Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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A worn out keyboard, cropped over the bottom left modifier keys. Posed in the image is a bearded prophet in Bronze Age robes, arms uplifted in worship.

But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (permalink)

Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done.

That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."

Not bosses, though. Bosses love AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively harassing the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/

Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job? I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care how it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?"

It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.

I've heard this from writers, architects…all kinds of professionals. "Did you use AI to help you outline this?" What a stupid thing to ask a writer! That's like asking "Do you use keyboard shortcuts, or do you mouse over the Word ribbon and click on the little scissors icon when you want to cut some text?" The actual, finished document is right in front of you. Is it a good document? Are those good words? Why are you concerning yourself with the writer's pencil-sharpening technique?

There's precedent for this: indeed, it's the very origin of management consulting. The first management consultants were the Taylorists; these were con artists that charged bosses vast sums of money to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing each step of their jobs to the instant in order to produce a mandatory choreography of "the best way" to do the job:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

None of these "scientists" knew anything about how to do the job, and critically, they never asked the workers why they used an "inefficient" technique to accomplish a task. Rather, Taylorists concerned themselves with getting workers to move like precision machines, transforming the factory floor into a stage upon which workers pantomimed "efficiency" for bosses who also didn't know how to do the workers' jobs.

If this produced inferior goods, or caused the workers pain by forcing them to repetitively move in injurious ways, that was a small price to pay. Bosses claimed they were buying improved efficiency, but what they were really after was reassurance: reassurance that the workers whom they relied upon were engaged in nothing more than a set of reducible, mechanical steps. Taylorized workers were required to act out a role in a play in which they were easily replaced, mindless appendages to the boss's skill, discernment and ambition. A Taylorized workplace is a colony organism whose brains are in the C-suite and whose busy workers are nothing more than drones and pismires.

AI is the apotheosis of this fantasy. A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn't have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton.

If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver's seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation's drive-train:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.

(Image: ArwinJ, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/14/changeling-a-fairy-tale-of-contemporary-new-york/

#20yrsago Sony’s rootkit disables CD drives when combined with AOL software https://web.archive.org/web/20071006050933/http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/14/sony-drm-woes-continue

#20yrsago Google’s new lobbyists: lying, astroturfing, push-polling scumbags https://web.archive.org/web/20071010112656/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009776.php

#15yrsago New Jersey e-voting coverup https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/09/13/nj-election-cover/

#15yrsago Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-perfectly-executed-mammoth-ambitious-technothriller/

#10yrsago Class action suit: smart sex toys spy on their owners and transmit their masturbation habits https://web.archive.org/web/20160915002121/http://www.vocativ.com/358530/smart-dildo-company-sued-for-tracking-users-habits/

#10yrsago Leaked: damning Scott Walker dark money docs that judge ordered destroyed https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/sep/14/john-doe-files-scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics

#10yrsago The DoJ is using a boring procedure to secure the right to unleash malware on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160915072648/https://www.wired.com/2016/09/government-will-soon-able-legally-hack-anyone/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden sets out the moral case for a pardon from Obama https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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