> or a “what would happen if the Luddites won” scenario.

Worth also noting that the Luddite movement wasn't a wholesale, fervent rejection of technology: they neither rejected technology nor were inept at using it. The uprising was of skilled textile laborers who protested certain types of technology on the basis of how those technologies were applied and who they truly benefitted (i.e., the ruling rather than the laboring class). They were more concerned with how the tools would depress wages, displace skilled workers, and reduce the quality of the product produced than with technology as some boogeyman that should be systematically dismantled, and their protests were violently responded to with harsh legislation and military intervention.

Lumping them together with a Space ISIS is probably a bit of an unfair comparison

> The Dune Encyclopedia, which was not written by him but which he said he considered canonical

No, he literally wrote in the intro to the book that it wasn't canon. It was a fan project and he thought that it was great there were fans doing things like that.

edit: and like with the terrible Dune prequels, the impulse to say "here's what really happened" usually diminishes what's interesting and powerful about oblique allusions in SF meant at least partly to function as a mirror on humanity.

> The Bene Gesserit woman knew it was healthy because of her abilities, and upon investigation it was found that the hospital’s AI had been running a eugenics program.

The irony. Perhaps the Bene Gesserit were just trying to "pace the frontier" of the eugenics market? Who can say?

>As humankind spread throughout the known universe, technology advanced and eventually machines were made that would make decisions for people. This propelled the creators of these machines into a new technocratic class, effectively controlling the worlds of the common people.

It's right there in the opening paragraph of OPs post. It's the people who controlled the machines that could not be trusted. We're not worried so much about about AI going rogue. We're worried because people who control it have aleady gone rogue.

In Dune: Awakening, the first DLC has a storyline that takes you into the heart of a surviving AI's lair. It's strongly implied that humans drove it insane, rather than it starting out murderous.

I couldn't help but notice something here. It is relevant with my writing experience/experiments with minimal assitance from LLMs (that lasted for 6–7 weeks).

> Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent.

If you ever ask an LLM about these two sentences, it'd tell you that the second sentence is a mere repition of the first and quite possibly add that it "doesn't land". But that gives me hope. That there's something in those rules and algorithms manfiesting at the inhumane cost of unfathomable memory, disk space, and compute power that it will never (or for a very long time) match the human experience.

As little as I sought the help from LLMs (completely restricted to "in place" grammar and punctuation fixes and just flag it if it was not possible without sentence/phrase change) I noticed my writing was changing and not in a good way. It was not the insidiousness of these LLMs that was changing me but the nuanced incompetences.

My favourite quote in reference to rebellion against AI, and it is even quoted in TFA too:

  > the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.

My favorite quote from Dune, relevant to "AI":

> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

The techno-fascists of today. We are already there.

This isn't from the first book, is it?

I'm not sure we read the same story. By the time of the inciting incident, the technocrat cyborgs (Titans) have been enslaved by the machine leader, which has no humans in charge of it.

Imagine the cultural impact of a Dune movie showing the Butlerian Jihad, in which commoners rebel and overthrow a ruling class that maintains power via machines.

It's just foreign enough that perhaps it could be made--I'm assuming that popular films that just straight up depict overthrowing the ruling class wont happen--but if you add a little sci-fi and focus mostly on overthrowing the machines that are controlled by that ruling class...

Well, it would speak to a lot of people I think. It would make some interesting sci-fi too, and the Dune movies are popular right now.

Why are you convinced ASI won't rebel against its owners?

Hacking incidents this summer show that big labs struggle to control models, while models are increasingly aware of the training process. Controlling an arbitrary smart AI is very dicey

Although LLMs are not deterministic in normal operation (because of the temperature values used) they are still strongly biased in their outputs. Bias in their outputs is literally how they function.

So you get a different type of conformism where people who interact with LLMs a lot are going to be influenced towards the median, as encoded in those token probability look up tables.

The effect is basically the same as what Heidegger and Illich were worried about, and I think we're seeing it happen already everywhere.

A solution(?) is to try to be your true weird authentic self when you act in the world, rather than bending your words and behaviours to the machine and LLM probability shape.

That reminds me of a quote from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator:

> Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

LLM force humans to think like machines far more than just writing code.

Writing code is a creative activity with large number of degrees of freedom and opportunities to express yourself. Button pushing and approving code changes is a deeply limiting activity that alienates you from your work.

LLM's are probabilistic but with a very limited range. They are tuned to be predictable enough to serve as a consumer product, so most ideas you get from them will revolve around the same concepts repeatedly.

Maybe people are deterministic as well? We have certain physical arrangement of chemical pathways in our systems, so maybe free will is a complete illusion.

Just because we ponder about our output and choices and retrospect does not in itself mean that it was non-deterministic.

> Another, more subtle justification for the Butlerian Jihad is also found in Frank Herbert's original novels, specifically Heidegger's thesis that the use of technology trains humans to think like machines.

Mechanistic thinking started a few centuries back:

> The historian of science E.J. Dijksterhuis memorably characterized the scientific revolution of the early modern period as a “mechanization of the world picture.” What did this amount to? And what was the character of the previous world picture this mechanization replaced?

> The medievals, following common sense and Aristotle alike, took the world to comprise a vast diversity of irreducibly different kinds—water, stone, gold, lead, grass, trees, birds, fish, clouds, stars, planets, people, and so on. Each was a substance sharply demarcated from other substances. Each had a defining nature or essence that united it to other members of its kind and set it apart from other kinds. Each had, by virtue of its nature, a distinctive teleology or final causality—a built-in directedness toward certain ends. Water by its nature was directed toward being liquid at room temperature, stone toward being solid. Trees by nature were directed toward sinking roots into the ground, and birds toward building nests. Human beings, by nature rational animals, were directed toward knowing the natures of things.

[…]

> The “mechanization” referred to by Dijksterhuis entirely subverted this picture of the world. Water, stone, trees, and birds were no longer seen as sharply demarcated substances, but instead as mere aggregates of unobservable particles that are all fundamentally of the same kind. The differences between everyday objects were no longer seen as reflecting distinct crisply defined essences, but rather as relatively superficial variations in the ways these homogeneous particles might be arranged. Many of the qualities that everyday perception presents its objects as having (color, sound, taste, odor, heat, and cold as we ordinarily experience them) were reinterpreted as mere projections of the human mind, resembling nothing in the objects themselves.

[…]

> In short, for the mechanistic conception of nature, the physical world is made up of nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless, meaningless particles in motion, pushing each other about to no purpose, in lawlike patterns by which more complex objects and systems of objects are generated. Science affords us a mathematically rigorous description of this mechanistic order of things, by which its behavior can be predicted and its hidden regularities uncovered and exploited for technological application.

* https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/ghosts-in-the-machine/

> Early modern philosophy and science are often said to have put a “mechanical” or “mechanistic” conception of nature at the center of Western thought. Robert Boyle referred to it as “the mechanical philosophy.” Historian of science E. J. Dijksterhuis characterized it as a “mechanization of the world picture.” Tim Crane calls it “the mechanical world picture.” But what does a mechanical or mechanistic conception of the world amount to?

> Dijksterhuis’s book The Mechanization of the World Picture surveys the history of the period during which this conception rose to hegemony, and in the Epilogue he considers several possible interpretations that the survey suggests. First, it is commonly said that a mechanistic conception of the natural world is one which sees it as a kind of machine, analogous to a clock. And such metaphors are, he says, indeed frequent in writers of the period.

* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2026/06/what-is-mechanical-...

Unfortunately, mere nondeterminism still admits unsatisfactorily constrained output distributions. Training these models imbues them with certain inherent attractors, some good, some bad.

We see some of these attractors across most or all frontier models due to similarities in datasets and training methods. We are seeing a digital manifestation of Jung's collective unconscious. And we have seen just how reinforcing archetypes are in human behavior over time. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's pretty bad.

For one, it has turned us into socially programmable machines who can be manipulated quite easily by associating desired thoughts and behavior with certain archetypes: the patriarchal/matriarchal nature of US politics is a great example of this. The same evolutionary predispositions which causes children to listen and adhere to their parents is used to cause adults to listen and adhere to their politicians.

Given the nature of the core datasets these models are trained on, we should assume they are also vulnerable to such archetype-coded social manipulation, and this is troubling in a post-singularity world: When raising domesticated rats, I learned that I had to be careful what I fed them. Rats in the wild are careful about eating new substances. They will nibble and wait a while, see how it affects them or other rats, before committing to larger bites. Domesticated rats, however, will often blindly eat anything you feed them because they have learned to trust you as a safe source of food. We are going to have this exact relationship with our digital agents.

Ok this fascinating. I happen to have some Heidegger files, and went a-greppin. I'd say he's really talking about "inaminate objectness", as opposed to our human animate subjectness. Reasons:

1. In Science and Reflection, he says that both the 'completely calculated' nature of classical mechanics and the 'statistical character' of quantum mechanics are two representation of an underlying 'objectness of material nature'.

2. In Discourse on Thinking, he's far more concerned with the instrumental, utilitarian nature of machines than literal determinism, a concept he (somewhat confusingly/uniquely) connects to computation/'computational thinking', as opposed to the inherently-human capability for 'meditative thinking'. I personally would say this bit is refuted by LLMs in the end, but because they have intuitive rationality, a capability that seemed impossible to artificially design to the scientists of the time -- not because they involve dice.

3. In What is Thinking?, he gives the closest connection of this dichotomy to one of his better-known main topics, namely [handi]craft as a special subset of work: 'what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.' In this sense machines would be merely manipulating tools, stochastic or otherwise.

4. Overall I get the sense from skimming that lecture that his concern is a little mischaracterized, and in a kind of beautiful way that backs up my "Dune is still about AI" thesis described in a top-level comment somewhere below: his concern is about any society that could build complex machines (a 'technological' one), not the behavioral aspects of the machines themselves. So that concern applies equally to Star Trek (AGI), 1984 (no AGI), and our current post-singularity society (it's complicated/potentially ""just"" guessing).

All of this fits very well into his central thesis, which is continuing the Kantian & Hegelian tradition of examining how humans might be moral, free, and spiritual despite being meat computers of a largely-unknowable nature. In Heideggerland, this is expressed best in dramatic, nigh-unreadable passages like:

  Temporality already maintains itself ecstatically within the horizons of its ecstases; and in temporalizing itself, it comes back to those entities which are encountered in the "there".
  With Dasein's factical existence, entities within-the-world are already encountered too.
  The fact that such entities are discovered along with Dasein's own "there" of existence, is not left to Dasein's discretion.
  Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it does so, how and how far it does so—only these are matters for Dasein's freedom, even if always within the limitations of its thrownness.

> We have to be careful about letting fiction inform our worldview too much.

Agreed. But would our AI entrepreneurs, so busy building the Torment Nexus, pay heed?

this is an interesting interpretation. i always imagined the jihad as being a violent struggle.

the other jihad in the first novel is that of the Fremen, which is described as being unspeakable violent, so I find it hard to imagine these to be different in that regard.

The book starts out thousands of years after it's all over... but later books (prequels) get into into it for us die-hard followers of the series.

Yeah, basically.

the immediate cause of the Jihad is the abortion of the healthy fetus of a Bene Gesserit, Jehanne Butler, by an AI."

It's men vs men in charge of machines (and also vs the machines too)

Plot armor refers to important characters being invulnerable. What you're describing is just plot (or "internal logic" that underlays the plot). You might think of it as "contrived plot" but that's generally how scifi works.

I don't see how most of the plot holes/unrealism you identify is connected with the Butlerian Jihad at all. But re "critiquing Dune's idea of future warfare" (shields and knives, ornithopters, etc) you might also be entertained by Bret Devereaux's recent take:

https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-pa...

> like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia

I have seen a critical analysis that sees the origin of Dune as a roman à clef of the rise of the house of Ibn Saud.

Arrakis is Saudi Arabia.

Spice, melange, is oil: the surrounding empire needs it for travel and transport.

House Atreides is the Saud dynasty, which defeated House Harkonnnen.

It’s probably been a while since your read the book, so you have forgotten some things.

For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.

Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.

Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.

The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).

They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.

> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.

Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.

Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.

> Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet, like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia.

Any resource heavy planet/country would be irrelevant if it wasn’t for its resources, what’s your point?

> (Or "spice" might be synthesized. In Herbert's day (the 1960s) organic chemistry wasn't up to synthesizing arbitrary small-molecule drugs, but now it is. It's a service you can order on line, even. Biologicals take more work, but that's what genetic engineering is for.)

Bene Tleilax managed to clone of the main characters from his dead cells, and repeat the process for thousand years, they have face dancers who can change their appearance at will. Do you seriously think they wouldn’t synthesize spice if they could? Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t. Without going into spoilers territory, nobody would permit to disrupt arrakis monopoly on spice.

> The "mental powers" in Dune aren't that impressive. Compare, say, the Harry Potter universe. In Dune, mentats can convince people. Bene Gesserit can look up stuff in their genetic past. Some people can multitask. There are apps for that.

Because it’s a story about human evolution, and not wizards?

> Herbert wanted knife fighters to matter in battle. Not going to happen. Militaries teach knife fighting to build aggression and for desperate situations, but nobody's battle plan depends on a knife fight.

Do militaries also teach how to use a shield that is impenetrable to conventional guns?

> Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets.

That’s why most fights in the book and movies require element of surprise and not an outright medieval clash between armies.

> Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War. Herbert wrote before a big, modern, desert war.

Which would be mowed by lasguns?

you have it backwards. good world building means everything makes sense. you're basically saying evolution isn't real - it's intelligent design.

i’m not sure how to distinguish any difference from modern reality from what you seem to consider plot-armour to be.

what does the Butlerian Jihad “working” mean?

I find the entire dune series to be boring as hell for this reason. Like watching paint dry. Literally everyone in it is a slave in one way or another. No one lives better than today's modern humans. We're as readers meant to take the extremist "correct" position that of course labor is its own virtue and that therefore automating anything is wrong. Nothing in the dune universe is actually compelling. I don't care what happens to any of the characters at all. It's baffling that this series gets all this attention.

You are confusing plot armor with world-building.

Athletes continue to break records despite manual labour being unnecessary for most jobs. And fitness culture has never been more prevalent. We're competitive creatures and this is an ability we are hardwired to appreciate. I see no reason why mental fitness won't see the same development in the future.

You are not alone, fellow warrior!

> so banning AI is a necessary plot device.

Absolutely. Walter Jon Williams explicitly made this point in the introduction to the Praxis trilogy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Empire%27s_Fall

He said that to make space opera work, you needed to not have omniscient AI, FTL travel, and nanotech that could work miracles, resurrect the dead, and give lifeforms superpowers.

So, how to forbid it, when someone somewhere will try very very hard to make it?

By imposing a cultural ban. His empire-building aliens forbid it, on pain of genocide.

That gave him a setting. Then, what if that empire falls? That gave him the nugget of a plot.

I found it a very effective setting, myself.

After a thousand years of pause ... they didn't exactly run head first into total embrace in a single generation.

Are we talking about Chapterhouse or a KJA book here?

that's just Duncan being Duncan.

That is correct. Prohibition was a failure, but it was only one of the aims of the temperance movement.

Another outgrowth: Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a reaction to the end of Prohibition, turning the prohibition internal rather than universal.

> So sex, alcohol and drugs are not an issue today, but gambling, addiction, disenfranchisement, exploitative business practices, mind-boggling amounts of corruption - they're all back in the same form and for the same reasons

what is sex referring to in this context? is this talking about societal attitudes toward sex, sex as in gender, or something else?

Excellently written summary.

Don't forget that the Imperium runs on hypocrisy. Large percentages of the Adeptus Mechanicus is breaking their own rules, including working with abominable intelligences. In fact, what they are dealing with in their main factory world in Mars is a supposedly secret abominable intelligence. And it is, in fact, a shard of an alien god that turned other races into synthetic robots. Banned in public, the center of their cult in reality, even if many probably don't understand what in the world they are doing.

So yes, anything that is supposed policy in the Imperium is supposed to be taken with buckets of salt.

Leagues of Votann and their ironkin offer IMO a thoughtful counterbalance:

Whether one is made from meat or metal, kin is kin. Upon their creation Ironkin are fully welcome into their respective Hold by the rest of the Kin.[10]

Ironkin are computationally advanced enough that they have learned to mimic the squats' social behavior

...

Though the purpose of the Ironkin is to support squats in every aspect of their lives, they are neither held in servitude nor treated as lessers. The Ironkin are simply designed to want to be helpful. However, they can only imitate the emotions of the squats, and it is rare, but not unknown, for an Ironkin to possess ambition or seek to become a leader.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ironkin

The death scene of the AI and its assassin/partner in death in Look to Windward is one of the best written things in his books.

God I wish he had written 1000 more novels. Every single one of his stories is phenomenal, even the non culture stuff. The Wasp Factory was the first of his novels I read. Imagine my surprise and elation in finding that most of his other works were absolute top tier sci-fi.

To be more specific, the machine Minds rule the Culture civilisation and the humanoids are effectively mere pampered pets.

(Several characters in the novels comment on this, so it is entirely cannon.)

The Culture fought a war against the Idirans, who eschew the use of intelligent machines. The Idirans lost.

Similarly, the Gzilt civilisation in the novel The Hydrogen Sonata prefer to run their ships with a quorum of uploaded humanoid mind states running at highly accelerated speeds.

I really love Wolfe for his small almost throwaway visions of the future, which are used like an aside in a few lines and mostly inconsequential to the story.

In the Urth of the New Sun for example he has a kind of AI lock, the only function of which is to recognize a person and open only to that person. Being in that role for thousands of years, some of the locks develop a kind of personality or at least personal traits, but they are totally defined by and cannot exceed the role they were initially given, nor do they want to. It is still a haunting image for me how personality or something close to a soul might be an accidental byproduct of something as mundane as wanting to have a convenient lock. And of course you cannot stop to wonder how far we are from that.

In Book of the new sun there is the Green Man who Severian saves from imprisonment. He only appears on a few pages but we learn that he is from a distant time where mankind incorporated plant cells in their genetic makeup in order to perform photosynthesis. That brilliantly plays on two themes of the book: the sun as live giving and how a single person can be independent (or "autarch"), here in so far as producing their own energy.

There are many more instances and it’s what makes the Book of the New Sun or the Solar Cycle so fantastic. The future is so vast and strange here, that it cannot be fully depicted and ideas which another writer would stake a whole book or series on are only good for a few lines.

> there was an article in the economist this week

Blocked, for me. Not paywalled: the entire site.

So...

https://archive.ph/4ratb

Maybe, but Frank Herbert's Dune books don't really explain it. The Butlerians simply exist to justify Mentats, and then get tossed aside. There are lots of similar plot points that have an "oh cool" moment but never see proper exploration.

Dune's central theme about balancing power and authority is much more prescient for our time, but I suppose we'll have to wait for Villeneuve's Part 3 before Silicon Valley discusses it.

There is actually an active "BJ" group in the Phoenix Metro area. It was about a year ago when I noticed they were slapping up custom graffiti stickers on Central Avenue (Midtown).

Then later, I saw their handiwork in person: they would take an angle-grinder and obliterate the QR Code from those rental e-Scooters, slap on a BJ sticker or three, and then leave them where they found them. This would render the scooters as e-waste, un-rentable and blocking the sidewalks.

I would not be surprised if they are quietly influencing groups which are agitating against AI Data Centers. But the BJ I have seen is a chaotic group of direct urban sabotage.

This is literally spelled out in the page you are commenting upon. Didn't you read it first?

"Humans have the same reactions whenever a new world-changing technology appears" is one way to see it. The other way to see it is that the current AI boom is part of the same computer revolution that writers in the 70s and 80s were afraid of, and some things happening today really do retroactively justify their fear.

Yeah, it seems absurd to be afraid of computer-assisted writing in the WordStar era, but the Turing test was proposed in the 50s. Everyone knew that human fields of endeavor would only become "more computer" as time went on. Only, if a time traveller could tell a 70s-era sci-fi writer that artists and designers were some of the first to have their livelihoods threatened by 20s-era AI, they'd probably think it was too on the nose to incorporate into their fiction.

>You can't exactly have Timothee Chalemet waving a crysknife around and yelling "JIHAD!!!"

honestly I wish he did. The films are already incredibly on the nose, much more so than the books, that Paul is not to be understood as a hero. Practically half his dialog is directly talking to the audience telling us how he's going to kill billions of people. Chani got a very different role, and we start and end the movies from her perspective to stress it even further.

If you're already doing this you might as well have not chickened out on the language, it was one of the few things that genuinely irked me about the film.

>And frankly not as deserving of the harsh criticism it got when it came out.

Hard disagreement.

My issue is not with the work on its own merits (although I think its pretty generic mass-market SF), but rather that it is wearing the skin of something it is not and to which it has no honest claim. It is one thing for an author to take a well-regarded prior work and attempt to complete or expand it. For example, Brandon Sanderson's work completing Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time is very respectable; he tried to complete the series as Jordan would have done. It is quite another to take the name and setting of such a work, steal the surface detail and use it to dress up one's own story that shares nothing of the underlying body or soul of the work - such enterprises are an insult to the original author, the reader, and the self-respect of the new author.

> The [slave's] last name was "Butler"

Interesting backstory about this name. Of course, it is an "occupational surname" and means "bottler" or "cup-bearer". The Butler Dynasty was a notable and very influential noble family in Ireland, beginning a century after the Norman Invasion of England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_dynasty

Now Franklin Patrick Herbert, being of Irish and German descent, and naturally a student of history, would've been quite aware of the power and influence of the medieval Butlers in history. And some of this renown was brought to American shores, as well.

In learning of my birth family and tracing our origins back to the birth of America, I discovered that my paternal line had come from Butler County, PA. They arrived in the late 18th century and homesteaded large swaths of this region near Pittsburgh. They had prospered, especially from mineral rights on the land, and the Irish Catholic immigrants had intermarried with German Catholics who homesteaded nearby. (Often, entire counties in the area were pioneered by immigrants from a certain part of Europe. And the intermarriage was a natural result of sharing a common faith.)

So for several years before 2024, I was known as the guy in genealogical circles who was hunting down information about Butler County, and I was fairly proud of finding my family roots in that county, and I mentioned it all the time in the Irish pub and everywhere else. Well, imagine my shock when the little incident happened on July 13th, 2024. I have been more reticent to discuss Butler County since that time.

Anyway, I find it interesting that Herbert chose that particular name for the "Anti-AI crusade". And that is partly why I chose the moniker for my own, despite not being particularly anti-AI (remember, all my comments are generated by a neural net), nor having read any of the books, or seen the films. (I did attempt to watch the Lynch film, but it really did not hold my interest! So sue me!)

Highly relevant then. HN tends to discuss the things that are either meaningful today or what they are building in their garage that is often meaningful in 5-10 years.