Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
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Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, The Stand, Mariann Hardey, 2026.
“That's the way the world is, that's the way it is... The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.” The world hasn’t ended with a bang, nor with a superflu that wipes out 99% of the population. But the lines are being drawn all the same. Can you feel it? Here in York, the wind is catching over the icy fields, carrying a bite that feels like a warning. At the right time of day, the fence posts cast spindly shadows, creating new runs for the squirrels while disrupting the unlimited flow of views over the horizon. It feels like a world holding its breath. In Stephen King’s masterpiece The Stand, humanity is divided in the aftermath of the apocalypse. You are either drawn to the light of Mother Abagail in the cornfields of Nebraska, a place of hard work, simple living, and moral purity, or you are drawn to the neon chaos of Las Vegas, the domain of Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, where technology and vice run rampant. I was reminded of this stark, binary division when I read a LinkedIn post this week. It was a declaration of purity. A manifesto stating that, with few exceptions, the essence of the author’s activity is human-only. It was a line drawn firmly in the sand: On this side, we have the Soul. On that side, you have the Machine. But there was something else in that declaration, something sharper than mere preference. There was shame. A palpable, heavy shame directed at anyone who dared to touch the forbidden tools. The author didn’t just declaim their own purity; they detailed an active, almost forensic effort to root out those using AI. It was a purity test of the highest order. The message here is very clear: even if you are transparent, even if you offer a notice to give context to your use of AI (I use Grammarly to navigate my dyslexia and organise ideas from my autistic brain), your work is rendered meaningless. It is tainted. They view the machine as a disqualifier. Use it as a prosthetic, and your effort counts for nothing. That is a Stand, certainly. But it is a stand taken on the solid ground of privilege. The Luxury of the Pure Mind When you draw that line in the sand and refuse the tools, you are telling on yourself. You are revealing that you have the luxury of a brain that works in a straight line. It is a flex. You are publicly announcing that your executive function behaves itself. Further, you are claiming the luxury of thoughts that march in a straight line, rather than everything all at once (hello, my thousand tabs open in my Notes app), exploding like fireworks. It means your working memory actually works and holds water. It is not a leaky bucket; you can hold a complex argument in your head without the pieces drifting away. It means you have the time, which today is the most expensive and finite of commodities, to do everything the hard way because you value the process over the result. For the neurotypical scholar, the writer with a steady flow of dopamine, or the professional with a team of human assistants to handle the drudgery, this Analogue Stand is a badge of honour. It is a choice to remain organic, nay, to prove their human-thinking-ness. It is the Boulder Free Zone: a place of high ideals, committee meetings, and the luxury of debating ethics while the power stays on. But for the neurodivergent, the dyslexic, the chronically overwhelmed, or the non-native speaker, AI is not a deal with the Dark Man. It is a prosthetic. The Impossible Stand Do not mistake my reliance for ignorance. I see the smoke on the horizon. I want to stand with you in the cornfield. I yearn to make a proper, righteous stand against the enshittification of our digital commons. I want to rage against the data centers that are draining our reservoirs and boiling our planet just to fuel a chatbot's hallucinations. I want to reject the computational bias baked into the very bedrock of these models, which automates discrimination at scale. I want to reject it all, because that is the right thing to do. But I can’t. That particular brand of moral purity prices me out of the market. To make that stand, to boycott the machine entirely, I would have to sacrifice my ability to participate in the intellectual world and hold down a job to support my daughter and me. My principles are intact, but my executive function very much is not. And when the choice is between contributing to the world with dirty tools or staying silent in a pure room, I have to choose the tools. I have to choose the messy, compromised, environmentally expensive ramp, because it is the only way I can get into the building. I am not a cheerleader for the apocalypse. I am just someone who needs to get to work and support my daughter and me to live, and the only bus running is headed to Vegas. The Ruthless Divergence In The Stand, the separation of the survivors is brutal. You either have the shine to hear Mother Abagail, or you don't. In our current academic and professional landscape, a similar divergence is taking place. On one side, we have the Pure Scholars. These are individuals who can navigate the labyrinth of research, citation, and synthesis with their unaided minds. They get to look down from their high towers, enforcing a system that has always demanded we just cope. Figure it out, the system says. If you can't keep up, you don't belong. It is a ruthless lack of support masked as intellectual rigour. On the other side are those of us in the Vegas of necessity. We are the ones who use the tools not to destroy art, but to enable thought. We have to (ok, I know controversial, stay with me) use LLMs to unscramble the noise in our heads. We do this when we find the starting sentence when the page is terrifyingly blank, and when we check the tone of an email, so we don't accidentally offend. I see this strategy as a a safety mechanism for those of us who find neurotypical social cues exhausting to navigate manually. To the King’s characterisation of the Pure Mind, our reliance looks like weakness. It looks like cheating. But they are judging us from a place of cognitive wealth. They do not see that for many, the choice isn't between Human Art and Machine Slop; it is between producing work with support or producing nothing at all. To us (me, if you will), it is an effective way to conserve our limited cognitive energy for the actual work of thinking, rather than burning it all on the mechanics of starting. We use the machine to clear the static so the signal can get through. This is my hard line. I will not accept a definition of integrity that relies on ableism. If using a machine allows a brilliant but scattered mind to contribute to the conversation, then the machine is not the villain. The villain is the system designed to exclude and silence individuals. M-O-O-N, That Spells Shame In The Stand, the character Tom Cullen is a gentle soul with a cognitive disability. He repeats things. He spells everything "M-O-O-N." In the old world, he was cast aside, viewed as lesser because his mind did not travel in straight lines. In our current discourse, we are in danger of doing the same to those who rely on AI. The shaming is rampant. If you use ChatGPT to structure an email because your anxiety has paralysed you, you are labelled as lazy. If you use an LLM to summarise a dense text because your dyslexia makes the words swim, you are accused of cheating. The purity argument implies that if you cannot produce the work with your raw, unassisted brain, the work has no value. It suggests that the struggle is the point. But as I argued in my previous post, A Vindication of the Locked Gate, it is a really idea to look closely at who is holding the keys. We often talk about the democratisation of AI, the idea that these freemium models are opening the doors of knowledge. For the neurodivergent user, however, the free tier of an LLM is not a casual toy; it is often the sole point of entry into a building that was designed without them in mind. When we shame the use of these tools, we are not defending intellectual integrity; we are reinforcing the locked gate. We are telling those standing on the outside, and clutching the only key they can they have access to, that they are wrong for even trying to enter the garden. Using AI in this context isn't a shortcut; it is a necessary way to navigate the Access Paradox. It is a choice to use the imperfect, hallucinating tools of the modern Vegas to survive in a system that demands a level of cognitive purity (see how King’s writing is so good!) that was never accessible to everyone in the first place. The Vegas of Accessibility We often treat the availability of AI as a shorthand for democratisation. But this openness comes with a heavy social tax. If we allow the Mother Abagails of LinkedIn to define the moral high ground, we push everyone else into the shadows. We create a world where using a tool to level the playing field is seen as a moral failing. No, thank you. I am not arguing for the Enshittification of the internet with generative slop. I am not defending the theft of artists' work. But I am defending the right of the user, we are the tired, the wired, the different, to use a ramp when the stairs are too steep. To stand in the cornfield and shout that you don't need the machine is fine. But do not look down on those who are taking the bus to Vegas simply because their legs won't carry them the distance. The Walkin' Dude is Judgment In King’s novel, the true evil isn't the technology (though there are nukes aplenty); it is the desire to control and dominate others. (Sound like any Silicon Valley figureheads we know?) The Hard Line in the sand is dangerous because it lacks nuance. It divides us into the Clean and the Unclean. I am Technologically Skwair. I am sceptical of the hype. I know the machine cannot love you. But I also know that for many of us, the machine is the only thing keeping the lights on in a brain that is constantly trying to short-circuit. So, draw your line if you must. Stand your ground. But look around you before you judge who is standing on the other side. They might not be soulless automatons. They might just be people trying to survive the plague of modern demands with the only immunity they could find. The world has moved on. We can either move with it, with compassion and connection, or we can stand in the empty field, proud of our purity, while the wind blows through the dead corn. Links and References
The Literary Anchor
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