Susu must have been a nickname for Susanna or Susanne or Suzanne. Susu ist a Chinese name. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or it’s from the Susu people of West Africa. It means simplicity. Or joyful. Or lily. It was only used five times in the United States so far starting in 2018, so it must have been a nickname. Susu was not Chinese or Japanese or Hawaiian. Susu was Wiccan.
Wicca is a fairly organised set of practices and beliefs. As far as rituals go, dancing “skyclad” around a fire on the summer solstice doesn’t require a religious connotation. Benjamin Franklin had a similar ritual, which he called “wind bathing”. Indeed, standing naked in a natural wind tunnel during a summer storm is its own kind of experience. It’s an experience that I will not in this moment attempt to describe through mere language. See for yourself, go have a wind bath (and touch grass while you’re at it).
Wicca had a moment in the nineties. There were some mainstream Hollywood films and shows like Buffy and Charmed that pushed the whole thing along. The emergence of grunge probably played a part, though there doesn’t seem to be anyone bored/brave enough to write an openly accessible academic paper on the cultural history of grunge paralleled with Wiccan popularity. The “most changed” winners that emerged between sixth and ninth grade was clearly the gothy Wiccan crowd. The cheerleaders were the ones running the yearbook club. Their sense of aesthetic is a trope.
image cc-by-nc Academia Bibliothecaque Religionum et Arcanorum
Susu and I were friendly, but we weren’t friends. I don’t think she ever came over to my house, but I did go over to hers once or twice. Technically, it wasn’t Susu who introduced me to the occult. I had played with a Ouija board at a sleepover in the fifth grade. That night we also did “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” and said Bloody Mary into the bathroom mirror two and a half times. Susu read my Tarot, I can’t remember what she said.
We invoked the spirit Gods and powdered the rocks of alchemy, and I never believed in any of it.
Until now.
Ha ha, no I’m kidding, I just thought that would be funny to write.
Belief, though, is so interesting. I never thought that Susu, or indeed anyone who believes in the supernatural, was stupid or crazy or anything else. I mean, there is a continuum of woo which has things that I can and cannot abide by, but my aunt believes in faeries and so do a bunch of Scandinavian folks and that is OK.
Our ways of knowing, our understanding of the world around us, our ability to make sense of our lives is routed in the narratives and framings that are instilled upon us as we navigate the world. Some of us can convince ourselves of the supernatural. Some of us hold conflicting ideas in our brains while we try to examine our values through our beliefs.
- The strange business history of the Ouija board > https://thehustle.co/the-strange-business-history-of-the-ouija-board
- Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings > https://aethermug.com/posts/culture-is-the-mass-synchronization-of-framings
- My On Writing episode > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqMu8JJesUc
Maybe I’m a caretaker
I am starting to believe that AI is, like the whole Epstein thing, absolutely and 100% anti-feminist horseshit. It is possible because we live in a patriarchy. Didn’t see me going there, did you? I didn’t know I would either, but here we both are.
Witches are female-coded. Caregiving is female-coded. My mother’s generation of women pretty much got funnelled into one of three professions – teaching, secretarial work or nursing. Take care of the kids, take care of the office stuff the men don’t want to deal with, take care of literally everyone.
I do not want to be an internet caregiver. I do not consent to taking care of the AI slop. I do not want to fix your LLMs typos and formatting. I don’t want to continue to point out that concept behind art is what makes it art.
I feel like this still of Anjelica Huston from the fantastic 1990 film Witches, based on a Roald Dahl book and produced by Jim Henson.
Over the last years, I’ve had a number of conversations, mostly with other women and queer folks, about feminism and AI. There seems to be some gender-coding on the whole idea of being an “AI Skeptic”, though my evidence is anecdotal. It was a woman, of course, Emily Bender who just this week explained that this term “resides within the AI boosters frame of view”.
The framing within my network, one that I both believe and also cannot seem to reconcile at the moment, is that AI is just a tool.
A few months ago, I attended a Mozilla alumni meet-up in Barcelona. On the first evening about forty previous Mozilla people – people who moved on from Mozilla to work with multinational non-profits or found tech companies with household names or advise the UN on policy stuff – sat in a circle and unloaded. We went around and talked about where we went after Mozilla and what Mozilla had meant for us. We talked about what it was like to make the web because we are all (still) Webmakers (see what I did there?)
And we made fun of AI.
Oh lord, did we. People who literally invented the ability to to play video on the web, people who made data analytics something that you could use without a masters degree in statistics, people who pushed code on the first browsers – all of us Mozilla alumni laughing our good goddamn asses off about the AI hype and hysteria. We wondered aloud to each other why so many people are so very bamboozled about the reality of the AI hype machine.
I understand technology, and truly AI and the LLMs are just a tool, truly. But if you can’t use a chainsaw responsibly, you shouldn’t be allowed to hold the fucking chainsaw! No one bothers to check the work of their LLM. People don’t fix the typos or repetitions or outright bullshit because they don’t bother reading closely. The LLM is soooo good now, I don’t need to give a toss! People are pushing dangerous code into repos. The security surfaces are increasing. Even technology journalists are publishing hallucinations. And when the AI fails people take zero accountability. We already have very little accountability in tech, honestly.
- Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations > https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/
- The Hype is the Product > https://rys.io/en/180.html
- Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale > https://maggieappleton.com/gastown
If you are using AI regularly, please check the work. Use your brain because your brain is the only one involved. If you don’t have the expertise to check the work, you should call someone who does. At least tell the human reviewing your LLMs output that you don’t know if it’s any good.
Maybe I need help
This rant was brought to you by my absolute rabbit-holing of the unhinged OpenClaw drama in which An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on a FOSS maintainer. Hours were spent.
SPOILER ALERT
Save yourself all the time – Cryptobros are suspect, but there’s still disagreement:
“there is a weird tech subculture involved here, but it’s not crypto. It’s e/acc. What we’re seeing is a slopbot owned by a guy who thinks he can prompt up the singularity.” Boxo McFoxo has thoughts
This experience combined with actual (and multiple) human beings complaining to me this week about corporate overlords insisting on AI integration and security frenzies currently afoot in various open source communities has made me think about the caretaking required when the robots are trusted.
- The obnoxious GitHub OpenClaw AI bot is … a crypto bro > https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-openclaw-ai-bot-is-a-crypto-bro/
- OpenAI’s acquisition of OpenClaw > https://venturebeat.com/technology/openais-acquisition-of-openclaw-signals-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the
- AI Grief Observed > https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-grief-observed/