On Artistic Puritanism from the Heart of the Tech Industry
- Sara Brink
- Dec 30, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
The online AI censors are a little too online
I’m a working artist in the Bay Area. I’ve been living on my own since 2021, my rent alone is $2,550 a month, and I’m a single woman freelancing in post-production. My only goal after my divorce was to stay in my apartment and to stay in Oakland. I hustle to keep up with my living expenses, I haven't bothered with health insurance for years, and I’m currently eking by and waiting for the wheel to turn in my favor. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get my production company up and running over the last year by producing, creative directing, recording, editing, sound designing, and publishing my content by myself, as close as I can to the broadcast standards that I work in professionally.
And when artists on social media blacklist individual people for using genAI, it infuriates me.
I live in the heart of the tech industry. How do y’all think I pay my rent? Every working artist in the Bay Area has worked for Big Tech to pay their bills. Even since I migrated here in 2013, I’ve watched the local artistic and cultural scene get hollowed out while the rest of the world gleefully co-signed everything the tech industry was doing. The tech companies trained their models off of the art y’all had been posting on the internet without qualm for decades, and the rent kept going up in the Bay, and the artists and queer kids and people of color and local natives kept being dispossessed and displaced. But even though Big Tech was already selling your personal data, it’s not until they start profiting off of stealing directly from you that you raise a stink? And you raise it against … users?
These priorities seem off.
Blacklisting individuals for using a product being actively pushed on a propaganda-groomed society is the rot of individualism personified. It’s bad organizing. I’ve seen local progressive organizers cause the same kind of stress fractures to their movement with ideological puritanism (*coughcough* Bernie bros *cough*), which is one reason why political progressives in the Bay Area consistently get steamrolled. It’s the opposite of community building, and it plays into the hands of the oligarchs. I honestly think that the too-online artists encouraging blacklists and boycotts have been sold the lie the tech companies have been pushing on us since the nineties - that anything worth talking about is happening online - because your arguments lack the refinement of grounded, real-world experience.
For one thing, genAI is a set of tools that the artists around me have to learn to keep up with the demands of our local economy. The people I know who work at tech companies are decent human beings who understand and feel conflicted about the roles they occupy and who have been completely supportive of me when I tell them about the independent projects I’m working on. I’ve never run a project of my own where I didn’t pay at least some of my collaborators, and the reason I’ve been able to do that is because of the work I’ve done for tech companies. The people who’ve been the easiest for me to do good work and collaborate with as a team haven’t been artists working on creative projects, but with creatives working on corporate projects. People here aren't thrilled about AI, perhaps even less so than the loudest internet antagonists, but we're far more able to recognize the reality and nuance of it, because we've been living and working together in the environment for years.
Additionally, these oligarchs threaten our real, bodily safety through control of our local politics. Did you know there’s a tech maniac and former CTO of Coinbase who’s pitched turning the Bay into a turf war of “Greys” teaming up with “Reds” and the police against the “Blues” and physically driving the Blues out? The Reds, Blues, and Greys are exactly who you’d think they are, and Marc Andreesen and Y Combinator love this guy. These weirdos are in our backyard, they’re wealthier than God, they explicitly menace us (see Garry Tan, “Die slow motherfuckers”), and we also depend on them because they’re hoarding all the money in our local economies. The financial situation I’m trapped in because I’m a progressive working artist in my specific geographic location is textbook abusive, and it was enabled by every one of you who posted your art on the internet expecting that the tech companies would behave.
You are not going to hit these companies anywhere that it hurts by boycotting genAI. There’s not enough of you, you’re not organized, and crucially, you are not on the ground. Just because the internet is a place-less place, that doesn’t mean that the tech industry is. They are embedded here with us in meat space, real people work at the companies on their real campuses including us and our neighbors, and y’all aren’t seeking out your fellow artists who have the most direct insight into them and the politics that shape their operations. That’s how I know the boycotting and blacklisting is about puritanism and virtue signaling, not impact.
You are the people who were bamboozled and swindled by these companies – THESE companies, the "started as Hot-Or-Not for college campuses” and “retired ‘Don’t Be Evil’ as a slogan” companies – so perhaps you’re not the best prepared to lead the charge against them. Some of us have survived and adapted around them, and are best placed to challenge them, but lack proportionate resources, infrastructure, and capital to make our work as impactful as possible. LA artists have only just run up against the tech companies, and combined with the fires and the strikes, they got smacked into the dirt. Though there are more artists down there total, I think overall they’re struggling harder than artists in the Bay, because they keep coming up here to take the rare narrative film jobs that could have gone to local filmmakers.
Those of you who are serious about changing the political landscape around AI could stand to sharpen your ideas by asking for insight from not only the people who call themselves artists, but all the creatives, influencers, and marketers in the heart of Silicon Valley. You might become more capable and resilient against the predatory behavior of tech companies if you seek out unheard, relevant perspectives of the people who have to live in their shadows, and start reframing your own perspective, at which as an artist you ought to already be adept. And consider redirecting resources to the community of radical, politically progressive artists that the tech industry chewed through first.