The AI Bubble Isn't Like the Internet Bubble — Workers Won't Smuggle AI Like They Smuggled Spreadsheets

In a recent article on Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow argues that the current AI investment surge bears little resemblance to the internet bubble of the 1990s. His core thesis: the internet took off because workers smuggled web tools onto corporate networks — they wanted them. AI, by contrast, is being force-fed from management down.

How the web really beat IT control

Doctorow traces the tension back to the days of Lotus Notes, a clunky all-in-one office suite that IT managers loved because it gave them mainframe-style control. Workers hated it — they smuggled in web-based tools like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, ICQ, AIM, and anonymous FTP servers to get their jobs done. They routed around IT policies because the web tools were better for real work.

This wasn't rebellion — it was survival. As Doctorow notes, "the exception is the rule" in knowledge work. Rigid policies break when workers encounter unanticipated situations. The concept of "work to rule" — where workers follow every policy exactly, without using implicit process knowledge — can grind a business to a halt.

AI is being pushed, not pulled

The key difference: no one is smuggling AI agents onto corporate networks. Employees aren't installing GPT-4 or Claude on their workstations because they genuinely need them to meet a deadline. Instead, executives and VCs are pushing AI adoption with the promise of replacing workers or cutting costs — not empowering them.

Doctorow recounts how the killer app for early personal computers was Visicalc — the spreadsheet. Workers snuck Apple II+ computers into work to run it, because IT had blocked the feature they needed. The motivation was internal: "they didn't do this to cheat or steal from the company — the whole point was to do a better job."

Today, no equivalent grassroots adoption is happening for AI coding agents or LLMs. They're being mandated from the top, often met with resistance or indifference from the engineers who would have to use them.

What this means for AI tooling

If the internet bubble was demand-driven (users pulled in the technology), the AI bubble is supply-driven (vendors are pushing it). That makes it more fragile. When a budget crunch comes, cost centers imposed from above are the first to be cut. Tools that workers actually need will survive.

The article doesn't predict a crash, but it argues that the market fundamentals are different: AI adoption numbers may look inflated because they reflect managerial mandates, not genuine user pull.