At this point, refusing to use AI, and especially LLM tools is an act of resistance. Give them no quarter. Purge them whenever you find them. Turn off Copilot. Poison any data that you put out into the world, and make it as difficult as possible for AI bots to train from your data. Treat the people who mindlessly boost AI as collaborators.
As of this morning, my website is no longer hosted on Vercel, instead sitting on a Hetzner VM in Helsinki. My databases and similar shall hopefully soon follow, as part of my project of pulling all my infrastructure out of the USA. In the interests of other people who might want to do the same, I thought it would be wise to document what I did and why. So, to work!
The ghoul in Arabic folklore is a spirit or demon heavily associated with graveyards, death and the consumption of human flesh. Ghouls lure unwary people into the desert or into abandoned places, killing and eating them and taking the form of the person they've most recently eaten. They prey on children and the vulnerable, take the shape of attractive women or loved ones to lure in unsuspecting victims and drink blood. While their depiction in popular culture is more varied, the motif of eating flesh, trickery, forbidden hunger and desecration is consistent through almost all of them. Ghouls are, in short, the monsters that trick you, that lie to you and that then kill you and eat your corpse. Does that sound familiar, Mark?
Between the sheer ubiquity of the practices and the effort put into suppressing cognitive dissonance described above, people functioning in these environments wind up believing that this is simply how business is: the deeply coercive, consent-violating and harassing nature of these practices fade away and become invisible. And at that point, we have a problem, because participating in this culture becomes key to being accepted by the business community, and thus, for anyone working primarily business-to-business, to winning clients. You have to post constantly on LinkedIn aggrandising yourself. You have to have a large email list which you consistently spam. You have to use socially comprehensible sales tactics to sell, no matter how toxic and obnoxious they are, because they're part of the social script. And if you refuse to use these tactics, you will, as sure as night follows day, wind up marginalised and not allowed into the business world.
Fortunately, while the year ahead is likely to be hard and horrific in a general sense, I have good reason to hope that it will bring more agency and capacity to act for me personally. We begin the year with a death and a burial, but as hard as that is, it is the end of a rather painful process that has been going on for the last four years. My hope is thus that this year can be a year for endings, new beginnings and renewed energy towards the things that are important to me: my personal relationships, writing and building my consultancy.