The same people who posture as anti‑corporate, anti‑automation, anti‑“machines replacing humans”, and anti-environmental damage are perfectly fine benefiting from other forms of automation and unpaid labor, as long as it props up their preferred ideology.
Mannequins, machines, industrial tools, and now AI have all made life easier, safer, and more productive. But AI threatens their gatekeeping power, so suddenly automation is “bad.” Meanwhile, their own ecosystem runs on unpaid maintainers, bug triagers, documentation writers, distro packagers, forum support, and the loud vocal minority of evangelists (-where do these people get their money?).
They’re not anti‑exploitation. -They’re just selective about who gets exploited.
Mannequins replaced human labor in storefront modeling, product display, sizing demonstrations, and visual merchandising. Nobody protested or wrote 40 page manifestos about the ethics of mannequin labor displacement. -Because mannequins didn’t threaten anyone’s identity. -AI does.
AI removes the need for obscure knowledge, gatekeeping, ritual suffering, and “real hacker” identity. Mannequins automated a job. AI automates a status hierarchy.
Linux culture depends on free labor, and pretends it’s noble.
The same people who scream about “AI stealing jobs” are perfectly fine with harassing maintainers, and contributors until they quit or burnout. Projects collapsing from lack of funding. Documentation written by volunteers, and distro maintainers doing full-time work for nothing.
AI threatens that narrative because it exposes how much of the ecosystem is held together by guilt, ideology, and moral pressure.
Their anti‑work lifestyle is enabled by automation. LiGNUts love package managers, build systems, CI pipelines, and automated testing, deployments, linting, formatting, and dependency resolution, but all these replaced human labor.
Because those tools make their lives easier.
AI makes everyone’s lives easier, including people outside their ideological bubble.
When it comes to the environment and ram/GPU prices; gaming is worse than AI.