Among the most depressing things about so-called AI is how so many workers report that they no longer talk to their colleagues. Everyone spends all day talking to their fucking “agents” instead. This is a horrible social experiment that is doing real harm and we need to stop it, fast.
“That’s how it is—we’re literate….But why do we lock ourselves into one mode? Why either/or? We aren’t binary. Why have we replaced oral text with written? Isn’t there room for both?” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/there-and-here
“Functional information-processing…is so utterly unlike the lived intelligence of a human being that to call it ‘intelligence’ at all is to wholly falsify its nature. ‘Artificial intelligence’ is a highly consequential misnomer.” https://www.ft.com/content/bdb3b820-905b-431e-82c0-386535755af1
To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/reading-matters-deeply
Erin is the best person to do this kind of work. Not only because she has the aptitude and care, but also because she is in the right place to both observe the clouds and report back to those of us on the ground. Everyone should throw money at her! https://www.wrecka.ge/launching-a-cloud-atlas/
In my personal headcanon, Le Guin and Franklin are the Ursulae, and they are right at this moment resting in the shade of a great big tree, drinking tea (Franklin) and whiskey (UKLG) and talking about the end of the patriarchy—which for them has already happened.
“If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/open-universe
Why we need anarchist calisthenics at work. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/break-what-should-be-broken/
“There is solidarity to be had in that motion and in that effort…for the act of creation, however humble or sublime, is elicited by the existence of the other who is to receive it.” https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/feeding-on-illusions
“When you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/hungrier-than-before
“One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it.” How will you be ready? https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/anarchist-calisthenics
“What I was saying: I have imagined your life; I have had to imagine it. What he was saying: it would be dangerous for me to imagine yours.” https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n11/patricia-lockwood/diary
Reading is how we attend the world, which is also how we change it. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/umyazu
How can the investor class simultaneously threaten us with no work, and, at the same time, threaten us with too much? It seems they fear equality more than hypocrisy. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/into-the-gap
I really think the only reasonable response to the increasing prevalence of 996 in the tech world is to organize for a 20 hour workweek with no reduction in pay. They are trying to move the Overton window for working hours; let’s drag it the fuck back.
“I want to fix this industry. I want you to have a place in it. I want us to have a place in it. Maybe you do, too.” https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/all-tomorrows-parties/
“The value [added by the mythical 10x engineer] is literally the wages that the other nine workers are no longer paid, and which thus remain on the credit side of the company’s ledger.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/ten-times
“The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves.” https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/
“I believe that writing is the most astonishing of all human technologies.” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/06/25/think-for-yourself-ai-dan-chiasson
“The nature of generative AI is in fact degenerative, serving only to cut information loose from its tether. It is the opposite of learning.” https://endlessbookshelf.net/2026/05/15/reading-the-structure-of-the-world/
“Fear that there may be no alternative to the will of the AI arise because we have been told for decades that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/promises-and-perils
“When you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/freedom-from-unreal-loyalties
We must not work for war. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/into-the-gap
“We would be much better served by teaching many more people how to think rigorously and reason about abstractions (and they would be much better served, too) than we would by just plopping them as-is in front of LLMs.” https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/
“New choices are hard. But they’re still yours to make.” https://dansinker.com/posts/2026-04-30-cave-of-time/
“The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/correct-attitude
The choice to cut parental leave is not properly understood as cost-cutting or simple leverage in a bad economy; it’s opposition to gender equality and we should talk about it as such. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/28/parental-benefits-slashed-deloitte-zoom-impact
Becoming automatons: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/automation-conformity
Chewing on something here about how tools for professionalizing work (Kanban, etc) can also be used to abstract and make distant the ethics and consequences of that work. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying
You have to refuse to read the proposal from the person who also hasn’t read it. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/mouthwords/
“There is something that learning is for, that thinking is for, that work is for, and that you are for, the discovery of which belongs to you.” https://medium.com/center-on-privacy-technology/an-open-letter-to-georgetown-students-in-response-to-recent-announcements-about-generative-ai-8869dcd523ef
“What must be done is to bring the future into the present, to make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/reformed
“I’ve worked really hard to set myself up with a life and career in which I can ‘me’ as much as possible.” Lovely piece from good people thinking about doing good work in these trying times: https://www.talkscratch.com/the-group-chat-how-we-get-by/
Every time they bomb a school, a place of worship, a family picnicking on the beach, a wedding, a hospital, a shelter, a refugee camp, the wrong house, the wrong building, the wrong block, they say the same thing: it was a mistake. The mistake is to believe them.
More and more convinced that the technocrats’ assertion that “AI” will take all of our jobs is a projection of their fear of a general strike.
“We cannot meaningfully separate the everyday use of ‘AI’ platforms from their application in death and war.” https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/propellant/
At the point in an essay when I have written 10K words, gathered pages of notes, have come to despair as to whether there is anything here worth anything at all, considered moving to the woods and disappearing forever, when I write one halfway decent sentence and think, “Ah, this might be it!”
Workers “were designed to be competent but limited, active but docile, intelligent but ignorant…incapable of having a horizon beyond that of their task. In short, they were designed to be specialists.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/designed-to-be-specialists
“Mass pseudo-culture…is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/pseudo-culture
The premise here—that we can develop shared practices to prevent being taken in by the design patterns that AI imposes—obscures the reasons those patterns exist in the first place, who made them, and what they aim to do. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
“It’s safer in the front!” https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/29/crossing-the-line-it-really-is-safer-in-the-front-surrounding-the-portland-ice-facility
“We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.” https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/25/minneapolis-responds-to-the-murder-of-alex-pretti-an-eyewitness-account
“Sometimes I just lay back and think about the fact that it’s whistles and car horns and crowds versus the modern gestapo….I couldn’t really wrap my head around the idea that this could work. But it does work.” https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/our-neighbors-in-minneapolis
Abolition is the only way.
Patient urgency is “a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/patient-urgency
“Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/loss-of-an-ideal
Tyranny all the way down. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/tyrannies-and-servilities
“Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/what-books-are-for
“I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/live-at-enmity-with-unreality
“I didn’t enter this field and take this type of job only to not do the job.” https://gregg.io/the-only-winning-move
“…do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it?” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/where-there-is-a-wall
“Statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells.” https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-line-and-the-stream/
It’s not enough to turn away from screens; we have to turn towards something else. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/thingness
“The dominant narrative about AI in 2025 isn’t extinction, replacement, transcendence, or even innovation….The dominant narrative about AI in 2025 is inevitability.” https://theantiquarian.email/archive/is-ai-an-apocalypse/
Thinking about the big ruptures in our work and what it means to notice them, acknowledge the (very reasonable!) fear they inspire—then put one foot in front of the other anyway. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/walking/
Inviting people to refuse a technology requires both models and support for alternatives. Instead of cars, protected bike lanes and a community of cyclists; instead of social media, third spaces and communal practices; instead of AI, work that is autonomous and dignified, etc., etc.
Agree with the point about offering alternatives here, but will add: much “popular” tech is terrible for people and society. Guns, cars, Facebook, AI—all very popular, all diabolical. Popular tech is routinely a horror. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
Bob Black’s Abolition of Work has hit hard every time I’ve read it, but it hits a little harder every year. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
“Work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles….But the dream-work and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imaginative reality.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/psychology-of-craft
“AI is an agreement machine, which is anathema to learning and critical thinking.” https://www.404media.co/ai-is-supercharging-the-war-on-libraries-education-and-human-knowledge
“I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants.” https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
I want to posit that one of the things we mean when we say we’re “procrastinating” is that our own sense of what matters has diverged from what our boss or company is concerned with. That is, procrastination is often a political conflict, not a personal failing.
“To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability & to demand that technology serve the many, not the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency & justice must come before speed, efficiency & scale.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-luddites/
I’ll be opening a winter cohort of the sf writing work/shop soon, get on the waitlist if you want to be the first to find out! Space will again be very limited so that everyone can fully participate. https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like it: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/
Digging for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/undersense
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is subtitled “A Health Resort Horror Story,” but somehow that undersells it. The book is smart, fun, and subversive, exactly as all horror stories should be. https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/empusium
“It is about a world that positively blooms around us because we are committing to the quiet and constant and careful work of tending to it.” https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make
After a few days with time spent in a car (unusual for me!), I’m noticing how being in a car makes the rest of the world seem insubstantial, lacking solidity. Everything moves out of the way for you. Nothing is reliably there except you and your companions.
“We should dissociate ‘work’ from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream, where work is an imaginative activity, a work of the imagination such as takes place in painters and writers.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-imaginative-activity
“We were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/we-were-angry
Coming around to the notion that the Venn diagram between workers’ rights and civil rights is nearly a perfect circle. Owners can buy their rights; workers cannot.
Semi-regular reminder that wherever you’re reading this, it’s likely not where I wrote it. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
Once you see RTO as one part of an anti-labor movement, it makes other things clear: in-office attendance requirements are designed to force tech workers to remain in expensive cities. Because a tech salary + a rural mortgage = a whole lot of power to say no.
A word about annual review season and being human. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/
May I remind people that the range of responses you have to a leader you disapprove of is quite broad: insubordination, sabotage, malicious compliance, slow execution, decision paralysis. Get creative! https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/oct/07/cbs-news-staffers-react-barri-weiss-appointment
A thing you can do when the doom gets to be too much is reread a book you loved. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/case-for-rereading
Supremacy thinking is the refusal of observation. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/beyond-credibility
A whole lot of actually very talented leaders are about to learn that management is the worst place to exercise their leadership.
“Because no citizen who simply settles for being a consumer of democracy should expect to have a real democracy ever again.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/opinion/charlie-kirk-media-truth-trump.html
If you’re noticing a parallel between the way people in the administration are demeaning most Americans and the way your boss is now treating you, you are in very good company. (Tyranny in government begets tyranny at work begets tyranny in the home.)
“The disenfranchised men of the manosphere disdain women, and yet women continue to be asked to feel pity and concern for them.” https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n16/emily-witt/do-you-feel-like-a-failure
One of the ways that supremacist ideologies function is by refusing rest: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/hurry-up-quick
A corollary to no ethical consumption under capitalism is no ethical employment: there is no where you can work and keep your hands clean. The choices are about where to draw the line, and how to mitigate the harm on your side of it.
“Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association.…We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.” https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together
“For me, there are two main rewards for working. One is the continual discovery within myself of new ideas; the other is deeper understanding of a problem.” https://everythingchanges.us/blog/work-problem/
“If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-tanehisi-coates
Nearly two years since I made a regular practice of turning my digital devices off one day a week and I cannot overstate how restful it is. I won’t make a virtue of it—I don’t believe in virtue!—but those days are so intensely alive, and that’s enough.
We are well past the point at which talking uncritically about AI should be seen as deeply embarrassing. https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/against-stocking-frames/
“The class struggle has been transformed into an internal struggle against oneself.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/self-exploiting-workers
On refusing to do what you’re told. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/not-doing/
Judith Butler: “Did you consider not complying with this request?” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/uc-berkeley-trump-administration-antisemitism
“Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/to-live
Deskilling in action. https://www.404media.co/the-software-engineers-paid-to-fix-vibe-coded-messes
What if our work is all the things we give a fuck about? https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/everything
“We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from ‘work-based society’: it no longer exists and will not return.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/exit-strategy
“All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/other-side
“A photograph cannot inspire an antiwar movement if the antiwar movement has been spirited away in the night to a facility in Louisiana.” https://www.theverge.com/features/761076/gaza-images-starvation-tiktok-ban
Love a wildcat strike. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/17/government-orders-striking-air-canada-flight-attendants-return-work
Nicola Griffith’s first novel is about making a home, and remembering the past, and the impossible beauty and danger of knowing women are human. https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/ammonite