Bandcamp
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
And unlike streaming sites, you own what you buy, and the artist gets paid much better; you’d have to stream the same song 200+ times with a premium Spotify account to generate the same profit for the artist as just buying the song outright on Bandcamp.
Be honest. Did you have an LLM write that? Because boy howdy, does it read the way LLMs output text, right down to missing the point.
Regardless, in only one place did I mention climate change effects, and that was in passing as the last item in a list of issues with AI and LLMs in particular. That was on purpose.
You can throw out the environment as an argument entirely, and accept Andy Masley’s entire premise (I don’t), and AI still has much for which it needs to reckon.
That’s called the black swan fallacy. “I’ve never personally seen it, therefore it’s not real.” That just sounds like cope and projection. You feel like this “loud minority” is preventing you from being so open about your love of AI, and so you pretend like everyone is secretly on your side.
If you were to get specific, people are generally receptive to very specific use cases, like tailor-made models for assisting medical diagnosis or security analysis of code. What people almost universally hate is the slop produced by generative AI, particularly in creative niches where what these machines produce isn’t art but a pale shade of it. Yet, these billionaires keep trying to shove GenAI down everyone’s throats at every turn, all the while ruining hobbies (see the RAM/SSD supply chain), livelihoods, health, rights (see Palantir; see who owns these tools), and the planet.
So yeah, if you don’t have a visceral reaction to someone shilling AI, I don’t believe you’re really that far left. The tools that broadly exist are not the tools of nor for the befit of the people.
A few years ago, I had an acquaintance that was trying to join the CIA. She got several rounds into the interview process but ultimately took a job at Meta (who she was also interviewing with). She got fired in one of the later mass layoffs, but she chose to work there. She knew the kind of company they were and are, and she was like, “They gonna pay me lots of money? Then I’m in!” And look how that worked out.
There is no world in which these companies are doing anything good, and if you think they are, then you’re the ignorant rube they want to help bring about technofascism, and they’re fine tossing you into their grinder as meat as they please.
Sounds like it’s still an alternative!