this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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None of that means that what OP is proposing wouldn't still be the right thing to do. A drop in the ocean, sure, but still preferable to the alternative.
Performative politics have been proven to have a paralyzing effect on people. If you feel you're doing something and it has no impact, you just disengage from meaningful politics because you already absolved yourself.
Ok, well in that case I guess we should just keep looking at those ugly as shit pixar-ish chipmunks. Maybe their cutesy faces will motivate someone of the 5k monthly visitors here to become the next unabomber who finally defeats Peter Thiel.
It's just a single png. If somebody kicks up their feet and stops caring after getting the mods to change it, then do you honestly think that they could've gotten anything significant done in the first place?
I'm one of them. I went from thinking naively that consumer politics matter to leaving my career to fight big tech, unionize tech workers, and for a year or so I've also worked on limiting the harm of generative AI specifically.
If I thought this petty stuff would do anything, I would have probably wasted a lot of time in the wrong hole.
The use of AI images without critique communicates to people that these things are normal and fine and inevitable and non-harmful. This isn't about staging a 'consumer boycott' in terms of harming profits as much as it's about not normalizing this kind of stuff culturally. The less acceptable this stuff is, the more likely people will be willing to push back against big tech more generally. It's part of the same movement.
And it's additive, not zero-sum. No one is saying "don't bother unionizing" because they're too busy pushing back on the use of AI images in an online community. In fact, I'd reckon, the broad societal pushback makes it more likely that people will be inspired to unionize!
In my experience it is the total opposite: the habit of individual, culturally-oriented actions cultivates a normalization of symbolic, small-scale actions and prevents people to develop a taster for collective action. Once they hit the limit of what they can do alone in the cultural sphere, instead of asking themselves how to overcome these limits, they just ignore collective forms of action to keep repeating the same individualistic and symbolic actions. Most people who show up and take initiative in collective efforts almost always have no history of engaging with symbolic actions and emancipating themselves from that mindset. There are a few, but it's by far the exception.