Most people are conservative

One of my strongly-held opinions, and one that helps understand a lot about both politics and real life, is that most people are conservative.

This is distinct from as being a conservative in the way that those who want to deport undocumented immigrants or pay as little taxes as possible or allow prayer in schools are, but rather simply that (aside from whichever issues happen to specifically matter to that specific person) most people want things to generally stay the same or slightly improve, and not be bothered otherwise.

People usually only stop being conservative in two situations: either they get educated enough and figure out a specific worldview or movement that speaks to them, and then adopt it to a sufficient extent to override the conservative impulse, or if things have gotten bad enough (and have no prospect of improving) that they actively want some kind of change.

This applies to more things than just politics. Consider user interface design – there are always going to be more people saying “ew, they changed the UI yet again” instead of “ooh, neat, the new UI is so much more efficient” regardless of whether the UI change in question is actually good or not. It usually takes several years of using that UI for people to, well, get used to it and start recognizing its strengths. A good example is the “Ribbon” UI introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, intended as the replacement to the traditional menu-based user interface that has, since its introduction in MS Word 5.5 for DOS, become really cluttered (MS Office 2000 and Windows 2000 tried to ease the clutter by hiding the less frequently used items behind a second button, but this only created a new issue, where the positions of menu elements would change unpredictably based on their frequency of use): most competing products started off presenting their traditional UI as a feature, but now have either switched to allowing a ribbon-style UI as an option (like LibreOffice), have implemented their own variant of it (like OnlyOffice) or even copied it wholesale (like WPS Office).

Politics

When it comes to politics, being conservative doesn’t necessarily mean aligning oneself with the “conservative movement” or supporting right-wing policies, – in general, it may lend towards centrist or center-right positions on some issues, but based on both the status quo and the individual’s experiences, the conservative thing to do may actually be politically liberal or even left-wing. For instance, the desire for things to get “back to normal” that motivated so many American citizens to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 was largely a conservative one, even if Joe Biden or his Democratic party were still liberal. Similarly, if the 2026 midterms or the 2028 general elections in the U.S. result in a substantial shift towards the Democrats, a large part of that will also be motivated by the (still) conservative desire to revert the Trump era’s disastrous effects.

Allow me to present a few examples of how this “conservative” thinking cuts across the political spectrum:

• In most places, not only in the U.S., but all around the world, people in cities tend to vote more in favor of liberal and progressive policies, whereas those in rural areas tend to vote more right-wing. This divide also operates on the same conservative instinct – in cities, the existence of public spaces and services is much more necessary and apparent, and therefore people feel more justified defending and even expanding them, whereas in suburban and rural areas, this is much less so.

• Whenever some new construction project is proposed in an existing neighborhood and the people already living there get to provide their input on it, the default reaction is typically a NIMBYist backlash, even if they otherwise agree with the need for that kind of construction in general. (This also has the sad side effect of directing most construction efforts to areas where the locals are least capable of resisting, which usually means areas populated by marginalized people, which in turn drives gentrification.)

• If a social policy is really popular, such as socialized healthcare in Canada and the UK or the Social Security program in the US, keeping it is the “conservative” option, and therefore the political conservatives who harbor a desire to privatize it would not openly suggest abolishing it, but instead gradually degrade it with a “death by a thousand cuts” type of approach.

• At least in U.S. politics, Republicans tend to struggle more whenever they’re associated with the Religious Right and other moralizing elements of the right wing, and Democrats tend to struggle more when they’re associated with “wokeness”, “political correctness”, DEI, “critical race theory” or other left-wing ideas aimed at correcting bad behavior on an individual level. I remember witnessing young people being driven to the right during the GamerGate era based almost entirely on the feeling that “the liberals” or “the left” or Hillary Clinton personally wants to censor their video games and force movie studios to put women and minorities into starring roles, rather than any actual economic or social policies. (The fact that the attitudes of movie and video game studios all over the world have very little in common with who is currently President of the United States did not matter to them.)

Generative AI

Generative AI, in my opinion, also shows this kind of attitude very well and how it breaks us apart.

If you’re used to it and derive some benefit from it, your conservative instinct will tell you that people shaming you for it or asking you to stop using it in the name of some more abstract goal (whether a practical one, like software quality, or an ethical one, like reducing energy use or not supporting companies run by right-wing bastards¹) are dealing in absurd exaggerations – the same way that it would be silly to assume that everyone who drives a Ford now, or drove one in the early 20th century even – supported Henry Ford’s views on Jews.

And if you are, instead, a victim of generative AI (of which there can be many types – maybe you’re an artist or a copywriter who can’t find a job, or a sysadmin whose websites are being practically DDoSed by crawlers, or a regular person tired of people using generative AI to create slop), then responses like “well, I happen to use it responsibly’ or “the actual energy usage of a single query is quite low” or “what about local models?” just sound like unreasonable defenses of bad behavior, and you’d rather this whole generative AI business stop (even if that’s also unrealistic and even the most drastic scenarios of the bubble bursting are not going to kill the technology as a whole, and would also have horrific side-effects across the world).

I, personally, don’t use generative AI partly because of quality and ethical concerns, but even more so because I don’t want to become dependent on a service that costs money to run and might not even exist or be as affordable in a few years, given the economics – but in an environment where software developers are encouraged to output more and more code and put off refactoring and bug-fixing until later, it’s no wonder how for so many of them the practical benefits outweigh the concerns, and I don’t think yelling at individual developers or project managers is going to fix the problem, the same way that yelling at car drivers is not going to convince them to take a bus – assuming the bus route even exists and isn’t going to require them to spend extra 30 minutes commuting either way (or, in the software analogy, that the not-AI-using developer isn’t going to end up in the next round of layoffs for not achieving their performance metrics, or the not-AI-using project isn’t going to fall behind the competition).