AI Rage Is Inextricably Fused With Justified Loathing Of The Extraction Class. 'Deal With It'

You may have noticed that anger at AI is white hot right now. For a bunch of reasons I've already discussed. It's particularly and unsurprisingly hot among young Americans, who can't find jobs, homes, health care, or much of anything else to give them a leg up in a country hollowed out by historic levels of corruption.

They're being told, usually by people who already have theirs, that they should be more excited about the latest evolutions in software automation. "Why aren't you more interested in nuanced conversations about the latest evolutions in software automation," fans of the latest evolutions in software automation will ask.

As if the world isn't on fire.

It's all starting to bubble over.

A few weeks ago a speaker giving a commencement address at the University of Central Florida was loudly booed after she proclaimed that improvements in software automation should be viewed as the "next industrial revolution."

From the video, Orlando-based executive Gloria Caulfield was clearly surprised at the level of anti-AI animosity demonstrated by the class of 2026.

It happened again last week when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, looking to bounce back from sex pest allegations, was met with the same response during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona:

It happened again at Middle Tennessee State University, when the graduating class reacted with clear hostility to Scott Borchetta, CEO at Big Machine Records, when he informed them that “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” In response to the boos, Borchetta told graduation attendees to "deal with it."

What I was struck by in all three instances is the speakers' surprise that their target audience wasn't more inspired by inane AI boosterism. And then their confident tutscolding of kids who they feel simply don't understand.

It's an interesting generational and class disconnect at a moment in history when the supporting pillars of polite society are being ripped apart by a monstrous coalition of bigots, fascists, and software salesmen who want neither repercussions nor honest conversation about their historically terrible choices.

I'm sure we're due for a few Atlantic and New York Times brunchlord opinion columns condemning young graduates for not being appreciative enough of consumer-culture innovation. It's basically a variant of the "you can't talk about AI with the left" discourse that demands suspension of broader ethical disbelief if you are to be taken seriously as a dutiful participant in free market ingenuity.

The thing is the kids aren't stupid. They see the field clearly. They see the difference between what's being sold to them by tech companies, the press, and commencement speakers, and what they have repeatedly seen with their own eyes.

They've watched tech oligarchs spend the last decade mired in scandal after scandal, hype cycle after hype cycle, steadily enshittifying everything they touch along the way. They just got done watching our top tech titans eagerly cozy up to the most virulently racist, corrupt bastards U.S. government has ever seen.

They've watched software salesmen enthusiastically support genocidal destruction, madness, and war. They've watched Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook repeatedly bare their entire asses in feckless subservience to a violent, sexist kakistocracy taking a hatchet to everything from civil rights to scientific research.

They've watched Elon Musk openly embrace white supremacy. They've watched Palantir CEO Alex Karp spout sexist, anti-democratic gibberish. They've watched vampiric techno-billionaire Peter Thiel sweatily embrace the dregs of society while attempting to dismantle democracy in between infusions of young peoples' blood.

They're having wildly misrepresented automation software shoved down their throat by terrible people and they don't love it. A recent Gallup poll found that just 18 percent of Gen Z now say they are hopeful about the technology, down from 27 percent a year earlier.

The percentage of Gen Z that think AI's benefits don't counterbalance the risks now sits around fifty percent, up 11 percentage points in just the last year. Eight out of every ten believe that using AI makes the process of actual learning more difficult.

If you're surprised at the scale of the backlash, you haven't been paying attention.

Unlike those of us that got an early glimpse of the potential of the internet before corporatism chewed it up and spit it back at us in subscription form, all many young Americans have seen is profoundly terrible assholes doing increasingly vile things in a country too broken, stupid, corrupt, and racist to function or resist.

Why the living shit would any of these kids believe anything being sold to them about any of this? Why would you think that now is the time to try and have a nuanced conversation about your vibe coded AI agent? All young Americans have ever known is a world intentionally set on fire by terrible men.

The Verge's Janus Rose recently put it this way:

Emerging from academia and into the vice grip of an increasingly brutal job market, young people face an impossible contradiction. They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind. They’re the first new generation of adults to navigate a world flooded with chatbots and generative AI slop, after having already lost years of their youth to the covid-19 pandemic. And all the while, Silicon Valley’s multitrillion-dollar push for AI adoption is clashing with their fears of its well-documented impacts — on the environment, disinformation, academic integrity, and our social fabric and emotional well-being, to name just a few.

So much of the rage comes from the disconnect between what they're being publicly sold (at commencement addresses, in the media, by politicians, and everywhere else) and the very obvious giant pile of shit that was left at their feet by previous generations. This creator sums it up pretty well:

I routinely see folks excited about the potential of AI taken aback by the indiscriminate rage being directed at terrible software salesmen and their products. I've heard complaints that it's difficult to have a nuanced conversation with people about AI, as if the house wasn't being burned down – with us inside.

If you're surprised by the level of anger being directed at AI, it's fairly likely you already got yours. You're likely comfortably ensconced with a healthy retirement plan (potentially from your years at a tech giant back when people still got excited about foosball tables, brightly colored tech company fonts, and free snacks).

You perhaps haven't realized that "AI," justified or not, has been inextricably linked to a rising and extremely angry cultural movement aimed squarely at the faces of our shittiest oligarchs. And it's only going to get more intense until this country has a meaningful progressive, anti-corporatist, and moral renaissance.

As I've noted previously the biggest problem with AI is the foundationally awful oligarchs in charge of its trajectory, scope, and implementation. The biggest problem with AI is terrible human beings.

Google and Amazon pay lip service to efficiency and a better tomorrow, but their AI products repackage the entirety of human journalism, insight, and art, hijacking any revenues that might otherwise go to human creators, passing off the end result as their own product in the pursuit of dominant advertainment mindshare.

Most tech giants and media companies see AI primarily as a way to lazily cut corners, automate already broken U.S. systems, and undermine labor. They see it as a path to creating a giant, badly-automated ouroborus that shits ad money without the need to pay annoying human beings a living wage or health insurance.

Facebook's primary goal is generating the laziest AI engagement slop imaginable at a scale only matched by their violent disdain for any meaningful ethical guardrails. And that's before you get to Elon Musk's gleeful mass murder of global toddlers, or the weird anti-democratic ramblings of top tech VCs like Marc Andreessen.

Young Americans very clearly see it. They see through it. And the kids are very much not alright.

None of these awful men deserve the benefit of the doubt that they'll be wise stewards of modern technological evolution, whether it's software, hardware, or the broader internet. I have no Earthly idea why anybody would be surprised that younger Americans would be so violently allergic to their sales pitches.

Understand this: rage against AI is white fucking hot, entirely justified, bipartisan, often indiscriminate, and inextricably woven into soaring disgust at the authoritarian-coddling extraction class. And you'll never be able to separate the two regardless of what your fancy new software can or can't do.

I'd also go so far as to remind sensitive AI boosters that this sort of indiscriminate rage at our corporatist authoritarian alliance is going to prove useful in the months and years to come, and should be given a healthy, wide berth by those who broadly enjoy things like, oh, basic survival, and functional democracy.