ON THE BULLSHIT OF AI BACKLASH AND THE COMMONS WE FORGOT TO FIGHT FOR

❖ EAARTHNET team MAR 09, 2026

In the early days of the internet, we were promised a great levelling—a digital commons where knowledge flowed like water, unowned and unstoppable, washing away hierarchies and letting anyone drink deep. Fast forward a couple of decades, and here we are: drowning in noise, scrolling through endless feeds of half-baked opinions, algorithmically curated outrage, and ads disguised as wisdom.

The noise is everywhere—AI-generated summaries of summaries, chatbots spitting out plausible nonsense, deepfakes blurring what’s real. And now, a growing chorus is yelling “Ban the bots! Smash the servers! AI is the devil!” as if the machines themselves were the ones plotting our downfall.

But let’s pause for a moment, as one might when spotting a particularly absurd bureaucratic form. Is the backlash against AI really the smart move, or is it just more noise? What if the problem isn’t the technology at all, but the stage of human development wielding it? And what if the real fight isn’t against silicon brains, but for reclaiming the commons—those open, shared spaces of knowledge and creation—from the enclosures that turn everything into proprietary profit machines?

Picture this: you’re a mid-level executive in a gleaming tech firm, the kind Graeber might call a “bullshit job” maestro. You’re at what ego-development experts like Susanne Cook-Greuter dub the “4th stage Achiever”—rational, efficient, goal-oriented, but trapped in a win-at-all-costs mindset where success means outcompeting everyone else, measuring life in metrics, and viewing the world as a zero-sum game.

At this stage, you’re not stupid; you’re just fragile. Alternatives threaten your carefully constructed self-image, so you enclose everything: data, algorithms, even human creativity becomes “input” for your models. Open-source? Nah, that’s for losers. Better to lock it up, patent it, monetize it, and call it innovation.

This is the real threat with AI. Not the tech itself—hell, in the hands of someone at a later stage, say the “Strategist” or “Unitive,” AI could be a boon, a tool for decentralizing power, democratizing knowledge, or even fostering empathy across divides. Imagine AI mapping indigenous land rights, crowdsourcing solutions to climate collapse, or amplifying silenced voices without extracting their data for profit.

But the Achiever? They see AI as a weapon for enclosure: proprietary models trained on stolen commons (your emails, your art, your searches), then sold back to you as “essential services.” The noise—the endless hype, the fearmongering, the viral memes—is their smokescreen.

Take the dichotomy of enclosed vs. open Commons. In the open Commons (think early Wikipedia, Linux, or creative commons licenses), knowledge is a living river—free to flow, remix, evolve without gatekeepers. It’s unitive: no one owns the field; we all tend it.

But the Achiever encloses it like the English landlords fencing off pastures in the 18th century, turning shared land into private profit. AI under enclosure? It’s ChatGPT hoarding data behind paywalls, or facial recognition tech sold to police states. The backlash that screams “Kill all AI!” plays right into their hands—it’s stupid rhetoric because it attacks the tool, not the encloser. Ban AI, and the Achievers just pivot to the next extractive gimmick. Leave the Commons undefended, and we lose the ground for real human flourishing.

Why does this matter now? Because the noise is deafening, and it’s designed that way. Lengthy articles like this one are excellent for diving deep, but in a world of 280-character takes, they get buried. We need to unfold this dichotomy not as abstract theory, but as a call to reclaim: support open-source AI (like Stable Diffusion or Hugging Face models), demand data sovereignty (your thoughts aren’t “content” for their mills), and evolve beyond the Achiever’s trap.

Graeber taught us that bullshit systems persist because we let them—because we forget we can refuse.

So, let’s refuse. The Commons isn’t lost; it’s waiting for us to fight for it. AI can be a curse in enclosed hands, a boon in open ones. The choice isn’t machine vs. human—it’s enclosure vs. freedom.

Which side of the fence are you on?

✊🌎❤️

eaarthnet / Gee