The Great AI Grift: How Tech Companies Rebranded Theft as Innovation
Silicon Valley’s self-proclaimed workaholics revealed they’re too lazy to do the foundational work of consent
Let’s set the scene:
Nick Clegg, after spending seven years working for Meta as president of global affairs was speaking at a festival honoring the Bloomsbury Group — a community of artists and writers whose entire project was rooted in creative sovereignty and social critique — told us that asking permission is “implausible.” That doing so would “collide with the physics of the technology itself.”
Not the business model. Not policy constraints. Not legal complexity. Physics.
As if AI, and the technology it is built upon, is woven into the fabric of the Universe. Phfft.
The chutzpah — or perhaps the mass of stupidity so dense it is collapsing upon itself into a singularity — is breathtaking.
But here’s what Clegg’s cosmic excuse-making actually reveals:
Only someone completely bereft of creativity who has never made something from nothing could say what Nick Clegg just said. If your business model collapses when consent is required, then it’s not a business, it’s theft.
Anyone who has actually worked in the trenches of the creative process knows that cultural work isn’t “content.” It’s the result of risk, time, and care. It’s how we make meaning.
Calling artists’ desire for consent “unworkable,” is an indictment of the entire industry itself.
This isn’t the voice of innovation. It’s the voice of grifters.
The Cosmology of Grifterism
The deeper problem isn’t just bad rhetoric. It’s the architecture we now live inside. Over the last fifty years, a financial regime has taken hold — one that shifted the source of wealth from material production below to abstract circulation above.
Think of it like this:
We used to extract value from commodities — things you could touch, shape, and sell. Now, value is extracted from circuits — through attention, prediction, behavior, and data. And those circuits run through you.
You’re not just a user, you’re a nodal point in a financialized ecosystem — one that sees your creativity, preferences, even your refusal, as monetizable flows. Value moves through you, not to you. Wealth is no longer produced with you but from you.
“Who benefits from this structure? The architects of extraction:
Nick Clegg. Sam Altman. Elon Musk. The “you can’t seriously expect us to ask permission” crew. They are the sovereigns of this infrastructure — people for whom asking is weakness, and consent is friction to be optimized away, as these people are not creators — they are the grifter kings of this cosmological order.
What Refusal Looks Like, Still
So what does resistance look like — not as branding, sentiment, nostalgia, but as practice — praxis?
In 2022, The New York Times (gift link) profiled a group of teenagers in Brooklyn who formed the Luddite Club. Their acts were simple: flip phones, Sunday park meetings, books, sketch pads, silence. No Instagram. No TikTok. No algorithmic self.
“I started using my brain, It made me observe myself as a person” one said.
They weren’t anti-technology, and neither am I. What they rejected was the transformation of technology into an architecture of behavioral compliance — a system where social legitimacy is achieved not through somatic relation, but through constant, anxious undirected affective self-performance. You don’t get to be anymore. You must stream yourself into data to be legible in this architecture.
What’s impressive about the Luddite Club isn’t just that it made the front page of The New York Times in 2022. It’s that three years later, the paper followed up (gift link). The members, now in college and managing life on their own, are still trying to hold the line.
While many of them carried their convictions into adulthood, life in an increasingly techno-mediated world comes with some unfortunate (if you are not part of the ‘you can’t seriously expect us to ask permission” crew) non-negotiables. They found that hey needed smartphones just to function in some required social and professional situations: QR codes; Dating apps; Transit; etc.
I can relate. I’ve tried to step away from the smartphone before. But without it, I can’t even access my workplace. Every login requires Duo Mobile an app that will not work on a ‘dumb phone.’
This is what it means to be locked into an architecture that tightens with every new “convenience.” One where opting out isn’t a lifestyle decision any longer, it’s a choice that cuts off your access to the world.
And Yet, They Persist
Even across the Atlantic, young Europeans are finding their own way out. A Dutch startup called The Offline Club has been organizing phone-free meetups across the continent — analog hobbies, silent reading circles, slow time with strangers. In April, over a thousand people gathered in London just to be unreachable.
This isn’t regression, nostalgia or technophobia — It is an act of being.
Even closer to home near where I grew, the NYTimes (gift article) featured a group of high schoolers in the Hamptons has been doing something quietly revolutionary: printing a newspaper.
The Ditch Weekly, started by a few middle schoolers in Montauk, has grown into a 20-person newsroom publishing 2,000 physical copies a week. They write restaurant reviews, profile surf shop owners, document police blotters, and chase down state governors for interviews — all without adult interference, without TikTok metrics, and without trying to be cool.
Their only real ambition? Getting other teenagers to put down their phones and pick up a paper.
What they’ve created is a cultural intervention. It is risky, relational, and downright creative AF. Nick Clegg couldn’t touch these kids with his scripted performatives. These kids are reclaiming the space and time from the circulatory economy of attention — which actively flattens it.
One of them put it best:
“I spend a lot of time on social media, so anything to break me away from that. It’s really bad. It’s like, actually an addiction.”
Then she looked at her friends and said, “That would be a cool article.”
This is resistance as form — as material praxis. The refusal is not a retreat from society, it is a prototype for reclaiming our agency and dignity. Our right to exist.
The scary narratives you hear even in mainstream discourse such as The Ezra Klein Show, are doing a great disservice to everyone. The narrative, we are told, is that this technology could lead to AGI — a state in which these parroting machines transform into cognition and — because they’ve presumably been trained on Robert Nozick slop (please allow for the inside baseball, I need it) — will rise up, take over the world and enslave or destroy us.
The reason this narrative is so pernicious is because we have already been taken over — and not by sentient machines, but by the architecture they require. We’re not awaiting a future where AGI enslaves us. We’re already laboring — right now — as the unpaid data labor force that keeps these systems functional, profitable, and expanding.
We have become ontologically tethered to AI.
We are caught in a system where our actions, communications, and desires are shaped by its demands.
It’s like a scene from a mafia movie:
A mafia boss pays a visit to a local shop. The shop owner welcomes him in, offers him a seat, and they start chatting about the kids and the weather. Then the mafia boss asks about a little matter of a payment — just a small thing, you know, the usual protection money. The shop owner hesitates. Business has been slow, he says, eyes lowered. Hopefully next month.
The boss doesn’t threaten him. He doesn’t raise his voice. He just reaches into his coat pocket and slowly places a revolver on the table. He doesn’t touch it again. He doesn’t need to, he just looks him in the eye and smiles.
A moment passes between them. The shop owner gets up, walks to the back, opens the safe, and brings out a few hundred-dollar bills.
The gun didn’t fire. It didn’t have to. It was already firing once he placed it on the table — virtually.
What Ezra Klein, Nick Clegg, and AI enthusiasts writ large don’t grok (pun intended), is that AI is the gun that is firing on the table, and the protection money we are continually handing over is our freedom to be.
If this analysis resonates, you might be interested in what I’m building in response. Muse Foundry is an offline-only record label — a cultural intervention against the extraction economy described here. No streaming, no algorithms, no data capture. Just music as it should be: embodied, relational, and alive. You can learn more or follow along at musefoundry.studio.