Submitted 3 weeks 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
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.
A brain ship will be the last subscription you‘ll need before leaving your physical body and entering hive mind of the web where our souls are merged.
Or something along those lines.
There is nothing on the other side. Only blackness.
You can borrow mine homie thank you for your service
I’ve lucked out with living in a few places back to back where the building provides the internet, likely because the city is a university town so there’s always tons of student tenants in the area. I haven’t had to deal with the pain of an ISP installation in years. Also get the added benefit of not having to worry too much about things like port forwarding on security risk, so you don’t have to dump your Windows 10 just yet in favor of resigning yourself to the Cult of Linux lmao
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.
Not all GPT users are American/residing in America
That is assuming OpenAI‘s tools are actually that powerful and useful or that Altman can keep convincing the US government they are. I would say it‘s still a very fragile enterprise.
I still wouldn‘t bet against the AI market anymore. Because even though the bubble must burst eventually the US government would intervene. There is no free market, just oligarchs enriching themselves all the way to he top.
Well, shit.
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?
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.
I’m a senior full stack software dev for over 20 years and I still search and use stack overflow links the same way as always. fuck your copilot licenses. they are not necessary and any productivity gains they bring are more than negated by the social and environmental impact from data centers and AI job losses.
This has been discussed on here many times. Barely anyone pays for LLMs. Only companies, corporations, and a few content creators do pay. Your common folk overwhelming majority does not.
And yet, threads have been flooded the past couple of days with users proudly declaring how they’re canceling their subscriptions after funneling who knows how much money into Altman’s pockets unironically and without an ounce of shame lmfao
And of those that do, I’m sure there’s large corporate contracts, negotiated with OpenAI and not going anywhere. Which is why they tell you how many paid subscribers they have, not how many contracts and then individuals.
The US government subscriptions would account for maybe 1 or 2 million paid users alone, and that might not include Palantir’s use of OpenAI models in their systems which then get contracted out.
This random website claims 44,780 companies reporting using ChatGPT. So entire small companies of 5-10 people might be using it, and then a thousand people at larger companies, that might get you to 10 million users right there.
Bregman is a treasure. Very based analysis of societal problems and actually doing shit instead of only observing.
Yes, and he’s such a great communicator as well. In those few paragraphs he packs arguments to convince people ranging from idealist liberals to cynical leftists.
All US big tech feudal lords are helping the Fascist US regime. Even Antrophic. Boycott them all…
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.
This is the way
Cancelled 2 days ago. Feel terrible for not doing it sooner.
You’ll be glad you quit when you did. ChatGPT is rotting people’s brains.
Just out of curiosity: what value did you get from a subscription that made it worth it before?
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?
Normal citizens actually pay for AI??
They are already on the enshittification path.
After the “please disregard copyright and generate all the Ghibli-style photos that you want” phase, now they enforce a 24 hour cooldown after any kind of image upload
I did my part this morning because fuck Sam Altman
Every penny given to a US company is bankrolling their government through taxes, and thus funding authoritarianism.
OpenAI has direct government contracts sure, but yeah.
I agree it sucks.
That’s why I’m telling myself that my unemployment is a heroic assault on fascism.
I can’t believe this actually has to be said. “Stop funding the death star!” Who the hell is actually paying for a tier subscription for that slop?
People just really don’t give a shit at all do they lmao
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.
This reeks of cope. Just cancel your subscription.
I would but I use codex for coding
Pathetic.
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.
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.
You guys can afford subscriptions? I just make it toil for no reason because I’m a real capitalist
LOL like I pay for any of this stuff?
Ikr, bitches be crazy
If you are not putting in effort to boycott anything and everything attached to American culture and lifestyle, you are and enemy of humanity.
LOL, oh cuz that went so well for Twitter? Fuck ai
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.
Wammityblam@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
myrmidex@belgae.social 3 weeks ago
Or self-hosting your shit. Or at least find a friend who does…
Wammityblam@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
True, but getting more expensive to do so by the day because of these AI companies.
Melusine@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 3 weeks ago
I guess we need to dip in retrotech
notwhoyouthink@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
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?
ragepaw@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Or both
Wammityblam@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Often both
FosterMolasses@leminal.space 3 weeks ago
Image
Yeah, they’re really hurtin’. Hang on, I’m gonna set up a GoFundMe page for them real quick…
Wammityblam@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ok