May 26, 2026
Bubble, toil, and office trouble
The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble
People say the web won hearts — AI is being shoved into the office anyway
TLDR: Doctorow argues the internet spread because workers loved using it, while many companies are now pushing AI from the top down. Commenters were split between calling it an expensive fake solution for pointless office work and warning that, even if the hype holds, the real danger is a brutal money burn.
Cory Doctorow’s big argument in his post is brutally simple: the early internet spread because regular people wanted it. Workers snuck web tools into the office because they made life easier, while today’s artificial intelligence boom often feels like the opposite — bosses and software vendors trying to force-feed it into every job whether people asked for it or not. And wow, the commenters absolutely ran with that vibe.
The loudest mood in the thread is somewhere between eye-roll, rage, and gallows humor. One commenter said the internet boom left behind useful stuff like fiber-optic cables, while this boom leaves behind expensive chips with a short shelf life and models that are “outdated” almost immediately — basically, yesterday’s miracle machine is today’s e-waste. Another went full scorched-earth, calling AI a tool for “bullshit work” and arguing the real problem isn’t that people need smarter software, it’s that offices are drowning in pointless tasks. That take got major “say it louder!” energy.
But not everyone was cheering the doom parade. One commenter pushed back with a very spicy reality check: unlike flimsy dot-com companies of the 1990s, chip giant Nvidia is already making mountains of money, so maybe the danger isn’t a dramatic pop but a slow, ugly money drain. Meanwhile, another hot take warned that the better AI gets, the easier it becomes for everyone else to copy it — which turns today’s moat into tomorrow’s puddle. In other words: the comments section didn’t just debate whether AI is a bubble. It debated whether it’s a scam, a cash machine, or just the world’s most expensive office memo generator.
Key Points
- •The article uses Lotus Notes as a historical example from the early web era and describes it as a precursor to modern office productivity suites.
- •It states that Ray Ozzie’s work on Lotus Notes helped lead to his appointment as Microsoft Chief Software Architect, succeeding Bill Gates.
- •The article says enterprise IT departments sought strict control over user activity, while employees increasingly adopted internet-based tools to get work done.
- •Examples in the article of worker-selected tools include Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN Messenger, ICQ, AIM, and anonymous FTP servers.
- •The piece notes that IT managers objected to these workarounds partly because outside tools could be insecure or malicious and because they bypassed firewall and compliance controls.