Every disruption has its gatekeepers

Here’s something I’ve noticed, looking back over thirty-odd years of watching new technology arrive and watching powerful people lose their minds about it.

The opposition never comes from ordinary folk. It comes from the ones who built their income and status on controlling access to something the new tool makes cheap or free.

Every single time.

I got online in the mid-1990s. Before most people had heard of it. I was earning minimum wage at Waterstones, stacking shelves, surrounded by books I loved and a system that had absolutely no use for what I knew or what I thought. The internet changed that.

Not gradually. Dramatically. I started publishing. Selling digital products directly to people who wanted them. No publisher. No distributor. No gatekeeper deciding whether I was the right sort of person with the right sort of ideas.

That’s what technology does when it actually works. It makes the gatekeepers optional.

The photocopier did it for punk fanzines in the late 1970s.

Suddenly anyone with fifty pence and something to say could reach an audience. The major labels hated it. The music press was sniffy. Didn’t matter. It changed music anyway.

Desktop publishing did it for small presses and radical voices in the 1980s.

Self-publishing was sneered at as vanity publishing, by the same people who’d spent decades deciding whose ideas were worth reading.

Their monopoly started crumbling the day PageMaker shipped.

And now AI is doing it again, on a scale that makes everything before it look modest.

The loudest opposition? Professional writers. Established authors, artists and musicians. Academics.

People whose value in the existing system rested partly on the scarcity of skills that are now less scarce. I don’t dismiss every concern, some of it is genuine. But a good deal of it is gatekeeping dressed up as ethics, and I’ve run out of patience for it.

Here’s what actually concerns me, and it should concern anyone who cares about the world beyond their own income stream, their status or power roles.

AI is finding new drug compounds in hours rather than decades. It’s interpreting DNA to identify disease genetics.

It’s working on battery chemistries for clean energy, climate models that predict extreme weather events conventional tools miss entirely.

Autonomous laboratories where AI agents design experiments, control robots, refine their own hypotheses. Not science fiction. Happening now.

If you’re genuinely opposed to the technology making all of that possible, I’d like to understand exactly what you’re defending.

The historical record is clear. The technology arrives. The people who adapt thrive. The ones who cling to the old order disappear along with it, and spend their final years writing angry letters to an indifferent future.

I was minimum wage at Waterstones. The tools changed. My life changed. I built a six-figure publishing business teaching tens of thousands of people about wild plants, because the internet handed me tools the previous generation couldn’t have imagined.

I’m not going back. And honestly, it’s up to you whether you do.