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Many businesses initially invited people in with open arms, promising that if they moved within their boundaries, the business would take care of all the hard stuff — the digging, the weeding, the sowing — and let you just do the parts you wanted to do.

When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.

There are no limits to the web — if it has borders, they are ever expanding. We may feel as though we are trapped in a tiny, crowded, noisy space, but it is only because we don't see over the walls.

We can have a different web, if we want it.

Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users

People need predictability. They need to know what they’re working on today, tomorrow, and next week if possible. Take that away and they’ll take a hit to their psychological safety. Take that away, and they aren’t going to be able to do good work.

Capitalists want control over labor the way that kings wanted gold, and Sam Altman is an alchemist promising no more complaining workers

Just because alchemists often did practice chemistry doesn't make alchemy real.

This is the great naivete of computer science: by imagining itself to operate on domains rather than on discourses about domains, it renders itself incapable of seeing the discourses themselves, or the social controversies that pull those discourses in contradictory directions

Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world.

Why does the awe attenuate? I agree with Altman that many of OpenAI’s applications “feel like magic,” in the sense of a particularly amazing card trick. The first time you see it performed it’s absolutely astounding, but with every subsequent performance you become slightly more aware of the patter and the occlusions hiding the sleight of hand. Eventually the trick is explained to you; even if you yourself couldn’t pull it off, you can see its structure and its weaknesses. Watching it now, you’re still impressed--even astounded--by the technical skill of the magician and intricacy of the trick design. But the sense of pure, baffled awe you felt at first is increasingly inaccessible.

It’s slop--incorrect, unwanted, and unnavigable L.L.M.-generated bullshit, forced into experiences that don’t really need it.