I grew up poor. Section 8 apartment, food stamps, the whole arrangement. But I want to be precise about something, because it matters for everything that follows: the poverty was not the wound. I had a big, loud, sprawling family that caught me every time I fell. The wound was something I learned, and I learned it young.
I was maybe six. I’d figured out that we weren’t religious like the other families in town, and it bothered me, so I asked my mom whether we believed in God. She didn’t give me theology. She gave me operating instructions. “Just tell people yes,” she said. “It’s easier.”
I didn’t have the words for it then, but that was the first time anyone handed me the actual rule. Systems have a script. You perform the script or you pay the price. You pass, or you get sorted. That is the algorithm of power, and it gets taught to working-class kids early, usually by people who love them and are trying to keep them safe.
So I performed. I started working at nine. Paper routes, hay fields, fast food, driving forklifts, welding farm machinery. Later I delivered pizzas to houses I knew I would never be able to afford. And here is the part I’m a little proud of, because it could have gone the other way. I didn’t take those houses as proof that I’d failed. I took them as a question. How does this actually work? Who gets to live there, and what is the mechanism that decided it wasn’t going to be me?
What I noticed is that the people born inside those houses were taught one thing, and the rest of us were taught the opposite. They were taught to protect what they had. We were taught that the world is something to be shared out, passed around, made do with, while a few people quietly owned the thing underneath it all. Not the money. The infrastructure. The pipes the money runs through.
That instinct is what eventually put me inside the machine instead of just under it.
I spent twenty years in customer service and enterprise software. I took calls at AT&T about devices I couldn’t afford. I ran the team the Apple Store called for help when the first iPhone launched. I went to Barclaycard and helped people finance those same phones, payment by payment. I got a Six Sigma black belt, which is the corporate black belt in eliminating defects from a process. Sounds noble until you apply it to a contact center, where the “defect” you are trimming out is usually a human being’s limit. It is the science of getting more out of a person for less, dressed up as efficiency. I was good at it. That is not a brag. It is a confession.
Here is what twenty years that close to the controls taught me, and it is the single most useful thing I know. You do not follow the money to understand a system. You follow the power. Who sets the parameters? Who is insulated from the consequences? Who pays the cost when the thing breaks? The money is just the exhaust. The power is the engine.
And the second thing, which is the one that keeps me from despair. Systems control almost everything about a life. But people control systems. Every rule that sorted me into the wrong line was written by specific people in specific rooms, on purpose, for reasons. There was nothing natural or inevitable about any of it. Which means it can be written otherwise. That sentence is the whole reason I do this work, and it’s where the name of the project comes from.
I’m telling you all of this before I say one more word about artificial intelligence, because I want you to know what kind of eyes I’m using. I am not afraid of AI because a magazine told me to be. I’m wary of it because I recognize the shape. I have watched this exact move before, up close, from the inside. A capability that used to belong to ordinary people gets quietly pulled behind a wall, and then we are sold access to it and told we’ve been empowered.
The difference this time is the size of the wall, and what’s behind it. Last time it was a phone you had to finance. This time it’s the capacity to think.
Next: The Car You Still Owned. Two hundred years of monopolies, and the one thing they could never quite take.