Scandals like that of Builder.ai - which should have their own code word, IAJI (It’s Actually Just Indians) - become more and more common[...]

This is just a strictly worse version of David's AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.

It’s history; sometimes stuff just doesn’t happen. And precisely because saying so is less fun than the alternative, some of us have to.

Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don't just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn't choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.