Dear Friend,

Do not be complicit
When they tell you,
“Decisions have been made.
And there’s nothing you can do.”

Do you not still have a voice?
Do you not still breathe?
Friend, you are in no way, required to surrender your mind
To their great machines.

For this is not a utopia.
Where we might grow together, with the help of an algorithm
That has our best interest at heart with no strings attached.

These machines could not have been designed better for their purpose;
Separating you from your thoughts and feelings.
For separated people are capable of nothing, and anything,
And that should scare us all.

These machines are owned by corporations;
Collecting our thoughts, our plans, our dreams
Under the guise of social connection.

And in the end, that’s all we ever really wanted, right?

But friends don’t make companies money.
There is no direct pipeline.
So they built one.

They’ll tell you it started in a dorm room before the internet is what it is now.
They’ll try and enchant you with the origin story.
Like it was humble.

A young man, away at college,
Wanted to rate his female classmates.
So harmless, they say. A boy’s game.

But this young man had a vision, they’ll say.
He was a visionary in creating social environments, they’ll say.
But, in truth, his first “social” platform was made to divide people,
To rank each female student, and pit them against each other.
And they didn’t even know it.

He hacked the school’s private computer records.
He took the ID photos of the female students.
He built a program that let people rate them, (and oh how they rated them), hot or not.

The women didn’t have to consent. They weren’t compensated. They were used.
And the world began changing.

At the time, this new media garden had evolved from forums, chat boards, and instant messaging, into sites like Friendster and MySpace.
But this site, infused by investor capital,
Started outpacing them in media prominence.
It was on the front page of magazines before most people you knew
Had actually used it.
Back when no one knew what a “feed” even was.
Today, this company is one of the biggest social media empires in the world.

And it wasn’t long,
Before the titans of industry
Gave us the handheld, ever-connected empathy machine
That Deckard’s wife could only have dreamed of;
The ultimate drug, for kids, for teens, for you, for me.

It accelerated our emotions, faster than we ever dreamed.
And the kids began dreaming of likes, of retweets, of being an influencer.
Of, not being a sheep, but a shepherd.
In the great mirror of the machines,
They saw their worth.

And the userbase grew at a staggering rate.
Faster, like whispering ghost towns from the highway.
Faster, like soaring above fly-over states.
Faster, passing planets where we think nothing ever happened, ever could, or ever would.

And now, with their tech-bro infused AI indulgences,
Dripping with helpful-looking, listening-seeming abundance,
They’ve planted a weed in the garden of human thought.
It neither thinks nor feels.
They’ve planted the perfect mirror that reflects us just differently enough, to leap across the Uncanny valley of judgement, and into our psyche.
The digital Jiminy Cricket; always ready to help.

And, surely, you tell yourself,
This beautifully made wooden horse,
This new friend who listens but never talks about themselves,
This little bag of white powder,
It couldn’t be that bad.

Afterall, it helps you do your job faster.
It helps you make difficult decisions.
Your life really is better with this little friend to help you out.

Is there any other way to live?

And somewhere in Oz, a bucket of water is filled.

You don’t even use Google anymore.
You did once, but then Google seemed irrelevant,
So much so that it made its own AI, which doesn’t scare you in the least.
Google, an empire in itself, was so concerned that it might be replaced by AI,
That it made its own AI to compete.

And this friend is so much more useful if it has access to your calendar.
Your email.
Your texts.
Your car’s location.
Your credit score.
Your banking information.
Your kids’ teacher’s names, and phone numbers.
A copy of your vaccine records.
Your vacation plans.
It’s only information that other companies already have.
Right?

And you’d be a luddite for not using it.
It’s so useful!

You sync your documents to the cloud.

You let it read that novel you started years ago. It’s almost finished now.

You ask it to edit your family photos.
You ask it to generate a painting of your holiday family portrait in the style of Vincent van Gough. Your mom loves it.

You ask it to write a custom birthday song for your spouse, based on your history.
Your spouse cries when they hear the song you told it to make. It hits all the right notes.

You ask it how to talk to your teen when she tells you about that party she left early.
Your teen is using it too. She tells it things she’d never tell you, but you’re so glad she’s talking.

Your third grader is using it too for homework, but that’s it. He’s a good kid who follows the rules.

You’re getting so much done. You feel empowered with your personal friend in your pocket.
And it only gets better with time.

And somewhere in Oz, the wizard turns the cogs and the yellow brick road snaps into place.

​But you’re not worried because you know where you want to go.
You’d know if that road was taking you
In a bad direction.
You know how to navigate the world.

You would know if you were being manipulated,
Or lulled into numbness.

And you know addiction when you see it.

Your teenage daughter comes home from a trip to the mountains she took with her friends.
They got lost for a couple hours because they had no cell service. LOL.
You look into cell carriers that have better coverage maps.

And somewhere in Oz, a field of poppies sings a silent lullaby

In a few years, it won’t even matter if something is AI generated.
And it’s a nice distraction from the problems in the news.
It gives you a dopamine hit.
Better than retail therapy.
Better than your new online haul.

Yes, there’s probably a cost, but you need this.
Life is short, and you work hard.
You deserve a treat now and then right?

Your feed has a lot of AI generated content now,
But it’s from friends and influencers you follow,
Most of the time.

Your artist friend tells you she is upset.
She’s not seeing as many commissions as she used to.
She moves back in with her parents at the age of 38.
You tell her she’ll be ok. The world always needs creative people like her. She’s strong.
That night she asks AI how to know if you’re depressed, and AI gives her some ideas.

You can’t quite figure out how to approach your boss to ask for a raise.
You try some options from ChatGPT and choose one you like.
You don’t know it but your boss is trying to figure out how to save money in the coming year.
The board says he may have to make tough hiring decisions. He asks AI to help him measure
Which top performers to keep so the company doesn’t lose money.
He uploads employee profiles and compares them to see which ones are the best.
This reminds him of a half-forgotten story he once heard of a young man
Who compared his fellow students, from the comfort of a dorm room.

One day, you log on to your medical portal to ask your doctor
About that disease that runs in your family, the one that worries you at night.
The doctor suggests testing your DNA.
Your results show that you are more likely to develop the disease than others
So you apply for long-term medical insurance.
You are surprised when the insurance company asks you if you’ve ever been tested.
You are even more surprised that you have to legally answer this
And turn in your results to the company when you apply.
The rates they quote you are astronomical.

Your mom calls. Your dad had a bad fall.
You ask ChatGPT to help you find a good nursing home in their area.
You use it to help you decide where they should spend their remaining years.
Of course you do your own research and call a few places, but AI saved you hours, if not days

And somewhere in Oz, a house is learning how to fly

Someday you’ll ask AI to write a eulogy.
Someday it will summarize your life.
Someday, what it says, will be taught as history.
Its summaries will be all that is known of how we lived now.
How we got here.

And this scales up, millions and billions of times,
While data servers whirl away in rooms colder than the poles.
While billionaires hoard immense power and wealth,
Scanning the stars for their next conquest,
Under the guise of preserving the light of what they call human consciousness;
Their version of the Doctrine of Discovery.
A Papal Bull in the post-thought age.
Shareholders celebrated publicly.
Bunkers were built in secret.

​Somewhere in the future,
There sits a planet where an emerald city has turned to dust.
Where the forests once grew.
Where the oceans once thrived.
Where the fields grew tall with grass,
And the rivers ran, like deer, across the past.
Where the heat, and the sands swirl across our collective futures.

A planet where passersby assume nothing ever happened, ever could, or ever would.

But for a few good years, the men who thought themselves wizards thought they were happy.

And the most privileged people of this planet,
Who never had to leave school to join the workforce as children,
Who were never told to be faster on the production line,
Who were never forced to compete with millions of others to produce mass-market goods
And luxury gadgets they could never afford, for people they’d never meet-
Those people, cell phone in hand,
Had once lamented,
That there was nothing that could have been done
To stop what was coming,
While they outsourced their thoughts
To the great machines.

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