I neglected to include in my newsletter last week that Audrey and I went to see Blind Injustice, Six lives, 117 years wrongly incarcerated, one story of exoneration and hope. It was a moving 90 minute opera that lingered with me all week as I continue to wrestle with what is happening in this country with fascism and artificial intelligence. The stories of incarceration and how these people’s lives were crushed by the judicial system in this country coincided with Adurey and I watching the Sing Sing movie this last week. It all kept me spinning out about how racist, cruel, and crushing the systems we already have in place is—something everyone just seems to be in a hurry to automate and scale using artificial intelligence.
As I was simmering in these thoughts of the isolation people face in the system I have also been talking with people as part of my daily struggle to perform online each day for the Internet machine while also navigating daily harassment from my stalker, the stories in Blind Justice and and theater in Sing Sing went to work on my heart and mind. I meet regularly with meet people who have also been harassed and run offline by my stalker. A new one came forward this week—it was a friend who ran an API security newsletter for years was harassed away by our shared stalker. The weekly conversations with people impacted by him, including my own continued struggles with him, all while watching Blind Justice and Sing Sing want me to reassure everyone know that I will be here when the line moves over them.
As I was continuing the curation my list of books that have help deprogram me I am reminded of just how important Ijeoma Oluo book Mediocre is to my work. The book holds a slightly higher place on my list because she describes the work I am doing with my reading and the storytelling around what I learn. I admit and acknowledge that I am mediocre, not because I am born that way, but because I was born into this white supremacist system that has taken me 40 years to be able to see. It is my responsibility to do the work to shine a light on this system, educate and bring awareness to other white men, and call out what is being enabled by this system in this moment. I can’t help but have faith that we can (and need to) reimagine our country and despite things seeming very, very dark in these times, everything is on the table for us to bring the change we need to end the reign of white men. The thin veneer that has been there my entire life which kept me from seeing things for what they are is gone—so let’s do this. I am ready.
All of my work to understand white supremacy and it’s alliances with AI is pushing me to do more fictional writing about whether or not ChatGPT knows you are, and whether or not that is a good or bad thing. But I also want to keep understanding the world by putting on my villain hat to understand how the Internet is used to not just isolate us, but also reinforce the lines that keep us separated in the real world. These existing lines are being baked into the Internet and scaled using artificial intelligence, and has me thinking about an Internet rate limit poor tax that slows us all down. My goal is to write an equal amount of stories on API Evangelist, Kin Lane, but more importantly Alternate Kin Lane, helping me load-balance the thoughts I have each week about the world around me.
Artificial intelligence is built upon the same information used to crush and incarcerate the people I learned about in Blind Justice and Sing Sing. It literally is trained upon their arrest photos and their stories about them as told by the system—not by the humans that were crushed by the system. As I watch Elon Musk literally tear down my own work in the federal government and fire people that I personally have worked with using an “AI-first” mantra I am left with no illusions about why they champion AI. As I read comments from conservatives on friends timelines via Facebook and other social media platforms talk about Musk and Trump just holding government accountable as they literally fire the people and gut the agencies who were doing the work to hold not just government but also corporations accountable—I am reminded how valuable these Internet created siloes and isolation are to fascism. In this moment there is not a single “valid” use of AI you can hold up in front of me that will convince me that AI matters and is something we should be celebrating.
