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I don't care how well your "AI" works - fiona fokus
(fokus.cool)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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Privacy
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I mean... it seems painfully obvious and doesn't need much of a thesis behind it.
The wealthy want their slaves back, but they want slaves that don't push back, never ask for more, never need a day off, don't need sleep, don't need breaks, and are needlessly sycophantic to stroke the egos of the wealthy. It's no more complex than that: the promise of LLMs was that they could have deeply exploitable knowledge workers without any of the fuss or mess of humans who want a life outside of their fucking jobs.
Like what else has this ever been? It's been transparent since day one that this is why every business pushes AI adoption so hard, for them it has to work, they're willing to bet the future on it because they think their sheer belief in it and throwing money at it will eventually "make it work."
On the plus side, anyone who understands LLMs understands their limitations and the problems that are baked in to how they work and how those issues can't be "fixed." So this dipshit ass all-in plan that the wealthy have is doomed to crumble because it's never going to work the way they want it to. So we've got that going for us.
Anyway I hate tools being described as "tools of the ruling class" because it often misses the point of how such tools can be useful to the proletariat as well. Class solidarity is a tool of the ruling class, but class solidarity would be golden in the hands of the proletariat, who vastly outnumber the wealthy class and ruling class. All tools are useful, what makes a tool dangerous is who wields it and what they choose to use it for. A hammer can be used to build and it can also be used to smash in someone's skull. Tools aren't the problem: specific dangerous humans are. I don't actually have huge problems with AI LLMs providing they are open source and rolled out small scale on home PCs, I just have an issue with their industrial applications at scale and the attempt to use them to consolidate power and control. They don't have to be used that way.
A hammer can be used for good or bad but a shrapnel bomb can only kill and maim; not all tools are multivalent like that, some are realistically only used for evil. Additionally, divorcing discussion of a tool from the social context like this is blinding to the real consequences. We don't have small scale LLMs running on personal machines (even if we could, that's not how it is now), we have them at industrial scale controlled by a few billionaires. It's purely fantastical thinking to say that just because you could imagine a world where they'd be used for good, that actually means anything.
Uhhh, it's pretty trivial to set them up. I have a local Ollama instance set up on my PC with several different open source models available right now. Just because not everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's not possible. I don't even have an especially fancy computer, either. Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb RAM, Radeon 6600XT 8gb video RAM, not exactly top of the line. I struggle with programming logic sometimes, so I use it to help me figure out if I'm doing something right or not when I can't find an answer online, an activity I wouldn't exactly classify as "evil."
I also wouldn't consider a shrapnel bomb a tool, it's strictly a weapon just like a gun is strictly a weapon.
I get all that, I just mean you can't just ignore the social reality. Like you said elsewhere in this thread, Linux is barely cracking 3% of the desktop market. Can you run an LLM locally? Of course. Do people do it? No, except a couple of hardcore enthusiasts. That is an issue which can't just be cleanly separated from the technology itself and has to be taken into account when discussing it.
Also, weapons are tools.
they also want skilled labor; they are happy to have it scrape from authors and artists - primarily the same groups who the ruling class despise.
I mean really they despise anyone with skills because the reality is they have hardly any themselves as they've spent their lives paying for everyone else to do everything for them. They can't make a meal, they can't drive a car, they can't do basic appliance repair, they don't know how to actually use a computer other than social media, they can't wash their own clothes, they can't do anything for themselves. They despise every skilled person because it betrays their egotistical view that they are simply born better than everyone else and deserve to never have to know how to do anything at all. It reveals they know nothing and are useless to society at large, just a drain on the rest of us.
Secondly, I did say "knowledge workers" and I personally think authors and artists are a type of "knowledge work" as they require knowledge coupled with skill to do the work, just as people managing servers and databases also require a combination of knowledge and skill. Poetaetoe pohtahtoh.
Thus it's also why they are all pushing hard for humanoid robots because they want to automate the human body after they have automated the human mind.