On Smug Bastards, AI Panic, and the Cult of Free Everything

written by Awen Null

Today I made the mistake of commenting on other people’s posts and threads, you know, the digital equivalent of walking down a street minding your own business, only to realise every second doorway contains a self-appointed moral philosopher ready to lecture you about the collapse of civilisation.

Some days, the internet is wholesome.
Today, it was a feral zoo of smugness.

There’s a particular breed of poster who speaks with the serene confidence of a monk and the emotional range of a parking enforcement officer. I wasn’t even posting my own thoughts; I was replying to theirs. And the replies I stumbled into were enough to make me think I should be wearing biohazard gloves when scrolling.

So let’s talk about it.
Let’s talk about AI panic, fabricated jobs, paywalls, entitlement, “everything should be free,” and the strange moral theatre some people perform as if it’s activism.

And ironically, this is free to read.
Because at some point today I thought: fuck it, I’ve given all these thoughts away for free in anyway, might as well publish them here where they gain actual provenance.

The Free-Everything Fantasy

Someone wrote that they find it “irritating” when they go to comment on an article and discover that commenting is a paid-subscriber privilege.

Irritating.

As though decades of creative labour, editing, hosting, platform fees, and emotional energy should be gracefully sacrificed so strangers on the internet can fire off a hot take without paying the price of a flat white.

Look, I’m no evangelist.
The web is held together with caffeine, delusion, and the ghosts of abandoned newsletters. But expecting creators to produce multilayered, researched, emotionally coherent work for nothing, and then complaining because you can’t comment for free, is the purest entitlement.

Creators aren’t utilities.
And access is not a birthright.

If everything is free, only the wealthy will create.
The rest will be too busy trying to afford their own survival.

AI Panic: A New Form of Performance Art

Then came the statements declaring AI a “plague.”
A threat to humanity.
A destroyer of wealth, opportunity, the environment, and spiritual integrity — all before lunchtime.

Meanwhile, the same people are writing online posts for free, delivering thousands of words to a corporation that profits from their existence. But AI is the plague. Right.

Here’s the quiet truth:

AI isn’t the threat.
The economic system is.

We live in a world where 90–99% of jobs are invented — administrative padding, managerial theatre, compliance rituals, productivity pantomimes. Jobs exist to justify the economy, not to serve human meaning.

So when someone shrieks that AI will “steal jobs,” I can’t help laughing.
If a machine can do it, perhaps the job was never real in the first place.

AI isn’t exposing human weakness.
It’s exposing systemic absurdity.

And that’s scary — not because it destroys work, but because it reveals the emptiness of so much of it.

The Sovereign Artist vs The Free-Rider Audience

Another gem:
“Because AI might take jobs, maybe writers should unpaywall their articles. Nobody needs money anymore.”

This is a grown adult saying this. Out loud. On purpose.

The cognitive leap required to reach that conclusion is impressive. Olympic-level. While AI, apparently, is destroying civilisation, humans are out here demanding artists stop charging for their labour because society might evolve.

This is not idealism.
This is magical thinking mixed with a dash of entitlement and a pinch of “I don’t want to pay you.”

The same people demanding free content are furious about inequality.
It’s incredible.

You can’t simultaneously say:

“Capitalism is exploitative.”
and

“Creators should work for free because I want to comment.”

Pick a lane.

Paywalls aren’t greed — they’re oxygen masks.
No one can create under permanent scarcity.

60 odd Years, 6 Global Shifts, and Not One Apocalypse

I’ve adapted to more technological upheaval than half these commentators have had birthdays.

Calculators were going to ruin maths.
Word processors were going to destroy writing.
Digital cameras were going to kill photography.
Adobe was going to obliterate “real art.”
The internet was going to rot minds.
Computers were going to erase jobs.

Every decade, someone declared the end of civilisation.
Every decade, civilisation adapts.

AI is no different.
It’s a tool — like caffeine, sugar, Prozac, alcohol, nicotine, LSD, mania, grief, or insomnia. All of those have shaped art. All of those are “unnatural” influences. All of those are accepted.

Yet AI is somehow the apocalypse.

Give me strength.