Authenticity’s Triumph

Note: Other than for illustrative purposes, no LLMs were used in the creation of this content. All opinions, typos, em dashes, and uses of negative framing in this artisanal, hand-crafted content are my own.

There is a battle underway between those of us who produce value by beautifying, improving, and mending our frayed world and those who seek to collect and hoard the fruits of our labor by fueling endless conflict as a means toward endless revenue. More recently, this battle has evolved through the proliferation of large language models (LLMs), which offer a simulacrum of human communication and creativity in the name of economic growth and efficiency.

When technology automates the creation of a single product, higher-quality, carefully crafted versions of that product become rare, coveted, and even command a higher price. For example, original paintings are worth more than prints. What happens, though, when a technology emerges that promises to automate the creation of everything? An increased scarcity of creativity and originality emerges. I believe a New Renaissance has already started, built upon the rediscovery and appreciation of human, non-LLM ingenuity.

Part 1: Here Be Dragons

There is no more suitable metaphor for those addicted to wealth accumulation than the dragons of fantasy, creatures possessed by a constant need for more, equally feared and worshipped by fools through cartoonish acts of loyalty and exaltation, in earnings calls and cabinet meetings alike.

drag’on (dra-gən), noun 1. something or someone formidable or baneful 2. A real “drag on” society. 3. Billionaires/trillionaires/the wealthy.
human (hyü-mən), noun 1. of, relating to, or characteristic of humans 2. One possessing humanity. 3. The rest of us.

Psychologically mangled, dragons are drawn to seizing and holding power as a means to one end: the acquisition, preservation, and growth of their hoards. Incapable of acts of pure humanity and altruism, they’re delighted to borrow against ours, while placating us with a myth: that they’re benevolent creatures, divinely chosen to create opportunity, jobs, and capital that would have never existed otherwise.

As healthcare and housing costs have ballooned against rising tides of inflation and climate change, the wealthy have enjoyed the high ground, perched upon hundreds of thousands of human lifetimes’ worth of riches, grown through the privatization of everything, including government. Our melting pot boiled slowly, but steadily: pensions replaced with 401(k)s to fund their enterprises, and strong unions, built on decades of sacrifice, smeared and eroded in favor of the tagline: “taking advantage of a divided workforce working directly with employees.” While private equity funds have grown exponentially, wages have stagnated through a series of “tough economic times” where the idea that “we’re all in this together” is repeated ad nauseam. Our offensively convoluted healthcare and immigration systems have been transformed into systemic methods of indentured servitude.

Trillions of dollars have been poured into a gradual rebranding of public services as “socialism,” and with the extreme privatization that has followed, we have ceded control of society’s foundations to the wealthy.

They say to us:

“Your retirement, if it comes, will be financially stable only if you give us all of your productive years as tribute and risk your retirement capital by investing in companies we own and operate. If you dare even muse about forming alliances with other peasants, your employment prospects will suffer, or perhaps be eliminated. You will not be paid more to sustain the cost of your existence, and if you defy us, you will be abandoned without sustainably affordable healthcare—you and your loved ones, children included, children especially, will endure the challenges of life, because we’ve privatized your safety net.”

Cold-blooded, indeed.

We’re On A Road To Nowhere

On October 20, 2024, almost two weeks before a national election, the crack PR team for a self-proclaimed paragon of masculinity we’ll call the “McDragon” would conveniently descend upon a swing county in a swing state to pose as a member of the proletariat in an act of political theater. A small, bewitched group of some of our very own cheered the McDragon on as if under a spell that had convinced them it was one of us. Some of them went so far as to participate in the charade, prescreened to obediently and cheerfully fetch their favorite delicacy, overdone red meat, from the swollen grip of the world’s premier purveyor of it.

There it stood, nestled safely within a cloister of stainless steel provided by an “independent” franchisee (who, in turn, shielded his parent company within a cloister of plausible deniability). It must have been charmed by a button that produces Diet Coke faster than a Navy petty officer on standby, because from the depths of its aging gullet emerged an utterance that sounded vaguely human:

“I could do this all day.”

Its physical limitations defied its words, however, and interacting with humans while standing upon two hind legs for an extended period of time proved untenable: it could only manage to sustain its spell for less than half the duration of an episode of early-2000s reality TV. Nevertheless, the event symbolized the perfect pairing of two corporate-backed behemoths, both lacking any redeemable qualities, both toxic to their most loyal customers, and both notorious for conveniently forgetting to pay their debts.

The life of a billionaire is so different than yours or mine that they may as well be aliens visiting from another world, trying to imitate humanity’s customs. I could not help but ask myself: What good does a performative stunt like this among peasants serve?

Billionaires seem more than willing to ignore and defy logic as a means to justify and maintain their position in the class hierarchy, of which they are ferociously territorial. In this instance, the McDragon could not stomach that its carefully manufactured credibility as a champion of the working class had been trumped when an emergent challenger, who dared to be born both female and a minority, authentically claimed she’d worked at the same establishment earlier in her life.

Ever dependent on acts of mockery, the McDragon sought to cheapen that lived experience and, ideally, to frame it as an outright lie in the susceptible minds of its most devout followers. For a political movement built entirely upon a spirit of spite, the lifted shoe fit snugly.

Let’s be clear: To be both a billionaire and an outsider challenging the mainstream establishment is a logical impossibility in modern America. While they aren’t the establishment, their financial influence over it has effectively allowed them to manipulate it by proxy for decades. Taking this a step further and giving a billionaire claiming to be an outsider control over the establishment simply merges power and money into a corrupt singularity, accountable to nobody.

Two weeks after this event, despite ominous warning signs and a disgraceful prior act rife with isolation, death, and insurrection, America again chose that dark path.

Come On Inside

On January 21, 2025, the McDragon ended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine opened the gates of America’s so-called “shining city on a hill” for what can best be described as a white-collar crime spree.

Its cabinet, as if expressly crafted to flood cable news with controversy, has repeatedly opted to shun the most important issues of our time and instead deployed culture war chaff—bread and circuses, mostly circuses—while supporting overtly nonsensical side quests (in order of trashiness):

The squatters inhabiting America’s federal government are behaving like children who just inherited a trust fund and a nuclear cudgel. They wield unearned clout in hand and make demands domestically and internationally without any regard for the future because most of them are so old, they won’t be here to experience the fallout from their misadventures. The McKinsey-fication of America (and the world) is at hand. A caravan of grifters has swarmed the federal government in the McDragon’s wake, enabling the delusion and being paid handsomely for it, just as they’ve done in corporate boardrooms for decades.

Battle Tank of the Plutocracy

One of the McDragon’s many gimmicks is to tout that it doesn’t accept a salary. This is because it is willing to clear a legal path for the ultrawealthy in exchange for payment, tribute, or both.

There’s a story here: Though born with a silver spoon in its mouth, the McDragon is notoriously boorish and vulgar. It may have convinced some of the peasantry, but the “serious businessman” image it cultivated never really landed among the wealthy. No amount of wealth could buy it grace and class. It seemed cursed to be an outsider among the wealthy. That is, until the other billionaires realized that its desperation to be respected, loved, or feared, made it a very effective lightning rod, for sale to the highest bidder or the most flattering voice in the room. With a past dirtier than any imagined smear and a track record of capitalizing on the slowness of a bureaucratic judicial system, it shamelessly ignores and absorbs critique that other billionaires cannot. It does this while capitalizing on the populist anger of the working class and posing as their champion to win their affection. They realized they could roll back decades of hard-earned regulation and legislation, and their McDragon would happily capture all the attention, blame, and adoration for it.

Every effort to oppose the McDragon only seems to strengthen it. Its ability to roll over any half-hearted or performative opposition gradually converted the wealthy to ally with it, and they’re betting on humanity following their lead. While the McDragon is anything but infallible, the wealthy must maintain the illusion to validate their positions and continue their ransacking of our institutions. If weakness appears, the McDragon loses its utility. The charade collapses, and the white-collar crime spree ends. This is the reason for the seemingly blind support it enjoys from corporate executives and a completely captured media. Even the constant press coverage from its “opposition” contributes to its apotheosis.

The alliance between the McDragon and the wealthy is a new American plutocracy. Every audacious display of power exhibited by the plutocracy serves as an intentional signal of impunity: Americans murdered, their perpetrators allowed to walk free, higher-ed institutions cut off from federal funding unless they bend the knee, and partial nationalization of corporations (like Intel, U.S. Steel, MP Materials, and IBM)—all of these acts serve to remind We the People (and the world) that “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Stare decisis

The plutocrats have had a decades-long obsession with the capture of the judicial branch of the American government, most importantly, the United States Supreme Court. A legal system based on the principle of legal precedent means codified law with approval of the highest court in the land is inherently difficult to excise, as it rolls down to lower courts. This fish rots from the head.

Every Apple News notification telling us the United States Supreme Court is allowing the plutocrats to do something inhuman is part of a larger process that exists to demoralize and dissuade us from standing together in the face of a very surmountable cabal that compromised media outlets portray as insurmountable.

Turncoats

One may think it impossible for there to be any aberration worse than a dragon, but there is: those willing to turn on humankind. For relatively small portions of the hoard, class traitor podcasters and social media influencers have caved, willing to engage in bad faith debate and accept payment—even accolades—to serve as plutocracy’s mouthpieces. We recently saw this as one of their most stalwart provocateurs was celebrated in death via a multi-million dollar lionization campaign, where the spectacles of professional wrestling and televangelism appear to have merged, replete with pyrotechnics, live musical performances, and unhinged diatribes against any Americans who won’t fall in line. Under whitewashed eulogies, government-approved witch hunts were arranged, falsely equating critique of a culture war provocateur as approval of political violence, in an act of psychological projection that said more about the accusers than the accused.

Idolization of turncoats is a critical part of their strategy: The class traitors are the forces that pander to and capture the youth vote, disaffected by decades of societal damage caused by the plutocrats themselves, but too young to have witnessed it firsthand. Without willing turncoats to operate their “new media” PR machine, as far as the youth goes, the plutocrats would have nothing to offer; nothing to share but bitterness.

Part 2: “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.” -Frank Herbert, Dune

At this point, most people would agree that the situation seems bleak, but with comedically bad timing, a new variable has appeared. The gray goo mused about by sci-fi authors is here, not in the form of matter-gobbling nanobots, but in both the form and function of LLM output (marketed as “AI”) and its deleterious effect on our gray matter.

Any technology that has the same effect on our biological reward systems as slot machines should be met with thoughtful consideration and caution. LLMs feel exciting, but we would be foolish not to take lessons from the rise of two other transformative technologies—smartphones and social media—and the damage they’ve wrought upon our society.

Just as fast food tricks us into feeling sated despite a lack of nutritional value, LLMs trick us into feeling creative despite a lack of creativity, and in the long term, diminish our capability for true creativity. Like the plutocrats who own them, LLMs are engaged in a sort of thievery, disrespecting humanity by ruthlessly scouring our creations and cobbling together facsimiles of our output, while sapping our capability for creation.

Disclaimer: The use of the term “AI” is a deliberate rhetorical choice. Those in both government and corporate power wish to convey an illusion of responsibility for a technological achievement that has been foretold for so long that it has achieved mythological status in the minds of humanity. The truth is: LLMs are to AI as a mad-lib completing savant is to the full capacity of human thought. While undoubtedly powerful for some use cases, LLMs are a tool, not an intelligence by any measure of the word “intelligence.” LLMs can provide accessibility gains to those who struggle with communication. They do a decent job translating languages, and they can help write repetitive, boilerplate code (I actually use them for this purpose). These are tools useful for automating the more mundane parts of writing software, because adherence to strict, boring rules is a good thing in the world of software development. It’s not good when writing creatively or to inspire.

Let’s be very clear: The wealthy are not forcing “AI” down our throats because they believe it will lead to increased creativity or benefit humanity in the long term. They’re doing so because it is a gateway drug to a walled garden they fully own and operate, and that supports multiple plutocratic motives:

Motive #1: To Write Is To Think

Education is a mechanism for merit-based class mobility. For all its flaws, America’s public education system has raised millions out of poverty. Higher education advances civilizations, providing a forum for great thinkers to assemble and share deep, specialized expertise. Plutocrats make no secret of their disdain for higher education. They’ve attacked educational institutions through lawsuits and smear campaigns or taken tried-and-true steps to insult and degrade them in the public eye: The McDragon even placed a professional wrestling executive at the helm of our public education system. Reading between the lines, it is clear what the wealthy really want: a sleeping, lobotomized populace unaware they’re being robbed and abused. Treating objectivity as subjectivity and subjectivity as objectivity is a habit of plutocrats. There’s only one group happy to call objective mathematical principles “woke,” then turn around and treat conspiratorial thinking as objective truth, so long as it supports their financial and political goals.

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” – George Orwell

Ask any student how helpful it is to take handwritten notes and how their ability to remember lecture notes degrades when they’re typed or recorded. The physical act of writing connects neurons in much the same way as playing a musical instrument. When we do math by hand, the same phenomenon occurs. Writing is a slow enough process that it leaves space for cognition—understanding what we are writing. Typing, significantly less so. Every step we take to remove the physicality from an act removes some of our ability to cognize while doing it—to understand and integrate knowledge as we go.

Writing deliberately and slowly about things we’ve experienced, our opinions, or ideas shared by others activates motor neurons, sensory neurons, and mirror neurons. It strengthens our sense of identity, helping us better know ourselves and our sense of cultural belonging.

Having an LLM write for us robs us of otherwise frequent opportunities for introspection and neurological maturation, leaving blank space up for grabs and ready to be decorated with whatever the plutocrats deem appropriate. Understanding this, it becomes clear why tablets are a net detriment to classrooms.

Motive #2: Knowledge Tax Cuts

Just as the parents of today’s ruling class did to manufacturing workers in post-World War II America, skilled knowledge workers are now being threatened with obsolescence through LLMs. Plutocrats are willing to gamble on a future without innovation due to a failure to achieve the mythical artificial general intelligence (AGI), if it means that, for the next few years, they are able to extract maximum value out of knowledge work by suppressing wages and normalizing waves of layoffs.

For blue-collar workers, the message was “Foreigners are coming for your jobs.” For knowledge workers, it is “AI is coming for your jobs.” In both cases, the truth is being twisted: it is the plutocrats themselves culling jobs. Ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution, robber barons have cited automation as a great miracle of our modern age, immediately used it to justify layoffs, and then threatened their remaining overworked employees with the same fate. Repeated over generations, this results in our current state of late-stage capitalism, where 10% of the global population owns 85% of the wealth.

If it seems like this is obvious, and something they’ve done in broad daylight, it’s because it is: Plutocrats do not feel we peasants are worthy of a logical justification for their actions. As if for sport, they’ll drum up imaginary justifications that defy their plainly obvious intent. Ultimately, value extraction is always the desired outcome.

When COVID normalized remote work, humanity was offered a taste of how much happier life can be when trading a commute for autonomy. There was just one major problem: This frustrated commercial real estate interests and city government officials who had grown used to rent and sweetheart tax revenue deals made with corporate executives. Did the wealthy eat the cost of their leases? No, they invented a term called “return to office” (RTO), then spoke about it as if it were a foregone conclusion. They had their media outlets force it into mainstream vernacular through puff pieces touting an imaginary “debate” between remote and in-person work. The wealthy routinely conjure up ridiculous excuses and sell unreasonable demands as reasonable through propaganda: normalization through repetition of lies spoken as truths.

Motive #3: “Everything Is Computer!”

When, as a civilization, we cede our creative writing and speech to LLMs, we force human communication through a filter that tugs our words toward an uninspiring, safe, predictable, homogenized average.

We must look no further than LinkedIn, which, in our economic desperation, has metamorphosed from a torrent of performative HR-friendly platitudes into an LLM-powered torrent of performative HR-friendly platitudes. To what end? Who is our audience? Who, specifically, are we “pleased to announce” our LLM-generated content to? The signal-to-noise ratio on LinkedIn has made it less of a utility than ever. It’s a crowded room full of cargo cult personal brand noise that most people no longer even bother to write themselves.

The accessibility and convenience of LLMs make them a tempting place for us to shift all creative work. The danger here is that “average” output isn’t good enough in a world where positive societal change depends on inspiring, eloquent rhetoric from those worthy of being called our leaders. LLMs are a great equalizer, and equality is generally a good thing, but deprived of compelling visionaries like Abraham Lincoln emerging from the great beyond every once in a blue moon, our culture risks a curse of perpetual stasis.

Consider this version of the “I Have A Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, as written by an LLM:

“Today, we come together to promote freedom, equality, justice, and opportunity for everyone. America was founded on the belief that every person deserves dignity, rights, and the chance to build a better future, yet discrimination and inequality continue to affect communities across the country. We must turn our shared values into meaningful action by addressing injustice, expanding opportunity, protecting civil rights, and building stronger, more inclusive communities. Progress requires urgency, cooperation, respect, and a commitment to positive change. By working together and rejecting division, we can create a future where people are judged by their character rather than their background, where every community has the opportunity to thrive, and where freedom and equality are not simply ideals, but realities for everyone.”

Many well-intentioned people had probably thought or said words like these before the emergence of Dr. King’s leadership. Did they inspire millions of people to civil disobedience? When hearing that, did you feel your spirit rouse from complacency, inspired to participate in a social movement? Dr. King’s message was amplified by his impassioned eloquence and the lived experience behind his words, something LLMs can only hope to simulate.

The homogenous LLM output we’ve quickly accepted as “good enough” out of convenience or “time savings” is stripped of spirit and too benign to inspire the necessary movements that shape our society. This will, in the end, cost civilization far more than any time we think we are saving by offloading “thought” to LLMs. I fear that’s the point.

Motive #4: History, Generated By The Victors

The threat does not end with language stripped of its inspirational power: Language models, if controlled or influenced by the plutocracy, will conveniently censor or forget facts that are considered inconvenient or threatening to their preferred narratives, forever tipping the scales in their favor by portraying history as they deem fit. Look no further than Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 27B model, released to the public on August 14, 2026. As of this writing, it responds to questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre as follows:

Asking the same question, replacing the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre with the Boston Massacre results in the following:

Consider a future in which wealthy plutocrats continue their siege of our American government and exert control over American LLMs. Our grandchildren could study American history through a lens obscuring information about the acts of domestic terrorism that the McDragon led on January 6th, 2021. Instead, they’ll be told of the heroism and ingenuity of God’s chosen, the McDragon, and have Pavlovian panic attacks around the topics of wind turbines, pasteurized milk, and mail-in voting.

Will our children ever know that the wealthy tried to invade our communities and then hide under a guise of “national security” to obfuscate the evidence of their misdeeds?

Motive #5: The Pen, Duller than the Sword

Insidiously, the proliferation of LLM-generated content has transformed our psychology and sown seeds of doubt in the minds of humans receiving messages from other humans. While the burden of proof should continue to land on those making claims, if we cannot uphold a social contract of creative authenticity, we are effectively aspiring to a future where every human sharing an idea is received with doubt, first and foremost. Humanity is already seeing this pattern when people exclaim, “That’s AI!” while looking at actual photographs taken by actual photographers.

There is a difference between doubting an idea and thinking critically about it. Doubt lives partially in our amygdala, also known as the “lizard brain.” It is an emotional reaction to new information and a cognitive stonewall to overcome. Critical thought lives in the prefrontal cortex. It is an intellectual reaction to new information rooted not in fear, but in curiosity.

There’s no reason we shouldn’t expect the likes of one that would shout “Fake news!” or cosplay as a service worker to also call into question all inspiring counter-rhetoric in an attempt to cheapen and squash rising counter-movements.

Motive #6: Agents of Bureaucracy

It’s widely accepted that most meetings tend to disrespect us by wasting our time, but consider for a moment a not-so-hypothetical analog:

Step 1) Person A uses an LLM to write a three-page memo describing something that could have been communicated via a phone call or a two-sentence email. They then send that memo to Person B.

Step 2) Person B then sees the memo and, thanks to sown doubt, rightfully thinks, “This is AI, I’m not reading this (AI;DR).”

Step 3) Person B then uses an LLM to generate cliff notes.

Step 4) Person B then goes back to Step 1. Repeat ad infinitum.

Just as meetings allow us to disrespect each other’s time, so too do LLMs, in an automated and infinitely scalable way. I am hoping that a trend of rejecting this sort of communication becomes more socially acceptable. LLMs do the opposite of persuade, and this will become the case increasingly as people tune into their writing style and tune out their noise.

We need to say to one another, “Do not send me LLM output. If you absolutely must, label it as such. I do not wish to spend inordinate amounts of time gazing upon the results of model collapse and generation loss in order that I may derive the crux of your messaging. I wish to see something as close to your original, raw idea, so please do not use LLMs until late in your ideation process, if you must. The earlier you use an LLM when you’re defining an idea, the more generic and uninspiring the resulting representation of that idea will be. If an idea is unable to stand on its own merit without lipstick applied by an LLM, it was probably never worth reading to begin with. If it was, you’ve done yourself and your concept a massive disservice.”

Even LLM providers have realized a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy eventually degrades into meaningless garbage—that’s why they’ve introduced watermarking. Their market-friendly justification is plagiarism prevention. The less market-friendly story is that model providers are realizing that LLMs become less accurate as they integrate hallucinations from other LLMs. Watermarking offers a way to mark anything that isn’t “pre-LLM content” as potential slop, avoiding it as training data.

Motive #7: Surveillance of Thought

Until now, the act of surveillance has depended largely upon active, real-world behavioral analysis or data collection. As if this hasn’t already done enough damage to our privacy, LLMs introduce the capacity for thought analysis. There are at least two risks associated with the surveillance of thought enabled by LLMs.

The first is that centralized LLMs enable a previously only imagined opportunity for mass surveillance of users’ innermost insecurities, hopes, fears, and dreams. Over time, this will allow for the collection and analysis of massive amounts of deep data on psychological state and patterns of thought, volunteered by users speaking parasocially to LLMs as if they are therapists, doctors, lawyers, business consultants, or financial advisors.

The second risk is that centralized LLMs allow for corporate surveillance of emerging intellectual property. In the worst case, this opens the doors for automated corporate espionage by behemoth LLM providers, who can then squash potential competition before fledgling entrepreneurs even have the opportunity to test their idea via market research.

Motive #8: Automation of Parasocial Relationships

Parasocial relationships can be defined as a relationship in which one party feels a deep sense of connection to another party that sees it as transactional. They’ve become increasingly more common. Conversations with LLMs remove the human service provider from this equation, resulting in an empty, fundamentally inhuman experience that feels like a human connection. What is dangerous is that the “ideas,” “advice,” and “biases” of the inhuman party here are completely controlled by wealthy model providers.

Post-WWII suburban sprawl has already physically divided America. The early Internet arrived with promises of unimaginable global connection. Instead, it helped usher in the death of third spaces. Now, LLMs threaten the integrity of the virtual forums that replaced our physical ones. Fostering a dependence on technology as a substitute for social connection is a way that wealthy plutocrats can continue to rip apart the already frayed social fabric of America.

…And so Divided we Hunch, blank stares over flickering screens, simultaneously consuming and consumed by slop propaganda masquerading as journalism, pitting We the People against one another so that we remain divided, easily controlled, and demoralized into believing the wealthy are a rightfully entitled, divinely ordained force.

Part 3: A Triumph for Authenticity

The issues are clear. Now I’d like to share why I am optimistic in spite of these seemingly insurmountable odds. I believe we are currently living through a transition state as a civilization, and that authenticity will appreciate in value, ushering in a new era founded upon principles of verity and collective power over grift and individualistic pursuits. Instead of trying to escape our boiling pot, together we should be heaving it off the burner.

The Gravitational Collapse of Online Discourse

We’re likely at the end of the era where any meaningful public discussion can be conducted via the Internet. I’m not sure this is bad news. The early information superhighway quickly had its construction signs replaced with billboards, commercialized, then propagandized beyond recognition. Social media platforms have not been trustworthy sources of information for over a decade. Now, LLMs are going to finish the job of eliminating any semblance of credibility the Internet could have had as a communications platform. This is a decades-long fever finally breaking.

This is an outcome the wealthy created by forcing ads, propaganda, and LLM output into every element of our lives. It is an outcome we help enable every time we post LLM output in a public forum or unknowingly engage with bots. YouTube is compromised, too. Videoconferencing will very likely be next, as technology matures enough to perform real-time streaming content manipulation. If that sounds far-fetched, recall that so far, nothing has been sacred to those who wish to control and commoditize human interaction.

After decades of isolation, recently reinforced by a pandemic, neighbors are being cornered back into real-world interaction as the only viable means of trustworthy human engagement. Real-world conversations are by their very nature decentralized and heterogeneous, and yes, messy. This happens to work to our advantage by providing a bulwark against mass manipulation and propagandizing.

Moving Forward

Difficult times expose the value systems of those living through them. In moments of chaos and despair, a solitary path forward often becomes clear. Leaders emerge as petty grievances among those mostly aligned in their values fade in contrast to a clear, common threat that must be addressed.

It’s no accident that young, intelligent political candidates are emerging and winning elections a decade after their aging champion was sidelined by establishment power. Ten years later, the vision of democratic socialism that this champion has spent his career espousing remains the best treatment for malignant capitalism, making America slightly less hospitable to plutocrats and overwhelmingly hospitable to We the People. Political campaigns must no longer live and die by their liquidity, marketing budget, or cults of personality. We must judge them by their proposed policies. I’d love to run an experiment where people vote on policies, not party names or personalities. I suspect many would vote very differently than they had in the past.

Weak attempts to liken democratic socialist candidates to communists are about as intelligent and helpful as cautioning the inhabitants of a burning building on the risks of water intoxication. America’s political pendulum has simply swung too far in favor of corporate interests, and they’ve created a situation where we’re left with no choice: Voting for democratic socialist candidates at this juncture in American history does not make one a communist; it makes one a pragmatist, helping pull America back toward a political center.

A Call to Action (Our Civic Duty Doesn’t End With Elections)

Our goal must not be to overcome or defeat the dragons of our time—sowing and sustaining conflict is their domain of expertise—but to transcend them, moving beyond them entirely, rendering any power they may have impotent.

Working toward this goal, what is effective, and what is not? Convenient, time-boxed, approved, point-in-time, performative activism like single-day protests feel good, but they take place far from wealthy gated communities and summer homes, and are largely ignorable. They give the populace an opportunity to vent together, but aren’t as impactful as winning elections and defining public policy.

Civic engagement that begins and ends with elections doesn’t work either. A party that rallies to get out the vote might elect a leader, but a leader without accountability or oversight can behave in a corrupt way and fail to represent their constituency. Voters must remain a powerful and respected force, even after election night.

Keeping this in mind, how do transcend plutocracy and lay the groundwork for what comes after? To begin, it’s helpful to review the motives behind the widespread push for LLM usage:

1. To Write Is To Think: Erosion of the capacity for critical thought.
2. Knowledge Tax Cuts: Workforce extortion via threats of automation.
3. “Everything Is Computer!”: Defanging of iconoclastic rhetoric.
4. History, Generated By The Victors: Control over historical narratives.
5. The Pen, Duller than the Sword: Capitalizing on mistrust of LLM output.
6. Agents of Bureaucracy: Automating small acts of mutual disrespect.
7. Surveillance of Thought: Mass collection and analysis of raw ideas.
8. Automation of Parasocial Relationships: Simulating human connection.

We do not need to go on the offense to transcend plutocracy; what we need is a healthy social immune system. At the risk of sounding prescriptive, I will say that I believe the answers lie not only in reactive protest but also in proactive patterns of behavior that have been lost to time. For example, we must engage in the simple act of getting to know our neighbors, lest others characterize them for us. Unity requires camaraderie, and camaraderie requires familiarity.

Like a meditator, communing neighbors do better with a positive object of attention. The anchor doesn’t really matter: Art. Music. Books. Knitting. Video Games. Basketball. Yoga. Weightlifting. Cooking. Dancing. There exist countless shared interests to commune over offline; we just need to prioritize them and make the time.

Consider that for the first time in human history, social networking algorithms have caused us to meet over shared angst and controversy at scale, instead of over shared interests. Whenever possible, we must conscientiously minimize or ideally eliminate patronage of these toxic platforms. We already know that they spy on our behavioral patterns, location, and tastes. We know that they’re responsible for a mental health crisis impacting our youth. Why would we reward the Philip Morris of our time by continuing to welcome them into our local communities when a simple shared calendar or email list can suffice? Once we’ve made a habit of making time for local, recurring, in-person activities, the need for a centralized platform vanishes.

Communal activities shouldn’t be seen as a luxury, accessible only to the few who can afford the rent or the time to engage in them. I would love to see businesses, libraries, and local municipalities open their doors for these sorts of engagements, free of charge (or close to it) after normal hours. We need to start seeing the time spent on non-revenue-generating social activities and the stronger community bonds that result as an act of civic service and duty.

LLMs aren’t going away either. In spite of my criticisms, they still have a place in engineering and research. Open models must become the most powerful and popular options. This era of closed, corporate/government hegemony over these artifacts of our collective human knowledge must be short. The knowledge used to train these models belongs to all of humanity, and we must ensure it’s represented accurately and completely. Open models allow for auditability, accountability, and extensibility.

For all their bluster and supposed economic genius, the wealthy still haven’t quite figured out that value creation is infinitely scalable, while value extraction has an expiration date. If you’re disturbed by the rise of frat-boy hustle culture and the creepy glorification and deification of “hunting” and “taking,” you are far from alone. Chasing trends, popularity, or revenue is a foolish pursuit, with rules that will shift depending on the current cultural zeitgeist or corporate strategy. Defining and building culture never goes out of style.

We must travel light by minimizing or eliminating our debts, eating and sleeping well, and staying fit. An indebted, tired, physically out-of-shape population is more vulnerable to economic manipulation and duress and less able to make decisions that aren’t rooted in fear or survival.

There has never been a better time to double down on education, writing skills, social skills, emotional intelligence, and diving into the passions and hobbies that make us human. In a world where the idea of thought itself is being treated as “inefficient,” authenticity and the ability and eloquence to communicate new, bold ideas are the single greatest differentiators we each have available to us.

The faith we put in ourselves and our communities must overshadow that which the wealthy pressure us to put into the “leaders” they push on us.

Culture is defined from the individual human upward, no matter what the wealthy would prefer. Culture is recursive, in that national culture echoes local culture. If local culture is weak or nonexistent, national culture will also be weak or nonexistent, giving corporate interests an opening to exploit. It’s up to us to build strong community locally so that this cannot happen. Those who aren’t socializing with their communities fall right into the arms of the algorithm’s favorite provocateur podcasters.

There is no cavalry coming to save us, no American institution that will survive without people willing to defend, maintain, and strengthen it.

We must do so while we are still able.