last week's listen - personal choice and AI

hi everyone. i've been away a bit and not publishing - traveling and then catching up from being gone, etc. so this is more like Last Month's Listen :) but i still want to dive further into the conversation about personal choice; especially as i feel like the Left has struggled in recent years to meaningfully engage any nuanced discussion around this.

Last Week's Listen will be dropped occasionally, mixed in with its sibling, Last Week's Read. It may be slightly edited pieces but also maybe just snippets, streams of conscious, etc. that help me process through things I'm listening to or reading and the ideas, thoughts, and mostly questions that come up.

Last Week's Month's Listen - personal choice and AI
26 September 2026

Movement Memos (The AI Boom Is a Corporate Project. It Can Be Disrupted, Brian Merchant)

"The AI boom is often presented as an unstoppable technological shift, but Brian’s reporting reminds us that it is a brittle and faulty corporate project — and that corporate projects can be disrupted." The question that I want to pose in relationship to this is: If it is so brittle that it can be disrupted (if not destroyed), will we destroy things that we become attached to or dependent on?

I don't feel the need to rehash most of this episode. I do think it's worth a full listen. I appreciate the work of both Kelly Hayes and Brian Merchant. These are two of my go-to people when it comes to critical reporting, writing, and dialogue around our current techno-fascist situation. I think the emphasis on AGI as a replacement of labor and how this relates to why the owning class desires the promises of companies like Open AI is critically important to understand.

What I want to get into, though, is from the end of the episode and what I find to be a relatively common reaction on the Left to critical responses when we engage with the things that destroy us - in this case AI. Hayes says, "I don’t want us to get it twisted and think that the formation of some moral elite that brags about its consumer choices and shames people amounts to having power, because it doesn’t." While I mostly agree with this sentence, I also think that we often let this be a reason to not hold ourselves to a standard of opting out. I would prefer some nuance around exceptions while a high bar is held for the vast majority of us.

A similar way that I've thought about this is as someone who works in public health and is a staunch supporter of vaccines. I know someone who has a very rare condition that meant that in the early days of the COVID vaccines, it was uncertain if it would be safe for her to get the jab. She would be the first to say that this rare exception does not make it okay for people to not get vaccinated just because she couldn't. If anything, it was all the more reason why she wanted people to get vaccinated - so that she would be safer until she could get the shot. I think this is similar to AI. If there are rare exceptions where people are forced to use it or it is the absolutely only option, let's talk about it. But that is actually a reason to then otherwise completely opt out and destroy it - not a reason to make a lot of excuses for many of us to be wishy-washy in our ethical behavior.

This is, of course, a larger conversation that extends beyond our individual tech choices to the bigger question of how much our personal choices to avoid things are important in our work to change the world for the better. But for the sake of this short piece, let's focus on AI. I agree with Hayes that focusing our anti-AI vitriol at individuals is neither useful nor remotely strategic. The world is not improved by people saying shitty things on social media platforms. So, to be clear, I'm not advocating for that.

That said, I believe that our choices do have a relationship with our ability to change the world. They are not the thing that changes it but I disagree with the idea that they mean nothing. In capitalism - especially late-stage, post-neoliberal, techno-fascist capitalism - there are intense limitations to our ability to make choices and being purists about it is not helpful. But the radical left's often knee-jerk response in the past decade or two that, therefore, nothing we do as individuals matters rings as not only a hollow but detrimental reaction to the liberal consumerist approach to change. It loses any nuance and feels like a lazy non-approach to the question. I think a relationship with our personal choices is relevant and worth a place in our politics.

Here are the basic components of my argument: 1) we do not tear down systems that we are dependent on, 2) if we want the world to look differently, we must be in the practice of that world as much as we can be, and 3) having some underlying belief that we are impactful in a beneficial way is important to our ability to sustain ourselves as movement makers. Additionally, on the other side of that same coin of us being able to have an impact, what we do, read, engage with, use, etc. all impacts us, changes us.

Let's look at this in relationship to the use of AI in our daily lives. First, if we as individuals become dependent on ChatGPT to the extent that we can no longer write without it, what is our motivation to destroy it? The further it becomes entrenched in the world, the less people are able to live without it and it becomes a default that we then cannot imagine living without. When I was working as a professor, I adamantly told my students that they were not allowed to use AI or it would be considered plagiarism and they would fail. They did it anyway (there is no definitive way to prove it so they basically called my bluff). Public health masters students did not believe that they could write papers without AI. I struggle to believe that those students will then fight to abolish it (or be much of a benefit to the future of our collective health if they lack basic critical thinking and language skills).

Second, one of the fundamental reasons that I identify with anarchism and not socialism or communism is that I don't believe that there will be a singular moment of revolution after which the world will be as we desire. I believe that we must work every day to build the world that we want to live in. This means striving to be in practice of that world. We don't just not call the cops on people, we work on creating systems of care, of transformative justice. If we don't want a world that has AI in it, we must live as if that world is here today and build what we need instead of choosing the latest techno "answer" instead.

Third, it is imperative for me to believe that I can make the world a better place. This is what gets me out of bed everyday. Beyond that, I know that the choices that I am able to make have an impact on me. I don't consume animal products. I don't think that this choice ends factory farming or the leather industry. And also, it changes me; it is relevant to how I relate to the world around me. Even if I can't control most things, I don't want to abandon an honest relationship to the chains of production, the externalities of my decisions. It's just not about saving the world, the animals, etc., it's also about saving me.

Something that relates to all three of these is when Hayes talks about how if you are using this technology and you know about the topic, you realize how wrong it is. But if you don't, you could believe what it's producing despite it being wrong. Her follow up about controlling content and censorship should tell us that we cannot cede our information gathering to these machines if we want to build the world we want to live in, have a beneficial impact on the world we live in today, and maintain our autonomy.

As I stated at the beginning, shaming users of AI is not strategic. However, I do think that we should expect those on the Left to be opting out as much as possible; and completely opt out in our movement work. If you are forced to use it at work, that sucks and hopefully some organizing can help. But in organizing spaces, I'm seeing email composition, transcript recordings of meetings, design work, and much more being just handed right over to these surveillance tools without question. Social media shaming may be useless but we cannot avoid challenging each other in what it means for us to make ethical choices in our lives whenever possible.

Those using these tools may not be our enemies but that doesn't mean that we can't challenge each other to make different choices when possible. We would never fight racism or sexism or ableism in this way. Which brings us to what will mostly have to wait for another piece of writing because it is too big for this one. As Hayes brings up, people are struggling and there are needs not being met. Yes, I see this everyday. But why do we need to use the shortcut of AI for the vast majority of those? Much of the digital world has not actually improved the lives of people actively using it - it is a falsehood that that is universally so. AI doesn't exist to combat an ableist world or make it more accessible. It doesn't seek to end colonialism. It doesn't care how lonely you are. Those are all marketing tools that we need to be smart enough to not get manipulated by. We humans who care for each other and the world, WE hold the answers to our societies' problems by working towards collective liberation.

We cannot just give in and make excuses. That should be a basic expectation for us in our work together. We need to be able to talk about it and have the baseline expectation for ourselves that we prioritize real relationships and work done by our fellow humans.

Related reading: Devi Sridhar, "We all know a lack of exercise is bad for our bodies. So what is relying on AI doing to our brains?," The Guardian, September 25, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/25/exercise-bad-bodies-ai-brains-students-tech-health