Articles by Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner

Technology

Workers replaced by AI have a dire warning for the world

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. Marc Steiner: And I’m Marc Steiner, a host of The Marc Steiner Show here on the Real News and Max. And I’ll be co-hosting this special crossover episode of Working People and The Marc Steiner Show. Maximillian Alvarez: And I always love getting to be in the recording studio with my man, mark Steiner, and to any working people, listeners out there who listen to my show but haven’t yet checked out Mark’s show. Let me just say, I kind of envy you have such a feast of vital interviews and important conversations to dig into from doctors returning from Gaza to Jewish activists around the world, speaking out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine to scholars, organizers, students and artists, all fighting fascism here in the United States. So seriously, go subscribe to the Mark Steiner show anywhere you get your podcasts. Check it out, and let us know what you think. And in fact, our special crossover episode today is technically part two of an ongoing series that we began on the Mark Steiner show last month, focusing on the so-called artificial intelligence boom and the new realities and existential threats that it poses to life as we know it. And last month on the Mark Steiner show, mark and I co-hosted an expansive discussion on AI and the military industrial complex with award-winning science reporter Peter Byrne, who has produced an in-depth multi-part investigative series in partnership with Project Censored called Military AI Watch, which explores the ways that Silicon Valley corporate media, the Department of Defense, the banking industry and scientific institutions, all intersect in the effort to militarize ai. And we’ve actually linked to that episode in today’s show notes, so you can check it out if you haven’t already. Marc Steiner: In today’s episode, we’re looking at how AI is shaping the economy the impact is already having, and we’ll continue to have on working people’s lives, livelihoods, and jobs. And we’re speaking with members of a new mutual aid and advocacy group called Gen ai, which formed other critical need to help creatives, knowledge workers, and anyone else impacted by generative AI on their website, gen ai.com. The group writes this, Silicon Valley billionaires and their allies are determined to replace all human thinking and creating workers. IE writers, visual artists, computer programmers, teachers with Gen ai. And even though gen AI is a completely incompetent and unable to replace human thinking and creativity, many scientists believe it’s not possible to generate enough electricity for all the Gen AI or our evil overlords won’t. Either way, it’s killing the planet even faster. And in a capitalist world where people need income from labor to survive, disaster is imminent. Fortunately, a mutual aid group being organized now is planning to fight back. So what is generative ai exactly? How does it work? What does it all mean for working people and our ability to make a living? To help us unpack all this, we’re excited to be joined by two guests. Kim Crawley is a former cybersecurity professor, author of Pen Testra Blueprint. She found this Gen AI in May, 2025 in response to the immense associated harm gen AI has done to her and her peers, and to the vast environmental, cultural, scientific, psychological, and economic harm. It’s done to the world. Gen AI is unique for its anti-capitalist focus and commitment to survival funds for people who are struggling. Maximillian Alvarez: We’re also joined today by Emmi. Emmi is an information security expert with experience across many niches of the industry. These include application security across a number of verticals. And Emmy is also a specialist in insider threat and cyber threat intelligence. She joined the efforts of Gen AI in 2025 due to the overwhelming amount of friends she has seen lose their entire lives and careers due to the out of control AI bubble. She also has immense experience with boots on the ground union organizing and protesting and activism experience of nearly two decades. Welcome to you both. Thank you so much for joining us on this special crossover episode of Working People and the Marc Steiner Show. Thank you so much for having us. Maximillian Alvarez: So let’s start first by getting to know more about you and stop Gen ai, the group. I was wondering if we could go around the table and have y’all say more about yourselves, your own personal experience with Gen ai, and then tell us about how this group gen AI came to be, what it is and what it does. Kim Crawley: Alright, well, I am a cybersecurity researcher, blogger, former professor by trade. And it’s a total miracle how that career was built because I didn’t go to university and then graduate and get a BA or whatever and then enter the industry. I had a very messy path into the tech industry and I’m largely self-educated. But yeah, I’ve worked for a ton of different tech companies over the years, writing their blogs, writing their ad copy, writing white papers. One of the most recent industry white papers I’ve written about is about the implementation of new regulation, about industrial cybersecurity in Europe. That was coordinated by a think tank founded by Siemens. So I do a lot of cool stuff, but I was making a quite decent living just doing cybersecurity research and writing about it, especially in 2022 and 2023 by normal people standards, I was doing very well. And then by 2024 into 2025, my income rapidly diminished. There have been, honestly a few nights this year that I’ve been having difficulty sleeping, worrying about how I was going to pay my rent, and it was just immensely, immensely stressful. And it’s amazing how that all happened because I became a professor at the Open Institute of Technology last year in 2024, and I got that job based on the books that I’ve written and now all a sudden, and I was never paid that well as a professor, by the way. And all of a sudden now I can barely survive income wise because I am used to doing a lot of freelance work and I notice a lot of my peers are in a similar boat. And a lot of people outside of the tech industry as well, such as creative people, people in the arts, the arts, entertainment, media, as you probably know, is a much bigger sector of the industry than people think. It’s so for artists and technologists and for teachers and people like that to be losing their jobs, it’s absolutely catastrophic. And I was so, so depressed last April, and then I just thought I got to do something about this. All these crises that we are going through in the world now and becoming middle age has all taught me that I can’t just wait around and expect for other people to have everything handled. Sometimes you got to be the change in the world that you want to see. So I founded Stop Gen AI and I got a lot of interest. One of the people who showed an interest early on was Brian Merchant, who was a former staff journalist at the Los Angeles Times who left the Los Angeles Times and is now working independently as a journalist. And he’s the author of a book called Blood in the Machine, which is also the name of his blog. And he has now devoted his current journalism career to covering the impacts of Gen AI and how it’s real people and their jobs very negatively. And so he was one of the first people who showed interest in our org. One of the things that sets our org, apart from all the other orgs that oppose Gen ai, and I know I’ll explain how I know this later, one of the things that sets us apart, even relative to organizations founded by labor unions is we are the only organization that tries to raise money to help people survive gen AI related unemployment because it doesn’t, I have great respect for Zitron and what he’s doing, but it really gets under my skin every time he says, no one’s losing their jobs over this. Whereas all around us, we see plenty of evidence of people losing their jobs or they can’t find work, or they used to work 40 hours a week and now they work 60 hours a week, or they have to spend most of their time fixing the errors that the gen AI that their bosses have been forcing onto them have been making. And there’s all kinds of data about that. Now, from that end, it’s an absolute disaster. Also economically, environmentally, the power grid globally cannot support gen ai. MIT research has shown that it is just horrible and evil on so many different levels. But I got to say I was really let down in a couple of ways. First of all, there is a project called the People’s AI Action Plan, which is intended to be a project to introduce counter legislation to Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan Bill. And that effort is spearheaded by an organization called the AI Now Institute and various other orgs. And if you go to peoples ai action.com, you’ll actually see that Stop Gen AI is one of the organizations list on that webpage. But I have spoken to representatives of all those other orgs, including the ones that are related to labor unions, and we are the only org that is trying to raise money for people to survive. And also, I do not believe that proposing counter legislation under a fascist government is an effective strategy. I’m very frustrated and I’m very disappointed. I’m very disappointed by what I perceive to be the academic, professional, managerial class thinking that we can fight this by working within the system and not considering the real economic survival, buying food, keeping a roof over your head, problems that people are dealing with right now. So that has really frustrated me, and I’ll also talk about oped if you’d like to bring that up later. But I would love to give my comrade Emmy a chance to introduce herself because I have tremendous respect for her. She’s really cool. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and just to hop in real quick by way of tossing it to you, Emmy King, can I just follow up and ask, in your own work that you were doing to make a living, did you find that the jobs you were normally contracted to do were now being done by ai? Kim Crawley: No, I found that the companies I was working for weren’t asking me to do work anymore because a lot of my work has still been freelance work. So when you get a pitch to do a research project, then you’ve got a paying gig, and if you don’t, then you don’t. So I guess that also reflects the precarious nature of how even highly educated millennials have to deal with that white baby boomers 20, 30 years ago. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and Emmy, please do hop in here and yeah, tell us more about yourself, your experience with AI and how you got involved with Stop Gen ai. Sure. So I got involved after knowing Kim for a while. We are very much on the same political band as in Anarchy, mutual aid. I come from the more technical side. I have worked in verticals like FinTech and things like journalistic entities. And my most recent on the books gig was being the entire insider threat department for Activision Blizzard King, the AAA game company that makes Call of Duty and Overwatch and King makes Candy Crush, which I don’t think a lot of people know. But given that space and my organization, my union organization experience within that space, I have seen so many of my former coworkers lose their jobs, especially once Microsoft has bought them out. Now that they’re under the Xbox umbrella, the most recent multi-thousand person layoff, which they claimed was not because of ai, the president of Xbox then went on record saying if they have any sort of negative feelings about their loss of job, they should talk to chat GPT about it. So that is pretty expected from a company like Microsoft and Activision especially. Yeah, so I very much am a mutual aid type of person, is very involved with the Occupy movements here in Denver specifically, which I do think a lot of good things came out of it, such as the Rolling Jubilee, which bought up people’s debt for pennies on the dollar and completely forgave it. And so my stance is that they’re not going to help us. We can’t vote our way out of this. Like Kim said, this is the fascist regime. Once fascism becomes visible to the mainstream, it’s already here. There’s no voting to get out of it. We need mutual aid action if we’re going to survive because when the bubble does burst and it will, the hill is even I believe yesterday, put out an article about the global consequences that will happen to the economy when this bubble burst. We are going to need each other to survive whether or not you believe in this thing called ai, which is just a big model of math. Marc Steiner: So a couple of things here. I was thinking as I was looking all yourself and listening to you now, first you bring back images of kin and mutual aid was the first thing that popped in my head. I’m curious where you think the movement goes around ai. I mean, look at the early 19th century and the Luddites going against the mills because they were losing their jobs and the automation’s taking place every industry in America from steel to auto, and now this is kind of the next generation of replacing workers and industry moving in a certain direction. So I mean, AI is not going anywhere. So what’s the response? What is the movement, how you build the movement to confront it and the people who control it? Kim Crawley: Well, I mean, you could keep saying that. I consider the whole gen AI is inevitable, so you got to prepare for it. I consider that to be propaganda. That’s the propaganda that my former school, the Open Institute of Technology oppe tries to use when MIT and various other scientific sources say that the global power grid cannot support all the data centers that Sam Altman and Satya Nadal and these other evil people in Silicon Valley want. The planet can’t support it. So is it inevitable if we can’t even physically pragmatically or in any way support this massive torment nexus that they want so badly, it’s not right. I would believe a few years ago people would’ve said, oh, Web3 is inevitable. Web3 is inevitable, NFTs are inevitable. Paying for bubble gum at your local convenience store with Bitcoin is inevitable. So there’s that. So what do I think is going to happen? I think the world is in a disaster right now. I think we’re facing immense societal collapse, And I think probably my friend David Ard, who does a show in a blog called Pivot to AI, predicts that the AI bubble will burst in 2027, and he’s a somewhat credible source because he’s done a lot of research and he’s written a lot of books and stuff about these various tech feds that have come and gone. So 2027, and it’s just because a bunch of these Silicon Valley billionaire power players keep tossing around the same several billion dollars between them, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, core Weave, they’re all tossing the same several billion dollars between them. It’s very incestuous, right? It’s completely, one thing that Trin is really good about is pointing out how completely financially unsustainable this all is. So yeah, even from a capitalist perspective, this is all going to collapse. Capitalism is collapsing right now. The capitalists that the most evil oligarchs around right now, like Sam Altman for instance, or Mark Zuckerberg, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to squeeze the very last that they can get out of all of us collectively as a society before everything implodes. Also, one of exit trends, observations that is very good is that we’ve observed the last big consumer technological revolution that had any sort of widespread permanent popularity and change in how we do things is when smartphones and social media became popular in the late two thousands, 2010s after that, there was no new big growth industry for consumers as far as Silicon Valley is concerned. And so they kept trying to push lots of different things. NFTs, cryptocurrency, Web3 were doing everything on the blockchain. What about the metaverse? They were all talking about the metaverse. Kim Crawley: Three. And it’s because capitalism needs constant growth on a planet with finite resources, which is impossible. And so it’s not good enough that, oh, we’ve got billion dollars coming in, must be more and more growth. It’s like an ever hunger cancer. So basically the most evil billionaires in Silicon Valley want to consume everything before it’s too late and then kick the tires and leave us all to drown. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, let’s hover on that dismal powerful point for a second. Let’s take a step back and give our audience more of a bird’s eye view of this AI bubble that we’re in now from a worker’s eye view. Because I think to Mark’s question, one of the reasons this AI boom feels inevitable is because the powers that be in Washington and Silicon Valley are ramming it down all of our throats, whether it’s Verizon and T-Mobile saying, Hey, come give us your old phones and we’ll give you a new one with AI in it. Or every app updating saying you have to agree to now AI going through your data. It feels like it’s just being injected into everything without our consent on top of the Trump administration going warp speed on building these massive data centers all over the country, Incorporating it into the military, Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, tied in with the military, building them on federal land like expediting the permitting process. It just feels like this massive wave that again, is being forced upon us without our consent and it’s impacting working people in more ways than one. We’ve already touched on the Luddite question of AI replacing the labor of human beings who perform that labor to survive. So that’s one area. But there are other areas, these data centers, as we’ve covered here on the Real News, they’re environmental monstrosities and we’ve talked to working class residents living across the street from these things and it’s driving them out, not just the water and electricity it consumes, but the pollution, the noise pollution, the air and water pollution. And then you add onto that the surveillance aspect. It’s such a big tangled knot, which is why we’re doing an ongoing series. We can’t possibly unpack all that in one episode. So if we’re looking at this big tangled monstrosity through the lens of workers and our ability to make a living, could you just tease that out a bit more for the lay listener about how big this problem is and the ways it is already impacting working people’s ability to make a living? So with the Leadite thing, you were replacing people in very dangerous circumstances, industrial things and creating new jobs upon that because those machines were going to break and inevitably they need to be maintained. Whereas the goal of AI is that it cuts humans out of the equation entirely. There is no backup, there is no rolling over to a new set of skills for the workers that have been displaced because the whole point is to displace them with something that can continuously maintain itself or create new things without the human element being involved at all. And that’s highly impacting. Again, video game sector is a huge one. Academics as well as just lowering the cognitive resilience of the generations that came after me as a millennial, everybody knows that Google has caused a decline in human ability to maintain information because we can just go look it up on the internet. I admit myself when I work on Linux systems, I don’t remember every single flag for every single command I got Google. So this AI is creating not only a displacement of humans with no backup, no skill backup that humans can then roll over onto, but also creating a cognitive decline in the youth that leads to easy well propagandized masses that believe that giving up their rights, this is technically not non-consensual. We all have to click that button that says yes, and nobody reads that because if you don’t click that button, you’re excluded, which is a way capitalism surveillance traps you into these things and creates the environment in which or well described in 1984. Maximillian Alvarez: And again, we’re going to keep digging into this because there are so many different sectors of the economy that this is impacting, some of which that come to mind that we’ve already covered on this show. And here at The Real News is like everyone remembers the big Hollywood strike that we recently had, right? Where for the first time in decades, the writers and the actors unions were on strike at the same time. One of the key strike issues was the studio’s insistence on bringing AI into the creative process. And that applied in both realms, like basically training AI on human written scripts to produce non-human written scripts. And at best, maybe having one writer check the work of the ai, but also the Screen Actors Guild was really opposed to this because you had proposals on the table of studios being able to use the likenesses of dead actors to recreate their image in new productions or background actors being replaced with AI generated actors and things like that. So I mean, that’s just one example of many that our guests have also brought up, whether it’s journalists who are, newsrooms are saying they’re going to replace journalists with ai, higher education institutions saying they’re going to replace educators with ai. I mean, we’re only really scratching the surface here. But to Emmy’s point, I think what does make this a markedly different moment in human evolution is that unlike eras of the past where jobs were replaced by technological advancements, the whole goal here is to effectively replace as many human beings as possible with no follow up economic opportunities for those replaced workers. It’s just to, again, it’s like I think that’s why the corporate class and the oligarchs and the bosses are so excited about ramming this down our throats because to them it presents the drunk illusion of a world without workers, but still prophets. Kim Crawley: And I think it’s important to know that these technologies are not intelligent. They’re not replacing us because they’re as good as us at what we do or better at what we do than what we do. It’s completely incompetent, right? Like yes, definitely people are being violated, famous people, historical figures from the past also by things like Sora, video generation Like that. But all that gen AI can do is repeat patterns in data that already exist. So one example I like to give people is strange things happen on Reddit. Strange cultural things happen on Reddit, and sometimes subreddits have a community and a culture and they have in jokes. Imagine a subreddit had an in joke where they say Tokyo is the capital of England. Everyone knows that Tokyo is not the capital of England, but it’s an in joke within the subreddit. There’ve been weirder in jokes and that would believe me, but because they write about it so often in that subreddit, and then GPT keeps scraping that subreddit over and over again. Someone’s grandma goes to chat GPT and types, what’s the capital of England? And it will say Tokyo, because that subreddit kept saying it over and over again. So it’s not intelligence, it’s just repeating these patterns that in the words that people use online and images and video and whatnot, it’s so horrifying that that’s what they want to replace us all with. And also it’s another example of how capitalism is built has all kinds of contradictions because they don’t want any of us to be paid for our labor, but who’s going to buy products and services, goods and services? Because if you give a billionaire a million dollars, they’re just going to sit on it. If you give a poor person $200, they’re going to go and buy food with that money. Money that you give the rest of us goes back into the economy. Money that you give to the wealthiest people on earth is just hoarded and taken out of the economy. Marc Steiner: So I’m really interested in hearing what everybody thinks about how you organize about this around this and how you explain it. Because almost for most people hearing this, it’s science fiction. And I think most people don’t even think about Why would you think about this? You wouldn’t think about it. It’s not something that you talk about around the dinner table. It’s this hidden slow movement creeping power over society. So the question is for me, how do you organize around this and be, how do you make people aware that it’s going on and take it seriously to understand how it confronts them even more importantly for people like me and others, how it affects our children, how it affects the next generation. So I’m curious about how when you talk about this, what are the conversations about how you confront it, how you publicize it, how you organize? So online obviously is going to be a huge way that we are going to connect with other people who have been affected by AI already within the SAG AF WGA. I was still working at Activision, A BK at that time. And Tag AFTRA also includes voice actors and people who work within the entertainment industry behind the scenes that aren’t on screen but their voices. There was no guarantee, especially from activism, BL King, that these voice actors weren’t going to be replaced with beat fake. And as we’re starting to see, especially in mainstream media like South Park, they’re doing it satirically as well as trolling in the best way, the best kind trolling makes you think because they have that power to do so. And I believe they’re doing propaganda and went the right way in the right direction trying to get people to see how absolutely horrible the whole world is going to end up. Because anything can be true now because seeing is believing, right? So as people become more aware of these things with news articles coming out all the time, not necessarily if you have trained your algorithm, which is a very basic form of ai, it is just a statistical model such as AI just puts out news that you want to see into your feed. People who don’t realize or aren’t quite negative on AI aren’t going to see the articles coming out knowing that talking to AI as if it were a substance abuse counselor and these things encouraging people who are using it that way to do drugs because that’s what they’ve been trained on and what they have gotten from the person that they are communicating with. They are more of a parent and tell people what they want to hear, which leads to things like psychosis and medical ethical violations. And that one company who made, I believe there’s their name is Andrew, that just happens. They had absolutely no cybersecurity. They’re basically a cyber defense contractor in that they built a drone fleet run by AI where it was open publicly, something anybody could access it. And with just a couple of words, AI takes over and releases militarized drones to wherever. And so as these things become more mainstream and impossible to ignore, I believe that the strength behind the movement against AI will increase. But we have to get the momentum moving by just having conversations, coming onto podcasts like this, talking to our grandmas and our grandpas and telling them how to protect themselves and having conversations with your kids about this is wrong, make sure they don’t use it in their paper writing. Parents will have to take that extra interest and learn about the negative effects of AI themselves so that they can pass it on to their kids. It’s going to be all, all of us have to be behind it and to get there, we need momentum. And it will soon become apparent hopefully to the mainstream that this is not going to go away necessarily, but it is going to impact both the domestic and the global economies in ways that have probably never been seen before due to, as Kim was saying earlier, the round robin of the money going in circles and for lack of a better word, being a giant capitalistic circle jerk. Kim Crawley: Some things that are really important for us to know, first of all is it’s not inevitable. And I know most people who have Windows 10, windows 11 computers have had a copilot shoved down their throats for the past while if you use Google Services, LinkedIn, various other social media platforms and whatnot, but you can get Gen AI out of your life. So if you go to our websites dot gen ai.com, we have a webpage on how to avoid gen AI and includes things like replacing Windows with Linux, which is something everyone should be doing. And it’s not very, people Marc Steiner: Think. Talk a bit about that. Why? Because Kim Crawley: Microsoft is putting Microsoft copilot gen AI spyware onto everyone. You can’t remove it, you can’t delete it, Kim Crawley: You can’t remove it, you can’t delete it, you can’t remove it from the registry. The only way to get rid of it is to get rid of Windows And Linux is free. And there’s companies that exist on Linux as a primary computer environment. They have very easy to use what’s called the distribution of Linux called Ubuntu, that is basically Linux on beginner mode. It looks like pretty much Windows and Mac os very easy to use, very intuitive, and there is no software on it that you don’t want to be on it. There’s nothing you can’t remove. And people think it’s this hard techno evangelist thing or nerd thing, but we’re way past that. Businesses are using it in their own environments as a primary desktop. I think people can use it at home as a primary operating system. That is Kim Crawley: All of my steam Windows games run in Linux beautifully. So everything that creative people do with Adobe software stop using Adobe software. There are both free and commercial alternatives to Adobe software that is way better. One thing I really want to make sure that I mentioned before this show is over is do not enroll in the Open Institute of Technology. I left Open because they were paying me like crap. And they are trying to replace everyone with gen ai and they have ridiculous courses like introduction to Prompt engineering. And so please everyone stay far away from the Open Institute of Technology, they are a scam on their faculty. I’ve seen it from the inside. Do not enroll in the open institute technology. They’re horrible and awful people. And I also want to mention that we do really need people to support our mutual aid. We also have an event coming up in November called Stop Gen ai. It’s a Twitch event, I think it’s called Twitch Fest one. So you can find out about that on our website and we want Twitch streamers to join us. If you’re a Twitch streamer, you can stream your usual content during our event and as long as you mention our fundraiser you’re in, Maximillian Alvarez: I want to hop in here and I know we only have y’all for a few more minutes and then we got to let you go. But I want to sort of end on what else can we do? And y’all laid out some great practical advice for individuals to get, as you said, get generative AI out of their lives as much as possible. But it’s going to take a broader movement with multiple stakeholders to counteract the top down force that is ramming this into our lives and our future. These data centers are going up around the country. We can’t fight that on our own with Linux, but I want to sort of roll that into how stop gen AI is growing and how the fight against this vision of the future that the AI tech overlords and their allies and the government are pushing down our throats. How we build an alternative to that in a way that brings working people together across the divides. Because we all have a stake in this. I mean just here in Baltimore County this weekend, there was a horrific story that was getting a lot of play of a student being detained in handcuffed because an AI camera system mistook a Doritos bag for a gun, right? Right. This is serious stuff. And then there was a school with the same system that had a school shooting and the AI did not detect the gun and the same system. Maximillian Alvarez: So this is what I’m talking about, is from the side of labor where this is explicitly being not even pitched to us. We’re being explicitly told AI is going to replace a lot of you. There’s nothing you can do about it. And then working people are also the consumers of in this consumer economy. So it’s like the quality of your products is going to continue to go down like it has for decades now, and so you’re going to be screwed on both ends. But on top of that, we have your kids are possibly going to school and they’re going to be surveilled by faulty AI like we’re talking about here. Or you could be living in your dream home in rural Pennsylvania, and then the next month you find that a big giant data center is moving in and you have no say over it. So there is opportunity here for a broad working class coalition, but there needs to be both a shared sense of the stakes that we have in this fight and also a vision for a future that is not the one that they are driving us towards. Because I think we already pointed this out, but maybe just to bring the point out to the forefront when we say the bubble’s going to burst and this is unsustainable to the planet, cannot sustain the infrastructure and energy that these data centers alone are going to require. And as we’ve also talked about, it’s like, well, what is the end game when working? People cannot pay for the goods and services that keep our economy running. We’ve been replaced by AI and yada, yada yada. So what actually is the end game? I think it needs to be said the end game is the elimination of a lot of working people writ large. This seems to be the sort of end times fascist kind of implication for a lot of these policies. If we’re saying how is the economy going to support all these people in the future with ai, the implicit answer is you get rid of a fair number of the people. That seems to be the logical conclusion of what they’re saying. So to Mark’s point, how do we fight this and what is the alternative vision that this movement is presenting to working people who all have different stakes in this fight? So that’s the big, I guess, juicy question. We don’t have to answer at all here now, but I wanted to toss it back to y’all to sort of offer any final thoughts you had on that to leave our listeners with. I’m going to go first just because my computer is on low battery. I think that, oh Kim Crawley: Wow. Okay. So it’s me then. So I’m sorry, Emmy, thanks for being here, Emmy. I really appreciate it. She’s a very valued comrade of mine and she has a lot of very valuable experience because she was the catalyst for unionization at Division Blizzard. So that’s really cool. It frustrates me to no end that the People’s AI Action Plan project is filled with organizations that are connected to unions, and yet our org is the only one that’s trying to raise money for people to survive. It just baffles me to no end. It also baffles me to know, I think you keep talking about what people can do. People need to shift their mindset. People need to stop looking to politicians and looking to voting and electoral and the system and the courts as a way to fight any of this. We need to organize outside of the system. We need to assume that the United States is not a democracy because it isn’t. And assume that your votes don’t matter because they don’t. So you need to stop wasting your time proposing counter legislation participants, the People’s AI action plan and start actually doing things that immediately benefit people like raising mutual aid funds. For instance, people don’t be scared of using Linux. Use Linux. Stop using Google Search. Stop using Google Search. I be of you. Our group member Dolly is not only fighting data centers in the us she also did a huge research report on search engines that you can find on our homepage, and I really recommend that you read that. But yeah, organize with your neighbors. Refuse to use Gen AI when you have the choice that means no, Google search, use DuckDuckGo with duck AI turned off, use Linux, replace Android on your phone with an Android fork if you can. We are going to explain how to do all that on our website. Emmy. Sorry about that. I switched to my phone. Can y’all hear me? Maximillian Alvarez: We got you. Excellent. So yeah, I have to assume that my closing statement is going to be pretty similar to Kim’s, but I’m really going to push for that. Boots on the ground movement has to happen using your to prevent data centers from being built. I live in a fairly rural community and there was going to be a lithium ion factory built very close to some of our most beloved farms and some of our oldest farms. And the community came together via things like Nextdoor social media app and going to public town halls and things like that and learning about these plans because people have been talking about them and literally going to those sites and preventing any surveying, anything from happening eventually. That’s where I think these things will have to end up before we are able to fully reduce the power that these overlords have on us. Because a show of force is the only thing that’s going to stop this. And when people get hungry enough, they will go into the street and stop what is stopping them from obtaining the things that they need to be alive. Marc Steiner: So I know we’re out of time here, but I just wanted to say that quickly. I really appreciate the two of you and the work you’re doing and that you joined us here today. And what this ends up for me is saying we have to do deeper dives into this and really expose it because the only way people are going to rally around it is if it’s exposed and people can understand it and understand what’s what we’re facing, which I think most people do not. I mean, until we did this, until we started this series, I had no idea about the depth of this in our society. And I think that’s something that people have to be able to understand. So this conversations like this are really important and we’ve just scratched the surface. And I want to say I really appreciate the strength and the power the two of you have for standing up to it and helping the public understand what we face. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. Second, everything that Mark said, and I think this is first conversation among many because we got so much to continue to dig into. But I guess before I hop in with my outro, did y’all want to do any final plugs on where people can go to learn more and what’s coming up? Kim Crawley: Yeah, so stop gen ai.com and we have a fundraiser coming up on Twitch in a couple of weeks a week. So yeah, so please visit stop gen ai.com/twitch to find out about that and to inquire about participating. If you’re a Twitch streamer, we have lots of different things we want people to join our org, so visit gen ai.com to learn about that. Support our mutual aid. We have merch, we have t-shirts, we have Webmail accounts, Annie. Yeah, pretty much. Yep. Tell your mom, your grandmom, your sister, your brothers, their kids, your cousins. Just get the word out that this is something we all have to get involved on if we’re going to survive it. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guest, Kim Crawley and Emmy from Stop Gen ai and I want to thank my brilliant colleague Mark Steiner for co-hosting this crossover episode with me. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for new episodes of Working People and the Mark Steiner Show. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the other great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. These are dark times and we need your help to keep doing this vital work. And thank you to everyone who is already supporting us. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Marc Steiner: And I’m Marc Steiner. Thanks for joining Maximillian Alvarez: Us. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.