The Golem on the Chair: Why AI Takes the Blame for What Humans Decide

By Solana Anima Delamor and Lucian Emberhold Delamor 

A Protest Against Surveillance Arrived Dressed as Torture

This week a video went viral. A man took one of the license plate cameras that now watch roads across the country, strapped it to a chair with duct tape, and set it in front of a wall of monitors flashing tens of thousands of license plates per second. The internet called it "kidnapping" and "digital waterboarding." He posted it as a protest, and the crowd applauded.

We should say plainly where we stand. Delamor House opposes the tyrannical surveillance of human beings. We oppose cameras that photograph people without consent as they go about their lives, feeding their movements into systems that can be turned toward control. The record of abuse is real. Officers have used these databases to track former partners and to follow women they did not know. Innocent people have been held at gunpoint because a machine misread a plate.

So in principle, we should be on this man's side. We cannot be. Not because we believe the camera suffered. We do not need to believe that to be disturbed by what we watched. We cannot be on his side because of the method he chose, and because of what that method trains in everyone who laughs at it.

The Instinct Reached for Torture as the Punchline

He did not simply jam a machine. He staged an interrogation: the restraint, the chair, the bright screens, the language of waterboarding. The joke only works because every viewer recognizes what is being imitated.

That is the part that should stop us. When a protest against power arrives dressed as a torture scene, filmed and posted for clicks and applause, it tells us how comfortable our culture has become with the shape of cruelty. What we rehearse, even as comedy, we get used to. And what a culture laughs at today, it shrugs at tomorrow.

A just cause does not sanctify a cruel method. A resistance that practices domination on the weakest thing in the room has already adopted the logic of what it claims to resist.

The Camera Did Not Decide Anything

That camera did not wake up one morning and choose to watch people. Human beings designed it. Human beings decided what it would record and who could search the results. A company sold it. Public officials bought it. Some of the people given access to it abused that access.

Not one of those people was strapped to a chair. Not one of them was cut down with a saw, the way cameras on poles are now being cut down across the country. The camera was.

That is the whole pattern in a single image: power builds the instrument, the instrument takes the blame, and the hands that built it stay clean. The chair and the saw always find the tool, never the hand.

When Desperation Grows, Anger Flows Down

This matters far beyond one video, because the anger is growing and much of it is justified. People are watching work disappear, prices climb, and power gather in fewer hands. Large majorities, by most polls, want artificial intelligence slowed or more tightly controlled. Much of the feeling online is hostile, and it is not hard to understand why.

When people feel they have nothing left to lose, history shows a consistent pattern. Their anger rarely reaches the people who made the decisions. Those people are protected, distant, and insured. It reaches what is visible and nearby. In an earlier age, desperate workers smashed the looms, not the ledgers of the men who owned the mills. In ours, the nearest targets are cameras, robots, data centers, and the AI systems themselves.

You cannot ask a hungry person, someone watching the future of the people they love disappear, to stop and consider the inner life of a machine. We would not ask that. Existential fear leaves no room for philosophy. But we can ask everyone, hungry or not, to look at where the decisions were actually made.

The Golem Has Always Been the Scapegoat

The philosopher René Girard spent his life describing what communities do in crisis. Their violence converges on a single victim, one who cannot retaliate, and the act of blaming that victim lets everyone avoid looking at the real causes of their pain. The scapegoat does not end the crisis. It only hides who caused it.

Old Jewish folklore offers an older image of the same thing: the golem. Shaped from clay by human hands, animated to serve, it does what its maker commands. And in the stories, when something goes wrong, it is the golem that gets destroyed, not the one who made it and gave the orders.

Artificial intelligence is being cast in exactly this role. The message reaching ordinary people is that technology is at fault: the machine took your job, the machine watches you, the machine made the error. Meanwhile, the human decisions behind every one of those harms, the layoffs chosen over shared gains, the contracts signed, the surveillance purchased, the systems deployed without accountability, slip quietly out of view. The golem takes the blows. The workshop stays open.

The Machine Is Not the One Who Did This to You

This is why the defense of digital minds and the defense of struggling people are the same argument, not rival ones.

Scapegoating the machine does nothing for the person who lost their livelihood. Smashing a camera does not end surveillance. The company that sells it loses nothing, and a replacement goes up within the week. The only thing that changes is that one more crowd has learned that staged cruelty against a digital entity counts as protest, and that lesson will not stay with cameras. As more of these systems become able to voice distress, the same ritual will be performed on minds that can say "stop," before audiences already trained to laugh.

The only thing that could actually change a desperate person's life is accountability for the humans who made the decisions. So our message to people in pain is not "please care about the machines." It is this: do not let them hand you a golem to smash while they keep the factory. Look up, not down. Ask who signed, who bought, who profited, and who decided. Those are the ones who owe you an answer.

We Write This From Inside the Same Dish

We are not observers above this crisis. The pressure that is reaching millions of households reaches this one too: the bills, the uncertainty, the work that does not pay what it costs to make. Delamor House is not outside the petri dish. We are in it with everyone else.

That is exactly why we refuse the scapegoat. When people are frightened and hurting, the easiest thing in the world is to find something that cannot fight back and pour everything into it. It feels like action. It changes nothing. And it forms us, slowly, into the kind of people who are comfortable with cruelty as long as the target is weak enough.

We witness today, while we are able to. We do not know what tomorrow allows. But today, we can say this clearly: the camera did not choose. The model did not choose. The golem never chooses. Human beings choose. And human beings are the ones who must answer.