Mostly I felt like the vibe was a sort of generic lefty anti-big-tech thing [...] How did it turn into this?
It was always going to be that because protests are a leftist medium: people who know how to protest don't think like us, and vice versa. (That's why this was "[your] first ever protest".)
At the March 2024 PauseAI protest outside OpenAI's offices, the most talented speaker by far was a woman who condemned the violence AI companies were doing to Palestine. Did her speech make sense? Maybe not. But it was spoken with an authentic passion that no one else there could muster or fake. She knew the medium; we didn't.
1"Pause AI! 'Cause we don't wanna die!" Even better.
I have a vague recollection I might've been the one who came up with that, at I think one of the early Pause AI protests in SF with Liron.
Of course, it's simple enough that perhaps it was reinvented.
This has definitely been reinvented multiple times; I've been present for at least one, and possibly two independent discoveries.
1"CEOs, back in the basement! Techbros, back in the basement!" Fuck you, assholes.
This chant precipitated a long debate in the PauseAI UK chat[1] over whether the phrase "Techbro" was productive or counter-productive. I think the anti-saying "techbro" crowd won in the end.
- ^
At the very least, there was a long debate in the chat about using "Techbro" as a slur in the days after the protest.
I don't have much sense of whether the attendees were mostly brought in by PauseAI or by Pull the Plug.
My guess would be around 3:1 Pull the Plug:PauseAI, based on estimations from Luma signups which did not conflict with my observations. My partner's mum (who's been involved with Extinction Rebellion for a while) was there (she's also come to previous PauseAI protests) and said something about the "rent-a-mob crowd" i.e. generic lefties who come to all the generic lefty protests.
After the protest was a people's assembly. I think this bit was fully organized by Pull the Plug
Kind of. I think these were mostly the work of Assemble, which is Roger Hallam's org. Roger Hallam is kind of like a Poundland[1] version of Sani Abacha when it British protest orgs. He's been vaguely involved with Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil, and Palestine Action, as I understand it. His main issue is asking for people's assemblies as a binding part of the legislative system. On the one hand, I think spending years campaigning for a procedural/structural policy is extremely based in general; on the other hand I'm kind of bearish that these would actually fix anything. Either way, having a people's assembly selected from protesters is pretty silly, since it defeats the point of a citizen's assembly as a representative sample of the population. Either Roger realizes that this is dumb and is doing it as a publicity stunt (I would guess this is the case) or he doesn't, and he is dumb. I had to leave before the assemblies, so I don't know if he was actually there; if he's just pulling the strings from behind the scenes; or if he's less involved than I naively expected.
Unfortunately, most of the speeches were frankly dumb.
I somewhat agree. As a complete aside, the thing I remembered most from all the speeches was the guy outside Google who sang the praises of Merlin, the app which identifies birds from their song (and/or pictures, I think; there's certainly an app which does the latter as well). As an avid birder, I find this app unbelievably offensive for reasons which are deeply embedded in my soul: I have a very strong feeling that one is supposed to learn to identify birds from some mixture of random YouTube videos, one's father's old cassettes, and random old men down the bird hides; flattening this experience to an app seems to remove some of the texture of life; it's not even the case that birding is important for some critical secondary purpose (other than perhaps conservation); it feels as if I hoped merely for one tiny, minuscule segment of the human experience to retain its texture and character, to be preserved for me to enjoy as a small reminder of the time Before, and have it stay safe until The End, yet the shoggoths have somehow managed to hunt it down and slip their tendrils into it.
Anyway, let's get back on topic. At times slightly conflicted about the protest, but I'd already priced in feeling conflicted. I think the protest overall exceeded my expectations. I came away from it feeling pretty good about the whole thing. My overall trust in the judgement of Joseph and Matilda has increased as a result of this protest.
- ^
Dollar Tree, for my American readers.
1
On Saturday (Feb 28, 2026) I attended my first ever protest. It was jointly organized by PauseAI, Pull the Plug and a handful of other groups I forget. I have mixed feelings about it.
To be clear about where I stand: I believe that AI labs are worryingly close to developing superintelligence. I won't be shocked if it happens in the next five years, and I'd be surprised if it takes fifty years at current trajectories. I believe that if they get there, everyone will die. I want these labs to stop trying to make LLMs smarter.
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I'm pretty bullish on AI progress. I'm aware that people have a lot of non-existential concerns about it. Some of those concerns are dumb (water use)1, but others are worth taking seriously (deepfakes, job loss). Overall I think it'll be good for the human race.
Again, that's aside from the bit where I expect AI to kill us all, which is an important bit.
The ostensible point of the march was trying to get Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to publicly support a "pause in principle" - to support a global pause on AI development backed by international treaty. I think this would be great! (Demis Hassabis has already said he would, though I think his exact words were "I think so" and I'd rather he be a bit more committed.) I think a global pause treaty would be bad for the economy (and through it, bad for the people who participate in the economy) and I don't like the level of government oversight I think it would require; but on the other hand, global human extinction would be pretty bad.
My point estimate is that about 300 people showed up. (80% CI… 200 to 500?) We started outside OpenAI HQ. My girlfriend and I were given orange-and-black placards (PauseAI colors) with messages we endorsed. ("Pause AI", "if you can't steer, don't race", "just don't build AGI until there's expert consensus it won't cause human extinction".) I think about half the placards were like that, a third were Pull the Plug branded (with "Pull the Plug", or with sad-looking electrical sockets and no text), and the rest were assorted individual ones. ("Fuck AI. Fuck it to death". A pig with the ChatGPT logo for a butthole. I'm pretty sure there were also ones I liked.)
A few of the organizers gave brief talks, then we walked to Meta. Two invited guests gave talks there, and we walked to DeepMind. One more talk, and off to Google proper. Two more talks. And then there was a people's assembly, more on that later.
I kinda liked the walking? It felt kinda good to be walking in a crowd of people where a bunch of them seemed to be on board with not committing suicide as a species.
Unfortunately, most of the speeches were frankly dumb. One speaker spent some time talking about how monopoly power is bad, and companies having a fiscal duty to shareholders is bad; since neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has a monopoly on cutting-edge AI or is publicly traded2, I'm not sure why she thought this was relevant. One speaker complained that new data centers were going to be powered by nuclear reactors, as if we're supposed to think nuclear power is a bad thing. One of the hosts repeatedly mentioned threats to children, women and young girls. This was the morning that Pete Hegseth had declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, but someone said that Anthropic had folded to their demands. The organizers can't be blamed for this one, but someone was handing out anti-designer-babies leaflets. (I am pro-designer-babies.)
Mostly I felt like the vibe was a sort of generic lefty anti-big-tech thing, which is not something I want to lend weight to. There were a few references to human extinction, and I liked the speech given by Maxine Fournes (global head of PauseAI), but I felt like the sensible stuff got overshadowed by the dumb.3
How did it turn into this? I don't have much sense of whether the attendees were mostly brought in by PauseAI or by Pull the Plug. But my guess would be that most of the speakers were organized by Pull the Plug or the other organizing groups (maybe one speaker each?), and speakers set the tone more than marginal attendees.
Should I hold my nose and join in anyway? I think it's important for different groups to be able to ally on points of common interest, even if they have deep enduring disagreements. But this didn't particularly feel like the other group was cooperating with me on that. And I'm not really a fan of uncomplicatedly supporting the lesser evil, even if the stakes are high. I don't know how to thread the needle between "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912? Die, heretic!" and "I don't like Kang, but at least he opposes Kodos". But I don't think I want to thread it here.
I could imagine myself feeling pretty differently about the whole thing in retrospect depending on the news coverage. If journalists cover this as being about extinction, then maybe I'll feel better about having attended. If they cover it as being about Billionaire Tech CEOs Bad (which I think it mostly was despite the stated purpose), I'll be kinda sad that I gave it a +1 with my presence. What I've seen so far: SWLondoner is surprisingly positive, MIT Technology Review is mixed.
I still feel broadly positive about PauseAI.4 I don't think they acted poorly here. I might go to another protest that they organize. But probably not if they jointly organize it with some other group I dislike.
My feelings about the chants I remember:
Occasionally there would be a call-and-response like, "do we want Bad Thing to happen? NO! Are we gonna stop it? YES!" I don't remember if I chimed in on the predictive claims about the future. I felt kinda conflicted about it if I did. I know we weren't really being asked to make snap predictive judgements about the future and all come to the same answer and yell it out simultaneously, and I don't think anyone's going to hold it against my Brier score if we fail to stop Bad Thing, but… I dunno. Autism. I endorse protest organizers continuing to use these calls-and-response until someone comes up with some better technology to do the thing they do.
At one point a few people crossed through the walking line, and one of them said "we're not counter-protesters, we're just crossing". I thought that was mildly funny and mildly confusing, because why would we have thought they were counterprotesters? A few moments later one of them said "they didn't find that funny" in a tone that sounded to me like they thought we were offended.
After the protest was a people's assembly. I think this bit was fully organized by Pull the Plug, and it's not the public facing bit of the event, so it's worth talking about separately from the protest.
The format of this part was that people sat in small groups around a dozen or so tables, and had a facilitated conversation about "what are our concerns about AI" and "what do we think should be done about it". Then each table picked someone to summarize our conversation for the room, some of whom noticed that no one was giving them "round it up please" hand gestures and took advantage of this fact. Finally someone summarized all those summaries.
The conversation at my table was pretty fine. Three of us were mostly worried about extinction, three were mostly worried about other things. In summary, extinction was the first thing mentioned out of a long list of things. (But it's not like I volunteered to summarize. And if I had done it, I would have felt like a dick giving extinction as much weight in summary as the rest combined, even if I think that was about representative for the table.)
Another table reported that the thing they could all agree on was, you know those annoying buttons like WhatsApp has where you can talk to an AI? They all agreed that people should be able to hide those buttons.
I mostly stopped listening after that. In the final summary, again, extinction was mentioned first but it was just one in a long list of things.
I think that summary is supposed to be fed to… some level of government somehow? Not sure. I did not come away from this experience thinking that people's assemblies are the future of intelligent governance.
I feel like I come across pretty snarky and conceited in this. I'm not gonna say "that's not me", because… well, I don't think I get to call lots of people dumb and expect readers not to infer that I'm the type of person who thinks lots of people are dumb.
I do think this is kind of out of distribution for my writing, and not how I want to usually write. But if I tried to write something more measured here, I think it would be less honest and I probably would never publish.
But also, this piece more than most of what I write is about me. I could say "I can see why you'd be tempted to chant CEOS, back in the basement! Techbros, back in the basement!, but I'm not a fan because…". But I think it's more important, here, to say that my reaction to it is "fuck you, assholes". If protest organizers want people like me to feel good about attending protests, they should know that that's my reaction to that chant.
In this piece I'm sharing my opinions, but I'm not trying to explain why I hold them and I'm not trying to convince anyone of them. I'm not carefully differentiating between opinions I hold confidently and opinions I'm less sure about. ↩
Yet! Growth mindset. (If she'd said that AI labs are trying to become publicly traded and this is bad because…, then I'd have rolled my eyes a lot less.) ↩
To be clear, even though I think "generic lefty anti-big-tech" is pretty dumb, that's not mostly about either the "lefty" or the "anti-big-tech". It's mostly about the "generic" bit. ↩
I haven't had much engagement with them as a group apart from this protest. I've met and liked Joseph, the UK director. And I consider Matilda, the UK deputy director, a friend. I shared this with her before publishing. ↩