him. Butterflies are flying. And now he's finished gardening. The garden is finished for today. And he's relaxing! It's just like being at the dacha in the summer! Everything is so green! And here it's summer in full swing!
A rabbit and a hare. Two friends in a field. Such an idyll. Kind little animals. They don't bite. They're all smart. They're all friends. Here are two friends. A rabbit and a hare. They met in a field. Everything is so bright. In light tones. And everything is so carefree here. A clearing. They're going to play. They live in different corners of the field. And here it is, summer in full swing! Here they are on the hill.
A small shrew. This is also about summer. Such an unusual creature. Like a mole or a mouse. A shrew. Here in the garden. Overgrown grass. Some old things. Somewhere here is another field. Moss. A swamp. The greenest place. With a ton of grass.
A skylark. Here we have early spring. And the lark and the sparrow are good friends. Spring is beginning. Black sticks. Branches. Everything is still so light and cool. Dew. Water. It's still cool in this spring. It might rain. And everything is still so gray. But it's already turning blue and bright. The ice is melting. It's spring after all! And there's a bird!
A grasshopper. So green. And everything around is green. Also about the juiciest summer. A grasshopper is such a large creature for the grass. Green. Warmth. Sunshine. The best time is summer! The grasshopper is doing perfectly well. Everything is so super green. And the grasshopper is a musician. He composes and plays here. It's always like this for him. He's green. And his favorite color—guess what—is also green!
8 new cards are waiting for a new version! Animals! Friends! They live in a cheerful place. In a fractal surface. It's always summer there. And they live there and do their own thing. There, too, there is spring and summer. The birds arrive again in the spring. And in the summer, everything is nice and sunny. For some, a place is always summer. And who has spring and summer? And the birds fly here and there. They like to fly. To stretch their legs.
I program the cards in the Visual Basic programming language. It's a cool thing. You can use it to place objects on a form using the mouse. And then program them. This version has a ton of new cards! It's a real record!
Kind animals little cards version 0.2 "Crawl next" - it is newest version. Six little cards about good and kind animals. With little picture. And small story. Lots about mice. Duck. And chicken! Big and yellow! And lots lots about mouse! Mouse - crossing the ditch, or going to sleep!
Kind animals little cards: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/apps/kindanimalslittlecards/index_eng.html
Website: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/home_eng.html
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