# On Alliances > Source: > Published: 2026-02-20 21:37:39+00:00 This morning (it is evening now in freezing Berlin) I wrote an article about a blog post Cory Doctorow had released the day before. In his post Cory made an argument about LLM usage that I criticized: I think his view on technology being neutral and it being possible to “liberate” any technology by making it “free and open” is a bit wonky. You can read his stance and my arguments in the respective articles. Cory Doctorow is not like you or me. He is famous – at least on the Internet and in the tech spaces around it. And for a good reason: He is a prolific writer who probably writes more in a year than I will in my lifetime. He has clear politics and usually stands by them. And – and that doesn’t happen too often with techy people – he is charming, eloquent and thinks quickly on his feet. I do admire all those qualities immensely, especially because many of them stem not just from luck but from doing the work. He’s well known because he has written consistently for decades now. This fact has probably lead to a lot of harsh criticism of Cory around my – and sometimes based on my – article. People seem to feel betrayed and with a few people commenting on Mastodon I had to reply to keep things on topic and not making things personal. Because while I do disagree with Cory in the points I outlined in my article and on other things I did not intend to write a hit piece (and I hope it didn’t come off as one). I was trying to make a specific argument about another argument a person with a huge platform has made that I found a bit problematic. That is all. A lot of the critiques of Cory’s argument (including mine) referenced his characterization of people refusing to use LLMs on ethical grounds as “purity culture“. And while I do think that the way he deployed that term and narrative in his article is mostly a defensive move to delegitimize a sort of value based argument he finds uncomfortable the responses to my article have made one thing quite clear: Cory does have a point. I do not like the very conservative/right wing coded term “purity culture”. But in the responses I did see a lot of “Cory did this thing that I do not support so he’s out”. I read claims of him being bought by “big AI” companies or similar things attacking his character and intentions which is not just unfounded and unfair but also a massive overreaction to what he wrote or argued for. There is a tendency to project too much on people especially by folks on the Internet. The Internet and the way Cory makes himself accessible here gets people to feel a deeper connection than they have to some random celebrity or idol. This parasocial relationship leads to even small disappointments leading to a direct declaring people outcasts. The people one was admiring even hours before. We do have a lot of fights in front of us. Fascists weaseling their way into power. Big tech aggregating stronger and stronger monopolies and creating increasing levels of dependencies. An economy grounding itself just on the speculation that stochastic pattern generation machines will somehow generate more money next year than even god has with a very probable recession/crash just behind the horizon when reality hits. And for basically all of these fights I am 100% sure that Cory will be on the right side of the fight. Will do all in his power to defend democracy, to defend for example our ability to speak our minds and to tell fascists to fuck off into the sun (probably in smarter words that I can). This article is not really about Cory Doctorow. Or me. It is about us having to realize that we will not be able to do this on our own. And if we demand perfect, flawless ideological congruence we will lose. The way that digital communication forms around communities and chosen families has a tendency to quickly define in- and outgroups. Which is healthy and often necessary – especially for groups of people who are being discriminated against. There is value in having a strong shared moral core. But that’s not where we can stop. We also need to be able to form alliances. And not all of them are perfect. Sometimes another group wants a similar thing you want but for a completely different reason. Or they might just want parts of what you want. And we need to be open enough to realize that and work together at least till we get that one thing. This does not mean that a certain degree of shared values are not necessary: That is actually a big problem these days that sometimes when you name existing problems in the world the worst people try to attach themselves to it. Say you argue that rents are too high and suddenly the fascists are agreeing. There can never be an alliance with those. But when it comes to the big and heterogenous space of “the Internet movement” or “digital people” there are a bunch of things that could get big tent support which might help getting some actual change. Just as there are things that can hardly get 3 groups to agree. So in that aspect Cory is absolutely in point. There is a tendency to build people up to these larger than life people and dropping them as soon as they say something dumb. There also is a tendency to keep looking for differences when there are so many similarities. This is a thing we are doing to ourselves while Big Tech and the Billionaires – while potentially hating each other – are always forming strategic alliances to keep us down. We sometimes demand too much from one another. Demand perfection and (quoting Cory) purity. That is not how people are. Any one of you who supported my article pointing out what I consider flaws in Cory’s argument will also find something you and me disagree on. Find something dumb I said. It’s really easy to do actually. I’ve written into the Internet for a long time and I am not a very smart person. There’s a lot of dumb shit. Hell, if I was that strict I wouldn’t even form an alliance with myself. Alliances are important. You will never find a perfect one. Alliances are temporary, utilitarian and don’t need to be based on deep friendship. They need some trust and a clarity of one’s own goals as well as an understanding of the goals of the other partners. Maybe that’s a good thing to focus on this year. I myself can learn a thing or a thousand in that regard. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.