AI Companies as Print Capitalists
The Anderson framework applied to the AI moment produces a specific and uncomfortable identification: the major AI labs occupy the structural position of the sixteenth-century vernacular printers. They are profit-seeking enterprises whose commercial decisions — which languages to support, which use cases to optimize, which pricing tiers to offer — have community-formation effects that exceed and frequently contradict their business objectives. They are not primarily in the business of producing an imagined builder community; they are in the business of selling inference. But the community is being produced anyway, as a byproduct, and the governance of that community is being decided by commercial decisions taken for other reasons.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The sixteenth-century vernacular printer did not set out to invent the French nation. He set out to sell more books. The community-forming consequences of his activity were invisible to him at the moment of decision and only legible in retrospect, once