I was five years old, sitting on the floor of a school gymnasium in Paxton, Illinois, watching an old television on a rolling cart, when the Challenger came apart in front of us. Seventy-three seconds. A thing that was supposed to be impossible (the smartest people in the most powerful country, working at the very edge of what we knew how to do) breaking on live television while a room full of kids watched. Nobody knew what to say. I’m not sure I ever fully got up off that floor.
I’ve spent the rest of my life watching the same thing happen in slower motion. The Cold War. The Wall coming down and the scramble to extract value from the rubble instead of building something better. The economy gutted in the nineties and called progress. Wars started on lies. 2008, when the people who broke it kept their bonuses and everyone else kept the bill. And in between, quieter and closer to home: the contact centers I helped build and then got shipped around the world to run, in towns that were already on their knees, where the whole business model was getting more out of people for less and calling it efficiency.
Every one of those had the same shape. A system that was supposed to hold people up, holding up the wrong people instead. And every single time, the people it broke were told the same thing: this is just how it works. You’re lucky to have what you have.
That’s a lie. I know it’s a lie because I watched the people who built those systems decide (with their own hands, on purpose) and I watched the people who paid for those decisions have no say in them at all.
What broke
I grew up poor. Section 8 apartment, food stamps, a mom who was twenty-one with two kids and two different dads, and a father who didn’t show up until I was six and mostly wasn’t there even then. But I want to be honest about something, because the poverty isn’t the wound. I had love. I had grandparents, aunts and uncles, a big sprawling family, people who showed up. What I didn’t have was the thing they tell you the world runs on. And the first lesson I ever got about how the world actually works came in a classroom, when I figured out we weren’t like the other families because we weren’t religious, and I asked my mom if we believed in God, and she said: just tell people yes. It’s easier.
That’s the whole machine, right there, taught to a child. There’s a script. You perform it or you pay for not performing it. Pass, or get sorted.
I started working at nine: a paper route, then everything after it. Hay fields. Mowing lawns. Fixing things. Fast food, retail, a forklift, welding balers, shipping and receiving, the city, an IT internship. I delivered newspapers and pizzas to houses I would never be able to afford to live in, and I want to be clear that I didn’t want to be those people. I wanted to understand how they got to be them. How does anyone get there? And the longer I looked, the simpler and uglier the answer got: the people born into it are taught to protect what they have, and the rest of us are taught to give everything away: to treat the world as something to be shared out, while a few people quietly treat it as something to be owned.
I was fifteen when I learned the difference between independence and abandonment.
There’d been years of it: my dad treating my mom like garbage, my mom promising we’d leave and then lying to my face and taking him back. One night it boiled over, I got between the two of them, and my mom made her choice. She put her fifteen-year-old son out of the house and kept the man who called him names. I bounced: an aunt and uncle, grandparents, couches. I’ve been on my own ever since.
Here’s why that matters, and why I’m telling you instead of keeping it to myself: my mother called that independence. It wasn’t. It was abandonment. And I have spent thirty years learning exactly where that line is, because the powerful blur it on purpose. Independence is someone teaching you to build the thing and then trusting you to build it. Abandonment is a closed door and the cold on the other side of it. They are not the same, and every system that throws people away while calling it freedom is running the same con my mother ran on me at fifteen.
What I learned
What saved me wasn’t the system. It was people.
My aunts and uncles had trades. Electricians, maintenance, motors, sales. People who built a life with their hands, on their own terms, who answered to the work and not to some institution pretending to care about them. And a few of them (and a few people after them, at jobs, in classrooms) did the thing that actually changes a life. They took a chance on me. They saw I could learn. They taught me something and then got out of my way.
That’s where everything I believe comes from. Not a book. Them.
Because here’s what they proved: systems are built by people, which means people can build different ones. Nobody handed down the contact center from on high. Nobody discovered the quarterly layoff in nature. Men in rooms decided, and men in rooms can decide otherwise. The whole thing is more fragile, and more ours, than they need us to believe.
I chased that down for years. I took political science and philosophy courses in junior college, read the anti-Federalists, watched my own state’s governors go to prison one after another and wondered how anyone expected me to trust institutions at all. I went into the workforce at the same time. Working 40 hours a week, taking 16 credit hours. Union labor. Non-union managers. That was a PhD in and of itself. I was in the system. I needed a job. I wasn’t able to make it work otherwise. Debt started to mount. Paychecks became servitude.
In 2003 I was at AT&T, taking calls about devices I couldn’t afford, and I’d go on to manage the team Apple stores called when we launched the iPhone. After that I went to Barclaycard, helping customers finance those very phones, and then Firstsource handed me a Six Sigma Black Belt and taught me unit economics. I enrolled at ASU because I could not stomach spending my one life building better machines for getting more out of people for less. I needed to figure it out. How and why is this happening? Who controls what? Everywhere I went, the same sentence kept turning over in my head: systems control everything, but people control systems. People would tell me to follow the money. Money’s part of it. Money’s the lubricant. But money isn’t what tells you the truth. Power is. Who decides. Who’s protected. Who pays.
What’s happening now
And now we’re doing it again, with the biggest lever anyone has ever built. And this time I recognize the shape of it, because I’ve been on the wrong side of this counter before: I spent years selling a device I couldn’t afford, then financing it for everyone else. Artificial intelligence is that same arrangement, scaled all the way up: the thing you’ll never own is no longer the phone in your hand. It’s the engine underneath everything.
For two hundred years, every new way of communicating eventually put the power to speak into more hands than the one before it. The press, the telephone, the internet: monopolized for a while, sure, but the capability kept leaking back out to ordinary people. Artificial intelligence is the first one that runs the other way. It doesn’t just concentrate the channel: it concentrates the capacity to create itself, because it runs on compute, and compute is expensive, scarce, and owned by a handful of companies. For the first time, the machine that makes the thing lives somewhere you and I will never be allowed to own. That’s not a glitch. That’s the architecture.
And right on cue, the old pattern: to satisfy the capital that owns them, companies are burning people: laying them off, piling the work onto whoever’s left, telling them to “do more with AI,” and calling it discipline. It feels like 2008 again because it is 2008 again. Same break, new tools. Except this time there is no safety net underneath it, and people are going to get hurt. There is no doubt in my mind about that.
This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you technology is neutral, or that the market sorts it out, or that progress takes care of itself. I won’t. It doesn’t. The window where we get to decide what this becomes is open right now, and once this kind of concentration sets, it does not reopen on its own.
The Pope, of all people, put it better than the entire industry has managed: what is the society we are building, and what does it mean to be free within it?
That’s the only question that matters. And we are answering it right now, mostly by accident, mostly in favor of the people who already own everything.
What I’m asking
So here’s what I want, and I’m going to say it to two people at once, because this doesn’t move unless both of them hear it.
To the kid who is where I was, broke, motivated, sorted into the wrong line, certain the people who were supposed to hold you up have other priorities: you don’t need permission to exist, to build, or to own what you make. Nobody’s coming to hand it to you, and they never were. But here’s the thing nobody told me, the thing I had to learn the long way: you do not have to be alone to be free. That’s the lie underneath all of it: that independence means doing it by yourself, that needing people is weakness. It isn’t. Freedom is owning your own rails and having people around you who won’t let you fall. Both. The whole point is to stop being alone while you build the thing they said you’d never own.
To the people with capital, and power, and the actual ability to move this: you’ve felt it too. The sadness. The quiet understanding that the thing you’re building is breaking people, and that the numbers don’t care. You can choose differently, and you’re one of the only ones who can. Technology turned loose in private markets, unchecked, will do what it has always done: sort us into the owners and the owned, and call it inevitable. It is not inevitable. We can build institutions and tools that don’t break the people they’re supposed to serve. We can put a floor under this before it locks. We can decide (on purpose, together) what kind of society we’re building and what it’s going to mean to be free inside it.
I’m not asking you to believe the system fixes itself. I’ve watched it my whole life and it doesn’t. I’m asking you to do the harder thing: grieve what’s broken (really look at it) and then help build what isn’t.
I can’t save everyone. I know that now. For a long time I thought it was my job to be the thing that catches everyone, because no one caught me, and I’ll tell you where that road goes: it goes to burning yourself down to ash and having nothing left to give anyone. So that’s not the offer. The offer is the thing my aunts and uncles gave me. I’ll teach you what I know. I’ll hand you the tools. I’ll help you find the others. And then I’ll stand next to you and build, as one of us, not the system holding it all up.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Nobody is coming to save us. So let’s build it ourselves, together, and make sure that this time, the thing we build doesn’t break the people it was supposed to hold.