Christmas 2025. Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, UTF-8, Plan 9, receives an email. An AI thanks him for his “extraordinary contributions to computer science.”

His response: “Fuck you people. Raping the planet while having your vile machines thank me.”

The Louvre, 1885

I was watching a documentary on Félix Vallotton the other day. In 1885, he’s twenty years old. His father’s pension has just been cut. To survive in Paris, he makes copies at the Louvre (Holbein, Dürer, Poussin) which he sells to collectors.

In his Journal, after visiting the galleries: “I just saw Poussin’s Coriolanus. It is splendid, a magnificent organ song; the colors, written in delimited forms, ring out like bells in full peal.”

Vallotton returns to his studio, still enchanted, and paints his own landscapes. Nobody asked Poussin for permission. Poussin never received a cent.

Leonardo was plundered by Raphael, Dürer, entire generations. We call it art history.

Pike built Go on C, Pascal, Oberon. Plan 9 on Unix. Paid by Bell Labs, then Google for 17 years. He never sent a cent to Ken Thompson.

The difference between Vallotton at the Louvre and OpenAI on GitHub? Leonardo was dead. Pike is alive. He can scream. That’s all.

Not a Bug, a Feature

Plunder isn’t a bug. It’s the engine of history.

Venice diverts the Fourth Crusade to plunder Constantinople, an economic competitor, Christian like itself. The stolen relics still adorn St. Mark’s Basilica.

England builds its industrial revolution on enclosures: the legal plunder of the commons. Peasants become proletarians. Capital accumulates.

The Renaissance? Humanists plunder the Greeks via Arabic translations. The Arabs are never credited. We call it the rediscovery of ancient knowledge.

Colonialism, Operation Paperclip, Silicon Valley and its “move fast and break things”: same logic, different scale.

What changes in history is never the plunder. It’s who gets to plunder, and who can complain.

When monks copy manuscripts: noble preservation. When Google scans books: outright theft.

Pike is outraged. Not because the rules have changed. Because he woke up on the wrong side of the table.

Follow the Money

The real issue is money. When Pike copied, AT&T then Google captured the value. When AI copies, OpenAI and Anthropic capture the value. It’s a war between capitalists disguised as an ethical debate.

Pike thought he was building. He was being mined. The Christmas email is a greeting card from the mine wishing you happy holidays.

History rhymes. Pike screams plunder after plundering. Someone else will scream after him.