Technology and Living

CW: Please be advised this essay contains frank discussions of sexual activity and the political realities of 2026 America. It is not intended for individuals below the age of 18.

A few years ago I briefly spoke with someone that I ERP'd with in another life and encountered a sentiment that really caught me off guard. It was something like:

Ah, I don't RP anymore, I just use ChatGPT for it.

At the time the prospects of LLMs were not quite as rosy as they are today. My opposition to them as a technology was more vulgar and hopeful the whole thing would fizzle out. I politely bowed out from the conversation not long after and sat with my disgust about the whole thing.

In the interim we've seen things like the uniquely derangement-inducing ChatGPT 4o that have made my soften my stance a little bit. It's clear that there is a group of people who are vulnerable to - let's call it "preoccupation" with chatbots. I view the more unhealthy or obsessive forms of LLM usage the same way I view cigarette use; your body your choice, but don't try to put one in my mouth, please. The attempted economic reorganization around producing as much software as possible muddies this a bit, but is beyond the scope of this article.

So, if not disgust, what is the emotion I feel now considering interactions like this? I feel a deep and abiding confusion, instead. We've already had pornography from the dawn of time, and the imagination can do wonders if you're in a pinch. I can still see some strained logic to generating erotic material via LLM if you have some incredibly specific capital f Fetish. It's the idea of replacing an activity like roleplay with one of these tools that loses me entirely. What's the point, then? Something like that is for me necessarily interpersonal. A significant portion of the appeal is contained within my ability to make my play partner feel and think things, to provide and receive pleasure in tandem, to create a memory and shared experience. I certainly love reading the hot words on my screen, too, but it's only one part of the experience.

I know this confusion is mirrored in the other direction, too. I doubt any of the "ai but wokely" people I regularly express frustration with will read this, but I read them and they are similarly confused frequently. Why the backlash? Why the apathy/disinterest? Even as LLMs have gained some amount of favorability in certain fields, why are there stubborn holdouts who deeply resent it? There are a number of very uncharitable theories that've been floated by this crowd to explain this. Ultimately I think the answer is much simpler. Software in and of itself can't make life worth living. In terms of human flourishing, we may be past the point of diminishing returns. I suppose it had to happen sometime.

Well, why do I think this? There's two main angles.

Every Problem In My Life Is A Political Problem

In a global sense I am absurdly fortunate, functionally a lottery winner. I am a citizen of the imperial core and benefit - however unwillingly and in obscure ways - from the capitalist imperialism choking the rest of the world out. Among my cohort I am similarly fortunate despite my middling income. In theory I am poised to reap the benefits of software and technological improvements very handsomely. This is doubly the case as someone who grew up in a home with a desktop computer and has remained technically savvy in the meantime. But if we actually consider the relevant political thrusts of the era, this falls apart rapidly:

• A distinctly stupid and distinctly American take on the secret police is committing offenses that shock the conscience as a matter of course.
• The mad king is doing foreign adventurism in service of our apartheid client state and threatening significant horrendous economic shocks.
• A vulnerable minority is being scapegoated for issues conjured in fever dreams of the ultrawealthy and their reactionary simps, and the nominal opposition party is not inspiring confidence in their ability to meet the moment.
• And, topically, the people driving the latest advancements of this very technology are joined to the hip with some of the worst political groups around, including building new and exciting antidemocracy technologies.

All of these problems are fundamentally problems of politics and violence. Being able to generate more software does not meaningfully assist with resolving any of them. It's possible that there may be gains around the margins, but that's also certainly going to be eclipsed by the fact that the large-scale computing sector is wedding themselves to the fascist government currently in power. So, no, something that makes more software - even good software! - is not going to excite me. Why would it? Software is aggravating some of these problems!

Asking me to be excited about LLMs is fundamentally the same as asking me to be excited about any change to the consumer market. There have been a number of these waves from the tech sector. The "sharing economy" was initially hyped as a way to leverage massive unused supply of cars and homes. Now the gig economy is stuck with us, a vestigial rent-seeking parasite reaping money out of transactions. Is this really better? Is the world better for the crypto boom which - while a shadow of what it was - left behind a well-financed lobby group incentivized to continue making a scamming tool? Is the world better for industrialized tobacco, or opiate pushing? At least cigarettes got what was coming to them in the end.

Now despite all that, I do like consumer technology. I still buy the occasional gadget. I love the Macbook Air I am typing this on, despite my better judgment; it's the best computer I've ever owned by some metrics. But it is a luxury, one I could get by without if I needed to, and it doesn't change my life. I could suffice with much less computer. Indeed, my plan right now is to run my current desktop rig into the ground given component costs. My next computer is sitting in the closet unassembled for right now; Again, this is because I've largely hit the diminishing return on luxury from electronics. The most wonderful thing it can do for me computationally cheap - connect me with the world.

Every Blessing In My Life Has An Animal Nature

Well, okay, you might say. Maybe LLMs won't stop fascism. That'd be unreasonable to expect of most things. But surely there's some kind of benefit software can provide to me? I mean, I use computers every day. What about a bespoke app? What about workflow improvements?

Again, the problem: There are many wonderful things in my life.

• I love to fuck in my weird asexual way. I love to cuddle my friends and partners and move fluidly between intensities and intimacies.
• I love board games. I love the tactility and that it's a game that doesn't use a goddamn glowing rectangle. I love shared laughter at shocking twists or coups in games like Arcs. I played My Favorite Things with some polycule mates recently and had some lovely laughs and confusion as they flexed scifi knowledge I was clueless of. My game shelf has so many warm memories on it.
• I love to go swimming. It's so much fun to move in three dimensions! Freeing! I love rock climbing for the same reason.
• I love to cook and make coffee for my kindred. The secret ingredient really is love.

We're well past the point where software makes any of these better. Sometimes it seems nigh-impossible - app-enabled boardgames are maligned, and the tactility of it is a huge part for me. And as discussed prior, I wouldn't see any point in an intimate interaction with a p-zombie. Software can't go swimming for me.

Well, there's also barriers to these things:

• Arranging to get the right people in the right place at the right time for activities is challenging.
• Getting out to do my favored outdoor activities can be tricky when I don't own a car.
• Cooking just sucks sometimes. It's the ADHD. But it has to be done, so...

Another strikeout. Some of these are just facts of life - even if I woke up and communism had begun, I imagine scheduling DnD would continue to be quite difficult. Others are tied with those political problems I mentioned before.

Ultimately, so many amazing things about being alive occurs in the real world with other people. An LLM's ability to assist me with that is absolutely minuscule to actively harmful depending on the context. And all this is as an introvert - I find people exhausting even as I love them so, and I thus often end up in my den alone to recuperate. Ah, time to summon an LLM?

Absolutely not. There is so much art, you realize? Art was already democratized. There is more beauty in the world than we can ever hope to perceive or than will ever be found and appreciated. Disused fanfiction archives hide works of art. There is more life-affirming music on Bandcamp than I could listen to if it was my job. All LLMs do is add more noise to the ratio. There's no value in that at all.

And honestly, even in my darkest moments where I might like to anesthetize my brain and not think about the stupid world I find myself in, Balatro was already invented. There have been many attempts to copy it and I have not been impressed with them. I seriously doubt an LLM is going to do much better there, and honestly, I don't know if it should. Do we need the Super Cigarette for Brain? Surely the regular one is enough.

But what about Post-Scarcity?

There's an obvious rejoinder to everything above that is worth a brief mention. Some more optimistic "woke but AI" sorts insist strongly that LLMs will usher in an age of post-scarcity. LLMs will generate so much economic value that humans will no longer have to almost any work, and we can freely devote our time to leisure. Obviously I sympathize with this hope as a socialist, but I find it unlikely for a simple reason.

Functionally, we have reached a point of meaningful post-scarcity already. We can literally get energy from sunlight, we have the knowledge to grow more than enough food to feed everyone, and are capable of what would have been considered miracles in another age. There is the whole oncoming climate crisis, yes, but even this could be solved with international coordination. You could persuasively argue that technological development being "frozen" at some earlier point could've had a similar effect - all people housed and in reasonable health and dignity.

Yet it hasn't happened. Why? More recently it's been because the capitalist class has a strangehold on the means of production and economic capital writ large, obviously. Even "AI but woke" folk will readily trash talk companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. Do you sincerely believe these people will usher in a utopia? Or are they more likely to simply let loose with the cybersecurity version of a machine gun?

I'm skeptical, is all. This is also why I am unimpressed by claims of increased economic productivity - to what end?

You can't make me be excited about "AI".

It's just not going to happen, sorry. In this way it's nothing personal - many unambiguously good technological advancements are not "exciting" except sometimes in retrospect. But the patterns of the consumer technology space for the last while don't leave me optimistic about this one as a product. Indeed, I've tacitly set aside my actual objections to the technology because in some ways it's not what this is really about. Similar, that means I don't feel the need to weigh it against claims of utility in specific fields. Fair's fair, I think.

I don't think any of this is indicative of some moral virtue on my part, to be clear. In many ways I've been very fortunate that the life path I ended up on. The communities I've been part of have provided so much meaning that was entirely divorced from technology beyond being a substrate upon which interactions happen. One of the especially pernicious things about the modern landscape is how actively hostile it is to this very kind of relationship and community building.

And really, that's the actual reason I wrote this. I am feeling not insignificant dread about what LLM Mania is doing to broader culture and the economy, of course. But there's still quite a lot worth doing, and it will continue to be worth doing even if LLMs eat the world more than they already have. Indeed, nurturing some of these practices might be more important than ever before. And that's where excitement comes from, for me. Organizing to form solidarity. Making a new joke with friends. Improving at my climbing ability. You are a mammal and you exist like a mammal, and you will continue existing like a mammal because you can't actually cut-paste your brain into a computer. Go live like it. No matter what dumb horror median american society inflicts on us, you will be glad you did.