A while back, Hank Green admitted to using AI, and was honest about how it had hurt his cognition. As a result, he was founded by anti-AI ideologues dogpiling him for having ever used it in the first place, particularly on Bluesky and Reddit, the latter where I saw someone justifying said harassment because it “came from a good place”.

Similarly, I had encountered homophobic remarks for reply-gating my posts about large language models (LLMs) due to the toxicity associated with anti-AI ideologues, especially on Bluesky where it has gotten really bad. Funnily enough, I actually unsubscribed from all general-purpose LLMs as I felt I was using it too much for reassurance, and was not using it as any learning aid at all. However, I got this from my own experience, and not from people shouting at me or calling me a cocksucker for having nuanced opinions. I think Hank was dealing with the same thing.

However, this isn’t really about LLMs, or even generative AI in general. It’s not even about Bluesky, or any social media platform. This is about toxic ideological puritanism in general, and how ideological extremists are enabling obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental illness that is so fucking debilitating and locks you into a toxic cycle of stress. When it came to Hank’s use of AI, I feel like people are considering him “tainted”, which does not gel well with me at all.

What is OCD?

OCD is an anxiety disorder characterised by persistent unwanted thoughts that cause anxiety, disgust, or generally some sort of uncomfortable feeling (the obsession), followed by a repetitive behavioural act intended to suppress the anxiety, thus relieving the sufferer (the compulsion). Compulsions create this illusion of control inside the sufferer because of the relief, however this relief is temporary and when the thought comes back, this behaviour is repeated constantly, meaning it becomes out of control. This behaviour is harmful in the long term as it doesn’t address the underlying cause of the behaviour, and can hurt the sufferer, the people around them, and/or their relationships.

Everyone knows the hand-washing focus of OCD, where someone may have obsessive thoughts about their hands not being 100% clean or free of harmful microbes, leading them to constantly wash their hand and thus leading to issues like dry skin and – ironically – potentially infected wounds. But it’s not just that. Someone can have OCD thoughts over whether they’ve locked the door or not, even if they actually did. The brain is in a loop of shouting “what if it’s not locked, and someone breaks in?”, even though they saw themselves locking the door. In this case, the compulsion would be checking the door repeatedly, including travelling back to the home even if it means negatively affecting the task at hand (e.g. going to work).

Another real world example can be a mother having intrusive thoughts about harming her baby in one way or another. Compulsive actions here can include checking the baby’s breathing, overly sterilising feeding bottles, or letting someone else care for the baby entirely which can harm the relationship.

I heard during a segment of ITV’s This Morning that OCD is “your brain refusing to acknowledge what your eyes can see” and that is a great way to put it. But, how does this relate to ideology?

How ideological extremism breeds OCD

Ideological extremism can breed OCD by way of purity, and alongside it, the fear of uncertainty and social stigma. All in all, ideological extremism relies on anxiety to keep people trapped into their views, much like how cults operate, and the easy way in is by purity.

Purity

The OCD everyone knows, the one focusing on handwashing, is centered around purity in a scientific sense – that is, your hands don’t have harmful microbes on them that could contaminate the things or people you care about when touching them. With ideological extremism, OCD manifests in a psychological and philosophical sense, focusing on moral purity and being a good person instead. “Moral scrupulosity” is a known term in the OCD community. Perfectionism is a related term to this, as well.

OCD loves working in absolutes, and ideological purity is great for it in those already suffering from it while getting its foot in the door in those who don’t – ideological purity equals good person, right? And you don’t want to Not Be Good, right?

Fear of uncertainty

OCD can be characterised as a fear of the unknown. A lot of OCD thoughts tend to start with those two words: “what if?”

Ideological extremists and OCD both love to abuse those two words. What if this action that goes against your beliefs and ideology actually causes harm? In most cases, you probably won’t even know, but it’s knowing what might happen, what could be possible, that can spur on anxiety.

Social stigma

I wasn’t sure on whether to add this section, but I felt like I had to because I feel the harassment I see towards people online might be a compulsion in order to control people.

When you join an ideological community and stay there for a substantial amount of time, making so-called connections in there, unhealthy behaviours get encouraged by the community. Never mind the connections you’d make here that you’d probably miss from leaving any community, what if you get ousted and ex-communicated as a result of leaving this ideological community? (Socio-)Political ideologies rely on this a lot to keep it alive, using the above factors if they need to.

This doubly hurts if you have other mental disorders result in emotional problems. People with ADHD know the term “rejection sensitivity dysphoria” well – while it’s not an official term for, or a factor into, the assessment for ADHD, it’s also common enough that people with ADHD made their own term for it.

Examples

Linux / Anti-Big Tech

Anyone who read my Linux problems post may remember this. A lot of the drive towards desktop Linux has been ideological, as a middle finger to Big Tech, and this results in desktop Linux itself being a great breeding ground for ideologically focused OCD. As a recap, a friend wanted to host an instance of Nextcloud, a self-hosted cloud drive platform, in order to pry his data away from the confines of Big Tech and be private. On the surface that might be fine. To the ideologues, this might be celebrated. For me, however, the reasoning raised alarm bells. Call me paranoid, but I was worried he was doing this due to anxiety, or god forbid – OCD. Thankfully, Nextcloud’s requirement of a domain name stopped him in his tracks, and I was able to calm down the anxiety without reassuring him.

I’ve also come across a post on Reddit of someone who got so deep into the rabbit-hole of flamewars ovr things that don’t matter at the end of the day (such as init systems) that it killed their enjoyment and replaced it with anxiety. What if they were using Linux wrong?

It goes back to purity – or rather, perfectionism. I was like this too, trying to find the perfect Linux distro for me when really, Linux was still not for me given my reliance on MusicBee (and honestly, anything Linux native is crap in my opinion.)

Now, I’m running Windows. It’s not great, but it’s better than dealing with OCD over what distro to use or how it should be used.

Online privacy

I’m going to preface this by saying that privacy is inherently a good thing, online or offline. While I agree with the principles, some people just take it way too fucking far – one such person was another friend of mine.

Before we met, he was on Linux and watching a Linux centric YouTuber that was an extremist on privacy ideology, and he fell for it. This resulted in him configuring his operating system as private as possible, to the point he was actively making it harder to use for zero legitimate reasons. In this case, the privacy is the purity. He realised something went wrong when he was doing his daily browsing through the Tor browser. This guy wasn’t doing anything dodgy or illegal, nor was he in any active danger that warranted its use. He simply fell down the privacy extremism rabbit hole.

He now runs Windows, with a debloater to remove all the crap that Windows 11 throws at him.

Anti-AI in the free & open source software community

Being on Bluesky since 2023, I’ve seen a lot of OCD behaviour particularly around the use of generative AI. A lot of it is considering any software that uses LLMs as tainted. That said, what really takes the cake are lists of “slopware”, that is any free and open-source software where the developers have used LLMs in any capacity or form. It includes such unethical projects like, uh… Godot. And the Linux kernel. Conversely, there are lists of software considered “untainted” and “ethical”, where developers have openly refused to use or accept LLMs.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. Considering something “tainted” is the sort of thing that breeds OCD, if not bolsters it outright. In my opinion, this is exploitative towards people with OCD or anxiety in general. I don’t care if AI companies are being even less ethical – two wrongs do not make a right. I get the anxiety around generative AI in general, and people are right to be scared, but that is still not a justification for bolstering or creating the condiitons where OCD can thrive.

I’ve seen people abandon .NET for Zig because of the constant AI smushing into .NET and the refusal to use AI in Zig. Now, I’m not a fan either, I had to unfollow the official .NET account on Bluesky because it kept posting about AI which I didn’t follow them for. That said, I still didn’t abandon .NET, C# is still a good language (honorable mentions to Visual Basic and F#) and there are good projects being built with .NET to this day. Furthermore, I’m concerned about the behaviour of Zig’s developer towards Rust. If that means I’m tainted, then so be it.

Jaiden Animations and veganism vs. vegetarianism

Jaiden Animations is a storytime animator, and she used to be vegan. She was initially proud that she was saving animals with her decision, but found it to be mentally draining and restrictive, to the point she felt it was hurting her relationships with her friends. As a result, she took the pragmatic approach: she still doesn’t eat meat, but she brought egg and cheese back into her diet which gave her more flexibilty. She ended the video by educating people on what to look out for when buying food, and what they can do to do their part – if they take out even one bit of meat, that’s still progress.

She had anxiety making this video because of how ideologically toxic veganism can be (ngl, there’s parallels there with my experiences using Linux) and, well, I can’t say she was wrong about having that anxiety. I found this posted on a vegan subreddit while finding the video, and still, there were people saying she was abusing animals by going vegetarian. Some popular vegan YouTuber was talking shit about her as well. She’s not pure anymore. To the staunch vegans, she’s a heretic now.

Again with the purity nonsense. She’s still doing her part. Most people eat meat and other animal-based foods that are unethically sourced, and anyone making any dent into that in any way possible is only a good thing.

You’re an ideologically impure hypocrite, deal with it.

Are you on Bluesky, posting about how bad generative AI is and how people should bomb datacenters? Do you post to Eurosky about how bad America is? Even if you’re using something like Wafrn which is anti-AI, or bridging your Mastodon account to Bluesky using Bridgy Fed? Well, congratulations, you’re posting on a platform that uses LLMs to assist with code, to some datacenter somewhere in America. Doubly so if you’re posting that on a device running Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, even desktop Linux. Big Tech companies all have well known instances of bad behaviour (including Apple, who produced the device I am writing this post on right now), but even Linux is tainted, as it allows contributions from LLMs.

You’re already ideologically impure, and you’re basically a hypocrite. Deal with it.

Now, I’m going massively extreme here, but it’s not to instill anger or anything or be like that one “we should improve society somewhat” meme. The point I’m trying to make is, no-one is perfect. You will never be able to reach ideological purity, doing so will be futile. Latching onto that purity will result in you having a mental disorder you never ever wanted.

…but you’re still a good person.

This isn’t to say making decisions based on principles is invalid! Not doing so is impossible, we all have our beliefs and principles. The overarching point of this post is to not let this come at the cost of your wellbeing. You can’t be a good person if you don’t look after yourself.

As I’ve thought about this, I thought of the yin-yang philosophy, where two polar opposites are interconnected, needing a part of each other in order to achieve a balance and therefore true harmony. This maps nicely into pragmatism vs. ideology. Jaiden is a great example, she found going purely vegan hurt her friendships, but she didn’t just go back to eating meat. She allowed herself to eat dairy and eggs, doing her research on how to do it ethically. Is it pure? No. But who the fuck cares? She’s doing her due diligence, and therefore her part, while being able to stay social with her friends.

OCD hates balance, vagueness, and an embrace of uncertainty, but that’s what you need to do to live. You need to do your part to improve society in ways that don’t actively harm you. If you’re ideologically impure even for a bit, so what? You’ll live. If you need to be pragmatic, be pragmatic. Don’t let ideological extremists – or your anxiety – bully you otherwise.

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This is a more serious post of mine, but I felt like it had to be written. A lot of the behaviours I see particularly from anti-AI people on Bluesky and Mastodon feels like a manifestation of OCD, including the dogpiling I hear about. As someone with OCD, it felt like I had to say something even if people don’t like what they need to hear.