Google only lists ten hits for “progwashing”, which makes it pretty damn close to 🏆 YET ANOTHER NEOLOGISM 👑, but I want to push this in a different direction. We’ve come to the point where just about any stance can be critiqued by what amounts to (as the t-shirts say) a unix shell script involving a litany of -isms. This kind of reactive advocacy has become, in essence, the infrastructure for what amounts to a cultural DDOS attack. Sorry, but the idea “AI is problematic” is not in itself problematic; in contrast, the idea that AI isn’t problematic is seriously fucking problematic. The highlighted para in this image never comes out and says that, of course — it just ends by invoking prefab criticisms of ableism and privilege, and tacitly never gets around to (wait for it…) problematizing those claims. If democracy dies in darkness, this is how dialectics die.
Critiques of AI may smuggle in some ableism and privilege, but so do dubious new technologies that consume staggering amounts of energy to flood every zone with bullshit while threatening the livelihoods and legacies of entire sectors of society.