Submitted 16 hours ago by Womble@piefed.world to technology@lemmy.world
As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman
This is such a bleak time for tech enthusiasts.
It really feels like every single major tech company is making either absolutely moronic or completely evil choices
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
It sucks even more to be a tech worker, your job is constantly threatened by automation, but you also hate working for an evil company that does not care about you, but good luck finding a non evil company that pays 6 figures
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
Or self-hosting your shit. Or at least find a friend who does…
True, but getting more expensive to do so by the day because of these AI companies.
I guess we need to dip in retrotech
Their only interest is profit, it was only a matter of time for that interest to consolidate into corruption and greed. In a world where making choices that benefit all do not generate as much short term gains as making choices that benefit a select few, it is easy to see exactly why these companies operate the way they do. Their interests are not ours.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We should have regulated tech (and hard) decades ago. Were Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg not example enough for tech enthusiasts, or now that it’s too late is it the right time to shed our naive fairy tales about the Billionaire Supermen who want nothing more than to save us all?
Don’t stop at chatgpt. Cancel any subscription you have! Stop using any big corporation you can!
Internet subscription canceled! See you on the other side brother
Pirate the internet! Hack the planet! DDOS the universe!
I’d be all in on community driven networks if one existed around here. Perhaps I need to start…
“Oh ya here’s the community Plex server. Heres our community forum.”
Etc.
There is nothing on the other side. Only blackness.
Cancel ALL your -tions! Benedictions, Predelictions, Prescriptions, Conniptions, Convictions!
I think it’s optimistic to think they would even care about a boycott now. By volunteering to cross the lines that Anthropic wouldn’t cross, they’ve achieved Military Industrial Complex status. It doesn’t matter if you don’t pay for a subscription, you’ll fund them with your tax dollars whether you want to or not. Their mass surveillance tools are too valuable to let them fail, so they’ll get propped up and bailed out no matter what.
Every additional customer using their product currently causes them to lose money, hand over fist.
You should still boycott them anyway though, they care about user numbers and user activity.
Well, shit.
Bregman is a treasure. Very based analysis of societal problems and actually doing shit instead of only observing.
Don’t pay for it. But use it. A lot.
GPUs are very expensive, so if you have them generating (for free) short stories of happy little kittens riding the subway in Manhattan or whatever, you are costing them a lot of money. Just don’t give them any data.
People actually pay for ChatGPT? I am completely out of the loop lol. Maybe thats a good thing.
I’m a software developer for a small company with the two owners being the engineers and they have a Copilot subscription. It saves you countless man hours.
Looking up documentation is very rare now as it’s consumed that much data. It’s not perfect but it’s not we are vibe coding either it’s more like intellisense n steroids. We have lots of practices for how we do things and it learns from that context.
I wouldn’t pay for it for personal use but business use it’s actually great for us.
And keep in mind that Anthropic is just as pro-war and morally bankrupt as OpenAI; the only difference is they didn’t donate as much to the Trump coffers.
and also not Musk’s Grok and not Google’s Gemini and of course not the Chinese DeepSeek so what do we use then?
Preferably just our brains, but if not that, then perhaps somebody running an open model. DuckDuckGo and Proton both have “their own” options, and people with good enough hardware can run something locally too.
Mistral.ai Le Chat has the appearance of being more responsible and is offering open source models. I’m making no claims on their behalf, though.
I don’t have any experience with them yet, but I was looking at a kagi search subscription and that comes with AI usage from different models. Could be an option?
Spoiler: All Americans that pay taxes are bankrolling authoritarianism. People who buy items from America are bankrolling authoritarianism.
Are all you Americans going to stop paying taxes?
I did
They haven’t used their 2nd amendment yet, so I doubt it.
All US big tech feudal lords are helping the Fascist US regime. Even Antrophic. Boycott them all…
I did my part this morning because fuck Sam Altman
I recommend moving over to Mistral.
A European, non-fascist option.
Bankrolled by Andreessen-Horowitz three times (2023, 2024, 2025), might depend on your definition of fascism.
According to billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen, AI is good, fascists are saints, and anyone who stops rich people like him from funding, deploying, and doing whatever they want with tech is a literal murderer.
I made a similar comment on this thread but I’m back-tracking now I’ve read about Marc Andreessen.
Back tracking or side stepping?
What are you moving to?
Cancelled 2 days ago. Feel terrible for not doing it sooner.
Just out of curiosity: what value did you get from a subscription that made it worth it before?
You’ll be glad you quit when you did. ChatGPT is rotting people’s brains.
Already done. Both because they are a corrupt company run by legendary grifter SCAM ALTMAN. But also because GPT is inferior to Claude in almost every way. Even Gemini is leaps ahead of GPT at this point.
LOL like I pay for any of this stuff?
LOL, oh cuz that went so well for Twitter? Fuck ai
I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription because I’m no longer willing to financially support Microsuck’s bullshit. It was hard too. There isn’t another groupware solution that works as well as Exchange. It was important enough for me to make the move despite that. I’m not completely cured of my Windows dependency yet but I’m working on it.
If you are not putting in effort to boycott anything and everything attached to American culture and lifestyle, you are and enemy of humanity.
And so is every other cent invested into any US tech company. This also includes watching a single ad on YouTube. So stop with those boycotts, if I have no other choice but to use those services on a daily basis.
pirate2377@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Normal citizens actually pay for AI??